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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?

#141

Post by bjornsing »

notac wrote: post #137
bjornsing wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this. These are all real problems. But why is the solution that I change my behaviour? This is exactly what I'm tired of: Because other people are assholes with big frail egos who do not understand their place in the world... I have to change? No, they have to change. Putting this on me just glosses over and prolongs the real problem: That a lot of people with frail big egos need to realize they are not al…

honestly from reading how you write about yourself, I would immediately drop you into the "thinks more highly of themselves than they ought". Bucket. People who call themselves high performing rarely are in my experience. It's the humble people who learn and grow for the joy of it who truly shine.

Being proud of your abilities and accomplishments is not mutually exclusive with curiosity and joy of learning.

More generally: Your perceived correlations are not necessarily causal relationships.

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

#142

Post by ManlyBread »

newswasboring wrote: post #68
ManlyBread wrote: post #11

My current company tries but does it very poorly. I work for the so-called "software house". They keep on asking if I want to do a cloud cert yet they don't really provide any course materials nor allow me to take time off to focus on learning. This is a very common pattern for these certs and I've seen the same in other places as well; there's always someone who wants you to get that certificate but you're never rea…

Any discussion on why this was an inhouse training? Why not just buy a couple of udemy courses for everyone? For that matter they can just give you a youtube playlist and then have doubt solving sessions. Would have been cheaper than paying an engineer for half a year.

They did it because the company policy is to provide in-house training if possible. At first we were to get it ASAP, but then ASAP became "soon" and "soon" became "6 months". The engineer in question is just a regular engineer, they just handed him the additional responsibility.

Either way, they could have just paid an another company to get us a real course but they'd rather pretend they have competent devs rather than actually have competent devs.

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

#143

Post by ManlyBread »

taormina wrote: post #61
ManlyBread wrote: post #11

My current company tries but does it very poorly. I work for the so-called "software house". They keep on asking if I want to do a cloud cert yet they don't really provide any course materials nor allow me to take time off to focus on learning. This is a very common pattern for these certs and I've seen the same in other places as well; there's always someone who wants you to get that certificate but you're never rea…

Don’t worry, your intuition that the cloud cert is useless is spot on.

Unfortunately it's also tied to corporate politics. If I get this useless cert it will get listed as an "accomplishment" which helps in getting a raise / promotion.

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

#144

Post by arvindamirtaa »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #67
arvindamirtaa wrote: post #60

By having no pure managers. Everyone who is a manager actively makes independent contributions for a not-insignificant portion of their work-week. So, when we have 1-on-1s with them, we can actually discuss improvement avenues from the same vantage point. Not some spreadsheet pushing manager who has no clue how to measure engineer-productivity or performance. When they do code reviews, their comments serve as an impo…

As a manager I typically let the employee lead the 1:1 discussion and we are agile so status of work isn't really useful since that's done at standup. What would your ideal frequency and topics be for a 1:1? Do you expect productivity or performance for software engineering to have measurements?

My ideal 1:1 is about once a month. Especially in high-ownership teams, you could go days without actually talking to people aside from a 10-15 min check in call.

So, it's sometimes nice to have periodic validation that you're keeping true to the course / indication that you need to make a few minor adjustments, etc. That's on your side.

From your manager's side, if they find something isn't working, they don't need to wait 3/6 months to bring it up at which point there isn't much you can do to get back the lost productivity.

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

#145

Post by jl2718 »

jcpst wrote: post #138
jl2718 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a 10x engineer. I have the awesome capability to show you that a project is going to cost 10x the time/budget, and why you don’t need it, and should probably focus on the obvious 1x idea.

I always go with 11x engineer. It’s even better than 10x

11x abs…. What are you, crazy? Nobody can work out their abs in 11x.

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

#146

Post by yourapostasy »

bjornsing wrote: post #136
yourapostasy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly I’m quite tired of this false humility norm. It is a matter of where you focus your humility. Your accomplishments and deliveries? Absolutely market how they are 10X impacts than the norm. No need to label them "10X" of course. Point out their impacts, and the impact craters on problem spaces label themselves. And thereby you get labeled. How much you rely upon everyone around you and they in turn rely upo…

> Humility is absolutely essential when offering to help others and organically receive help from others to mutually cover everyone's gaps across this functionally infinite canvas of knowledge when taking down objectives together. I don't know... Humans have a very strong tendency to promote cultural norms that will make them successful. So the socially focused "humility experts" want to make the game about humility.…

> One of their IMHO less ethical moves is to sabotage others who do not want to play their game.

Oh, those are straight up assholes in a different clothing of the week. Yeah, once I identify one of those, I route around them if I can, or they find that my teams and I will only work with them on a very formalized, documented in the open, by the book, unfailingly positive and polite basis. If I have to, the juniors I advise will see their work that is unavoidably interfacing with such people championed by other managers and me.

It vastly slows down the delivery velocity around said person, but I've found no other solution when I'm forced to work with them as they're utterly toxic to work with otherwise. Such a person will find the Nash equilibrium adjusts the more they give up said behavior, but in my experience I've never seen one of these types turn completely around (but that might just be a function of only consulting and not sticking around long enough to find out).

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

#147

Post by sneak »

schwartzworld wrote: post #48
zkirill wrote: post #28

I always thought the term "10x engineer" was only used in job ads. Nobody I know refers to themselves (or even thinks of themselves) as a "?x engineer", unless it's for marketing purposes in which case you might as well put 100x for good measure. The "best" engineer in the world would probably tell you that "the only thing that they know is that they know nothing". They may also say that the most valuable thing that…

A smart 10x engineer would use his special power to do 1/10 the work everyone else does.

Or they would try to work as much as possible, earning 10-10000x more than everyone else does.

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

#148

Post by sneak »

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…

> You can't "create" 10x engineer. You either have work ethic or you don't.

I don't think that anyone who believes in the "10x engineer" (myself included) thinks it has anything to do whatsoever with how much they work, or their attitude toward the work. "Work ethic" suggests that it's about how much effort they choose to put into it, and that's nothing to do with it. 10x engineers will do more per hour than median engineers, whether they work one hour or ten in a day.

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

#149

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

> how companies create 10x engineers

They don't. All the ones I can think of appeared before getting paid. I'd hesitate to say they are born but they're certainly not made in the corporate world.

Also to answer your first question: my company isn't.

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