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Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

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Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#71

Post by cies »

zmxz wrote: post #65

You can't "create" 10x engineer. You either have work ethic or you don't. If you have the work ethic, if you're disciplined, if you genuinely enjoy programming and the feature/software you work on - then you have the capacity to be better than engineers who enter this line of work purely and only for the money. That's what makes the difference. And no company can make you like the software you're making, to be discip…

While I agree with all you said, I hold the belief that intelligence is mostly determined by birth (probably genes).

So that may be a limiting factor even when your work ethic is high.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#72

Post by criddell »

badpun wrote: post #35
flavianh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most don’t, I’m wondering if they should.

A large part of being 10x is the motivation. You can't train motivation.

And environment. If you have to attend meetings or don't have an office with a door you can close when you need to, it's a lot more difficult to do deep work.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#73

Post by tootie »

yogini wrote: post #15

I have been a part of training sessions in my previous organisations, but in my opinion, training will not create a 10x engineers. Why? Most of the training sessions I attended or used to happen in my organisation were on very general topics. All these topics can be easily learnt via any other medium like youtube. Instead, I have seen pair programming or code-reviews making better engineers. The organisation used to…

Yup. For almost anything, modeling behavior is far more effective than training. Hiring well and having complex problems to solve is what makes engineers better.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#74

Post by whiddershins »

dolmen wrote: post #32
whiddershins wrote: post #21

My current company does tons of training. The devs are trained in project management, team building, project leading. Individual team members suggest trainings on a topic, and if enough people are interested they schedule a time and do it. We have book clubs, and regular developer discussion group. All of this is encouraged and on company time. There are also more extensive multi day trainings and certifications I ha…

So how do you use that training stipend?

I haven’t used it much yet, so I’m not sure. Books, courses.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#75

Post by whiddershins »

flavianh wrote: post #30
whiddershins wrote: post #21

My current company does tons of training. The devs are trained in project management, team building, project leading. Individual team members suggest trainings on a topic, and if enough people are interested they schedule a time and do it. We have book clubs, and regular developer discussion group. All of this is encouraged and on company time. There are also more extensive multi day trainings and certifications I ha…

I assume some of the skills you're trained on are technical too. Your organization sounds like it does a lot to develop engineers, do you think it's paying off regarding competition or other tech companies?

Well, for one thing it allows a flatter organization, which makes for (imo) a really great quality of life.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#76

Post by cies »

Move to better tech: going from building apps on Drupal to Ruby on Rails got a big team to understand what they were doing (MVC, web applications, migrations, DDD, fat-model, separating concerns, REPL-based development, deployments-wihtout-migrations in one command, ssh, and more).

Then going from Groovy to Kotlin (using types in your advantage, functional-style where it makes sense, IDE comprehension of code, fear-less refactoring).

Now we are using Elm to replace some brittle React/Litelements/jQuery mess (sum-types, strong typing, currying, etc.)

Also I believe we should regularly discuss bad code examples, code style improvements and evolving the processes. We do this in a "retro" session at least once a month.

One of the best thing I learned is to accept to be a "bad programmer", hence I like strong typing, defensive coding styles, and smart IDEs.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#77

Post by jstx1 »

zmxz wrote: post #65

You can't "create" 10x engineer. You either have work ethic or you don't. If you have the work ethic, if you're disciplined, if you genuinely enjoy programming and the feature/software you work on - then you have the capacity to be better than engineers who enter this line of work purely and only for the money. That's what makes the difference. And no company can make you like the software you're making, to be discip…

As someone with ADHD, it’s kind of sad that I’ll hit some career ceiling because I can’t get myself to put in the work.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#79

Post by randomdata »

mylons wrote: post #63
randomdata wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a dumb 10x engineer, I once tried being on the job 1/10th the hours of my colleagues and I still ended up outproducing them by an order of magnitude. I failed to account for the fact that they waste a lot of time doing unrelated tasks, like meetings, leaving only a fraction of their day to get anything done.

how is that dumb of you? even as a salaried employee your time is ultimately what you’re selling to your employer. you just reduced your cost of goods by 10.

Well, I could have also put in 1/10th of the work, not just 1/10th of the hours, and matched their output. Also, I'm just naturally dumb.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#80

Post by zmxz »

jstx1 wrote: post #77
zmxz wrote: post #65

You can't "create" 10x engineer. You either have work ethic or you don't. If you have the work ethic, if you're disciplined, if you genuinely enjoy programming and the feature/software you work on - then you have the capacity to be better than engineers who enter this line of work purely and only for the money. That's what makes the difference. And no company can make you like the software you're making, to be discip…

As someone with ADHD, it’s kind of sad that I’ll hit some career ceiling because I can’t get myself to put in the work.

That sounds like quitting before even trying. If I were you, I'd first exhaust every possible option I have at my disposal to become better before calling it quits.

You might have ADHD but you can also adjust to it and work around it. Don't call it quit until you literally exhaust everything you can.

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