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Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

nair.sh

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Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#301

Post by eithed »

Jensson wrote: post #285
eithed wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be an indicator that PM isn't doing their job; PM should be able to answer you questions regarding what the business wants (= people who you're trying to serve). Developers, by the nature of interacting with domain, do become experts in the domain, but really it should be up to PM what the domain should be doing business-wise.

If that is what a PM needs then there aren't enough good PM to warrant a PM role for most products, so just make software engineers do that in most cases. Edit: The main role of PM is to decide which features to build, not how those features should be built or how they should work. Someone has to decide what to build, that is the PM, but most PM are not very good at figuring out the best way for those features to wor…

> not [...] how they should work

So that we're on the same page, what I think should be PM responsibilities:

If I have a user story: "As a customer I want to purchase a product so that I can receive it at my address" - PM defines this user story as they have insight to decide if such feature is needed.

PM should then define acceptance criteria: "Given customer is logged in When they view Product page Then 'Add product to basket' button should appear", "Given 'Add product to basket' button When customers click on it Then Product information modal should appear" etc - PM should know what users actually want, ie whether modals should appears, or not; whether this feature should be available for logged users only, or not.

How this will work shouldn't matter to PM; these are AC they've defined.

Of course the process of defining AC should involve developers (and QA), because AC should be exhaustive to delivering given feature

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#302

Post by toshikatsu-oga »

hamstergene wrote: post #69

Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…

[dead]

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#303

Post by cpursley »

cpursley wrote: post #255
hamstergene wrote: post #69

Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…

This sounds like a whole lot of copium from devs who don't want to bother with the effort of just writing stuff down, ie good documentation practices... Actually, maybe even worse (not directed at parent) - I think some "seniors" have a stick so far up their err keyboard, and think they are so wise beyond words that they refuse to share their "all knowing expertise" with anyone else as a form of gatekeeping or perhap…

*write stuff. Siri dictation can’t be overhauled soon enough.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#304

Post by jghn »

hibikir wrote: post #209
hamstergene wrote: post #69

Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it. An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to anoth…

A non-trivial part of the big difference between the juniors that seem talented and "get it", and those that don't is precisely their ability to form accurate enough world models quickly. You can tell who is going at the "physics" of software and applying them, and who is just writing down recipes, and doesn't try to understand the nature of any of the steps. It's especially noticeable when teaching functional progra…

This happened at an old employer of mine. We started to go down the FP road, veering off the standard OOP of the day. About 25% of the people picked it up immediately. About 50% got it well enough. And 25% just thought it was arcane wizardry.

Between that latter group and the bottom portion of the middle it sparked a big culture war. Eventually leading to leadership declaring that FP was arcane wizardry, and should be eradicated.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#305

Post by giancarlostoro »

Yokohiii wrote: post #126
giancarlostoro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me when the ELK stack was called just ELK (idek what it is now) we had a server we put it on, and after making the additional dashboards my manager wanted, we learned the limits of ES / ELK. It needs a ridiculous amount of memory, because it will shove everything in memory. Same thing when I learned that MongoDB indexing puts every item in memory as well, which is a yikes, why would you not want to index? I b…

Production grade multi tenant databases want to *solely* run on RAM. > why would you not want to index? Because if you don't need an index it wastes RAM, as you've learned. Maintaining indices also has a cost. Index only what you need. In the sense of the blog post: A senior with decent DB experience would have told you. ;)

You mean NoSQL which is slightly different and nuanced, in a shop that was mostly SQL with the exception of me, the one Junior developer using MongoDB and Elastic, mind you, we got a lot of things done and I learned a lot more about Mongo than I would like.

In all fairness this was my first job a few years ago as a developer, I deep dove MongoDB but I was also one of the only devs using it at this place.

My previous experience with MongoDB had been in college and more limited.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#306

Post by giancarlostoro »

Yokohiii wrote: post #203
tardedmeme wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything "wants to" run solely in RAM, but we don't have infinite RAM, so a "production grade" database should also be able to fetch data from disk unless this is an explicit tradeoff. MariaDB and PostgreSQL do not require all indices to be stored in RAM. Obviously they can be accessed more quickly if they are in RAM but they are designed under the assumption they will often be stored on disk. It sounds like MongoD…

Every serious database that is designed to handle moderate to high traffic, will expect you to have RAM to fit all data and indices. Relational DBs do a solid job if that's not the case, but that also sabotages the efficiency you could get from them. It will work for some time. If it's enough for your, that's fine. I am not experienced with MongoDB, I don't know if previous comment reports were the users fault or Mon…

Potentially a mix of both, though MongoDB was still very young when we were using it. Places like Google were championing it, or rather places that can afford to burn a ton of RAM.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#308

Post by j_w »

panny wrote: post #182
t43562 wrote: post #52

I found that the proposers of features "want everything" because they don't know what is critical - they're therefore totally unwilling to accept anything other than "the full monty". So as a senior developer you cannot propose any faster route. As you might imagine, a lot of these ideas fell by the wayside but we had to develop them in full.

It's the XY problem. The customers tell sales they want Y, rather than stating their problem X which they think Y will solve. Sales runs breathlessly to the dev team and demands we implement Y. Now scale this up to 10 customers or 100 customers. They all have the same X but come up with independent Ys. You see the problem immediately. Sales/marketing didn't do their job sussing out what X is and wastes dev time with…

This is why the first thing you should do as a dev when somebody tells you that they want Y feature is to ask why.

Non-developers have no clue WHAT they want, then know WHY they want it. The why is much more important to know, because the requestor has no clue how software works and imagines bad solutions.

Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise

#310

Post by randusername »

nullorempty wrote: post #51

What I found is that my willingness to communicate and share my expertise is usually not in demand with more junior developers. In general, I find developers uninterested in finding a mentor. They don't look at your linked in profile, they don't look at you as a possible source of knowledge and expertise. So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to shar…

Plausible alternative explanations:

- Juniors are discouraged to ask for mentorship because they are under pressure to appear competent

- Juniors have internalized from bad experiences that seniors are not to be disturbed

- Juniors grew up in a world where nobody modeled mentorship as a possibility for them; a CS major probably learned async, online, parasocially, without much 1:1 face-to-face interaction

- Juniors don't know what they don't know just yet-- and it doesn't always work well for someone to try and teach them explicitly-- but once they figure this out they'll be more interested in reaching out

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