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Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

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Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#151

Post by Verdex »

ScottFree wrote: post #95
ptero wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience being under 40 is not a prerequisite for being hired in software. A suggestion: two of the biggest turnoffs that I personally see and would work hard to avoid (not saying you have either of those): 1. Sounding desperate. Do not cast a very wide net at one company -- you can apply to mid level and principal level positions at different companies, but do not blanket all job postings at one company. Cho…

> Sounding desperate. Why is that a negative signal? The company has the opportunity to get top talent temporarily down on his/her luck for a reduced rate.

The same reason that "what's your biggest weakness" is such a stereotypical interview question. It's all about stories. If you can prove you're the best with math or with certifications or whatever, that is only a protection for yourself. But if you have a good story that is a protection for whoever you tell the story to.

What's your biggest weakness is all about your ability to tell a good story about a failure that you're responsible for. Because if you have a good story then the person responsible for you can retell the story to the people that they answer to.

Yeah, Joe messed up big time and then left the company and I was responsible for him, but listen to this great story that he told me about why everything was going to work. Clearly this failure was from external forces that shouldn't be held against me. Anyone else would have failed; it was inevitable.

Desperation isn't a good story for anyone. Yeah, I left Joe in charge. And he told me that he knew what he was doing. But he also seemed really desperate (and everyone could tell), like he would say whatever he had to in order to get the job. Yeah, this is clearly all my fault and I should probably be fired too.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#152

Post by theli0nheart »

WJW wrote: post #98
theli0nheart wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as how it gets approved, that's not enough money to really register at Amazon's scale. I've seen waste similar to that at companies much, much smaller than Amazon that goes entirely un-noticed. Maybe I'm being dense, but this still doesn't register for me. If 4+ calendar years of work for a single team continues with no noticeable progress, then there's an organizational issue, no matter the size of the comp…

Of course there is, but that's not the point. Every large organisation has organisational issues and nobody in the history of humanity has found a way of preventing them yet. The only thing you can do when the group sizes get large is to try and keep the problem under control relative to how bad it is at other large companies.

I'm lost; what specifically is not the point?

As far as I could tell, the "reason" given by the OP for this waste was attributed to Amazon's scale. Could you explain how company size and broken corporate structure are correlated? Or explain why 20+ person-years of engineering time wasted isn't a symptom of broken corporate structure?

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#153

Post by mgkimsal »

ptero wrote: post #64
noad wrote: post #21

I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped. Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm suppose…

In my experience being under 40 is not a prerequisite for being hired in software. A suggestion: two of the biggest turnoffs that I personally see and would work hard to avoid (not saying you have either of those): 1. Sounding desperate. Do not cast a very wide net at one company -- you can apply to mid level and principal level positions at different companies, but do not blanket all job postings at one company. Cho…

> Learn what problems the company is solving and help them within their constraints, including using their tools and languages even if they look suboptimal.

within reason and 'on day one', yes, agreed. However, if you're hired in because of your skills/accomplishments, but you don't measure up, and it's because their tools/process/code is demonstrably bad, those are constraints that should be on the table for discussion/improvement. In most cases I've seen, those sorts of changes have a net positive for almost everyone on the project (fewer bugs, faster turnaround, whatever), at the expense of being a negative for a handful of territorial people threatened by change.

Not coming in on day one saying "you have to change everything to my approach!" - agreed. Toiling away in suboptimal situations when you know the poor results are improvable for fear of not wanting to look pushy... unacceptable (over a longer term).

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#154

Post by [deleted] »

faizshah wrote: post #137
llarsson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you chose the word "desperate" deliberately, would you mind telling us/me why someone with two-to-three decades of experience becomes "desperate" for a job? What did you work on during those years? Did you keep up with the industry? I am asking out of interest for both you and me. For you, I want to help you regain confidence that is rightfully yours, because someone with your experience should not need to feel de…

A lot of the coders over 40 that I know who are experiencing difficulty finding work are coders who spent years working at the same place and chose specialization over staying current. They chose to become the J2EE guy with 10 years experience at a fortune 500 or the off the shelf ecommerce specialist. Being overly loyal to these companies and seeking job security left them with little career security at companies wh…

[deleted]

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#155

Post by kumarvvr »

The_Colonel wrote: post #80
kumarvvr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small question. Is PHP still a preferred platform for any sort of complex web development? I have never even looked at the php site or docs, but I am curious. In this day and age, is there a subset of Apps that PHP is suited for?

Traditional (non-SPA) web apps is where PHP is quite strong. Also depends on the team, if you have a PHP team and it's a web project, you probably want to use PHP.

I recently started a project with ExpressJS as backend server, PUG JS as templating engine and Mongo and the Doc Store.

Pretty easy to setup, and preview the first index file.

Took about 1 hour, starting from 0 knowledge, though I am well aware of the NodeJS ecosystem.

To me, even .NET is a bloat, compared to Node.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#156

Post by lioeters »

kumarvvr wrote: post #63
deweller wrote: post #44

> PHP is banned at Amazon due to security reasons, but its successor, Hack, runs a lot of.. Just to be clear, Hack is not PHP's successor. Hack is a fork of PHP developed by Facebook. Hack will not overtake PHP any time soon. PHP has had security issues in the past. Sure you can do stupid things with it if you want, but modern PHP is security conscious out of the box. Frameworks like Laravel make great default choice…

A small question. Is PHP still a preferred platform for any sort of complex web development? I have never even looked at the php site or docs, but I am curious. In this day and age, is there a subset of Apps that PHP is suited for?

From what I've seen, I wouldn't say that it's the preferred platform. It's popularity is waning, and the trend is moving to newer, shinier technologies - for many good reasons.

On the other hand, a big portion of the web is built on PHP, legacy as well as greenfield projects. The language has continued to evolve, for example, PHP 7 with stricter type checks, syntax sugar, significant performance improvements.

Looking at Stack Overflow's popular technologies survey ¹, PHP is among the classics, along with Java, Ruby, Node.js, C#, Go.. It's not going away any time in the foreseeable future.

There's a market demand that PHP fills. There are a ton of PHP developers around the world to hire from, and it has its strengths (as well as justified criticisms). It's probably the easiest way for companies who have little to no web development experience to get started.

¹ https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#157

Post by dkdk8283 »

devnullbyte wrote: post #78
noad wrote: post #21

I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped. Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm suppose…

Just in case anyone reads this and gets very worried about getting older and being destitute, its certainly not always the case. I am 48 years old and having a blast. I am team lead working in the companies CTO office. I play around with build systems, making everything cloud native (kubernetes) and I get to work on a good amount of upstream open source projects. My company does not see my age at all, they just see m…

I’m over the hill, expensive, and want to spend more time with family vs work.

Shouldn’t minimize the reality of getting old.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#158

Post by scarface74 »

falcolas wrote: post #136
neogodless wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 40 and I don't suppose anyone has ever called me a 10x developer or a rockstar or a ninja, though I was recently described as having "a superpower to crush tickets." I have a feeling you have not applied "everywhere" in the United States, but please correct me if I'm wrong. I've never left my home state, and the deluge of recruiter spam on LinkedIn hasn't slowed down yet. And no I'm not an architect or team lead…

> the deluge of recruiter spam on LinkedIn hasn't slowed down yet Recruiters spamming you is not a correlative metric for companies hiring you. SV is worse than other locations, but even the midwest company I work for (I'm also over 40) much prefers to hire people straight out of college. They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours, and easily molded into an image the company wants. EDIT: To provide a small anecdot…

I’m 45, and was last in the job market in 2018 and before that in 2016. I’m in Atlanta. The last two times I looked for your standard senior/lead enterprise dev roles it took less than two weeks to get an offer just by using local recruiters.

Edit:

There is a huge difference between random spam from recruiters who throw a big net and working with local boutique recruiters who have relationships with local firms. I ignore the former.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#159

Post by overgard »

cyrialize wrote: post #103

I've been a developer for about 3 years now. This is probably my own fault, but I feel pressured to be constantly doing something towards programming. I feel like I should either be reading a book or starting a project. I have 10+ programming books where I just finished reading one of them and I have way more unfinished projects than I could count. It's reassuring to see the push-back against the 10x developer idea,…

I don't think it's so much about practicing outside of work hours, it's more about being mindful about how you're going about what you're doing and evolving it to make more sense. If there's a trait I notice in mediocre developers it's more just that they have no interest in examining their own work habits. Its the guy that always reaches for the menu bar instead of learning keyboard shortcuts, or the guy that refuses to learn anything about functional programming because they want to stick to the basic java they learned in college.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#160

Post by fnord77 »

aazaa wrote: post #114

> And what I have found is that most – say, 90%, of what I learn at one job is completely useless for the next one. Then the problem isn't with what's being learned. The problem is that the author lacks a framework for generalizing and internalizing the lessons learned. Letting 90% of lessons learned on the job go to waste later in life is going to lead to a very difficult career path. Later... > Compounding is a pre…

> Writing, both publicly and privately, is an excellent way to do that.

Is there a right way to go about this? This is something I need to start doing, personally.

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