Top developers can have a life outside coding • Hacker News Board

Re: Top developers can have a life outside coding

#211

Post by barry-cotter » Sun, May 22, 2016, 4:47 AM UTC

galdosdi wrote: post #198

hawkice wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that professional programmers have little understanding about the limits of human endurance in skilled labor. Junior doctors work 100 hour weeks and 36 hour shifts so busy they often don't have time to visit the bathroom. It may slightly harm your productivity by working more (almost certainly will) but to say you can't do anything on your own time except for watching Game of Thrones is overly pessimistic.

Or is it the other way around? Maybe it's the junior doctors that don't understand something that professional programmers _do_ about the limits of human endurance in skilled labor? There's no way those 100 hour weeks and 36 hours shifts don't lead to a measurable increase in errors. Given that in medicine, errors can cost lives, it's morally reprehensible that anyone allows this kind of thing to go on in medicine to…

Errors do increase with length of shift but they also increase when continuity of care is disrupted by shift change. When you look at patient outcomes it's a wash. This probably speaks more to awful shift change procedures than anything else but reducing the hours junior doctors are fostered for has not lead to any improvement for patients.

http://healthland.time.com/2013/03/26/fewer-hours-for-doctor...

I seem to recall surgery being an exception in that shorter shifts lead to more patients dying but I can't find anything quickly.

Re: Top developers can have a life outside coding

#212

Post by sirrocco » Sun, May 22, 2016, 5:51 AM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #203

ryandrake wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I need a plumber, I don't choose one based on his fiery passion for plumbing or because he fixes toilets for free in his spare time.

The analogy runs out of steam pretty quick. Would you prefer your heart surgeon be one who has a personal interest in the field, or one who after ten years experience felt that they had "learned enough", and that new techniques are just fashions. Would you prefer your pilot to be one who has a personal interest and really understands the dizzying array of knobs and dials in a cockpit along with understanding how the…

Honestly, when it comes to pilots I want one that has a burning desire to live.

Re: Top developers can have a life outside coding

#213

Post by jon-wood » Sun, May 22, 2016, 6:16 AM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #116

jon-wood wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's doable so long as everyone involved is bought in. We have a two and a bit year old and I work from home full time, with the odd visit to the office for planning sessions. The reason it works is that my wife treats me being in my study in much the same way she would me being in an office elsewhere, but with the perks of me being able to see her and our son when I come out to make some tea or have lunch, and witho…

Ahh, you're not looking after the kids, your wife is :) We both work, originally full time, but now 4 days a week.

It's not quite that simple - I work weekdays, my wife works Thursday, Friday, Saturday, with her Mum looking after our son on Thursday and Friday. On Saturdays I look after him.

Honestly I have no idea how anyone could expect to be able to work at the same time as looking after a two year old, I've done it once while my brother came over to entertain him, and even then it was just barely viable. Young children just don't understand the concept of someone being present in the room but not able to pay attention to them.

Re: Top developers can have a life outside coding

#214

Post by andrewstuart » Sun, May 22, 2016, 6:57 AM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #124

andrewstuart wrote: post #63

I am a recruiter and always ask this question - "Is programming just a job for you to get the bills paid, or do you have a broader interest?" The thing to understand, and what the author of this post has wrong, is that I am not looking to hear about how much TIME a developer spends on programming. I am wanting to hear the STORY of their personal interest. Because the truth is that if software development is a persona…

So, is recruiting a passion for you? Did you find yourself driven to do it whatever the cost? What personal recruiting projects have you done recently that you're proud of? Do you connect your recruiting with a personal interest? What kind of recruiting do you do outside of work hours? I would implore you to re-read what you wrote but instead of making it about software engineering make it about recruiting. Then tell…

I do projects that interest me but they aren't recruiting related.

Re: Top developers can have a life outside coding

#215

Post by dkrich » Sun, May 22, 2016, 8:13 AM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #87

98129129 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The field isn't rapidly evolving. It's about cramming new pointless APIs and frameworks that are pushed by $company in order to dominate some market segment.

Not evolving? Maybe you're just not learning enough to know what the newest evolutions are. Are you one of the people who see new technology as pointless fashion?

Care to elaborate on what some of these "newest evolutions" are?

I studied cs as an undergrad and in grad school and have worked professionally as a software developer for ten years, so I feel qualified to weigh in on this. I can count on one hand the core principles someone really needs to understand to be a great developer and valuable employee and few of those have changed in my career. Once you know those things, picking up the latest flavor of the month is not all that difficult. Sure there are specific applications that require a lot of specialized experience. I'm talking about the other 95% of programming jobs that one could find today.

Give me someone who is smart, has a fundamental understanding of oo programming principles, database design, and perhaps a bit of server architecture knowledge and I'll take that over somebody who doesn't but obsessively attends meet ups on the latest front end js framework.

Everyone is different. I've worked with great developers who coded outside work because they wanted to and they could. I've worked with others who didn't but we're just very, very smart.

The best developer I ever worked with was over 40, had a wife and two kids and rarely coded outside work. He just had different priorities. It didn't hold him back in his career I can assure you and if you had the chance to hire him you'd be making a mistake by just applying some arbitrary measurement of your judgement of his passion for his work. Perhaps your theory should be revisited.

Re: Top developers can have a life outside coding

#216

Post by rrtwo » Sun, May 22, 2016, 8:20 AM UTC

saryant wrote: post #162

patio11 wrote: post #23

I propose the Daenerys Targaryen test. If you know who Daenerys Targaryen is, you do not have "no time." You have priorities which included "I wish to know who Daenerys Targaryen is." No judgement! I do, too! But if you know who Daenerys Targaryen is and you're dissatisfied with your career growth, you should attempt to consciously be aware of the fact that you can choose different things in the future. It takes minu…

> It takes 1~3 hours to stick a flag in the Internet about one topic. Having one flag stuck in the Internet beats zero flags, by a lot. I gave one rather mediocre talk at a regional tech conference with maybe ~100 attendees. The video is online. From that day forward inbound interest skyrocketed. I'm not talking about cold calls or LinkedIn requests, I'm talking about startup CTOs asking me out for coffee to chat abo…

Went through the effort to find the video, you are a very good presenter! did it come naturally or did you work on it? if so how?

Re: Top developers can have a life outside coding

#217

Post by mto » Sun, May 22, 2016, 9:08 AM UTC

Yeah it's absurd. When I talk about this with my friends in other professions they hardly believe it. None of the lawyers or editors consider writing open source contracts or publishing free magazines in their free time. And even if they do something like this - there was never a company that EXPECTED that at an interview. The last interviews I had there were more questions about mini pet projects than about my 10 years professional experience or my PhD thesis.

Of course, when I was 15 I loved to program all my free time after school. Now I have wife, daughter, dog and being in front of a screen all day makes me very uncomfortable, no matter how much I like the subject.

I am now much more comfortable with "researchy" positions - in all those interviews, no one ever asked me about my github profile or if I like to "learn" the flavour of the day web framework in my free time (no, I don't...).

Re: Top developers can have a life outside coding

#218

Post by novel » Sun, May 22, 2016, 9:34 AM UTC

jasonme wrote: post #127

I'm from China, where hard-working with a lot of overtime work is advocated in almost every internet-related company. Developer here do 996 the whole year in and out (for those of you who don't know the concept of 996, it means working from 9 in the morning to 9 in the late for 6 days a week in the office. But sadly, usually, a lot of the developers can only leave the office after 10 or 11 at night). Everyone knows t…

> Everyone knows this is bad for improvement and health, but company owners keep pushing everyone with salary and punishment, along with moral pressure, that only fighting this way, the company can survive in the big race in almost every industry area.

Do they do any research to prove 996 is really effective? I have a hard time imagining how one could stay productive for long in such working mode.

Sometimes I have some hard deadlines (like a lot of other developers I guess) that requires to work 10-12 hours/day to get things done in time, but that usually lasts for a week, maybe two. And it's _already_ very exhausting. I'm wondering how exhausting it could be to work in such mode all the time...

Re: Top developers can have a life outside coding

#219

Post by mto » Sun, May 22, 2016, 9:43 AM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #131

lr4444lr wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious then, on what basis are new hires considered qualified? Not the ones moving horizontally from a similar company where employment itself in the prior company would denote ability, but those who are moving up in their career or from a different tech subspecialty? If a lot of the work is proprietary, you're not expecting FOSS contributions, and algorithmic tests are out, what metric do you use? Do you just m…

This comment puzzles me. How do you think anyone got hired 10, 20, 30+ years ago in tech? How do you think candidates are evaluated in other fields that do not have some equivalent to FOSS? I have a friend interviewing for a high-level marketing position. They look at your resume, ask you about your past work, give you some short tests or scenarios, and make a decision based on all the feedback the collect. It's not…

Agree, 10 years ago they asked you about your projects, how you solved problems, what you think about the decisions that were made, to reason about the technologies and architecture etc.

I still think, you can learn much more from that than from trivia questions or text book examples. If a person can argue about choice of technology/algorithm/architecture/method, can tell you how they approach a given problem etc...

My feeling is that the "shortage" is a lie. Back then there were no thousand competitors for every boring job out there. Weeding out so much wasn't necessary for 5 applications :)

Re: Top developers can have a life outside coding

#220

Post by TickleSteve » Sun, May 22, 2016, 9:51 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #125

sokoloff wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME, outsourcing works because you get (most) management onus placed on the outsourcer. Remote workers with in-office management doesn't feature that.

Having been part of outsourced projects since 2008,I would say that is a nice theory. You require the same amount of in-office management. Every time that management decided as you say, they got something else as delivery.

the outsourcee does not share the same values as the ourtsourcing company, therefore if you have any focus on long-term values such as quality then outsourcing does not work.

The outsourcee is always motivated to do the minimum work compared to an in-house team that can focus on quality and efficiency for the long term benefit.