Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

#41

Post by nitwit005 » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:10 AM UTC

> Meetings are there to ensure that everything is going smoothly and on schedule.

Hospitals are there to provide health care. But you'll sometimes hear a phrase in health that "a hospital bed built, is a bed filled" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roemer%27s_law). Health organizations will push patients to get extra, often unneeded, treatments if they system has extra slack.

Similarly, management calendars always seem to fill. It doesn't seem to matter what the ratio of staff to management is, or what's going on at the moment.

Re: Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

#42

Post by yamasanama » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:10 AM UTC

Galanwe wrote: post #39

quanticle wrote: post #27

Rare work-life balance. In other professions, your work day ends at 18:00, and you forget about the job. Not here. You will most likely always be online and checking the code, even in the evening. If that's the case, quit immediately. I've been in this industry for over a decade (oh god, has it been that long already?) and I have never had a job where I was "always online and checking the code, even in the evening".…

> If that's the case, quit immediately If you're so uninterested by your work that thinking about it after 6pm makes you sick, why did you pick it? I've been in the industry for 15 years, coding since 25+ years, and I very often think, code, read about work or work related things at any time of the day or weekend or vacation, because I find it interesting. Why would I work in something of no interest to me?

There is a difference between "want to" and "have to". You are talking about the former. GP about the latter.

Re: Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

#43

Post by quanticle » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:12 AM UTC

Galanwe wrote: post #39

quanticle wrote: post #27

Rare work-life balance. In other professions, your work day ends at 18:00, and you forget about the job. Not here. You will most likely always be online and checking the code, even in the evening. If that's the case, quit immediately. I've been in this industry for over a decade (oh god, has it been that long already?) and I have never had a job where I was "always online and checking the code, even in the evening".…

> If that's the case, quit immediately If you're so uninterested by your work that thinking about it after 6pm makes you sick, why did you pick it? I've been in the industry for 15 years, coding since 25+ years, and I very often think, code, read about work or work related things at any time of the day or weekend or vacation, because I find it interesting. Why would I work in something of no interest to me?

    If you're so uninterested by your work that thinking about it after 6pm
    makes you sick, why did you pick it?

Doing anything continuously for long periods without rest is unhealthy, and leads to both declining physical and mental health. Working 10-12 hour days is something that you can do for a short burst, but if you're doing it for months on end, it will negatively impact you.

    I've been in the industry for 15 years, coding since 25+ years, and I very
    often think, code, read about work or work related things at any time of the
    day or weekend or vacation

I think about code too, but it's rarely work code. It's usually about some hobby project or interesting algorithm that I've picked up.

Re: Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

#44

Post by renox » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:13 AM UTC

One thing missed: there are two kinds of meetings, the one where nobody wrote down the points discussed==>time wasted, the rare one where someone wrote a résumé of the meeting with clear action points and made sure to send the document to everyone asking for feedback, etc. These meetings are gold (provided the discussion was about concrete actions not moonshots)

Re: Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

#45

Post by yamasanama » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:14 AM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #32

> Meetings are there to ensure that everything is going smoothly and on schedule. Are they? At one time in my career you just let people know when something isn't going smoothly/not on schedule. A quick email (or equivalent) was more than sufficient to raise awareness. For various reasons I eventually fell into this meeting culture. I don't get it. It produces this weird state where everyone saves up what they have t…

> It produces this weird state where everyone saves up what they have to say for the meetings to avoid an awkward lack of participation or "I have nothing" in the meeting

This is an odd meeting culture. Just remove the requirement that everybody has to bring up something.

FWIW I've never felt like that in my teams.

Re: Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

#46

Post by yodsanklai » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:14 AM UTC

zabzonk wrote: post #4

i thought this was pretty good, the point on aesthetics in particular - how much code have i seen and thought "how could you have written something so ugly?"

Maybe because it's Friday night, you want to go home, there's one more test to fix after a long day of work and you don't have time to pull out the perfect design.

Or the code is already ugly when you start touching it, your manager is assessing your performance based on features. Any time spend on refactoring is time you're no shipping features (worse, you may introduce new bugs). So you add your feature, making the code even uglier.

Or of course, the person who wrote the code was not very skilled.

Re: Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

#47

Post by edejong » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:14 AM UTC

Galanwe wrote: post #39

quanticle wrote: post #27

Rare work-life balance. In other professions, your work day ends at 18:00, and you forget about the job. Not here. You will most likely always be online and checking the code, even in the evening. If that's the case, quit immediately. I've been in this industry for over a decade (oh god, has it been that long already?) and I have never had a job where I was "always online and checking the code, even in the evening".…

> If that's the case, quit immediately If you're so uninterested by your work that thinking about it after 6pm makes you sick, why did you pick it? I've been in the industry for 15 years, coding since 25+ years, and I very often think, code, read about work or work related things at any time of the day or weekend or vacation, because I find it interesting. Why would I work in something of no interest to me?

Because there is more to life than coding? Family, friendship, health, leisure… Other professionals actively try to separate these from their daily duties, regardless of whether they like their jobs.

Re: Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

#48

Post by yamasanama » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:16 AM UTC

invalidname wrote: post #3

I like this list. It's also missing "debugging". That's a skill that they don't emphasize in college because they can't test it and it's hard to teach. But there are ways to teach it and techniques. There are some books on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1484290410/ https://www.whyprogramsfail.com/ That can mitigate that a bit.

Most non-trivial programming homework assignments in college require debugging and a good school will provide guidance of how to do this.

One thing I do in job interviews is to have the candidate debug an issue (that they usually caused themselves and that I let them purposefully run into). Quite the eye opener of how they approach bugs.

Re: Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

#49

Post by josephg » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:16 AM UTC

invalidname wrote: post #3

I like this list. It's also missing "debugging". That's a skill that they don't emphasize in college because they can't test it and it's hard to teach. But there are ways to teach it and techniques. There are some books on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1484290410/ https://www.whyprogramsfail.com/ That can mitigate that a bit.

I also find it odd that nobody is ever taught to read code. We spend a lot of time writing code, but how many programs does the average CS grad read by the time they graduate?

Imagine going to school to learn how to write, but in the course nobody ever reads anyone else's work. And in fact, most people (including the professors) never read any books. For some reason, thats the status quo in software.

In industry, learning to read other people's code is one of the most valuable skills there is. There's plenty of times I've run into a showstopper bug in some opensource library we depended on, or needed another feature that was missing. If you can't read code, how can you fix the problem? Hope there's another library out there which solves your problem better? Implement some complex workaround?

But if you can read - well, you can just dive into your dependency, debug the issue there and file a PR. (And if you like, use a fork with the fix until its merged upstream).

Re: Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

#50

Post by kartoshechka » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 8:18 AM UTC

Galanwe wrote: post #39

quanticle wrote: post #27

Rare work-life balance. In other professions, your work day ends at 18:00, and you forget about the job. Not here. You will most likely always be online and checking the code, even in the evening. If that's the case, quit immediately. I've been in this industry for over a decade (oh god, has it been that long already?) and I have never had a job where I was "always online and checking the code, even in the evening".…

> If that's the case, quit immediately If you're so uninterested by your work that thinking about it after 6pm makes you sick, why did you pick it? I've been in the industry for 15 years, coding since 25+ years, and I very often think, code, read about work or work related things at any time of the day or weekend or vacation, because I find it interesting. Why would I work in something of no interest to me?

for some people having strict working hours is a baseline to prevent burnout, and generally to have more diverse life where you have time for family, leisure, or even coding your pet project that you don't hate, but it doesn't put any money in your pocket (yet :P)