41–50 of 221 posts
There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
> Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. I've been struggling to figure out what "slower" would look like when working in industry. If everyone's working 2x faster, how do you slow down meaningfully without getting axed?
After getting my CS degree I deliberately went into a sector where I suspected this kind of attitude doesn't exist (defense in my case) because already then I felt the whole web/startup culture had very little to do with software engineering.
This took a lot of courage. Glad to see this is being shared. It's the best honest advice I have seen to date.
> Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better. my uk mechanical engineering bachelors degree had a required module on the ethics of engineering which has always stuck in the back of my mind. i think we went over the bhopal disaster as a case study one week, although it was abou…
And while I don't have a problem with career instructors/academics generally, they can be so dramatic. :)
I have no doom and gloom at all for my IT students. Opportunities and crises really are the same thing in the real world; I just tell them, just learn and enjoy learning the tech and keep an eye out for how you can be a problem solver.
You'll be fine.
There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
Perhaps your vantage point from industry is in fact myopic. We all have our own biases.
I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice would set up a new grad for failure and have them focusing on the wrong skills for this market.
The bit about ignoring trends feels too head in the sand for my liking :/
There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
But disagree that this is a path to unemployment. At work we go very fast and yet I think fast is compatible with each of those points, just not in all situations.
Marc Brooker, distinguished eng at AWS, gives much more useful advice for industry, as you'd expect given his almost 30 years in industry.
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It’ll be interesting to see
There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
The industry's goal is to ship fast and profitably. A learner's goal isn't.
> Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. I've been struggling to figure out what "slower" would look like when working in industry. If everyone's working 2x faster, how do you slow down meaningfully without getting axed?