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Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

nair.sh

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Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#22

Post by hosh »

Complexity, if it can be reduced to a single measurable dimension, is only one of several factors in a solution space.

There are other properties such as, maintainability, scalability, reliability, resilience, anti-fragility, extensibility, versatility, durability, composability. Not all apply.

Being able to talk about tradeoffs in terms of solution spaces, not just along a single dimension, is one of what I consider the differentiator between a senior and staff+ developer.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#23

Post by giancarlostoro »

hirako2000 wrote: post #9
lnenad wrote: post #4

As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by > “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?” as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out…

A sort of survivor bias. A VP ordered to use elastic search, because it worked well at his company before. Turned out it worked well for us. Listen to the VP to make technical decisions. And use elastic search.

Reminds me when the ELK stack was called just ELK (idek what it is now) we had a server we put it on, and after making the additional dashboards my manager wanted, we learned the limits of ES / ELK. It needs a ridiculous amount of memory, because it will shove everything in memory. Same thing when I learned that MongoDB indexing puts every item in memory as well, which is a yikes, why would you not want to index?

I bet there's money to be made for building a drop-in to either of those two that requires less memory, would save companies a bundle, and make other companies a bundle as well.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#24

Post by zzzeek »

JohnMakin wrote: post #3

I don't necessarily disagree with this conclusion, but the way it is written has a lot of AI prose smell that was extremely distracting for me.

im either the biggest idiot in the world or this person is a terrible "copywriter". I found this post to be nearly unintelligible: "You can’t explain away someone else’s problem using your own problems." WTF does that mean? this would be a good place to put some very simplistic examples of what they mean, but they dont. is that because theyre trying to be succinct? clearly not as the post rambles on and on anyway. I hate posts that are both 1. not explaining their concept and 2. super long winded. That's a problem

are we just trying to say, "use AI for prototyping and customer demos that aren't important to be mature, use senior devs to develop and maintain the real products" ? You could just say that then...? Which I also disagree with as how AI should be used, AI is valid to include as a tool across all forms of development - it just should never be put in charge for production-level software (e.g. no vibe coding of mission critical components).

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#27

Post by nathanielks »

BiraIgnacio wrote: post #26

One could say in order to be a senior developer in any area, more-than-good- communication skills are required.

Unfortunately that's not the case. There are many senior and above level engineers out there who are unskilled communicators but very technically skilled.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#28

Post by bilekas »

lnenad wrote: post #4

As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by > “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?” as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out…

I came to say somethign simular actually.

> Ah, baby, this is my senior developer. The avoider, the reducer, the recycler. They want to avoid development as much as they can.

There are times when this is good, there are times when actively trying introduce an improvement is the best way forward. A good senior is able to recognise when those times are.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#29

Post by ____tom____ »

hirako2000 wrote: post #8

Most proof of concepts I've seen get traction turned into production. A rewrite? I recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened. The article touches on responsability, accountability. There is none for risk taker. By definition. You have a crazy idea, you rush it out, you hope clients bite. You profit. It's not even your problem how to make it work, sca…

> recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened.

Old quote: "There is nothing so permanents as a temporary hack."

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