Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The best programmers I know

endler.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 320 posts

Re: The best programmers I know

#11

Post by taneq »

rethab wrote: post #8

This is great advice. Unfortunately, all these AI tools make it far too easy for beginners to not follow it. I'm not sure if all this advice will become irrelevant or if those programmers trained in the 2020ies will not become those "best"..

I dunno, do they really make it that easy? From what I've seen they can give you some example code, and often it works, but when it doesn't, you actually need to know what you're doing to fix it up.

Fixing someone else's code is a great exercise, so maybe they're actually learning useful skills by accident? :)

Re: The best programmers I know

#13

Post by whstl »

wiseowise wrote: post #9
continuational wrote: post #7

I think this "good devs don't complain" mentality risks real issues being overlooked and left unaddressed.

Absolutely. I think it is incomplete: good devs never complain… they just give their 2 weeks notice and find a better place.

Especially in the current job market climate.

I talk regularly to recruiter friends and there seems to be a bimodal distribution going on, with some developers finding jobs straight away vs unlucky ones staying unemployed for months on end.

I recently helped a couple devs that were laid-off in 2023 and still haven’t found anything else.

Re: The best programmers I know

#14

Post by wiseowise »

DeathArrow wrote: post #2

I agree with all but one of his assertions. >Don’t Guess If you are working on critical software like code running in a rocket or medical device, sure, never guess is mandatory. But I and many other people can be in a hurry. We have to or want to move fast where it matters. I don't have the time to research every single detail nor I am interested in knowing every single detail. I am mostly interested in building some…

For others: if company mostly consists of devs, or God forbid management, like that - run asap and never look back.

Re: The best programmers I know

#15

Post by Manfred »

continuational wrote: post #7

I think this "good devs don't complain" mentality risks real issues being overlooked and left unaddressed.

Are you talking about the "Never Blame the Computer" section?

I don't think that addresses complaining, but rather redirecting blame to something nobody has control over instead of digging into the issue and finding the root cause

Re: The best programmers I know

#16

Post by bluetomcat »

rethab wrote: post #8

This is great advice. Unfortunately, all these AI tools make it far too easy for beginners to not follow it. I'm not sure if all this advice will become irrelevant or if those programmers trained in the 2020ies will not become those "best"..

> I'm not sure if all this advice will become irrelevant or if those programmers trained in the 2020ies will not become those "best"..

It's how they use the AI. If they see it as a glorified StackOverflow where you paste a big chunk of code and ask "why does it not work", they'll be in trouble. If they are able to narrow-down their problems to a specific context, express them well and take the output of the AI with a grain of salt, they'll be 10x programmers compared to what we were in the 2000s, for example.

Re: The best programmers I know

#18

Post by [deleted] »

ozim wrote: post #6

Reading documentation - if you are junior take time to go one level deeper to understand / fix issues you have. Then read also stuff adjacent to that. By trying to read some documentation like a book from cover to cover will be waste of time.

[deleted]

Re: The best programmers I know

#19

Post by OvbiousError »

continuational wrote: post #7

I think this "good devs don't complain" mentality risks real issues being overlooked and left unaddressed.

The full quote being

> Most developers blame the software, other people, their dog, or the weather for flaky, seemingly “random” bugs. > The best devs don’t. > No matter how erratic or mischievous the behavior of a computer seems, there is always a logical explanation: you just haven’t found it yet!

I don't see how you can conclude from that that real issues would be overlooked? I interpret this to be the opposite.

Post reply on HN