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To my students

ozark.hendrix.edu

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Re: To my students

#201

Post by sixtyj »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #85
saadn92 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gets me is the craft point. I've shipped more useful software in the last year than probably the previous five combined, and most of that is because I stopped treating code as the artifact and started treating the product as the artifact. The craft moved up a layer. > until it is clear and elegant New grads who spend weeks refactoring code are going to get lapped by new grads who ship something and iterate. Ther…

This person is an educator. You should absolutely learn how to code by deep practice. You can easily learn how to use the slop machine in I don't know a week or something if the job demands it.

Absolutely, wise man (not an entrepreneur) writes a message to his students.

We seem to forget what it was to be a freshman.

At that age, you look up to anyone who’s more experienced.

Yes, you have to deliver, iterate and make mistakes very often to learn from them.

But as the text clearly states: relationships, people and justice matter more.

Where can I sign it?

Re: To my students

#203

Post by Apylon777 »

cdfalcon wrote: post #19

There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Circumstantial

Re: To my students

#204

Post by mwigdahl »

smolgumball wrote: post #175
2ndorderthought wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This person is an educator. You should absolutely learn how to code by deep practice. You can easily learn how to use the slop machine in I don't know a week or something if the job demands it.

Absolutely wild to see this take downvoted. While it's abundantly clear that Hacker News has long since become a mouthpiece for the AI investment machine, I really hadn't felt the loss of strong engineering ethos until recently.

I didn’t downvote, but if I were to it would be due to the dismissive phrase “slop machine” rather than the message, which I agree with.

Re: To my students

#206

Post by ryandrake »

saadn92 wrote: post #59
cdfalcon wrote: post #19

There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…

What gets me is the craft point. I've shipped more useful software in the last year than probably the previous five combined, and most of that is because I stopped treating code as the artifact and started treating the product as the artifact. The craft moved up a layer. > until it is clear and elegant New grads who spend weeks refactoring code are going to get lapped by new grads who ship something and iterate. Ther…

I guess my response to this would be that not everyone is the same. You might like to ship more useful software. I got into writing code and made a long career out of it because I like writing code. Not "making products." Not "shipping things." Yes, making products and shipping things were necessarily a small part of my career, but that's not what got me out of bed in the morning.

It's like telling a writer "your job is now to bind up books and place them on the store shelves." OK, but it's a totally different job and not exactly one the writer is going to like.

Re: To my students

#207

Post by the_snooze »

davidw wrote: post #97
dijksterhuis wrote: post #8

> Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better. my uk mechanical engineering bachelors degree had a required module on the ethics of engineering which has always stuck in the back of my mind. i think we went over the bhopal disaster as a case study one week, although it was abou…

The 90ies weren't perfect, but it felt more idealistic to me, with the rise of open source software. People thought about ethics a bit more. It felt like the ultimate tide rising to empower people locally on their own computers, and that tide has been going out for some years. A bit with cloud computing, and now a lot more with LLM's. And the company a lot of SV people keep these days is pretty gross.

I wouldn't necessarily say "idealistic," but certainly constrained. Microsoft has always been scummy in one form or another, but always-on internet connectivity has allowed them to be scummy in persistent ways long after your purchase of their product. It's a serious money-maker, but I think that explosive growth has bred a whole generation of tech "professionals" these days that think more like Wall Street bros than sober engineers: make line go up, damn the consequences.

Re: To my students

#208

Post by ratrace »

kube-system wrote: post #110
cdfalcon wrote: post #19

There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…

I agree, some of this is awful advice for a entry level engineer: > * Cultivate your ability to think deeply. Do whatever it takes to carve out distraction-free bubbles for yourself in both space and time. This might mean saying no to technologies or patterns of working that others say are critical or inevitable. An entry level engineer is going to be inundated with a lot of technology they've never heard of and a lo…

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Re: To my students

#209

Post by CamperBob2 »

g-b-r wrote: post #152
ryandrake wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. This thread is so depressing. It's like the entire software industry has given up and just accepted "increase speed forever at any cost" as some kind of iron law of software employment. Is nobody even pushing back anymore? Even offering token resistance? The 'bros have truly won. Our only imperative now is "Can we crush it in the market?"

The parent comment (cdfalcon) has 41 votes right now, it's disgusting

How do you know how many votes another user's comment has?

Re: To my students

#210

Post by ratrace »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #116
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow can be fast. As I got older and more experienced, I didn't produce code faster. I just produced the right code . If you don't have to try five different things, and debug them along the way, you can be a lot faster without "going fast".

I've seen people work very quickly to create vaporware. I've seen people spend a week to change 2 lines of code and save a release. I don't know how people who practice engineering haven't seen these types of things happen. I've even seen a guy spend most of his work hours as a mentor even though his title was something like senior engineer. If anyone fired him that company would tank so fast...

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