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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

#121

Post by lwhi »

hosh wrote: post #64
lwhi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these factors are directly influenced by complexity.

They all influence each other to one extent or another. And, the Cynefine Framework defines “complexity” a bit differently than the intuitive way it’s often used. The simple domain is a single dimension. The complicated domain is a system of factors. I think when most people say “complex”, they are really talking about what Cynefine labels as “complicated”. The Cynefine complex domain is not so easily solved or reduc…

Isn't Cynefine a framework designed to sell consultancy services?

I think complexity is a byword for 'unintentionally complicated' here.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#122

Post by empath75 »

bilekas wrote: post #28
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.

I am an avoider and also a serial trend-hopper. You can do both!

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#123

Post by aspbee555 »

nullorempty wrote: post #51

What I found is that my willingness to communicate and share my expertise is usually not in demand with more junior developers. In general, I find developers uninterested in finding a mentor. They don't look at your linked in profile, they don't look at you as a possible source of knowledge and expertise. So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to shar…

> So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to share it with.

seriously. it kills me to have so much knowledge and expertise that few people appear to care about if not downright hate me for wanting to pass it on to others as it appears institutional knowledge does not have any value these days

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#124

Post by empath75 »

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…

After my first proof of concept went into production by surprise, I stopped building proof of concepts and started building MVPs.

That's not to say that my first pass that I show people is ready to go into production, but I build the PoC from the beginning with the idea that it _is_ going into production and make sure I have a plan to get to production with it while I am working on it.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#125

Post by empath75 »

goosejuice wrote: post #18

> The avoider, the reducer, the recycler. As this kind of person, it can be alienating in some teams / companies. What I've found works best is to convey how the added complexity will affect non-engineers. You have to understand the incentives and trade offs though, and sometimes it's better to take the loss. If you have the fortune of sticking around with the same leaders for awhile, a few rounds of being vocal, but…

My experience with avoiders and reducers and recyclers is that they want to avoid _my_ idea and do _their_ idea instead.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#126

Post by Yokohiii »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #23
hirako2000 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Production grade multi tenant databases want to *solely* run on RAM.

> why would you not want to index?

Because if you don't need an index it wastes RAM, as you've learned. Maintaining indices also has a cost. Index only what you need.

In the sense of the blog post: A senior with decent DB experience would have told you. ;)

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#127

Post by JambalayaJimbo »

nullorempty wrote: post #51

What I found is that my willingness to communicate and share my expertise is usually not in demand with more junior developers. In general, I find developers uninterested in finding a mentor. They don't look at your linked in profile, they don't look at you as a possible source of knowledge and expertise. So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to shar…

All the senior developers I have worked with are absolutely allergic to coming into the office, working closely with junior developers, and in general talking to people.

Whereas juniors are eager to chat, have lunch with you , and share what they’re working on, the seniors are guarded and solitary.

Maybe that’s just my workplace though!

And yes, the office is important.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#128

Post by Yokohiii »

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…

I guess it's company culture? I had a job and we initially had quick solutions that went messy. We set a hard policy that every "quick and dirty" feature will have a follow up story that gets pulled into the following 1-2 sprints. Often it turned out that the feature didn't live up to expectations and we just disabled or deleted it, the other times we reviewed it and refactored it properly.

We were highly autonomous team though and hardly had cadence complains. But mostly because the all other departments were lagging. Except marketing, marketing always has "ideas".

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#129

Post by Shocka1 »

nullorempty wrote: post #51

What I found is that my willingness to communicate and share my expertise is usually not in demand with more junior developers. In general, I find developers uninterested in finding a mentor. They don't look at your linked in profile, they don't look at you as a possible source of knowledge and expertise. So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to shar…

Wish I had you at my first engineering job at IBM. A couple senior devs there (not all) would get pissed when juniors tried asking them questions. Not only did it take a bit of courage to ask someone who had been there 20 years about something, but it was a 50/50 chance they were going to be an asshole to ya lol. Was a good learning experience for me - I go out of my way to mentor now.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#130

Post by entropicdrifter »

randysalami wrote: post #92
gfody wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is why I only communicate in poetry complexity is not what you believe it is please try listening

So cool. One reading is “complexity is not what you believe it is”. Another is “complexity is”… “not what you believe it is”. Seems similar but the difference is subtle. Even the “please try listening” line changes in both versions. One is confrontational, the other is empathetic.

Agreed. "complexity is" as a full sentence followed by "not what you believe it is" has a fundamentally different meaning.

Very cool

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