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Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

simonwillison.net

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Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#371

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Larrikin wrote: post #287
hostyle wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything is about money. Have you never wanted to be good at something because you enjoy it? Or do something for the love of the craft? Have you heard of altruism?

But why do that for the company instead of yourself?

Speaking only for my particular circumstances, the company is the vehicle that I use to do it for myself since it provides specialized facilities and equipment I wouldn't have access to as an individual or a founder. That I get paid for it is merely icing on the cake.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#372

Post by minimaxir »

webdev1234568 wrote: post #46
simonw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a single word of it was. I wrote this one entirely in Apple Notes, so there weren't even any VS Code completed sentences It has emdashes because my blog turns " - " into an emdash here: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/06e931b397f...

My biggest appologies, a very bad move on my part. I'll pay more attention before any sort of accusation like this

No one should be making any accusations of AI generation without strong evidence other than vibes. That hurts the cause of anti-AI use and punishes people who don't use it.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#373

Post by cesarb »

rootusrootus wrote: post #253
sodapopcan wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaining about including a ticket number in the commit is a new one for me. Good grief.

It could be a death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation and we don't have enough context. My company has spent the last few years really going 1000% on the capitalization of software expenses, and now we have to include a whole slew of unrelated attributes in every last Jira ticket. Then the "engineering team" (there is only one of these, somehow, in a 5K employee company) decrees all sorts of requirements about how we test…

> But putting the ticket number in the commit ... that's basically automatic, I don't know why it should be that big a concern. The branch itself gets created with the ticket number and everything follows from that, there's no extra effort.

That poster said "attach a JIRA Ticket to the PR", so in their case, it's not that automatic.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#374

Post by SoftTalker »

xnx wrote: post #368
endorphine wrote: post #104

> there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the “code review” process to handle the rest. It's even worse than that: non -junior devs are doing it as well.

Unfortunately, junior behavior exists in many with "senior" titles. Especially since "senior" is often given to those 2 years out of school.

Title inflation?

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#375

Post by antod »

trevor-e wrote: post #159

> Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work. Strong disagree here, your job is to deliver solutions that help the business solve a problem. In _most_ cases that means delivering code that you should be able to confidently prove satisfies the requirements like the OP mentioned, but I think this is an important nitpick distinction I didn't understand until later on in my career.

It's more than just solving a problem though, you should be solving the given problem without creating new problems. This is where the working/secure code aspect comes in.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#376

Post by switchbak »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #244
vernrVingingIt wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try almost 30 years in electrical engineering. I know exactly what those layers of abstraction are used for. Why so many? Jobs making layers of abstraction. But all of them are dev friendly means of modeling memory states for the CPU to watch and transform just so. They can all be compressed into a generic and generalized set of mathematical functions ridding ourselves of the various parser rules to manage each bespo…

Okay. Go write an operating system and suite of apps with global memory and no protections. Why are we wasting so much time on abstractions like processes and objects? Just let let everyone read and write from the giant turing machine.

Engineers value different things. It's why I loathe to maintain engineer-written code.

Let the downvotes commence!

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#377

Post by sunsetMurk »

anthonypasq wrote: post #366
layer8 wrote: post #138

I’d go further and say while testing is necessary, it is not sufficient. You have to understand the code and convince yourself that it is logically correct under all relevant circumstances, by reasoning over the code. Testing only “proves” correctness for the specific state, environment, configuration, and inputs the code was tested with. In practice that only tests a tiny portion of possible circumstances, and omits…

if your tests cover the acceptance criteria as defined in the ticket, why is all htat other stuff necessary?

Acceptance criteria are often buggy themselves, and require more context to interpret and develop a solution.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#378

Post by vernrVingingIt »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #244
vernrVingingIt wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try almost 30 years in electrical engineering. I know exactly what those layers of abstraction are used for. Why so many? Jobs making layers of abstraction. But all of them are dev friendly means of modeling memory states for the CPU to watch and transform just so. They can all be compressed into a generic and generalized set of mathematical functions ridding ourselves of the various parser rules to manage each bespo…

Okay. Go write an operating system and suite of apps with global memory and no protections. Why are we wasting so much time on abstractions like processes and objects? Just let let everyone read and write from the giant turing machine.

Easy; endlessly big little numbers. "Endless" until the machine runs out of real memory addresses anyway.

You all really think engineers at Samsung, nVidia, etc whose job it is to generalize software into mathematical models have not considered this?

We need a layer of abstraction, not Ruby, Python, Elixir, Rails, Perl, Linux, Windows, etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum... each with unique and computationally expensive (energy wasting) parsing, serializing and deserializing rules.

Mitigation of climate change is a general concern for the species. Specific concerns of software developers who will die someday anyway get to take a back seat for a change.

Yes AI uses a lot of electricity but so does traditional SaaS.

Traditional SaaS will eventually be replaced with more efficient automated systems. We're in a transition period.

It's computationally efficient to just use geometry[1], which given enough memory, can be shaped to avoid collisions you are concerned with.

Your only real concern is obvious self selection driven social conservatism. "Don't disrupt me ...of all people... bro!"

[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2987/1/...

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#379

Post by SoftTalker »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #299
tyrust wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code review is rarely done live. It's usually asynchronous, giving the reviewer plenty of time to read, digest, and give considered feedback on the changes. Perhaps a spicy patch would involve some kind of meeting. Or maybe in a mentor/mentee situation where you'd want high-bandwidth communication.

My first job did IRL code reviews with at least two senior devs in the loop. It was both devastating and extremely helpful.

Yeah when we first started, "code review" was a weekly meeting of pretty much the entire dev team (maybe 10 people). Not all commits were reviewed, it was random and the developer would be notified a couple of days in advance that his code was chosen for review so that he could prepare to demo and defend it.

Re: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

#380

Post by SoftTalker »

groby_b wrote: post #359
analog31 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the junior devs while their code is being reviewed? I'm not a software developer, but I'd be loath to review someone's work unless they have enough skin in the game to be present for the review.

I think we've moved on from the times where you brought a printout to the change control board to talk it through.

But are we better off?
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