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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

#251

Post by gedy »

sailfast wrote: post #145
noman-land wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem in my opinion is that folks afraid of posting treat chat channels like email and official record instead of a conversation. I like to post ideas, brainstorm, engage if I have a minute to respond to someone with a thought - kinda like being in an office - whereas many others seem to use it to blast out information after a lot of polish and they form a culture of announcements and no engagement, and get str…

> they form a culture of announcements and no engagement, and get stressed whenever someone asks a question or actually replies.

I agree, but this may mostly be pointing out they are not very good/qualified at whatever they are doing tbh.

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

#252

Post by localhostinger »

time4tea wrote: post #237

100% test coverage is a bit of a distraction. You can get to 100% by having tests that run the code, but have no assertions. You can run tests that test unimportant code just as much as super critical code. There's no differential between the two. Of course super critical code should have a number of different tests that exercise it. Its not the same as testing every path, its testing different inputs and checking th…

I like to think of test coverage as a negative indicator, i.e. if coverage falls below some defined percentage, it's a bad sign. But it doesn't make sense to optimize for that metric, because, as you said, you can have 100% test coverage but every single test can be bad.

I've always wanted to spend some more time on mutation testing, which can be used to improve test quality instead of just focussing on quantity. But I found it to be completely irrelevant in the industry so far.

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

#253

Post by prerok »

gls2ro wrote: post #162
QuercusMax wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a minor reprimand in a performed review for having a slightly heated conversation in a public channel. In the past that company had been very open about communicating about negative stuff (our CEO emailed the entire company when he visited one of the hardware labs that was a mess), but the upper management started tamping down on anything negative, and one of the things that suffered was any sort of honest comm…

This sometimes happens also when the original leaders are still present but they dont understand the effect the metrics are having on the entire company when it grows big. Have a senior leadership team and want them to not tell you bad news when you are the CEO/Leader? Then link their salary/performance to metrics like number of production incidents their team has. Suddenly the number of incidents that you know of de…

Indeed, it's called Goodhart's law. As soon as metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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

#254

Post by imetatroll »

optymizer wrote: post #149

I like the vulnerability displayed by the author. I'll share a moment myself: A few years ago I was the TL on a FAANG Android project, where for a few months I was doing more spreadsheet/TPM work than usual, and didn't have much time for coding. Once we had a meeting where I ended up coding in Kotlin live in front of a dozen younger devs to discuss the implementation of some feature. My work background is Android and…

I only hope that our field becomes heavier in the upper age category. Then maybe people will be more sympathetic towards my fumbles around languages I use frequently. ... I feel like I am always looking something up.

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

#255

Post by zvmaz »

forinti wrote: post #222

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.

> It's a shame

No, it's not. This goes against the whole thread and the article posted.

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

#256

Post by wwalker2112 »

I've been doing a lot of SE interviews lately for my company and one of my favorite coding assessments is a polymorphism challenge, mainly because our codebases are full of it. I was shocked at the number of engineers with 20+ years of experience who didn't understand it.

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

#257

Post by DrammBA »

wwalker2112 wrote: post #256

I've been doing a lot of SE interviews lately for my company and one of my favorite coding assessments is a polymorphism challenge, mainly because our codebases are full of it. I was shocked at the number of engineers with 20+ years of experience who didn't understand it.

> my favorite coding assessments is a polymorphism challenge, mainly because our codebases are full of it

mind sharing the challenge (or an analogous one so you don't give away the real one)? I'm curious how bad I'd do with it

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

#258

Post by ryanackley »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #244
j-bos wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dispose…

“Technical” people are also people, and that doesn’t exclude them from communicating like reasonable adults. Blaming the rest of the world for an inability to communicate effectively is not orienting the blame correctly.

You're wrong (IMO) The onus should not be on the communicator to qualify every statement of opinion. This is tedious and unreasonable.

Not prefacing what clearly is an opinion with "IMO" is not a jedi mind trick that makes others believe it as fact.

You're also demonstrating some hypocrisy by presenting your own point of view in the same manner. No qualifiers. You're simply stating something as truth

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

#259

Post by kelipso »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #135
_ea1k wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, some of the remote teams that I've worked on were only able to meet in person once per year, if that. They were very communicative on the tools that we had though.

No one is saying it’s impossible to build fully remote teams from scratch, it’s just very hard and requires strong leadership. Most companies have crappy management so they can’t pull it off.

I don’t even think it’s about leadership. Isn’t it weird for somehow to care about people who they only know through the phone or zoom calls? Some people won’t find that weird but I think a significant number of people would, or just can’t do that at all.

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

#260

Post by deadbabe »

xpe wrote: post #77
deadbabe wrote: post #15

[flagged]

I don't know that it is necessarily sick ... I suppose it depends what you do, how the people respond, and if you are playing a useful role in the interview process for your organization. Tell us more? On the positive side... Seeing how people respond to pressure (done within some bounds) might be useful information. Watching people dig deeper into their problem-solving toolkit (and even their determination and resol…

It saddens me that despite making a confession and making myself vulnerable to a wider audience, I am downvoted and flagged to hell. I won’t be discussing this any further.
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