The dispassionate developer • Hacker News Board

Re: The dispassionate developer

#231

Post by random_ind_dude » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #72

agloeregrets wrote: post #4

I'm betting on this article being controversial here somewhat. The point on OSS is hilariously true though. Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? OSS is great for almost everyone, don't get me wrong, but in whole, the largest tech companies in the world have gotten an entire community to test, fix, and develop…

I kind of wonder about the opposite. Back in the 90's when open source really took off, open source projects were useful things like Linux, MySQL and GCC: open alternatives to commercial software. Now that open source has become "important", though, we see more and more things like Spring and Angular: idiotic useless "frameworks" that seem to exist solely for the sake of existing and padding resumes.

Spring framework is "useless"? It's used by well-known companies like Netflix and LinkedIn as well as by a lot of Fortune 500 companies.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#232

Post by flukus » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 3:27 AM UTC

milesvp wrote: post #82

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely incompetent when assigned to a real project. Unpopular opinion on HN: This is actually quite common when you hire based purely on resumes or credentials. Some people are really good at interviewing and being charismatic enough to convince people to hire them. There are a lot of candidates who can talk the talk but really…

What you may be missing is how hard it is to actually create a good take home. Every take home test I’ve seen was rife with potential for the problem to explode in complexity. Even things that seem simple like names and dates have so many potential pitfalls that it can be impossible to tell as an applicant whether they intentionally laid a trap or not. Then there’s the incidentals, should I send them a docker image t…

> What you may be missing is how hard it is to actually create a good take home

The biggest issue I see are people underestimating the setup time for "simple" projects. You're a big software company that doesn't start new projects regularly, I'm a developer at a big company that doesn't setup new projects regularly, why do you expect me to remember how to setup "professional quality" projects in a couple of hours?

A simple console app might test if I can code, setting up a new MVC project with authentication, unit tests, IoC, etc is testing how well I can google shit I haven't had to setup for years.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#233

Post by neilparikh » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 3:51 AM UTC

agloeregrets wrote: post #4

I'm betting on this article being controversial here somewhat. The point on OSS is hilariously true though. Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? OSS is great for almost everyone, don't get me wrong, but in whole, the largest tech companies in the world have gotten an entire community to test, fix, and develop…

I'm skeptical that OSS actually provides that much free work for big companies. If you look at React for example, 25 out of the top 30 contributors are FB employees. The other 5 might have been as well, I just couldn't tell. If, for some reason, no one outside FB contributed to React, I doubt it would affect FB at all. The few commits that come externally would just be written in house.

I think looking at other corporate run project (VSCode, Kubernetes etc.) will tell a similar story: the vast majority of the code will be written by the employees of the company owning the project in the first place.

You could argue that companies are getting free bug reports, but users are probably reporting bugs because they find value in the tool, and would like it to be better, so it's hardly parasitic there either.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#234

Post by nocman » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 4:32 AM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #204

nocman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear what you are saying, but in fairness to the author of the article, he did say he would like people to care about their vocation. Also, I'd rather have a surgeon who was skilled, cared about his profession, and also was not burned out from overexertion trying to be "passionate" about his job. I think the medical field in general (not unlike the software development field in general) often undervalues people's t…

> from overexertion trying to be "passionate" about his job. This phrasing captures the issue exactly, imo. The split is between someone who is "trying" to be "passionate" about their work, versus someone for whom that's just an apt description. It seems like the discussions around "passion" tend to ignore that distinction. I think the problem could be alternately framed in terms of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation wit…

One issue is indeed when people are trying to project the whole "I'm realy into this whole software development thing!" vibe. Genuine excitement about something can almost always be differentiated from this, in my experience.

But the issue I'm more concerned about is this idea that you have to live, breathe, drink, eat, sleep software development 24 hours a day, or you are a lesser developer than someone else who does. There are obviously different levels of investment people are willing and/or capable to commit to a job in this field, and yes some people are better at it than others. However, I think many in our profession are being pushed to invest too much of their lives into career-centric tasks, and as a result will end up being less effective as developers than they could be. I think this is perhaps even more dangerous than being lazy, and not keeping your skills relatively current.

Having a good balance in life is the way to avoid burnout. It is way too easy to leave your family and/or friends in the wake. There are infinitely more things to learn, and you can't do it all. These are choices I personally struggle with, as I'm sure many others here do.

It doesn't help that almost all of the job listings are asking for people "passionate about X" (where X can be almost anything related to development), or looking for "a Rockstar Y developer", or some other such buzzword-laden description. It seems to me, that there is a way to describe people who want to do high quality work, who care about their results, but at the same time have a life outside of work. However, although I see some job listings where the writers appear to be trying, a lot of them leave me thinking "no need to apply there, I just want a job doing a lot of things that I am good at and enjoy most of the time. I don't want to join a cult."

Re: The dispassionate developer

#235

Post by bps4484 » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 6:08 AM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #30

"As you start to ponder the implied ethos, the stranger it gets. Would you like engineers to be passionate as they design new bridges? Would you like a surgeon to be passionate as she operates on you? Would you like judges to be passionate as they pass sentence on your friend?" I'm not sure what exactly he means by passionate, but I do know a surgeon who spends time reading and lecturing about the history of surgery.…

I thought the same thing about that quote. He is mixing up events with these two professions.

Nobody wants an engineer who is passionate while they are literally writing code, screaming at the computer and flailing his hands[1]. Much in the same way we wouldn't want a judge to be passionate when he's handing down a sentence.

But a judge should care about our laws, our constitution, and be opinionated about them. I want a surgeon who understands how the practice of surgery is evolving and stays up to date on best practices. I want a bridge builder to get ABSOLUTELY passionate about the type of materials used on a bridge and not settle for anything less. Similarly I think the best software engineers care deeply and are knowledgable about the craft of software engnineering.

[1] Well, I've had a coworker who did this and it was actually really comical and we were all entertained, but he was the exception that proved the rule.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#236

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 7:39 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: The dispassionate developer

#237

Post by danmur » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 9:51 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

Derpdiherp wrote: post #5

Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth. I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a famil…

On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of resumes. Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project. These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs, because it’…

My favourites are people who have some personal projects (finished or not) to show. They're usually more interesting and telling than open source contributions, though I definitely respect that.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#238

Post by pydry » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 10:00 AM UTC

omniscient_oce wrote: post #224

californical wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Surely someone who spends more time developing will be better at it. Now of course this doesn’t matter past a certain point — people could spend all their time working on something that doesn’t help them grow. Then once you have those 10,000 hours of actual growth, you are probably close to a Senior developer level. Which after 5…

I've seen this on Reddit a fair bit too but there's this sort of anti "10x-er" attitude. It makes logical sense to me that if someone spends more time practising a skill, then they would be more proficient and thus worth paying more. Yet there's a lot of pushback against that thought process because it is biased or something. Obviously there's more to a candidate than purely 'coding' skill but I find it weird that a…

I've found that a lot of hiring is explicitly biased against skill. The root cause is mostly the hirer wanting "people like me". Or, at least, not discriminating against "people like me".

I'm sure a lot of people who hire developers think of themselves as people who could write open source but don't have the time.

This also accounts for why stuff like leetcode persists (the hirers were successfully selected by that process), why top colleges are often preferred and even why the profession is predominantly white/male.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#239

Post by wpietri » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 11:58 AM UTC

anyfoo wrote: post #176

wpietri wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hiring a few engineers right now. I agree that some companies exploit "passion", and that companies doing that tend to over-weight weight things in a way that encourages having no life. I think that's a mistake. That said, I do think some sort of "passion" is really useful. I've been coding a long time. I'm on something like my fifth major language. My first computer had 4K of RAM; now my phone has a million time…

I know exactly what you mean, people being proficient in some very specific legacy domain (Vax BASIC is a good example, another might be AS/400/IBM i by now). Often going above and beyond in their niche expertise. Though it's hard to get a full picture. Maybe past gigs or other circumstances have given them enough financial stability that they don't strictly need to work anymore. They then continue consulting out of…

Definitely. If somebody is winding down their career, I totally get just sticking with the thing they know. A couple years back I decided I wanted to try my hand at building a mobile app. Starting from square one kinda sucked; suddenly being bad at something I am used to being good at was a drain. The ROI on a switch like that depends a lot on how many years you expect you can be putting the knowledge to use.

And yeah, I too worry about people who do that early on. Some things will probably last. E.g., I'd bet that Salesforce admins will still be employed 30 years from now. But the odds are not as good for most technologies in use today.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#240

Post by pydry » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 12:04 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #144

californical wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Surely someone who spends more time developing will be better at it. Now of course this doesn’t matter past a certain point — people could spend all their time working on something that doesn’t help them grow. Then once you have those 10,000 hours of actual growth, you are probably close to a Senior developer level. Which after 5…

> You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Except that 10000 hours thing is non scientific nonsense. To improve, you have to practice right way. If you code for 8 hours at work, coding 2 further hours wont make you improve more. Similarly, if you want to improve in music or running, just playing songs or jogging means you will hit plateau pretty fast. After that, you hav…

>If you code for 8 hours at work, coding 2 further hours wont make you improve more.

A) I'm pretty sure almost nobody actually codes 8 hours at work.

B) Those two hours will be of a very different nature to "work coding" and this can lead you to learn things you wouldn't pick up at work.