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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

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Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#521

Post by skydhash »

loglog wrote: post #509
skydhash wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to pair program, you can always send a message to your colleague about the design of the upcoming code, especially if it’s going to impact them or if it’s an area that they’re more familiar with. Waiting till a PR for feedback is wrong IMO. Code review is not for feedback, it’s for ensuring quality (many eyes on the output) and have a shared involvement in the evolution of the code. The time for feedback is e…

Writing and reading design documentation can be slower than pair programming. On the other hand, info about code design also belongs into inline documentation or commit messages (in this order of preference), so the effort might not be wasted.

I don't think so. There can be a lot of shared context within the team which can make prose shorter than writing code. And written words last longer than verbal exchange.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#522

Post by swiftcoder »

necovek wrote: post #502
swiftcoder wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in a few sentences, what do you expect out of a quality code review? (sounds like nothing in your case, but I am curious) From my perspective, there are three sorts of PRs: - One is very close to the final form of a particular change, and any feedback you get at that late stage is indicative of holes in your process. - Another is one where someone throws something up and says "hey, this is an experiment, can I get…

On the first category, what is a process you use which has no "holes" in it? Does everybody produce completely readable, tested code every time? Perhaps that's just "style" to you when it is "maintainability" to me?

> Does everybody produce completely readable, tested code every time?

Do your coworkers not reliably produce readable, tested code?

That's kind of the minimum bar for a software engineer in my book

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#523

Post by hatsix »

swiftcoder wrote: post #339
fg137 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most PR feedback was stylistic, with the occasional bug identified. I think that only speaks for your own experience. I have definitely seen more than a few PRs that needed significant work.

Yeah, that's fair. I have spent most of my career on high-pressure teams within FAANG, where we aggressively managed-out anyone who wasn't making the grade. And now in the startup world, we apply a very aggressive hiring bar. I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy working on teams who were routinely producing PRs that were in bad shape.

This is such a weird take. From my 5 years at Amazon, the only people I saw "managed out" were engineers who were good, it even great, at the code part of their job, but trash at working with the team. Our hiring bar was notoriously high, and it wasn't uncommon for engineers who were leads at their startup to get hired at L5.

When I was Bar Raising for promotions, I didn't review their PRs, I reviewed their Reviews. I reviewed the PRs that mentioned those reviews to see what slipped by. I looked at non-crunch time to verify they were reviewing at least as much code as their teammates.

If I saw someone 4x-ing the amount of code, they had better be 4x-ing the reviews too... if all they were leaving was stylistic formatting comments, they'd never make it to L6, unless the only thing they were reviewing was L6 code.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#524

Post by necovek »

swiftcoder wrote: post #522
necovek wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the first category, what is a process you use which has no "holes" in it? Does everybody produce completely readable, tested code every time? Perhaps that's just "style" to you when it is "maintainability" to me?

> Does everybody produce completely readable, tested code every time? Do your coworkers not reliably produce readable, tested code? That's kind of the minimum bar for a software engineer in my book

I like to invert that to: do I produce code I am perfectly happy with in regards to readability and maintainability or would I benefit from another pair of eyes?

Every question I get (when my code is reviewed) is a signal that code could be more self-explanatory, unless it is a complex algorithm itself, and that my — by now deep — exposure to the problem is keeping me misguided about what is and isn't "obvious" or "clear". A reviewer can take a step back and help ensure both them and I will be able to easily grasp the same code 3 or 24 months later.

Note that one of the best advice I got early in my career about doing a good code review is that you "just" need to ask good questions: the point is not for a reviewer to show how much smarter they are, but for both to develop a shared understanding and ensure code can be interpreted as quickly as possible.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#525

Post by hackable_sand »

keiferski wrote: post #370
bluGill wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal. The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.

This is true if you're writing a letter about a difficult topic. For HN comments, 99.9% of the time, a short comment is a low effort one and should be disregarded.

A comment should fill exactly the amount of space that it fills, no?

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#526

Post by wffurr »

loglog wrote: post #511
wffurr wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> the readability is the bottleneck not the code creation. He should improve readability. See this is where I think LLMs can actually improve software engineering. Use them to write better code not more code. The most useful LLM at work so far is the code review bot that occasionally finds things that I missed even with a careful self review and good test coverage. We should be prompting the LLMs to review our hand…

The bots can also write Rust instead of C++, doing away with the arcane nonsense accumulated by that legacy language. SCNR.

Bot-assisted Rust could be amazing; there's some ports already happening which wouldn't have otherwise. Maybe Rewrite-it-in-Rust can actually be a real thing and not just a meme. But it does put a big burden on implementors to understand what they're generating, and now it's in an unfamiliar language to boot.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#527

Post by jstummbillig »

throw4847285 wrote: post #355
jstummbillig wrote: post #231

I increasingly find that I don't care whether I am talking to an anonymous AI or an anonymous human, and believe that we will increasingly stop caring. Because why not? AI will simply on average be nicer to talk to than most humans, with clearer thinking and better arguments, less contradictions, and easier to comprehend. I don't know how humans could compete with that (but it also does not seem all that horrible, gi…

It's the argument from misanthropy again! AI is seen as unique innovation, but in terms of the real purpose it serves, it is the logical extension of something like Doordash. "I don't like people. I don't even want to call one on the phone to order a pizza. Make me a tool that lets me avoid that, please." Let me pose an alternative narrative. Rather than interacting with humans being intrinsically unpleasant (though…

This seems akin to hating on a toddler because they can't talk, with the only alternative being pretending that they are great conversationalists. It's a category error.

I don't need a human to be particularly good at anything to like them. Maybe that is how you work, but the idea is just misplaced to me.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#528

Post by keithnz »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #286
keithnz wrote: post #29

More and more I'm generating AI emails, often to people outside the company and often to do with technical issues / integrations we have / APIs. So far I don't think the people I'm emailing are really using AI as human responses are, well, lacking. What would be great is new email conventions for different communication pathways. Human -> Human (think we have this sorted) AI -> Human AI -> AI If you are doing AI -> H…

If you are trying to do AI -> Human communication you should be publicly flogged. Don't waste people's time with garbage you can't be bothered to write Just send them the prompt instead, let them see how little effort you care to place into communicating with them

no, and this shows you haven't really used it, prompts are useless, access to context is what matters. It's because I have access to things that others don't that make the difference, prompts are useless unless you are accessing public information. What you and others are missing is the results are highly valuable to the recipient, assuming AI responses are garbage is just silly these days, people need to get over their obsession with "AI slop", because it isn't.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#530

Post by bandrami »

rightbyte wrote: post #466
bandrami wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a question I usually ask which is "How would you convert a Julian yyyy-ddd date string to a military yyyy-mm-dd date string?" (I explain how a Julian date works if they aren't familiar with it.) The answer that almost guarantees I'll hire you is "there's got to be a library function for that, so I look in the manual". Almost as good is somebody whiteboarding how they'd convert ddd to mm-dd (and then account fo…

> My favorite answer was on a phone interview where he just hung up and wouldn't answer when we called back. Heh ... yeah well I wish I had it to do that. However, you are asking gotcha questions.

If "I want to see your instincts towards solving a problem" is a "gotcha" then we should just draw lots to hire people.
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