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The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

russolsen.com

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Re: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

#211

Post by NateEag »

0db532a0 wrote: post #205
vezycash wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I want your opinion on...." for me is a potential landmine. Such questions can be used to detect potential troublemakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign In college 10 years+ ago, one of my roommates had a laptop with 500MB ram and took a 500MB ram chip from anther room mate's laptop to speed up a game he was playing. He did this without the knowledge or permission of the laptop's owner who wa…

I’ve always been wary of one-to-ones with the manager for the same reason. Is it ever good to talk about problems with a manager, especially regarding other people? It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma. I still don’t know what’s best for me to talk about in this setting.

If you have a good manager, yes, it can be. A good one will often have years more experience at navigating tricky social and political situations than you do and will be able to help you work through any difficulties you're having with coworkers.

Good managers are far rarer than good programmers, though.

A decent litmus test for whether your manager can help with these kinds of problems is whether they've been on lots of productive projects and whether everyone likes them.

If both things are true, they likely are quite good at navigating interpersonal conflicts and arriving at win-win outcomes. It's nigh-impossible to achieve both those outcomes in a large organization otherwise.

Re: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

#212

Post by darkerside »

sseth wrote: post #189
avinium wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you know something will work, there’s a HUGE amount of groundwork to get social traction for a change. Without it, you’ll get the change but not the “team progress”. You're not wrong, but equally I'd argue that if you need a huge amount of groundwork to implement change, you're probably in the wrong organization. Good organizations value good ideas, irrespective of who thought of them.

> Good organizations value good ideas, irrespective of who thought of them. Ideas with only upside and no downsides may be trivially executed. The problems come with ideas where costs are certain and up-front, while benefits are medium-to-long term, and the transition may carry risks of its own. Big changes and ideas usually are disruptive and the best organizations may still struggle to pull them off. In my experien…

Even downside-less ideas bear some opportunity cost, no matter how trivial the change (or intangible the cost). I agree with everything else you said.

Re: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

#213

Post by vezycash »

0db532a0 wrote: post #205
vezycash wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I want your opinion on...." for me is a potential landmine. Such questions can be used to detect potential troublemakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign In college 10 years+ ago, one of my roommates had a laptop with 500MB ram and took a 500MB ram chip from anther room mate's laptop to speed up a game he was playing. He did this without the knowledge or permission of the laptop's owner who wa…

I’ve always been wary of one-to-ones with the manager for the same reason. Is it ever good to talk about problems with a manager, especially regarding other people? It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma. I still don’t know what’s best for me to talk about in this setting.

Remembering this is important: Trust is earned.

Test people in different ways to see if they can be trusted. Share inconsequential secrets and see who else hears it. Once had a boss who'd let cash drop while walking to see what you'd do.

If you can't trust em, update your CV and get busy getting a new job you become desperate.

Edit:

https://www.inc.com/wanda-thibodeaux/want-to-know-if-someone...

Googled that for ya. Get others

Re: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

#214

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #195
WilliamEdward wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clearly leaving out some important detail, which makes me think this is 100% your fault and you were being stupid, even though you want to play the victim

Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of what details someone else left out. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

[deleted]

Re: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

#215

Post by russolsen »

Now that my job resembles the 'biggest boss of all' more than the young developer that I was all those years ago, I often think about what I would have said to that young man.

If it were me I would thank that young developer for all the hard work and offer a few bits of advice on getting things done without pissing people off.

And then I would get all of the leads together and have a serious talk about how we can take care of all of our people while at the same time producing the best system humanly possible.

Good developers work hard and care harder and, being human, they have egos. But everyone has blind spots and everyone makes mistakes and the essence of a good organization is that it blends the strengths of all of its members.

Re: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

#216

Post by WilliamEdward »

dang wrote: post #195
WilliamEdward wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clearly leaving out some important detail, which makes me think this is 100% your fault and you were being stupid, even though you want to play the victim

Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of what details someone else left out. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

This would be a personal attack if it was wrong to be stupid... But it's not. Everyone acts this way sometimes.

I don't even suggest they are stupid all the time, just acted so in that moment, which again is completely fine but responsibility should be shifted.

I'm sorry the use of that word is too much for you to handle, and I probably should have used another method to call out someone's mistakes. I'm also slightly disheartened that hackernews thinks the default use of stupid has to be cynical. That's my mistake and I will adjust to the fragile culture here.

Re: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

#217

Post by renox »

ken wrote: post #63

There's definitely value in respecting boundaries. Sometimes you have to take a small local inefficiency in order to create a bigger global efficiency. That's life. In my experience, though, this is a much bigger problem in software because nobody really knows what they're doing. There's no industry standard way to do almost anything. You can argue about "use Foo!" or "don't use Foo, use Bar!" and there's no one Corr…

> But I just trust him to use the right cable, because that's his specialty,

That's funny, your text reminded me of a colleague who discovered that the electrician she hired used the wrong cable..

Re: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

#219

Post by techbio »

> They knew, but they kept it to themselves because in that organization, there were some things that were more important than making the system better.

Hope this isn't the best advice I ever get.

I do like that it wasn't the biggest-boss-of-all's words that mattered, but how the words made him feel: never be this guy.

Re: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

#220

Post by ramraj07 »

darkerside wrote: post #77
ramraj07 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right, but what he said is also true: the act of hiring by itself becomes fairly unscalable unless you're lucky and get a constant stream of good candidates (which again won't work in your favor if your company isn't primarily known for its engineering).

It does become more difficult (most people don't hire people who are better than they are). That's different from saying that mediocrity scales better than skill. Skillful programmers understand points of leverage and reduce maintenance costs over time. Purposefully hiring mediocrity? Big companies do it, but not on purpose. Survivorship bias is in play here. Taking that approach is a form of managerial cargo culting…

I definitely know some big companies that hire mediocre people on purpose to make sure they stay back and don't leave in a few months. Needless to say those places suck to work.
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