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Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

nair.sh

71–80 of 361 posts

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#71
I may be missing something, but the "left" and "right" loops strike me as slightly different words for the same exact thing.

The company provides (offer | service) to the (market | user) and receives (feedback | payment).

The service IS the offer, the userbase IS the market, and payment IS the feedback signal.

Right?

EDIT - expanded on original comment to add:

The author's point might be lost on me but seems to be that framing things with one of those sets of labels vs the other may correspond to use of "complexity" vs "uncertainty" as the element targeted for reduction, and choosing those labels carefully in turn correlates to "senior" devs' persuasiveness in prioritization battles with product owners. To which my response would be, "maybe?". (shrug)

I'm not a copywriter by trade but I care about words and may have just been nerd-sniped.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#72

Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…

That’s very well put.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#73
Interesting article. I appreciate the range of perspectives here, and the overall pitch to keep the most experienced in frame along side new-fangled advancements (AI).

The "speed" loop reminds me a lot of RAD. In fact, AI might be _the_ thing that helps us deliver on RAD's promises from decades ago.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/software-engineering/software-...

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#74
Speed… speed… velocity… speed. All I hear about these days. Every meeting.

Honest question does high velocity / first mover ever really pay off these days?

I don't feel like having the first AI slop to the market has actually paid off for anyone? Am I wrong? Am I missing something? Am I out of touch?

The way I see it, first movers do a lot of work proving the idea works, and everyone else swoops in with better product or at least at a cheaper rate.

Beyond that, let's take the company I work for, for example. We have an ingrained and actually relatively happy customer base on a subscription model. I feel like the only thing increased velocity can do is rapidly ruin their experience.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#75

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…

Thats why you gotta write them in a language nobody else on the team has heard of.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no high performance database that wont take all of your memory (at least for size of data) if you let it. That's because it's much, MUCH faster to do it that way, though if you can deal with certain type of latency trade offs for throughput something like turbopuffer can do wonders for your costs.

MySQL doesnt eat up all 8GB of my system when I need to query a table with indexed values, MongoDB seems to eat it all up.

You paid one hundred bucks for that eight gb of ram, do you really want it to just sit there unused?

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MySQL doesnt eat up all 8GB of my system when I need to query a table with indexed values, MongoDB seems to eat it all up.

You paid one hundred bucks for that eight gb of ram, do you really want it to just sit there unused?

No, but my manager was wondering why our website was slowing to a crawl.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#78
Irrespective of the linked post, let me say why I (being sort-of-a senior developer) fail to communicate my expertise. In no particular order:

1. I am discouraged or forbidden from devoting time to communicating my expertise; they would rather use it. Well, often, they'd rather I did the grunt work to facilitate the use of my expertise.

2. Same, but devoting time to preparing materials which communicate my expertise.

3. A lot of my expertise is a bunch of hunches and intuitions, a "sense of smell" for things. And that's difficult to communicate.

4. My junior colleagues don't get time off their other duties to listen to "expertise sharing", when it does not immediately promote the project they're working on.

5. Many of my junior colleagues lack enough fundamentals (IMNSHO) for me to share all sorts of expertise with them. That is, to share B with them I would need to first teach them A, and knowing A is not much of an expertise; but they're inexperienced, maybe fresh out of university.

6. My expertise may only be partially or very-partially relevant to many of my colleagues; but I can't just divide the expertise up.

7. For good reasons or bad, I have trouble separating my expertise from various ethical/world-view principles, which fundamentally disagree with the way things are done where I'm at. So, such sharing is to some extent a subversive diatribe against the status quo.

8. My expertise on some matters is very partial - and what I know just underlines for me how much I _don't_ know. So, I am apprehensive to talk about what I feel I actually don't know enough about - which may just result in my appearing presumptuous and not knowledgeable enough.

9. My expertise on some matters is very partial - and what I know just underlines for me how much I _don't_ know. So, I try to polish and complete my expertise before sharing it - and that's a path you can walk endlessly, never reaching a point where you feel ready to share.

10. Tried sharing some expertise in the past, few people attended the session, I got demotivated.

11. Tried sharing some expertise in the past, few people were engaged enough to follow what I was saying, I got demotivated.

12. Shared some expertise in the past, got a positive feedback, but then those people who seemed to appreciate what I said did not implement/apply any of it, even though they could have and really should have.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You paid one hundred bucks for that eight gb of ram, do you really want it to just sit there unused?

No, but my manager was wondering why our website was slowing to a crawl.

Is the DB on the same host as the web server?

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#80

Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…

Well here's an engineering problem figure out how to mentor 10x the number of juniors
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