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You must read at least one book to ride

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#111

Post by ludicity »

gwd wrote: post #85
loeber wrote: post #65

> I've only ever written tests for personal projects because no employer I've ever seen actually had any working tests or interest in getting them, and I wrote the entirety of my Master's thesis code without version control because one of the best universities in the country doesn't teach it. I'm sorry, but after reading this sentence there is no way that this man is a great engineer. And I don't care how much he stu…

He did't use version control for his master's thesis because he never even knew about version control until after he left university. And he's saying that when he's in control of his own time (i.e., for his own projects) he writes tests; but that when he's being told what to do by someone else, they don't want him to spend his time writing tests.

Yeah, like, these are explicitly bad things. I have no idea how the commenter above thought those were brags, those are self-owns. My Master's thesis took 5x longer than it should have because there were no tests or version control, I absolutely limped through it. I'm still not confident some of the results were correct.

But it's also crazy that like, at no point did a single professor go "Submit a git repository, you morons". I was studying at Monash, which is a well-regarded institute in Australia, and I'm now pretty sure that most of the staff didn't know what Git is.

All four of my employers before I went into private consulting didn't use version control either. It's whacky out here.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#112

Post by ludicity »

pocketarc wrote: post #26
slothtrop wrote: post #14

Prefacing that I agree - The returns probably manifest at a senior level, where job security is already a non-issue and one has the privileges and power to make this knowledge actionable. This could be why the readers find it redundant and stick to coasting. I'd like to finish reading the Algorithm Design Manual, SICP and others, but it won't get me my next job, because I won't even be in the same room as someone who…

I always think about this - how many great engineers might be out there that are hard to spot/hire because there's no indication anywhere that they're great? And simultaneously, how many crap engineers out there are hired simply because they know how to play the "thought leader" game? And as a thought exercise: How would you yourself like to be found / hired? What would you do to show the company that you are indeed…

You might enjoy this recent article from my friend Adolfo: https://ochagavia.nl/blog/to-broadcast-or-not-to-broadcast/

But yeah, broadcasting has been great for my career. I don't even broadcast maximally employable things (but maybe that's a way to stand out) and am not even trying to get hired, but putting yourself out there does good things.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#113

Post by ludicity »

ksubedi wrote: post #6
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #4

I very much agree with this premise. My skills fall into three camps: That which I have invented myself, from first principles; That which I have read one book on; and That which I am bad at. One of the things I am bad at is finding books. Books are everywhere, most books are rubbish, and yet every book I've had recommended has been amazing . So, does anyone have a good book on finding good books?

I have started using large language models for book recommendations. I can be very specific about what I am looking for and the recommendations are hyper personalized. If you use some sort of tool that pairs LLMs with realtime data like Gemini the results are even better.

LLMs are actually great for book recommendations. Still not quite as good as looking up "HN best book on unit testing" for most topics, but great for niche things.

But, to be honest, my go-to move these days is joining a community and asking a well-regarded expert. I get all my recommendations from readers these days.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#115

Post by ludicity »

llm_trw wrote: post #73
thundergolfer wrote: post #31

I love this guy's cynicism and no-bullshit attitude. As someone who lived in Melbourne and has suffered Deloitte's "technology" department, the frustration and anger is warranted. Like everyone else, Australia has tech brain drain and loses its best software engineers to USA. But unlike almost everyone else it's a very rich country and so can still afford to spend billions of dollars training and deploying engineers…

Australia has amazing CS departments that produce more top talent computer scientists per capita than any other place I've seen. They then export those engineers to the US and Europe and import people by the boat full who can't code their way out of a for loop with a map and compass.

I studied with some very cool people. One joined my consultancy, and the other won a million dollars in a machine learning competition before we graduated.

Unfortunately, yeah, we were all removed from the workforce in a conventional sense almost immediately. I run my own business and most of our clients are American, my co-founder became an executive within four years, and the last guy went into private consulting for the mining industry.

I know of a local business with a great engineering culture, and they told me that they've run forty in-person interviews to fill a single slot in the past. And their team is really overloaded with Americans that immigrated to Australia for non-career reasons.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#116

Post by ludicity »

codazoda wrote: post #18

I am most productive, from day to day, when I’m also reading. It somehow strokes my mind and encourages my creativity.

We've been floating the idea of giving everyone on the team Wednesdays off, fully paid, to read non-technical material while they're benched. We haven't done it yet because I pay rent and am worried that maybe we aren't good enough at sales to generate that much surplus... but deep down, I think it'll make a smarter team and that'll pay for itself.

And the only reason that it's non-technical material is that it's just assumed that people are reading every other day, and we thought a break into psychology/fiction/whatever would keep the brain well-oiled.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#117

Post by ludicity »

deergomoo wrote: post #39

> Then there are engineers [...] who never try for the entirety of their careers This matches my experience 100%. I am not a brilliant developer by any measure. I'm competent enough, I can put together good solutions to the admittedly low-scale problems I'm assigned, and I like to think I have a pretty good sense for the right and wrong ways of going about doing so. But I'm not even sure I could land an interview wit…

It sounds like you'd be a brilliant developer by most standards, but have the curse of understanding the gap between yourself and a top 0.0001% Linux kernel contributing supergenius. Drop my consultancy an email in case we do enough revenue in 2025 that we want to hire for 2026!

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#118

Post by roncesvalles »

chamomeal wrote: post #114

> As a rough rule, I study more than the average engineer around me by up to two orders of magnitude. How in the world do you study 100 times more than average engineers??

Because he contends that the average engineer doesn't study anything.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#119

Post by shermantanktop »

wiseowise wrote: post #67
harrall wrote: post #38

Reading a book is like a mechanic learning how to work on cars without ever touching a car. Is reading helpful? Absolutely. Does it mean you would trust them to work on your car? Absolutely not. Would you trust a mechanic who didn’t read any books? I sure wouldn’t discount them because of that. At the end of the day, there is no signal of someone’s effectiveness better than their history of getting results. Measures…

> Reading a book is like a mechanic learning how to work on cars without ever touching a car. What a weird analogy. Programming without reading anything (a book, a manual, a guide) just makes you a monkey with a typewriter.

You can become functionally capable in any mainstream programming language with some working examples, newbie hello world tutorials, maybe a debugger, and/or stack overflow. You are unlikely to get past an intermediate level of skill, and you won’t understand the deeper patterns that motivated the language designers, but you can add features and write useful applications.

Is that really a monkey with a typewriter?

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#120

Post by chamomeal »

roncesvalles wrote: post #118
chamomeal wrote: post #114

> As a rough rule, I study more than the average engineer around me by up to two orders of magnitude. How in the world do you study 100 times more than average engineers??

Because he contends that the average engineer doesn't study anything.

Yeah I also kinda misjudged the tone at the beginning of the post. Commented prematurely. As for the rest of it, I actually sorta agree?

I know people who got jobs for DoD contractors out of college and are still writing the exact same matlab programs they were a decade ago.

But also most developers I know who’ve worked in a startup or small company are very committed to learning new stuff and mastering some tools. So idk I guess it depends where you’re working.

> Heck, you could probably eliminate almost all dud candidates during technical interviews by asking what their favourite tech book is, then only talking to candidates where you know enough to check if they've read that book.

You know, I bet this would actually work really well…

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