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The Making of Software Engineering Myths

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Re: The Making of Software Engineering Myths

#31

Post by jophde »

Morendil wrote: post #16
stilkov wrote: post #9

"The trope of 'software as a highly abstract, intellectually demanding, nearly mathematical activity' contributes to a myth of software development as a profession 'naturally' dominated by males: math is the subject of its own interlocking system of tropes, myths and stereotypes that paint it as a manly pursuit." That logic seems to be all backwards to me. Of course developing software is a highly abstract, intellect…

> Of course developing software is a highly abstract, intellectually demanding activity I don't mean to sound harsh, but "of course" and "it's absurd" aren't much of an argument. My advice is to dig into this a bit deeper. What do you think makes software "a highly abstract, intellectually demanding activity"? What would the world look like if that were NOT the case, what would it look like if it WERE the case? How d…

Not all of programming is CRUD web apps.

Re: The Making of Software Engineering Myths

#32

Post by wehadfun »

benched wrote: post #23
mwfunk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why anyone down voted this because there's definitely at least some truth here. A lot of times the stereotypical 10x rock stars in an organization are really smart and productive people who ship features and move on to the next feature, leaving maintenance to the people who are left behind. They get the glory, but in many cases (totally anecdotal of course) they did it by taking all sorts of shortcuts an…

I downvoted it because people will go to any rhetorical lengths, including "un-defining" the very word intelligence to death, just to believe some people aren't more intelligent than others. Oh, new rule! We can concede there are "10x" devs, but they have to write shit code! Give me a break.

Ok fine. I should not have called the orig developers code shit.

Re: The Making of Software Engineering Myths

#33

Post by k__ »

benched wrote: post #23
mwfunk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why anyone down voted this because there's definitely at least some truth here. A lot of times the stereotypical 10x rock stars in an organization are really smart and productive people who ship features and move on to the next feature, leaving maintenance to the people who are left behind. They get the glory, but in many cases (totally anecdotal of course) they did it by taking all sorts of shortcuts an…

I downvoted it because people will go to any rhetorical lengths, including "un-defining" the very word intelligence to death, just to believe some people aren't more intelligent than others. Oh, new rule! We can concede there are "10x" devs, but they have to write shit code! Give me a break.

Fair enough.

But couldn't it be that those "real" 10x devs are so rare, that they aren't a "thing"?

With real I mean those who don't write shitty code.

Re: The Making of Software Engineering Myths

#34

Post by SilasX »

YZF wrote: post #27

The biggest problems is that no "law" or "rule of thumb" of software engineering is always right. So "debunking" by finding an exception isn't really useful. The best answer to most of these questions is: It Depends (tm). There are situations where the right person making the right calls makes a huge difference and there situations where anyone can make a call that would turn out reasonably OK. There are situations w…

Exactly: the test of a heuristic is its average case performance, not its worse case. If you select for finding a really bad case in "proving" it wrong, that's not very informative.

Re: The Making of Software Engineering Myths

#35

Post by Pacabel »

bowlofpetunias wrote: post #26

Well, at least he's doing his best to prove the myth of all programmers being humorless autists who take everything literally to be true... Yes, sure, we're talking about exactly 10x when we talk about 10x programmers. Etcetera, etcetera. Even the most fanatical Agile evangelist gets both the tongue in cheek humor (with a serious undertone) of Zed's "programming, motherfucker", but not this guy.

To be fair, sometimes it is hard to tell when those in the Ruby/JavaScript/Web 2.0/NoSQL/"opinionated" crowd are being serious and when they're joking.

Some of the claims or statements they make in a serious manner are so far off-base that they appear to be jokes to those with more experience or higher standards.

The "JavaScript is like Scheme" claim is a good example of this. A lot of JavaScripters will openly express this idea in complete seriousness. Yet anyone who has actually used JavaScript and Scheme will know that this really isn't true at all. The true intent of the person making the outrageous claim is hard to discern. They might be serious, or they might be joking. Often, it's safest to assume that they're being serious, until they explicitly admit otherwise.

Re: The Making of Software Engineering Myths

#36

Post by thedufer »

Morendil wrote: post #16
stilkov wrote: post #9

"The trope of 'software as a highly abstract, intellectually demanding, nearly mathematical activity' contributes to a myth of software development as a profession 'naturally' dominated by males: math is the subject of its own interlocking system of tropes, myths and stereotypes that paint it as a manly pursuit." That logic seems to be all backwards to me. Of course developing software is a highly abstract, intellect…

> Of course developing software is a highly abstract, intellectually demanding activity I don't mean to sound harsh, but "of course" and "it's absurd" aren't much of an argument. My advice is to dig into this a bit deeper. What do you think makes software "a highly abstract, intellectually demanding activity"? What would the world look like if that were NOT the case, what would it look like if it WERE the case? How d…

> How does this claim coexist with that, which has been bandied about for decades, that software programming is on the brink of being automated away?

Now there's a good myth. Unless you really think programming could be "on the brink of being automated away" for over half the time its been around?

In which case, where can I bet against this theory?

Re: The Making of Software Engineering Myths

#37

Post by benched »

k__ wrote: post #33
benched wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted it because people will go to any rhetorical lengths, including "un-defining" the very word intelligence to death, just to believe some people aren't more intelligent than others. Oh, new rule! We can concede there are "10x" devs, but they have to write shit code! Give me a break.

Fair enough. But couldn't it be that those "real" 10x devs are so rare, that they aren't a "thing"? With real I mean those who don't write shitty code.

I.e.: Let's explore every possible angle from which we could detract from the phenomenon. Leave no stone unturned!

By my count, I've worked with 6 of these mythical creatures at 3 jobs in 15 years. Is that rare? I don't think so. The fact is, in a lot of cases the team or even the entire company would not even exist as they did, without these people. And everyone knew it because it was blindingly obvious. What would id software have been without John Carmack? Did you know that the first version of Microsoft Math, which included a fully general algebra solver, was written by one guy as a side project? Nobody else on that whole team did anything like that. Just that guy. The 10x dev is the person all the other devs are intimidated by, strictly on the basis of the code they've written.

Re: The Making of Software Engineering Myths

#38

Post by k__ »

benched wrote: post #37
k__ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. But couldn't it be that those "real" 10x devs are so rare, that they aren't a "thing"? With real I mean those who don't write shitty code.

I.e.: Let's explore every possible angle from which we could detract from the phenomenon. Leave no stone unturned! By my count, I've worked with 6 of these mythical creatures at 3 jobs in 15 years. Is that rare? I don't think so. The fact is, in a lot of cases the team or even the entire company would not even exist as they did, without these people. And everyone knew it because it was blindingly obvious . What would…

I know about guys like Carmack. He was the one I was thinking about when asking the question.

But I never met one like him.

To me, such people simply are far away in some big companys across the sea.

I always hope to meet such people to learn from them "how to do it".

Re: The Making of Software Engineering Myths

#39

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

benched wrote: post #30
r00fus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's important to distinguish 10x "developers" and 10x moments that a given developer has. It's like 1.000 game, a hat-trick or triple-double - sometimes any given player has the potential (though not all may be given the opportunity) to make their mark.

And yet nobody denies there was something highly unusual about Michael Jordan.

Basketball is a pretty narrow field though. Anyway, wouldn't you say Linus is a good 10x type of programmer?

Re: The Making of Software Engineering Myths

#40

Post by jamii »

eurleif wrote: post #17
Morendil wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course developing software is a highly abstract, intellectually demanding activity I don't mean to sound harsh, but "of course" and "it's absurd" aren't much of an argument. My advice is to dig into this a bit deeper. What do you think makes software "a highly abstract, intellectually demanding activity"? What would the world look like if that were NOT the case, what would it look like if it WERE the case? How d…

>How does this claim square with sites like the Daily WTF, which provide evidence that many gainfully employed programmers do not, in fact, use their brains very much? With the more or less weekly announcements of "security breaches" caused by people ignoring basic best practice, for instance storing passwords in plain text? I take many people being bad at programming as evidence that programming is hard, not that it…

I take it as evidence that we are doing it wrong. I can only hope that in 50 years time people will look back and wonder how we managed to get it so wrong.
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