Professional Programming: The First 10 Years • Hacker News Board

Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years

#31

Post by gombosg » Thu, May 19, 2022, 9:49 PM UTC

albertzeyer wrote: post #13

ctvo wrote: post #9

> Fearlessness is undervalued Being technically fearless is also a trait I've identified in engineers I enjoy working with. It's hard to quantify how you gain this. I think it's a combination of strong fundamentals and deep curiosity. It forms when things stop being magic.

I observed that many people are really afraid even of basic things. "I don't want to click here because I don't know what it does. Maybe it breaks my computer or deletes all my stuff." Maybe it's because I started using computers as a child (~9 years old or so) but I always had the mindset to just try things out. You cannot really break the computer or delete stuff. Every tool will always put a very clear warning bef…

You mostly can't break computers, except when stuff actually breaks in production and it hurts users/customers a lot. And thus we have engineers responding to incidents and writing postmortems. :D I have learned a lot from alert and incident management!

Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years

#32

Post by terrycrowley » Thu, May 19, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

Great article. The point about fearlessness resonated. Ray Tomlinson (wrote the first inter-machine email, picked the @ symbol, helped design TCP) was one of the best and most fearless engineers I ever worked with.

Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years

#33

Post by calderwoodra » Thu, May 19, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

Amazing post, thanks for putting this together.

Three points I think are undervalued in my experience:

> Typing can be the bottleneck

> The most important trait in developers: rolling up their sleeves because it has to get done

> Nothing really matters, except bringing value to the customer

I often feel the code needed to deliver value is not that complex and most senior folks can do it, but in an effort to "save time" on typing, they try to design something complex and debate endlessly, when what's really needed is rolling up your sleeves, getting it done, then saying "oh that? I finished coding it and it works, let's ship it already"

(edit: formatting)

Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years

#34

Post by benkwokcy » Fri, May 20, 2022, 3:57 AM UTC

calderwoodra wrote: post #33

Amazing post, thanks for putting this together. Three points I think are undervalued in my experience: > Typing can be the bottleneck > The most important trait in developers: rolling up their sleeves because it has to get done > Nothing really matters, except bringing value to the customer I often feel the code needed to deliver value is not that complex and most senior folks can do it, but in an effort to "save tim…

I think the author was being a tiny bit hyperbolic saying "nothing really matters but value for the customer". In a restaurant kitchen, the goal is to get food into the customer's mouth... but you still want to keep your knives clean and tidy. Of course, keeping them tidy isn't the point of the restaurant either.