Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Expectations of professional software engineers

adamj.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 116 posts

Re: Expectations of professional software engineers

#41

Post by [deleted] »

vubui wrote: post #29
horsawlarway wrote: post #12

Personally - I don't see a lot of value in this list (I read all 50 items and watched the video and I regret wasting the time). There are certainly some valuable concepts - but the presentation is fairly incoherent (including the video of the talk he gives) and not particularly helpful. Many of these items are utterly unrelated: Some are fairly specific to gaming (profiling/memory layout/timing) some are basic profes…

I think it has a so what problem. It sounds nice but then so...? I failed to understand what exactly the author wanted to convince people to do. Expectations - for who? Let's say someone does exactly this, then failed to actually ship something that people want then it's as useless as not knowing the list at all.

[deleted]

Re: Expectations of professional software engineers

#42

Post by matai_kolila »

I didn't have time to go over all 50 but I do like #3, "I have confirmed that someone else can articulate what problem I am trying to solve."

Too often I see devs go down some deep rabbit hole to solve a problem no user has ever had, and I wish they'd have talked to me first about it.

But the author of this article could have generalized a lot here, many of these could be summed up by the (admittedly less interesting) "I know how to communicate clearly and do so frequently with my team."

Re: Expectations of professional software engineers

#43

Post by jstimpfle »

omega3 wrote: post #30

Having worked in Unity I'd take engineering advice from their top execs with a grain of salt.

This guy in particular has collected some serious credibility. In the past he's worked at Insomniac Games. He is also credited for popularizing Data-Oriented Design and has delivered at least one talk that went viral and that video thumbnail of him in his red flower shirt has become a meme for a no-bullshit and requirement-focused engineering approach. Go check him out on Youtube.

Re: Expectations of professional software engineers

#45

Post by Agingcoder »

feoren wrote: post #31
mjw1007 wrote: post #22

His expectations around producing documentation go only as far as "Think about what documentation or data users need to understand and use your solution." That seems like rather a low bar, compared to items like "I can articulate how all the data I use is laid out in memory." I'd prefer to live in a world where a professional software engineer was expected to write documentation, and expected to be competent at it.

> I can articulate how all the data I use is laid out in memory. That's not a high bar, it's an arbitrary hoop. It'd be like saying "I always know which processor cache my variables are sitting in". In modern languages it may be literally impossible to look at a block of code and know what's sitting in the heap vs. on the stack, and the heap is often broken into many different components only fully understood by the…

You want to (I do too!) , but the abstraction eventually leaks (you get unexpected behavior in long running processes because of gc/libc/kernel issues, or you need very specific control performance wise, etc) , and you end up having to know about it.

Re: Expectations of professional software engineers

#46

Post by isitmadeofglass »

vubui wrote: post #29
horsawlarway wrote: post #12

Personally - I don't see a lot of value in this list (I read all 50 items and watched the video and I regret wasting the time). There are certainly some valuable concepts - but the presentation is fairly incoherent (including the video of the talk he gives) and not particularly helpful. Many of these items are utterly unrelated: Some are fairly specific to gaming (profiling/memory layout/timing) some are basic profes…

I think it has a so what problem. It sounds nice but then so...? I failed to understand what exactly the author wanted to convince people to do. Expectations - for who? Let's say someone does exactly this, then failed to actually ship something that people want then it's as useless as not knowing the list at all.

> I failed to understand what exactly the author wanted to convince people to do.

He’s writing a list as part of his imaginary shower argument with his boss and coworkers as to why they are all inferior and he’s perfect and why all the problems they are facing are easily attributed to his list of 50 points of things he feels he does that they are failing to live up to.

At least that’s my take away.

Re: Expectations of professional software engineers

#49

Post by i_like_apis »

This is good. It’s been a while since I found an article about software development worth bookmarking.

I think anyone should be expected to write a simple bug report, with reproduction steps and expected versus actual result. There are a lot of people out there who don’t do this simple, necessary task well!

Post reply on HN