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Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

nair.sh

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Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#211

Post by davebren »

The loop on getting slop out to market quick in order to get feedback is already flawed. If you don't understand the problems of your customers well enough to come up with a coherent vision for how to solve them you shouldn't be the one doing the product design or making high level business decisions in the first place.

There's a place for prototyping and experimental features but now agile has cultivated extreme learned helplessness and everything is an A/B test because there's no longer any ability to judge whether something is good or bad based on a holistic vision.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#212

Post by blastro »

asdfman123 wrote: post #83
nullorempty wrote: post #51

What I found is that my willingness to communicate and share my expertise is usually not in demand with more junior developers. In general, I find developers uninterested in finding a mentor. They don't look at your linked in profile, they don't look at you as a possible source of knowledge and expertise. So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to shar…

This is my frustration at my current job. There's so much silliness and no one cares about avoiding it. A less experienced dev suggested using "AI magic" to replace a URL validator. I protested, suggesting a cached fuzzy match solution (prepopulated by AI)... and no one cared. Now the AI model has been suddenly turned down, and our system is broken. We're going to have re-validate the whole system. A younger develope…

you've healed me - resonates

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#213

Post by robin64 »

I enjoyed reading this, and I agree with the underlying message: communicating better with our audience.

I think the framing started in the right path and then took a slightly wrong turn.

Both loops presented benefit from being tighter, faster. One to take a system to a “stable” (maintainable) setpoint quickly. The other to handle uncertainty.

And the additional insight about splitting the systems to better adapt to AI… we’ve described spikes for years, well before AI went mainstream

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#214

Post by robin64 »

I enjoyed reading this, and I agree with the underlying message: communicating better with our audience.

I think the framing started in the right path and then took a slightly wrong turn.

Both loops presented benefit from being tighter, faster. One to take a system to a “stable” (maintainable) setpoint quickly. The other to handle uncertainty.

And the additional insight about splitting the systems to better adapt to AI… we’ve described spikes for years, well before AI went mainstream.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#215

Post by notatoad »

bilekas wrote: post #28
lnenad wrote: post #4

As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by > “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?” as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out…

I came to say somethign simular actually. > Ah, baby, this is my senior developer. The avoider, the reducer, the recycler. They want to avoid development as much as they can. There are times when this is good, there are times when actively trying introduce an improvement is the best way forward. A good senior is able to recognise when those times are.

both of these things are equally important. every change will annoy somebody. every change breaks somebody's workflow.

preventing the unnecessary changes can help you get the political capital in your org to push through the changes that really need to happen.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#216

Post by tardedmeme »

Yokohiii wrote: post #203
tardedmeme wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything "wants to" run solely in RAM, but we don't have infinite RAM, so a "production grade" database should also be able to fetch data from disk unless this is an explicit tradeoff. MariaDB and PostgreSQL do not require all indices to be stored in RAM. Obviously they can be accessed more quickly if they are in RAM but they are designed under the assumption they will often be stored on disk. It sounds like MongoD…

Every serious database that is designed to handle moderate to high traffic, will expect you to have RAM to fit all data and indices. Relational DBs do a solid job if that's not the case, but that also sabotages the efficiency you could get from them. It will work for some time. If it's enough for your, that's fine. I am not experienced with MongoDB, I don't know if previous comment reports were the users fault or Mon…

You certainly don't need to hold all data in RAM to serve "moderate" traffic. A modern hard drive can seek about 80 times per second, an optimized RAID array even more, and an SSD tens of thousands, and if we're pessimistic, it takes 10 seeks to service a request. To me a light load means up to about a request every second, a moderate load means maybe 20 requests per second and a heavy load means hundreds or thousands of requests per second. Pessimistically each (read) request takes 5-10 random reads to service and almost every system is read-mostly.

I think these are realistic expectations for most apps. Obviously the likes of Netflix and Uber get orders of magnitude more, but 99.9% of apps aren't a Netflix or an Uber, and you don't have to optimize for scaling until your app is on a trajectory to become one, and putting your database on an SSD already let's you handle several thousand concurrent users with ease.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#217

Post by kstenerud »

hathawsh wrote: post #165
gooseyard wrote: post #159

Earlier 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…

In theory, it's the same as in practice.

In practice, it isn't.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#219

Post by kstenerud »

gfody wrote: post #81
hamstergene wrote: post #69

Because 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…

this is why I only communicate in poetry complexity is not what you believe it is please try listening

There is complexity

that can only be moved around,

not eliminated.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#220

Post by imp0cat »

goosejuice wrote: post #18

> The avoider, the reducer, the recycler. As this kind of person, it can be alienating in some teams / companies. What I've found works best is to convey how the added complexity will affect non-engineers. You have to understand the incentives and trade offs though, and sometimes it's better to take the loss. If you have the fortune of sticking around with the same leaders for awhile, a few rounds of being vocal, but…

> You want to bake me a whole birthday cake? Just put a candle on my sandwich.

I think these people also need to learn that, in the eyes of the customer, a sandwich with a candle is in no way comparable to a birthday cake.

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