One common behavior seen in “mature” software engineers • Hacker News Board

Re: One common behavior seen in “mature” software engineers

#121

Post by powerapple » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 12:27 PM UTC

sroussey wrote: post #17

PaulKeeble wrote: post #5

The idea of fixing a whole class of problems is common in safety critical software. When you find the cause of a bug its not just about fixing the bug but looking for this pattern of failure everywhere and fixing that and then understanding the aspects that led to this class of bugs to begin with and eliminating those. Its just good engineering to solve the class of problems not just the bug in front of you. But I ha…

I like to rate engineers across various categories, but really I found that there were two general classes of great engineers: fast and slow. For marketing tests, etc., the whole team would be fast engineers. For payments, the whole team would be slow. Everything else I would try to have tension -- a mix of the two so they learn and appreciate each other. This is condensing a multidimensional vector into just a line,…

That's how I see brains work differently: fast and slow - one brain can quickly associate, find information; another brain is slow to load, in the end, you get 100% of what you need. I appreciate slow brains.

Re: One common behavior seen in “mature” software engineers

#122

Post by fzeindl » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 8:31 PM UTC

lcall wrote: post #119

fzeindl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I have written a blog article about this: https://fabianzeindl.com/posts/the-codequality-pyramid#testa...

Excellent article; thank you. I have written similarly in my notes, focused on the code maintainability (or component quality) part, but not in a shareable format yet. It is a sort of maturity model (I hope eventually to turn it into a grid with practices on the left side and levels across the top, so the RH column is near-ideal behaviors personally and organizationally). But the concept begins with a self-code revie…

Thank you for you kind words. Let me know if you could use my system.

I haven't mentioned documentation yet, but this is certainly something important that I might include in a future revision.

Re: One common behavior seen in “mature” software engineers

#123

Post by sroussey » Tue, Feb 14, 2023, 6:22 AM UTC

zuj wrote: post #98

sroussey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to rate engineers across various categories, but really I found that there were two general classes of great engineers: fast and slow. For marketing tests, etc., the whole team would be fast engineers. For payments, the whole team would be slow. Everything else I would try to have tension -- a mix of the two so they learn and appreciate each other. This is condensing a multidimensional vector into just a line,…

This is an interesting observation. I like to think myself as a slow programmer. Do you think discussing this in an interview before you actually got the job in order to evaluate if you are fit to the role joining is a good idea ?

Sure, just use the word “meticulous” instead of slow.