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Aging programmer

world.hey.com

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Re: Aging programmer

#251

Post by yuan43 »

> Communicating effectively is a complex skill that takes years to develop, and an essential one if you want to program professionally.

I suspect that a good chunk of the drive to send "aging" programmers into management is that they're much better at communication than their peers. And part of it has to be that a subordinate who is better at communication than the manager often becomes a de facto manager.

Leadership often doesn't respect organization charts. But this can cause a great deal of angst among anointed leaders.

Re: Aging programmer

#252

Post by bilekas »

I love this, and I can see myself agreeing already, while a few years younger it's quite reassuring to know I'm not just weird about some things.

One I have only recently come to appreciate though is paired programming.

> I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero.

There is a limit of course, but recently I've been doing more and more, not by instruction but just more sitting on a call sharing a screen and going through the work day. Good combination of chit-chat and some problem solving, it's actually really nice for remote work.

Re: Aging programmer

#253

Post by shakezula »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #245
shakezula wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree with parent comment. Leet code interviews, while sometimes obnoxious, are still good exercises. I have learned a lot of nuanced takes from a leet code interview with an interesting question.

OK, fair 'nuff. Right now, I'm working on a data parser for a backend API that fetches a JSON response, using the built-in NSURLSession stuff, turns it into a Swift Dictionary, then I sort through that Dictionary, and emit a bunch of Swift struct instances for use by the API consumer. The reason for this, is because the API that I wrote about seven years ago, is giving us performance problems. I wrote about that in t…

> I speak it without an accent

I love this, and I’m stealing it. it’s a perfect description of competency in a language, imo.

I absolutely understand the emphasis on shipping, and i actually have recently come to lament some of my unshipped projects lately (I’m in a phase of finishing instead of starting projects myself, and sometimes have felt like I haven’t gotten to ship anything in my software career, but that’s another story for another day) but part of the core skills I attribute to allowing me to finish are the same ones leet code interviews helped me polish. how one works on a low-level data structure is one of the core aspects of software engineering i examine in a new hire.

What I think I’m trying to say is, I don’t mean to stop working on shipping a project to focus on leet code toy problems, but rather that a lot of leet code interview problems have given me better insights on how to focus and solve problems im trying to ship. I have found great value in going back and rehashing leet code interview problems and turning them into tiny libraries after i was given them. So much so that I’ve turned it into an exercise. I’ll have to write a full post about it sometime, but writing tiny libraries has been one of the best things I’ve done for my technical skills.

Re: Aging programmer

#254

Post by therealdrag0 »

granshaw wrote: post #229
hindsightbias wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an office mate whose dream was to retire to the tools desk at HD. While brutal, there is something to working later from a health perspectice. When I was young, retirees played tennis and golf but I dont see as much of that in my cohort.

Snide all you want about it, but the country club trend provided community and physical activity

I’m only in my 30s and starting to find the idea quite attractive.

Re: Aging programmer

#255

Post by technion »

yu3zhou4 wrote: post #231
PheonixPharts wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> almost no one wants to take a chance trying to develop a new way to interview. I'm guessing your in the under 40 camp, but interviews did used to be better . In the early days of the startup explosion interviews where much better. The biggest signal at the time was having an active github profile or otherwise existing portfolio of code. The strongest signal back then was serious contribution to any open source proj…

> The strongest signal back then was serious contribution to any open source projects (strangely today that almost seems to count against you) Would you mind sharing why contribution to open source might have a negative impact for an interview?

People in several enterprises have told me having a visible open source profile would represent a cultural fit issue.

Re: Aging programmer

#256

Post by BurningFrog »

mike_ivanov wrote: post #242
justrudd wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m kind of in this boat. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now (jeez). Mentoring a dev with 6 to 8 years experience is a pain in the butt (yes. I know. Not all of you). While I’ve got a pretty good memory, a lot of the times I don’t have a direct or complete answer for their question. I’ll have a tingle of a memory that is similar to their question. So I’ll give them that as a starting point and tell them how I’d ap…

While I’ve got a pretty good memory, a lot of the times I don’t have a direct or complete answer for their question. I’ll have a tingle of a memory that is similar to their question. The same. Especially under pressure. Which makes it virtually impossible for me to pass an oral technical interview.

If you've done good work for a few decades, you have tons of former coworkers willing to hire you.

Re: Aging programmer

#257

Post by iLemming »

cholmon wrote: post #148
thread_id wrote: post #69

At 64 years I am still going strong. I consider myself blessed that I have landed a position that allows the to be the leader (I manage a small team) and still be hands on with everything: Architecture, desgin, coding, infrastructure, cloud engineering, DevOps engineer, DBA, the list goes on. It is a Goldilocks job. The technologies that we manage and master are miriad. We are a small company and my team owns the ent…

I’m interested in hearing more about your Socratic approach to management. Could you elaborate on that a bit?

Socratic approach has something to do with asking questions instead of giving directions. I guess, instead of saying "You're an idiot if you think this works in concurrent setting...", one should say: "What do you think would happen if we run this concurrently? Are you an idiot?" :)

Re: Aging programmer

#258

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

shakezula wrote: post #253
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, fair 'nuff. Right now, I'm working on a data parser for a backend API that fetches a JSON response, using the built-in NSURLSession stuff, turns it into a Swift Dictionary, then I sort through that Dictionary, and emit a bunch of Swift struct instances for use by the API consumer. The reason for this, is because the API that I wrote about seven years ago, is giving us performance problems. I wrote about that in t…

> I speak it without an accent I love this, and I’m stealing it. it’s a perfect description of competency in a language, imo. I absolutely understand the emphasis on shipping, and i actually have recently come to lament some of my unshipped projects lately (I’m in a phase of finishing instead of starting projects myself, and sometimes have felt like I haven’t gotten to ship anything in my software career, but that’s…

> I’ll have to write a full post about it sometime,

I'd read that.

> but writing tiny libraries has been one of the best things I’ve done for my technical skills.

I do that all the time. When I get to a bunch of code that I think has reuse potential (like, say, a backend connection SDK), I break it into a standalone GitHub repo, set it up as an SPM package, and give it The Full Monty for testing and documentation. The testing code usually dwarfs the implementation code, and the documentation is...well, you can see for yourself. Here's a few of the packages that I've written: https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/

I usually take a few days off the main project, write, test, document, and release the subproject, then re-absorb it into the main project.

Re: Aging programmer

#259

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

throwyuno wrote: post #249
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, fair 'nuff. Right now, I'm working on a data parser for a backend API that fetches a JSON response, using the built-in NSURLSession stuff, turns it into a Swift Dictionary, then I sort through that Dictionary, and emit a bunch of Swift struct instances for use by the API consumer. The reason for this, is because the API that I wrote about seven years ago, is giving us performance problems. I wrote about that in t…

If you’re looking to get hired as an individual contributor somewhere else, maybe you should. But judging from this and other posts of yours, you’re not, so you’re probably not doing it wrong. It’s just that when interviewing, it can few easier to evaluate some algorithm puzzle than to figure out what it means and whether it’s true that “the app is gonna be great.”

Well, that screed I wrote, is a fairly typical "geeky conversation" that can be invaluable, in an interview.

I used to hire pretty senior-level engineers. They would be writing C++ image processing pipeline code, to some insanely exacting standards.

My technique was usually to get them relaxed and comfortable, then start asking them for stories about the projects they've worked on. It was always a joy, when I could get them to start chattering, like the post above. I would look at the enthusiasm, and the passion, as much as the technical detail. I'd love hearing them talk about discovering problems, and how they addressed them.

Re: Aging programmer

#260

Post by skirmish »

cholmon wrote: post #148
thread_id wrote: post #69

At 64 years I am still going strong. I consider myself blessed that I have landed a position that allows the to be the leader (I manage a small team) and still be hands on with everything: Architecture, desgin, coding, infrastructure, cloud engineering, DevOps engineer, DBA, the list goes on. It is a Goldilocks job. The technologies that we manage and master are miriad. We are a small company and my team owns the ent…

I’m interested in hearing more about your Socratic approach to management. Could you elaborate on that a bit?

Not to presume what the OP meant but I understood it as: answering questions by asking questions. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
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