101–110 of 745 posts
That being said where you lay on the scale depends on context.
In my previous project I was a [-0.25;0.25], so I quit, because I was miserable and so were my teammates who had to work with me.
Now I'm doing great and even helping others be more productive.
> Every system eventually sucks, get over it
I'm a fresh recent grad developer, and this is good to know to calm me down from over architecting. I'll do my damnedest, but it's to know it's not awful if things get a bit messy eventually.
This is a very insightful list. But there is one thing I'd quibble with: while it's inherently a super-subjective metric, I would say that 10x programmers do exist. Both in the "can support a company by themselves" sense and the "mad lone genius" sense. Not all the 10x programmers are good at working with other people or on other people's ideas. 0.1x programmers are often lost or afraid, although they may just be uni…
Saying 10x programmers are a myth because it's crazy that someone could do in 1 day what another could do in 1 week makes the assumption that both programmers in the example have the same amount of context, background understanding, and experience. The benefit of talented engineers comes from the fact that they avoid costly pitfalls - not that they pump out more code per hour worked. I feel this "10x programmers are…
I like the advice (and the "context" caveat, at the start). > The best code is no code, or code you don’t have to maintain I always say "The best code I write, is the code I don't write."
I always say "code is a liability".
I hate code, and want as little of it as possible in my programs.Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could say that, but my cat thinks you'd be wrong. However, I'm yet to see my cat boot up the computer.
Ultimately pets are for humans, whatever you do for your cat you do for humans. The same logic works there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't call Vermeer a 10x painter, Beethoven a 10x composer, nor Shakespeare a 10x author. It would be silly to call Turing a 10x computer scientist, or rockstar and ninja would be insulting. Vermeer, Beethoven and Shakespeare are masters of their crafts. The same word we use for skilled tradesmen. Why can't we call them master programmers?
I think part of the reasoning is in the trades there's the presumption that to be a master you must also be old (with exceptions, Da Vinci was active when he was still younger, 20). In the programming industry, there's likely a bias more toward younger people, and hiring offices ask for the world. They'd like a whole staff of masters and rockstars. Though that doesn't preclude "older" people from being known as maste…
I've been a developer for 15 years... anybody else feel like the further they get into their career, the more they want to keep their opinions to themselves?
I feel like as a junior dev I had way stronger opinions and I was a lot more vocal about them. Now, I still have opinions, but I've learned that nobody gives a damn about my opinions so I just keep them to myself.
I have seen many similar posts what people have learned but not once have I seen: "Don't assume anything". So many times when shit hit the bricks because someone assumed something about some other thing they clearly don't know everything about. Which eventually lead to the system failing.
That's a useless advice IMO. How can you not assuming anything. I assume that my CPU works, for example. You can't write useful programs without many assumptions. Imagine program that does not assume that CPU works and reruns every algorithm few times with few different code versions to verify that outputs match. It might make sense for moon mission, but definitely not for another CRUD app. I don't have 20 years of e…
You are doing exactly that, assuming nothing. The number of times I've seem "meh, x can't be null here, just do nothing about it" (instead of some way of asserting that assumption, such as you provide) is staggering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ultimately pets are for humans, whatever you do for your cat you do for humans. The same logic works there.
With cats it's the other way round: the humans for cats.
The 10x programmer is a silly myth. The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly. You know, 10x is an optimistic number here. Some programmers will do in 1 day what you wont achieve in a life time. And not understanding that makes you a bad programmer by my book simply because this is the foundation of the job. So let…
It's as if the notion of people being arbitrarily born more or less with a knack for something is evil.
Let me tell you the story of when I realized I was (at best), a "not-mediocre" dev:
1. I've been programming for fun even as a kid. That's what got me into it: If you count kid-programming as "programming", I've been programming for ~14-15 years.
2. There was a girl who used to work with me at $DAYJOB, who is fairly well-known on The Orange Website, and has written some "thought leader" papers in certain niches. A real einstein.
"A couple of years -- and a few of those were writing another language. This is my first real job writing $LANGUAGE_WELL_KNOWN_FOR."
This is called "innate ability". Humans aren't created equal, nobody said they had to be, and it's not a crime to acknowledge it. Folks ought to get over it IMO, it's not a big deal.
I will never understand CS and programming-language theory concepts at that caliber or that intuitively, but who cares?
I'm also short as fuck so I doubt I'll be playing in the NBA anytime soon either. Life goes on.