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

Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

newsletter.kentbeck.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–139 of 139 posts

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#131

Post by colechristensen »

noodletheworld wrote: post #94
colechristensen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm telling you for me being a better more productive engineer had a lot to do with making better choices. I'm not selling you a book or inviting you to my TED Talk. Not wasting a tremendous amount of time automating something is indeed an important skill to learn (because automating things is way more fun for some people than actually doing the thing). Coaching junior employees to neither ask me for help the instant…

> Growing up, in school, I did almost nothing and was consistently at the top of my class It is clearly widely and indisputably demonstrated that many high achieving children in this situation are failures as adults because they never learn to put effort in. Terrace tao is on the record writing about his experiences with it, and how it was only his failure in initial college admission shocked him into achieving what…

I don't know what to say, I'm sharing what has worked for me personally and you're going on about documented bodies of knowledge. I am quite possibly as least motivated by "business books" as it is possible to be.

You're trying to tell me that the advice I should give someone is "work harder not smarter". I'm not really interested in discussing with someone who is trying to convince me that what has worked for me isn't actually working.

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#132

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

smackeyacky wrote: post #50
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the place you’re at approaching AI in this context? As a senior I worry about the juniors coming in — Claude can do what I would have previously tasked to a junior. I guess the shape of the junior role just changes.

It has been interesting. The good guys got better with AI. The C grade guys mostly get confused, or follow hallucinations for a lot longer before they realise it’s a dead end. If anything AI seems to make it easier to see who is good and who isn’t. Ironically on the token use leader boards the C guys are crushing it. Edit: I was worried about Claude+junior myself but it’s not working out that way. It’s like giving an…

It’s interesting — my own impression kinda matches that; I’m still doing most of the thinking when using AI that I’d do before writing the code, it’s just that now the feedback loop is so much faster.

One of the artists at my company described generative AI as “I get none of the fun of actually drawing the thing and all of the work of fixing it so it works properly with what we need”. That’s not how I feel about it in relation to writing code.

Maybe I’m just tired and AI has made things interesting again.

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#133

Post by AlexeyBelov »

girvo wrote: post #86
codemog wrote: post #66

[flagged]

> And when corporate needs to lay off 30% they’ll think nothing of it. Having seen this literally play out this year: it was all of the C’s that were first to be cut shrug

In a couple of companies I'm familiar with the cuts weren't based on performance in any discernable way.

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#135

Post by tremon »

nilirl wrote: post #34

I've met maybe 1-2 people in my whole life who were clearly beneficial 'A' from the get go. There's also a weird 'A' that tries very hard but causes more pain than inspiration. Meaning, they're clearly smart but think that's all that's necessary to be useful. I once worked with an intern from MIT who came in and immediately submitted large PRs everyday that improved the algorithmic complexity for a bunch of functions…

> you can't argue against the improvement in time complexity

No, there's absolutely valid arguments to be had over asymptotic complexity when the you know the relevant bounds of the dataset.

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#136

Post by dang »

codemog wrote: post #66

[flagged]

Please omit swipes, not to mention slurs, from your comments here. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

"Edit out swipes."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Re: Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks

#138

Post by brailsafe »

Funnily enough, ostensibly for creating more work for others, I was just fired... before my day started. I'm not sure what failed or why, but because some of the team was on the opposite coast, they found out sooner and had to roll something back. All I know is that it was probably among a stack of deliberately organized PRs that definitely created more value than not, and were all reviewed and approved by the people responsible for the system, one of whom fired me and definitely couldn't have shipped most of the changes on their own. Despite it being a mistake and putting me in a vulnerable position now, I found it to be a sort of hilarious example of a headstrong control freak making impulsive decisions that detract from the team.
Post reply on HN