Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 510 posts

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#31

Post by bitexploder »

the-pigeon wrote: post #30
daenz wrote: post #18

>Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us. I thought they were going to go the direction of "he's an asshole" and was ready to accept that, but this particular criticism is actually disturbing. People with strong visions can often appear to be "making it up as they go along,…

It really depends. I take this really just to mean "everyone has faults". People often idealize heroes and think of them as beyond human. If you do that and met your hero then your illusion will often be shattered. But the problem is just that you were putting them on an unreasonable pedestal. Of course some people are frauds and some people have no idea what they are doing but manage to make people think they do. Bu…

I like the phrase “kill your heroes”. Not literally, of course. But in your mind. They are just flawed people like everyone else that happen to have been mythologized. Learning more about your heroes often leads to disappointment.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#32

Post by swader999 »

daenz wrote: post #18

>Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us. I thought they were going to go the direction of "he's an asshole" and was ready to accept that, but this particular criticism is actually disturbing. People with strong visions can often appear to be "making it up as they go along,…

What is wrong with making it up as you go? I mean everything I've ever built I had a notion of what I was doing but most of the real work was in the details. Anyone could say I was making it up as I go. I'd be like yeah, if I knew completely how to do it, I'd already be finished it.

Then there's the times where you think you know exactly what you're doing and after going down a road you realize it's the wrong way. Failing to learn and see the signs and make the embarrassing declaration that you got lost and need to turn around is never good. But some people just keep driving. It's hard though when there's a big line of cars behind you that think you actually know where you are headed.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#34

Post by swader999 »

eqmvii wrote: post #5

> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all. This a thousand times. Having empathy for future devs, maintenance, and bug fixes is so important.

I always say that's too hard for older devs like me to understand. Go easy on the elder abuse.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#35

Post by the_only_law »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #27
the_only_law wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happened to me too. In fact I'm in the process of leaving the field for something else altogether. I do tend to get weird looks and "whys" when I mention it, but its difficult for me to really explain in a concrete way, but I've just lost all excitement and motivation to do anything with programming (despite my mind still operating in very much a hacker mindset, where I see X and thing "I bet I could make X do Y)

Try building something of your own just for fun. See if you see sparks of your old love back.

That's the thing, I've been trying to do that for years now. I've got about a dozen cool ideas that bounce around in my head and a new one every few months or so. I can spend all my non-free time thinking about and designing them in my head, but when it comes time to actually write the code, I just kinda lose all motivation.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#36

Post by kylestlb »

eqmvii wrote: post #5

> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all. This a thousand times. Having empathy for future devs, maintenance, and bug fixes is so important.

Future devs? More like future me... how can I build this so I can change it or fix it when PM decides against it in 2 weeks?

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#37

Post by runawaybottle »

daenz wrote: post #22
eqmvii wrote: post #5

> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all. This a thousand times. Having empathy for future devs, maintenance, and bug fixes is so important.

Amen. Something bizarre I have noticed though in junior-almost-senior engineers is that they pride themselves in obfuscating and writing "highly complex" logic, with no documentation. It's almost like they are demonstrating their new abilities in the worst way possible. I have been dealing with one of these engineers recently, and they have expressed to me that they love writing because it's so terse. It's been a poi…

I wish more managers and business stakeholders investigated this more carefully. Team members of this type add a shadow overhead that impacts velocity dramatically. It’s always visible to average competent devs on the team, but can be invisible to managers who don’t investigate as to why only one person is particularly productive on the team. Most people won’t go to their bosses and say ‘so and so writes overly complicated code that’s making my life a living hell’.

In fact, I think a third-party auditor would be a valuable service for dev teams to utilize at least once a year. Totally neutral party that can come in and say ‘We’re pretty sure the codebase is too complex and we noticed the commits came from so and so’. The business value here is you can root-cause velocity issues that can come from decent people who need to be reigned in (not necessarily fired).

I’m literally prepared to pay to have these people objectively assessed.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#38

Post by austincheney »

eqmvii wrote: post #5

> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all. This a thousand times. Having empathy for future devs, maintenance, and bug fixes is so important.

That is frequently misinterpreted to mean use dependencies instead of writing code. It’s all the same to the product.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#39

Post by josephorjoe »

daenz wrote: post #22
eqmvii wrote: post #5

> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all. This a thousand times. Having empathy for future devs, maintenance, and bug fixes is so important.

Amen. Something bizarre I have noticed though in junior-almost-senior engineers is that they pride themselves in obfuscating and writing "highly complex" logic, with no documentation. It's almost like they are demonstrating their new abilities in the worst way possible. I have been dealing with one of these engineers recently, and they have expressed to me that they love writing because it's so terse. It's been a poi…

i was debugging some very terse, elegant, and dense code. i added a bunch of logging throughout to understand what was going wrong.

someone then removed all of my logging because it was ugly.

and then had to put it all back in when another bug was coming from the same terse beautiful code.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#40

Post by daenz »

swader999 wrote: post #32
daenz wrote: post #18

>Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us. I thought they were going to go the direction of "he's an asshole" and was ready to accept that, but this particular criticism is actually disturbing. People with strong visions can often appear to be "making it up as they go along,…

What is wrong with making it up as you go? I mean everything I've ever built I had a notion of what I was doing but most of the real work was in the details. Anyone could say I was making it up as I go. I'd be like yeah, if I knew completely how to do it, I'd already be finished it. Then there's the times where you think you know exactly what you're doing and after going down a road you realize it's the wrong way. Fa…

Nothing wrong with making it up as you go, and I didn't mean to sound like I was knocking it, if I did. Sometimes everyone fumbles around trying to find solutions that work...it's a totally valid way to approach some problems.

Sometimes it's a hybrid of knowing what you are doing but not knowing the implementation specifics. You know you need to connect high-level pieces A, B, and C with specific constraints, but it won't be until you get into the low-level implementation that you'll know if it is indeed possible. I think that's an example of both having a vision and also improvising as you go.

I am concerned about how to effectively communicate visions to people, because it gets everyone rowing in the same direction. If nobody thinks that you have a vision, when you do, there is no reason they should choose your direction vs just do their own thing.

Post reply on HN