page 10 of the slides says: > kill yourself now That's totally inappropriate no matter how funny you think you are.
Coming from a link titled "Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted" I expected some humor that may not be Politically Correct. Strangely, your response bothers me more than the quote. Could you not find anything positive to say?
For an industry with a very high rate of depression, and disproportionately populated by demographics where suicide is the #2 leading cause of death, it's a very inappropriate joke.
He bashes the "myth of the 10x" engineer. Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example. Anybody who has watched N0tch code on Twitch knows that there are certainly people who are far more productive coders than the average engineer. I have no idea if he's…
It's greed really - everyone wants to hire 10x engineers, but it's not like you're going to pay them 10x of course.
Or give them an office to think their 10x thoughts in when you can have them elbow to elbow and back to back with your most chatty, whistling, foot-tapping, phone-using employees.
It's not a matter of coding 10X times faster than another coder. It's a matter of coding to not put yourself into common traps/pitfalls that waste your time trying to get out of. And also to make the correct decisions/strategies early in the project to put it on a track that uses the correct tools, libraries, etc. that won't waste your time later. A junior developer is almost always a net negative on a team of develo…
What i commonly notice is if a developer starts solving the problem at its core, and then builds the interfaces around it, or he starts writing "utility" code, like writing code in hope that the problem will solve itself if enough helper code (or framework code) has been written for it. When i see a developer doing the latter, i know he will not be too productive, because he has no clear vision of the solution.
You're dismissing bottom up programing. That is actually a wide used technique, especially useful when the problem is not completely understood at the beginning.
He bashes the "myth of the 10x" engineer. Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example. Anybody who has watched N0tch code on Twitch knows that there are certainly people who are far more productive coders than the average engineer. I have no idea if he's…
It is hard to quantify programmer productivity objectively, but most of us know subjectively when we are productive and when we are not and the difference that can make. If at my baseline I am 1x, at my peak productivity I can easily see myself being at 5-15x. (How this works and how to induce this boost is a separate discussion). I believe others experience what I am talking about. From here it isn't a far leap to t…
Completely agree. Being able to focus on one thing uninterrupted and I can get a lot written. Sadly that happens very rarely these days.
I love to write code. And it's about 20% of my job. As an engineer, I spend most of my time in design (and meetings). The code is the fun, relaxing part. Many times, I don't even write code; I "review" code. We have "grunts" (younger programmers, usually) who pump out code all day. They're are involved in design too, of course. But in a very limited way. But you know, I think all of this comes with age. If you 22 yea…
> If you 22 years old, fresh out of school, you are going to be writing code all day. And that's how it should be, You need to cut-your-teeth. I'm 22 years old, fresh out of school and I'm as involved in design, recruiting and peer reviews as my older peers. And that's how it should be. Why? Because age has nothing to do with productivity, understanding or ability to come up with simple, elegant and maintainable desi…
While age might not have anything to do with productivity, experience definitely has. Especially when it comes to recognizing which problems are worth solving and giving (appropriate) pushback to product owners and managers.
I love to write code. And it's about 20% of my job. As an engineer, I spend most of my time in design (and meetings). The code is the fun, relaxing part. Many times, I don't even write code; I "review" code. We have "grunts" (younger programmers, usually) who pump out code all day. They're are involved in design too, of course. But in a very limited way. But you know, I think all of this comes with age. If you 22 yea…
> If you 22 years old, fresh out of school, you are going to be writing code all day. And that's how it should be, You need to cut-your-teeth. I'm 22 years old, fresh out of school and I'm as involved in design, recruiting and peer reviews as my older peers. And that's how it should be. Why? Because age has nothing to do with productivity, understanding or ability to come up with simple, elegant and maintainable desi…
Experience has a lot to do with productivity, understanding, and the ability to come up with simple, elegant, and maintainable designs. The "22 years old, fresh out of school" programmer is more pointed at the inexperienced individual rather than age itself. I would say the same comments could apply equally to 38-year old programmers that just started work after graduating from a hacker school. The fact is, when so many problems are merely iterations of previous ones, how can you ignore the wisdom of people that have been doing the same work for 20-30 years? It's ludicrous to believe that the contributions coming from a fresh grad with no practical experience will be on par with the quality of the solutions from programmers much more experienced.
What i commonly notice is if a developer starts solving the problem at its core, and then builds the interfaces around it, or he starts writing "utility" code, like writing code in hope that the problem will solve itself if enough helper code (or framework code) has been written for it. When i see a developer doing the latter, i know he will not be too productive, because he has no clear vision of the solution.
You're dismissing bottom up programing. That is actually a wide used technique, especially useful when the problem is not completely understood at the beginning.
It is also useful as a refactoring technique. Pulling common structures and patterns out to helper code often reveals the true structure of the existing code, which makes the end result easier to see.
I love to write code. And it's about 20% of my job. As an engineer, I spend most of my time in design (and meetings). The code is the fun, relaxing part. Many times, I don't even write code; I "review" code. We have "grunts" (younger programmers, usually) who pump out code all day. They're are involved in design too, of course. But in a very limited way. But you know, I think all of this comes with age. If you 22 yea…
> If you 22 years old, fresh out of school, you are going to be writing code all day. And that's how it should be, You need to cut-your-teeth. I'm 22 years old, fresh out of school and I'm as involved in design, recruiting and peer reviews as my older peers. And that's how it should be. Why? Because age has nothing to do with productivity, understanding or ability to come up with simple, elegant and maintainable desi…
Age and experience have everything to do to come up with efficient software architectures, except on trivial problems. Every coder I know (and I know 2 that are world class) look at his/her old code with regrets, and a kind an awe saying "What I was thinking ?".
You will improve with time. Coding is no different than any skill.
I love to write code. And it's about 20% of my job. As an engineer, I spend most of my time in design (and meetings). The code is the fun, relaxing part. Many times, I don't even write code; I "review" code. We have "grunts" (younger programmers, usually) who pump out code all day. They're are involved in design too, of course. But in a very limited way. But you know, I think all of this comes with age. If you 22 yea…
> If you 22 years old, fresh out of school, you are going to be writing code all day. And that's how it should be, You need to cut-your-teeth. I'm 22 years old, fresh out of school and I'm as involved in design, recruiting and peer reviews as my older peers. And that's how it should be. Why? Because age has nothing to do with productivity, understanding or ability to come up with simple, elegant and maintainable desi…
So you have no experience and you are just as involved in design? I could see that maybe for UX, but not for engineering. Either your entire team is inexperienced or they are just patronizing you.