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

Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

nair.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 361 posts

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#111

Post by Johanx64 »

nullorempty wrote: post #51

What I found is that my willingness to communicate and share my expertise is usually not in demand with more junior developers. In general, I find developers uninterested in finding a mentor. They don't look at your linked in profile, they don't look at you as a possible source of knowledge and expertise. So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to shar…

For all I know maybe you are an expert, but as a general rule of thumb - people are sick of "experts" eager to share their "expertise".

It's simply the case that the supply of "experts" wanting to share "expertise" vastly eclipses the demand by several orders of magnitude.

I think there's a business somewhere, where you get paid to listen to "experts" and they get to feel better about themselves. It's a win-win.

So if people don't perceive you as an "expert" and dont go to you for answers, you simply do not register as one or they have a rather high bar which requires observable undeniable artifacts (and I don't mean credentials, I mean software) and competition is rather fierce - there's simply overproduction of people who think they are "experts" and thus you have to give unmistakable symptoms of being one to register.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#112

Post by nine_k »

lnenad wrote: post #97
nine_k wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Innovation is change, and change is the opposite of stability. Innovation can reduce pain though, if the current pain is strong enough. A stable stream of failures in production can be the kind of "stability" you want to disrupt.

What are we talking about? Philosophically yes. Factually, no. In the context of a system innovation could be switching from one form that renders in 1 second to another that renders in 50ms. Stability isn't part of that equation.

Is this switching risk-free? Consider all these ancient computer devices that run high-stakes equipment for years and decades without change. An RPi could replace an ancient PDP-11, cost a fraction, consume a fraction of energy, be faster, etc. But it also may introduce new and unknown failure modes.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#113

Post by senderista »

hamstergene wrote: post #69

Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#115

Post by onion2k »

allknowingfrog wrote: post #89
onion2k wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened. Why would you do that though? If you have a working 'prototype' that's handling the demand, has the required features, and doesn't really need to be rebuilt (except to appease the sensibilities of the developers), why would you spend time and effort on that? That makes no sense. The fact it's a prototype o…

Because the goal isn't "keep this exact version of the app alive and running". The prototype is never the whole application. If your only metric is incidents, then yeah, don't ever touch the code again. You can get a few feet closer to the moon by building a treehouse, but you still can't turn it into a spaceship.

The prototype is never the whole application.

In a world where people (stakeholders, Product, and dev teams alike) want the prototype to be the full set of MVP features, this is not true.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#116

Post by SoftTalker »

gfody wrote: post #81
hamstergene wrote: post #69

Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…

this is why I only communicate in poetry complexity is not what you believe it is please try listening

Reminded me of a colleague who wrote his email replys as haiku. It got old pretty quickly.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#117

Post by forlorn_mammoth »

hamstergene wrote: post #69

Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…

good things llms solve this problem by assuming everything can be put into words and then convincing the world this is true.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#118

Post by Johanx64 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #93
gib444 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my experience. You describe it more diplomatically than I do hah. To me, young people just don't seem to know, or want to know, that information and knowledge can be gained from a person. It's the arrogance of youth x100 They have a supercomputer in their pocket/on their desk, and an AI that knows 'everything'. I can't imagine what it's like being a teacher right now. How's your AI going to explain the office…

I don’t think it’s the arrogance of youth. It’s just that this generation and honestly a big cohort of millennials are not used to gleaning information from people. A stunning number of people have been raised/educated solely by the internet. That’s the source for knowledge, not other people.

> A stunning number of people have been raised/educated solely by the internet. That’s the source for knowledge, not other people.

On the internet you can learn from and sometimes interact with the best of the best, so the barrier of entry for what constitutes an "expert" is rised much higher.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#120

Post by dimaor »

nullorempty wrote: post #51

What I found is that my willingness to communicate and share my expertise is usually not in demand with more junior developers. In general, I find developers uninterested in finding a mentor. They don't look at your linked in profile, they don't look at you as a possible source of knowledge and expertise. So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to shar…

you have HN, there is always someone here, my friend :).
Post reply on HN