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Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

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Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#91

Post by vonmoltke »

odonnellryan wrote: post #61
vonmoltke wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish there was a job title for "good all-arounder with knowledge of the state of the art in a role with substantial self-direction", but I think that's probably "founder" or something. Or "owner of a very small business" maybe? That's the way I am drifting. I just can't seem to get in gear on my own. :(

Why's that? I've been thinking about starting my own side company. It is a lot of work!

Part of it is social and general anxiety. I'm afraid of putting myself out there, having my ideas and implementations judged, and finding both coworkers and customers.

Part of it is having trouble focusing on a single idea. Finding the right partner would help here: see #1.

Part of it is fluctuating levels of depression sapping my motivation outside, and sometimes inside, work. I have been fighting this for almost a decade. At one point several years ago the mere thought of doing things outside of work so reinforced how miserable I was in my day job that I couldn't get anything done.

I'm slowly working through my barriers. My most recent dip into the job market has demonstrated that the only way I am going to get the job I want where I want it is to make it myself, so I have renewed motivation to get moving.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#93

Post by jfoutz »

kazinator wrote: post #65
jfoutz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tell me about writing a compiler" There's no way to interview for what you're looking for, but compilers seem to require both great organizational skills and some algorithmic chops. there's enough complexity you can't hide lack of one side or the other. Anyway, asking about building and enhancing a compiler seems like one of the ways to get insight about how people grow code. Every program is a seed. Is this the kin…

Compilers aren't real-time, distributed, multi-user, ... basically anything that is hard from a software engineering perspective which includes deployment and testing. Compilers have reproducible test cases (if they don't, that is a bug in itself). You can catch regressions in a compiler with an automated test suite, and bisect their version history to see where it was introduced. Bug reports from the field tend to b…

If the point is looking for organizational skills, i think compilers are legitimate. They're big complicated beasts. Sure, some people in isolation can make amazing things with a few thousand lines of code - I think most people would be happy employing Fabrice Bellard.

Writing a C compiler seems like one of those standard undergrad activities. If a programmer can make that work, they probably have sufficient organizational skills. It seems like real-time, distributed, multi user app development is a separate filter.

I guess it's the distinction between looking for someone who is capable of solving those problems vs looking for someone who has solved those problems.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#94

Post by jimbokun »

I disagree with the premise that organizing code is not a recognized or appreciated skill among developers.

At least not since this was published:

http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing-...

Martin Fowler really struck a chord all the developers trying to do the right thing by cleaning up badly structured code, by giving the practice a name and explaining why it's important. Refactoring is definitely a widely acknowledged and accepted practice today, although probably more so in some communities than others.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#95

Post by JohnTHaller »

msandford wrote: post #7

This is incredibly true. I once turned 60kLoC of classic ASP in VBScript into about 20kLoC of python/django including templates. And added a bunch of features that would have been impossible on the old code-base. It turned the job from hellish (features were impossible to add) to very nearly boring (there wasn't much to do anymore). So with this newfound freedom I built some machines to automate the data entry and on…

Back when I worked corporate I loved when I got time to make the apps I was responsible for better. Getting free time to refactor an outdated procedure written by four different developers who'd all left that just barely worked, albeit slowly, was something I enjoyed. As was getting a couple days for minor bug fixes and small feature adds. I happily had the freedom to sit with the users directly and ask them about how they used the software in their jobs as part of those few bug-fix and feature days for the "late lifecycle" apps (read: they worked OK, so almost zero time was spent updating them other than major crashes and no major versions were scheduled). So, I got to implement unique features based on how they needed to do their jobs that previous developers hadn't thought to add because they'd only done the official 'users get together and ask for features, department head filters it, hands it to our department, department head filters it, assigns it to one of us to do in spare time not working on more important software' thing.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#96

Post by knodi123 »

w1ntermute wrote: post #88
vijayr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to me once. I went for an an interview at a huge real estate company. They had a chat with me for exactly five minutes, then gave me a computer (an old one, with keyboard not working properly) and some legacy code. I wasn't asked to fix it, but I was asked to make a small change and given half hour for it. That code had no documentation and no comments. Then 5 more mins to explain what I understood abou…

How'd you do it if the keyboard wasn't working?

Our main product was developed on a keyboard that was missing a "w". It's not a big deal, though - you can use a for(;;) loop instead of a while loop without hurting performance. And it's easy to just avoid "w" words in the view templates by being clever with word choice.

Of course, that's not true at all. But giving someone a defective-but-not-entirely-broken tool can be a clever way of seeing how they work around problems or how they deal with frustration. Joking aside, we once let a guy go during his 1 week probationary period because he got a little too angry at a slow server. It's a valuable test.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#97

Post by nly »

jeremiep wrote: post #74
justonepost wrote: post #17

Arguably, this is what higher level languages like Java and C++ provide. Tight organizational language metaphors that help implement design patterns in a thoughtful, consistently structured manner.

The abstractions provided by Java and C++ aren't very good compared to those provided by, say, Haskell and Clojure. For the most part, design patterns exist merely to fix the lack of a simpler lambda construct in the language. They more often than not add complexity rather than remove it. The biggest balls of spaghetti code I've ever seen we're always OOP with design patterns. I've seen far more clean C codebases tha…

C++ has lambdas and the standard library is, although baroque, heavily functional and well thought out.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#98

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

jeremiep wrote: post #63
qznc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The promise of Design Patterns (tm) is that you can systematically learn to organize your code. The article argues that only experience does.

But design patterns are horrible at organizing code. They have a much higher chance of introducing unneeded complexity. It should be no surprise that almost every single design pattern can be replaced with a simple lambda in languages supporting them.

Design patterns are excellent at creating the illusion of organisation.

I recently had to modify someone else's Mac app. On the surface it looked like a textbook example of successful use of design patterns. Everything was highly modular, functions were simple, there was clear separation of concerns, controllers and views were distinct, and so on.

Problem was, the key features were still baked in and hard to modify. So while it looked modular, it wasn't - the affordances were fixed and there was no way to generalise them without pulling apart at least a couple of levels.

IMO it's not abstract organisation that matters. Organisation is only good if it makes it easier to achieve clearly-defined goals and benefits. You need to know what the goals are, and make some guesses about what they might be in the future. Otherwise you're just putting stuff in layers and boxes and drawing arrows everywhere for no good reason.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#99

Post by amelius »

kazinator wrote: post #65
jfoutz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tell me about writing a compiler" There's no way to interview for what you're looking for, but compilers seem to require both great organizational skills and some algorithmic chops. there's enough complexity you can't hide lack of one side or the other. Anyway, asking about building and enhancing a compiler seems like one of the ways to get insight about how people grow code. Every program is a seed. Is this the kin…

Compilers aren't real-time, distributed, multi-user, ... basically anything that is hard from a software engineering perspective which includes deployment and testing. Compilers have reproducible test cases (if they don't, that is a bug in itself). You can catch regressions in a compiler with an automated test suite, and bisect their version history to see where it was introduced. Bug reports from the field tend to b…

Agreed. Nowadays, writing the runtime environment including a concurrent garbage collector is more complicated than writing the compiler.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#100

Post by crimsonalucard »

jdimov9 wrote: post #71

I agree that most complexity in software systems comes from managing state. So here is a simple solution - stop doing it. Stop managing state. Use the right tools for the job. Most mainstream programming languages are ridiculously inadequate for building any production software of any significant complexity without introducing more problems than you are trying to solve. Use a mature functional programming language th…

There's gotta be performance drawbacks to immutable state.
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