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“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

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Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#261

Post by asdff »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #173
jonfromsf wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can hide ANYTHING with financial engineering. Like off-books liabilities, systemic risk ... anything.

This comment is weird, but typical of HN. Most of the off-balance-sheet shenanigans of pre-2008 world are gone. There is now a global regulator that covers all systemically important financial institutions, that also includes very large insurers. The world of financial engineering is much lower risk and higher transparency than pre-2008.

Must be why every company pays its fair share of taxes right?

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#262

Post by alfalfasprout »

whstl wrote: post #67
alfalfasprout wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is in how they're productive. If they're productive because they're effectively cutting corners and leaving a wake of tech debt others have to clean up then they are productive while slowing down their team (or worse, the company) as a whole.

Anyone that has been doing this job knows that the majority of average developers in any workplace will also cut corners every once in a while and leave a lot of tech debt to others, with very few exceptions. This myth that more productive developers are somehow worse and will ruin projects is just rationalization without any ground in reality.

Except it’s not a myth. Many of us have encountered the perceived more productive developers that ship barely passable garbage.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#263

Post by callc »

antoniojtorres wrote: post #255
callc wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone who loves software: software is not special. Every discipline has infinite depth. Railways in 2D may seem simple but there the simplicity may be intentional. Just like when you write software that runs things like planes, trains, or medical devices, all of a sudden you’re writing in C, without recursion, without function pointers, without using the heap, etc. Look at the concord airplane. A mess…

I don’t think the comment was meant derisive like you and the other commenter are interpreting… relax?

Thanks, I edited to assume the best interpretation of the thread.

Since I want programming to be inclusive and not have a bad rap publicly, when a peer says “software is better than all other disciplines because of X, Y, Z” I want to convince them otherwise.

As a leader and teacher with more grey hair every day, I feel this responsibility

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#264

Post by jandrewrogers »

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote: post #94
jaggederest wrote: post #5

I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people looking to employ people in the field. These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor. It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the r…

> I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic The ratio of software engineers working in novel design spaces compared to plumbing style work is best guess ~1:5. The ratio in more mature fields like civil engineering is closer to ~1:500. There are lots of similarities between software engineers and the few folk in civ…

Very few software engineers are working in novel design spaces. Even 1:1000 is probably being generous. FWIW, this is true of conventional engineering too, but even more so.

A software engineer having no idea how to build something doesn’t make it novel, it just indicates inexperience or ignorance in all but a vanishingly small number of cases.

In practical systems, you won’t find much novelty outside the rare frontiers of performance optimization, systems software architecture, the occasional bit of weird silicon with unusual computational properties, and some narrow algorithm domains that have never been adequately developed e.g. compression and AI. Almost no software development can justify even thinking about these types of things and they virtually never do.

Conventional engineering is worse because the laws of physics constrain almost everything to boring well-explored solutions. In some cases, we’ve pretty much done exhaustive exploration of what is possible.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#265

Post by lovich »

asdff wrote: post #257
swatcoder wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a completely different understanding of what the craft is [software engineering vs business development] and how to approach it [optimal solution vs soonest deliverable]. You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the…

This is what happens anytime a field gets large in terms of job applications. Replace software engineer with anything else to that measure and you see the same things with wealthy families being overrepresented in the cohort because they always have an edge in getting the best credentials due to not having to work any part time jobs and having mom and dad (or even a paid advisor) actively working on your behalf to ve…

I completely agree. Software engineering is just the most recent field I can think of(unless you consider data science a distinct enough portion of software to carve off as a separate field) that has had this pattern occur.

Well that and this is a forum for a lot of tech people which means a good number of software engineers here.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#266

Post by lovich »

Aurornis wrote: post #214
swatcoder wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a completely different understanding of what the craft is [software engineering vs business development] and how to approach it [optimal solution vs soonest deliverable]. You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the…

> No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a completely different understanding of what the craft is I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation. I'm not that old, but I've been around long enough to hear people of ever…

> I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation.

And they’d probably be right!

I remember the grognards giving me shit about memory management and me giving it right back by explaining that what they considered a large chunk of memory would be worth pennys next year because of Moore’s law and I wasn’t going to waste time considering something that I literally couldn’t learn faster than it became obsolete knowledge.

Quantitative differences can create qualitative differences and I don’t think it’s surprising that we’re in a different age of software engineering than we were 10-15 years ago for any given X year

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#267

Post by noosphr »

callc wrote: post #263
antoniojtorres wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the comment was meant derisive like you and the other commenter are interpreting… relax?

Thanks, I edited to assume the best interpretation of the thread. Since I want programming to be inclusive and not have a bad rap publicly, when a peer says “software is better than all other disciplines because of X, Y, Z” I want to convince them otherwise. As a leader and teacher with more grey hair every day, I feel this responsibility

>As a leader and teacher with more grey hair every day, I feel this responsibility

You should probably do less of that since:

1). That's not what any of my posts said.

2). My degree says mathematical physics and not computer science or software engineering.

3). A field where you're tone policed by the tone deaf is the opposite of welcoming and inclusive.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#268

Post by nodoll »

jaggederest wrote: post #5

I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people looking to employ people in the field. These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor. It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the r…

There is something toxic about calling arbitrary things toxic.

>The effect of consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time trumps any number of crunch weeks and burnout episodes, to an almost absurd degree.

If you have an actual life, you know, with unexpected stuff coming up from time to time, this is just not possible. Then the only way to get stuff done is go 10x during the time you have whenever you have it.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#269

Post by roncesvalles »

>A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week.

Agree completely, and 10X engineers build such organizations.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#270

Post by lovich »

rsanek wrote: post #216
lovich wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor. Didn't we pass the rubicon on that in the early 2010s? I personally don't feel that its "like" finance but that its the exact same behaviors from the exact same set of people. Once tech stopped being a bunch of nerds in a basement and started being a source of wealth and power, it…

>Once tech [...] started being a source of wealth and power this happened "in the early 2010s"? I don't think so. Software engineers have no power, and in comparison to finance, quite limited wealth.

Despite where they are now, the FAANG founders could sling some amount of code back in the day.

I have no doubt they would fail their current interview cycle for engineers if they tried it under a pseudonym, they were considered software engineers when they started their companies and that cohort is now in charge of a double digit percentage of the planets wealth.

If you think software engineers have no power and limited wealth compared to finance then I can only imagine you are not a software engineer are are downplaying the amount of power the class has absorbed, or we fundamentally disagree on what a software engineer is

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