Shouldn't a senior developer strive to eliminate complexity while increasing velocity? The two do not contradict. Reducing complexity can increase velocity.
Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
161–170 of 361 posts
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#162It seems to me that the author fails to extrapolate on the effects of recursive self improvement. The only things preventing 95% engineer obsolescence will be compute/energy constraints and the speed of adoption, which can take years for large infrastructure companies. But it's coming.
Cuts both ways. If supply chain attacks continue recursive self improvement, everyone’s going to be working in air-gapped facilities. Departments also need to be air-gapped from one another. And each team air-gapped. And so on.
There’s a speed limit, because the faster you go the less room for error you have. It’s the same as being heavily leveraged with debt. If you have a cash investment and it drops by 50% you can just wait. If you’re leveraged 100-to-1, a 1% drop forced liquidation and wipes you out.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#163Because 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…
“Cursive knowledge”, as an old boss told me. Was incredibly ironic when he leaned into my misunderstanding.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#164This misses the basic problem of incentives. What "the company" wants doesn't matter, it's what the people making particular decisions want. There exist people who's jobs depend entirely on rolling out new features, or apps of some sort, and having them show up in some form of company metric. If the senior developers says it's a bad idea, those people won't listen, or won't care. Their job is on the line.
A typical example would be the researchers which are evaluated based on papers and new stuff they put out into the wide blue world. But if you are on a product side this makes little sense because you need to match “features” to the requirements expressed by the customers and you will tell researchers to stop pushing.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#165Because 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…
By complete coincidence, yesterday I came across this link to an article Peter Naur wrote in 1985 ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf ) which I haven't been able to stop thinking about. I've been doing this for coming up on thirty years now, mostly at one large company, and I spent a significant number of hours every week fielding questions from people who are newer at it who are having trouble with one thing…
Isn't that interesting? The job of exploring a theory or model to such an extent that it can be expressed in computer code always seems to fall on the shoulders of a software developer. Other people can write specifications and requirements all day long, but until a software developer has tackled the problem, the theory probably hasn't been explored well enough yet to express clearly in computer code. It feels like software developers are scientists who study their customers' knowledge domains.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#166Most proof of concepts I've seen get traction turned into production. A rewrite? I recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened. The article touches on responsability, accountability. There is none for risk taker. By definition. You have a crazy idea, you rush it out, you hope clients bite. You profit. It's not even your problem how to make it work, sca…
A mention of a “rewrite” triggered. Whoever does rewrites is effectively out of ideas on what to do next. This is an opportunity cost and the team/company chooses what is more important and the rewrite is never at the top. So even promising or expecting such a thing is silly.
IMO it is a bit arrogant to assume it is more important to engineer a better version of a thing rather than make money quicker and cut corners. In essence it is better to have a problem which is about how to scale a new product because it got traction rather than solve a problem how to sell more copies of already scalable thing.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
By complete coincidence, yesterday I came across this link to an article Peter Naur wrote in 1985 ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf ) which I haven't been able to stop thinking about. I've been doing this for coming up on thirty years now, mostly at one large company, and I spent a significant number of hours every week fielding questions from people who are newer at it who are having trouble with one thing…
Isn't that interesting? The job of exploring a theory or model to such an extent that it can be expressed in computer code always seems to fall on the shoulders of a software developer. Other people can write specifications and requirements all day long, but until a software developer has tackled the problem, the theory probably hasn't been explored well enough yet to express clearly in computer code. It feels like s…
Agree 100%.
Even the most verbose specifications too often have glaring ambiguities that are only found during implementation (or worse, interoperability testing!)
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#168They fail to communicate in the same way we fail to download a copy of "the truths of the world as we know it" into every child's brain. It's easily to say " look both ways when you cross the road" but speech is so one dimensional. It's a slow tape reel and that's just the encoding.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
By complete coincidence, yesterday I came across this link to an article Peter Naur wrote in 1985 ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf ) which I haven't been able to stop thinking about. I've been doing this for coming up on thirty years now, mostly at one large company, and I spent a significant number of hours every week fielding questions from people who are newer at it who are having trouble with one thing…
Isn't that interesting? The job of exploring a theory or model to such an extent that it can be expressed in computer code always seems to fall on the shoulders of a software developer. Other people can write specifications and requirements all day long, but until a software developer has tackled the problem, the theory probably hasn't been explored well enough yet to express clearly in computer code. It feels like s…
> It feels like software developers are scientists who study their customers' knowledge domains.
I agree so much with this. It's why I feel so stifled when an e.g. product manager tries to insulate and isolate me from the people who I'm trying to serve -- you (or a collective of yous) need to have access to both expertise in the domain you're serving, and expertise in the method of service, in order to develop an appropriate and satisfactory solution. Unnecessary games of telephone make it much harder for anyone to build an internal theory of the domain, which is absolutely essential for applying your engineering skills appropriately.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#170[deleted]