Live data from Hacker News

Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

old.reddit.com

11–20 of 510 posts

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#11
post #3

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.) I agree but think it is more than just _documentation_: effectively communicating ideas through text was one o…

I just use headerdoc-type stuff. Been doing it for decades.

It works very well, and doesn't really add any overhead to my work.

I write about how I do documentation here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/leaving-a-legacy/

It's a long read, because it's a big topic.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#12
post #3

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.) I agree but think it is more than just _documentation_: effectively communicating ideas through text was one o…

The first thing to learn is that there are four types of documentation:

learning-oriented tutorials

goal-oriented how-to guides

understanding-oriented explanations or discussions

information-oriented reference material

https://www.writethedocs.org/videos/eu/2017/the-four-kinds-o...

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#14
post #5

> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all. This a thousand times. Having empathy for future devs, maintenance, and bug fixes is so important.

Someone please translate that to Latin and start plastering that on office walls so people take it more seriously. It’s going to save all of our mental health in the long run.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#16
post #3

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.) I agree but think it is more than just _documentation_: effectively communicating ideas through text was one o…

I've seen lack-of-documentation worn as a badge of honor. "I'm moving so fast, I can't waste my time on documentation. That's the next guys problem."

And management is usually/always ok with this short-term optimization.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#18
>Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

I thought they were going to go the direction of "he's an asshole" and was ready to accept that, but this particular criticism is actually disturbing. People with strong visions can often appear to be "making it up as they go along," when really they are just subpar communicators.

Short story, I am helping my current company switch from a monolith to service-oriented architecture, and in the process have built a framework for spinning up new fully-deployable services from scratch that gets engineers 90% of the way there (minus the business logic). I have a strong vision for how it works and had a dozen-page RFC accepted by the engineering team for it. Yet there are engineers who think I am making it up as I go (I have been asked this indirectly), without any vision guiding the pieces into place. I have chalked up this feedback to me needing to improve my communication of the vision.

So the post's response of "I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us" is disturbing because it makes me realize just how difficult communicating a vision is... if this hero that the poster paid $5k to go see can't even convince one of their fans, what chance do normal people like you and I have of convincing people that we're not making it up as we go?

>EDIT: I realize that I am posting under the assumption that the person's hero does in fact know what he's doing. If he truly is making it up as he goes, the above doesn't apply.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#19

> When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it. This is the saddest. One more soul taken by the shrinking of the hacker culture.

Been doing this professionally 15 years, and still am enamored with tech and programming. I actually avoided getting into the field because I was worried it would ruin my favorite hobby if I did it professionally (which is why I majored in Philosophy instead of CS in college)

I get sick and tired of all the rest of the bullshit, but never with tech and programming itself.

Post reply on HN