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

The worst programmer I know

dannorth.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 668 posts

Re: The worst programmer I know

#511

Post by lolinder »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #484
lolinder wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't competitions usually have completely different kinds of problems than what you typically run into in production fires? When I think of competitive programming I think of algorithms and puzzles, not network errors and data corruption. In my experience production fires are rarely put out by rote algorithmic knowledge, the skill is more having a detailed knowledge of the inner workings of every layer of the system…

Yes, it's not the full equation. But that type of environment gives you a mindset that isn't present in most other types of coding. The ability to think under pressire, identity the fastest solution, and store a number of approaches in your head should you encounter dire edge cases. . >the skill is more having a detailed knowledge of the inner workings of every layer of the system so that you can come to the right co…

It still seems a bit of a stretch to jump to the conclusion that someone who's good at fighting production fires probably has experience with competitive coding. You could maybe conclude that they would be good at competitive coding were they to try it, but competitive coding is way less popular than just... having a career in software.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#513

Post by vegetablepotpie »

madeofpalk wrote: post #481
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what the GP means by “gaming” the system is that the teams did all the technical activities of scrum without providing much or any business value. The issue with scrum or any process that involves estimating is that every software project will inevitably have some risky element or difficult to estimate task that is essential to the execution of the project. Scrum will incentivize teams to avoid the essential…

“Story points” help you predict your work in the future. Knowing what and when you deliver can be valuable! Say you’re developing software for the next Super Bowl broadcast - it’s useful to know whether you’ll deliver what you said you would. If it’s looking like you can’t, you can start to make educated decisions about what work to cut and get a better idea of what you actually will deliver.

The criticism of the GP is that teams at his company would estimate story points differently depending on how much stress they wanted to take on and not based on the complexity of the work. This had the impact of the low stress teams not taking on ambitious work. Whereas teams that would take on ambitious work and attaching points to that work were working at unsustainable levels to meet targets.

In your Super Bowl example, you'd either get a team that would focus on doing the scrum activities but never deliver anything useful regardless of how many points it would take, or you'd get a burnt out team that's on the verge of flaming out. In either case "Story points" provide you with no predictive capacity even though predicting would provide value.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#514

Post by dabraham1248 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #490
tfgg wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harry Nyquist isn't exactly an unknown engineer who doesn't have his own achievements, though - not sure why people are saying he would be fired in a modern company!

He doesn’t have his own achievements? I have heard of the Nyquist frequency, the nyquist limit, the nyquist sampling rate and the Shannon nyquist theorem. As far as I know no other individual has had this many “things” named after him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Joh...

Note that the "Known for" section on his main page has 119 elements. But they're not all named after him.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#515

Post by refulgentis »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #504
refulgentis wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't happen at FAANG either, absolutely nothing to do with gov't

Sure they do, you just haven't demonstrated that exceptional performance.

Going rate for breakthrough performance is $10K, ask the GitHub Copilot guy, and read my bio

Re: The worst programmer I know

#516

Post by WalterBright »

Stratoscope wrote: post #304

Some 20 years ago, I worked at a moderately large software company that sold a desktop application for Mac and Windows. The team had mostly Mac experience and they were just getting their feet wet with Windows. So naturally the Windows version had some problems. At the time, I was known as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help improve that version and help the team get more familiar with Windows programming. I…

> a few months later

> Which was exactly what I thought they had hired me for!

It's good to regularly update your manager with what you're doing and accomplishing, as they may not realize it at all.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#517

Post by vinay_ys »

gcheong wrote: post #447
whirlwin wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an odd practice. Not sure who conducted the review, but managers especially should be familiar with the concept of coaching, and recognize that you were doing a great deal of it. I am a technical manager myself and spend a lot of time on coaching team members too.

20 years ago when I started there wasn’t anything I experienced that could be called coaching, mentoring, or leveling up. Sure, I could get some time from a more experienced developer to get another set of eyes on a particularly hard problem if I wasn’t able to come up with a solution but for the most part I was just expected to work with minimal explanation or direction. Very little in the way of code reviews as wel…

Around that same time, my first job was at GE medical systems. The team I was part of was responsible for developing systems for digital X-ray machines. We were developing a new mobile x-ray product and it needed some new capabilities. As a fresher out of college I worked on some of the most critical systems capabilities and features and I got brilliant support from my seniors in software engineering and domain experts (radiology + image processing researchers). They literally taught me 3 different things (coding to professional standards, image processing, systems engineering) at the same time and we were super productive as a team. That set the bar for my expectations on how a team should function for a long time.

Luckily 2 years later I went a startup and similar great experience of team work and supporting each other continued. I worked at 2 more startups which grew a lot and were super successful and the culture continued.

Only in recent times, (post 2019) I have noticed that people are obsessed with performance rating systems and gaming them. I notice junior engineers are not as curious to learn or challenge-seeking as engineers a decade. And I notice recently promoted senior engineers are not as talented either. I used to think this had to correlate with dominant programming language – c/c++/go vs ruby/java etc. but I don't know if that fully explains it.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#518

Post by gsuuon »

stephen_g wrote: post #506
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the same way with my coworkers. I spend a lot of time helping juniors with their code and doing code review. My boss talked to me and told me to stop helping out so much and focus on my own tickets.

That’s good feedback I think. There’s an article that was going around again about ‘glue work’ ([1]) that has a story where an engineer gets caught up doing all this kind of mentoring, coordination and other work like that and then is passed over for promotions because they don’t have technical achievements (though they claim to have become instrumental in enabling everyone else’s technical achievements). The article…

I think this is an important perspective - in the end you need to do what the company asks of you and not what you think is right for the company if the two are in conflict.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#519

Post by Stratoscope »

progmetaldev wrote: post #493
Stratoscope wrote: post #304

Some 20 years ago, I worked at a moderately large software company that sold a desktop application for Mac and Windows. The team had mostly Mac experience and they were just getting their feet wet with Windows. So naturally the Windows version had some problems. At the time, I was known as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help improve that version and help the team get more familiar with Windows programming. I…

I know it's too late now, but you are the type of developer that makes our profession an actual craft. Sharing knowledge is the biggest benefit to provide other developers, and too few that decide to go that route are rewarded for it. If it weren't for developers like you, we wouldn't be anywhere close to where we currently are in the software world. I try to give back knowledge as much as possible, because it's not…

Wow, thank you. I am grateful that my comment attracted so much thoughtful discussion. But your comment is the one that really touched my heart.

I was reading it to a close friend just now, and I have to confess that I choked up a couple of times reading it.

So again, thank you, my friend.

p.s. You don't happen to be anywhere near the SF Bay Area? If you are (or even if you're not), please drop me a note at the email address in my HN profile.

Anyone else who is in the mid-Peninsula area, feel free to do the same. It would be nice to meet up with people who have an interest in this topic.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#520

Post by hannofcart »

Stratoscope wrote: post #304

Some 20 years ago, I worked at a moderately large software company that sold a desktop application for Mac and Windows. The team had mostly Mac experience and they were just getting their feet wet with Windows. So naturally the Windows version had some problems. At the time, I was known as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help improve that version and help the team get more familiar with Windows programming. I…

> Some 20 years ago... I called "house calls": visiting other developers' offices...

Ah, the good ol early 2000s, where devs had "offices" or "cubicles" to themselves.

Post reply on HN