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Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

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Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#221

Post by ryanackley »

saghm wrote: post #187
tomyedwab wrote: post #143

Well written article full of humility and vulnerability? I love it. My reaction: you don't need to feel ashamed of not knowing something, there is far too much to know and I'm still learning new techniques and concepts 37 years in, so I would never judge you for it. I would also not judge you for having your own preferences and opinions. I too prefer working in an office to remote work, but when I say this out loud o…

I don't take issue with what you've said about remote work despite very much having the opposite opinion to you because you phrased it as your own personal opinion. This blog post does pretty much the opposite though; its analysis of remote work is pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth. It was an especially weird editorial choice to make use of th…

It feels like you're blaming the author for the lazy thinking of someone who might read his opinion and take it as objective fact.

The 7 times 9 analogy doesn't track it all. 7x9 = 63 is an objective fact by definition. His thoughts on remote work are an opinion by definition. If other people decide that what he says is dogmatic, blame it on their own lack of critical thinking skills.

The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#222

Post by forinti »

I feel that many coders have a very basic understanding of SQL, don't really want to get better at it, and don't really care.

If they can get away with a query that takes 2s to return a single row, they will be quite content and will not be bothered to look at the query plan.

It's a shame, because everything could be a little better with hardly any effort.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#223

Post by mattmanser »

noman-land wrote: post #127
_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. Part of growing up in chatrooms was an implicit bravery of saying something out loud in a room full of thousands of people. There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms. Chatrooms have evolved in a really interesting way. I think the first generat…

There's always been a silent majority in every platform, IRC/HN/Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/Insta/TikTok. Doesn't matter what platform it is, most people are lurkers, silent consumers, they don't post.

There's nothing new here, there's no problem to solve. Doesn't matter if you're anonymous or publicly identifiable. 90% of people don't contribute, they just consume. 9% contribute occasionally. And 1% are regular contributors.

The 1% or 90-9-1 rule is pretty well known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#224

Post by j-bos »

ryanackley wrote: post #221
saghm wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't take issue with what you've said about remote work despite very much having the opposite opinion to you because you phrased it as your own personal opinion. This blog post does pretty much the opposite though; its analysis of remote work is pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth. It was an especially weird editorial choice to make use of th…

It feels like you're blaming the author for the lazy thinking of someone who might read his opinion and take it as objective fact. The 7 times 9 analogy doesn't track it all. 7x9 = 63 is an objective fact by definition . His thoughts on remote work are an opinion by definition . If other people decide that what he says is dogmatic, blame it on their own lack of critical thinking skills. The meta-point of the article…

> The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us.

In my experience this is a common failure point among tech/analytical folks (myself included) which leads to their words and actions being genrally misconstrued and effectively misunderstood by the larger segement of the population which is rarely able or disposed to handling communications without embellishments.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#225

Post by Aeolun »

hnlmorg wrote: post #193
Aeolun wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. People weren’t assholes and/or snowflakes in those days. Implicit in being on the net was that you were fairly well behaved.

How far back are we talking? 90s? 80s? 70s? For the 70s, I would agree with you. But the moment home users, and particularly kids, gained access to the internet, you started to see a subculture of trolling. Source: I was one of those 80s kids. It’s not something I’m proud of, but writing bots to troll message boards and scrapers for porn and warez played just as significant role in my journey into my IT profession as…

Well, yes. We definitely fucked with the systems, and to a lesser extent the people. But 80s internet didn’t have shit like swatting. Or what Mr. Beast makes people go through for entertainment.

And everyone was in on it. We were all trolling, and being trolled, and perfectly well aware of what trolling was. But now people deliberately target and exploit the vulnerable on the internet.

I feel like the only thing you needed before was a fairly thick skin, but now you need a lawyer and a smorgasboard of security.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#226

Post by imtringued »

abhashanand1501 wrote: post #207

> Am I suggesting 100% test coverage? No, I’m not suggesting it. I’m demanding it. Every single line of code that you write should be tested. Period. This is from uncle bob. I hate the argument by people that 100% leads to "bad quality tests". Not doing it leads to bad quality code, people who don't care about quality of code, and hence dont write tests, suddenly start to care about quality of tests.

100% means testing things getters and setters in Java. At some point you're testing nothing.

If you tell people that 95% is just as inadequate as 0%, they'll tend towards 0%.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#227

Post by j-bos »

_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

> I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much

I believe the change is largely demographic, and I'm NOT referring to gender/nationality/age/race. Rather to the personality of people working in tech today. Long ago tech people were almost exclusively sourced from the weird kids who couldn't/didn't read the room and other things of that nature, they just said stuff, asked stupid questions because they wanted to know. Most people don't do that, so if tech is now made of more "commonly adjusted" people, then there will be less dexterity in navigating a less social and more (actual) productivity focused medium (remote/async comms).

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#228

Post by Havoc »

_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

Fixing bugs via teams chat is not what author means with "breathe the same air as the folks you work with". Better example would be picking up subtle social clues like Frank looks quiet today and has a frown on his face...let's take him aside for a coffee chat and figure out what's wrong

As much as I hate RTO, chat/video really does have lower social clue information density

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#229

Post by Yokohiii »

Kerrick wrote: post #52
crystal_revenge wrote: post #38

> left inner join While I do appreciate this joke (and I do hope this is a joke), I've recently had a project majorly held up because a lead dev didn't understand SQL. It's great to admit gaps but it's equally important to close those gaps. > As a hiring manager I interviewed software engineers and tried to filter for object-oriented knowledge. Retroactively, it’s clear I was hypocritical. As some one who has been on…

I am indeed learning, working to close those gaps. For automated testing, I'm in the middle of reading Developer Testing by Alexander Tarlinder, with xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros coming close behind. I'm also working through Test-Driven Development: By Example with my wife as we have time. For SQL, I read Grokking Relational Database Design by Qiang Hao last winter, and I started SQL Queries for Mere Mortal…

I don't fully grasp whether your knowledge gaps are severe or just an impostor syndrome. Do your knowledge gaps affect you or do you just feel guilty for not being an expert of every tech?

It's easy to feel dumb on the internet, around every corner there are people pointing out your mistakes and they seem to know it all. But it's often just by chance, of course there is someone out there that know this exact thing you got wrong. You did the rare thing what no one does in tech, you said what you don't know, all the _experts_ out there simply hide that.

The other issue is also that people try to overwhelm you with their questionable knowledge. I find that quite problematic with OOP. I've smoked a lot of the OOP crack, but I feel more efficient without all the rituals and dogmas. Knowing all the bells and whistles of smart OOP stuff will just cause more shame, because with every piece of code you will think "oh I have to do it that way or people will hate me".

That being said, I usually prefer to know the essence of something. There are many ways to testing, but if you know what it's conceptually doing, then you can write your own test lib. It's not hard, neither magic. But elaborate frameworks and ritualized concepts often lead you away from the gist of things. You are supposed to do things how they've imagined it for you, if you don't, feel shame.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#230

Post by abhashanand1501 »

imtringued wrote: post #226
abhashanand1501 wrote: post #207

> Am I suggesting 100% test coverage? No, I’m not suggesting it. I’m demanding it. Every single line of code that you write should be tested. Period. This is from uncle bob. I hate the argument by people that 100% leads to "bad quality tests". Not doing it leads to bad quality code, people who don't care about quality of code, and hence dont write tests, suddenly start to care about quality of tests.

100% means testing things getters and setters in Java. At some point you're testing nothing. If you tell people that 95% is just as inadequate as 0%, they'll tend towards 0%.

There are two possibilities

1. The getters and setters are not called anywhere in application logic. In that case, delete the getters / setters and get to 100%.

2. The getters and setters are called somewhere in the application logic. In that case, they should have already been covered in the test for the application.

There is really no excuse to not write tests to get to 100%.

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