311–320 of 745 posts
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> How long would it have taken you or me to write Doom, or Quake? Almost definitely not 10 years.
If you wanted to write Doom, starting in 1993, and take 10 years, your most efficient strategy would probably be to do something else for the first nine of them and wait for the technology to change around you.
> “if they ask about time off in the first interview then they are never going to be there!” The fact that this attitude is common scares me when I'm doing interviews. Time off is incredibly important to me. What's the use of making a great income if you can't get the time off to enjoy it? The culture about the use of PTO varies wildly between companies. A friend of mine worked somewhere that supposedly gave 20 days…
> “if they ask about time off in the first interview then they are never going to be there!” The fact that this attitude is common scares me when I'm doing interviews. Time off is incredibly important to me. What's the use of making a great income if you can't get the time off to enjoy it? The culture about the use of PTO varies wildly between companies. A friend of mine worked somewhere that supposedly gave 20 days…
Personally, I've never not used all my PTO in a given year and would consider being unable to do so a show stopper.
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Don't forget to write for future you . They'd appreciate some consideration as well. Mostly along the lines of "wtf does this module do?"
The best one for me was documentation to complicated for me - by me.
40+ years of experience here, and I'll tell you the #1 thing I've learned: * Software is a social service. Its for other humans. Incredibly, it doesn't matter how educated the developer, they still seem to have to learn this lesson themselves, over and over, until it sinks in...
Nothing between "click button" and "problem solved" is your user's problem, they're all yours.
This is a very insightful list. But there is one thing I'd quibble with: while it's inherently a super-subjective metric, I would say that 10x programmers do exist. Both in the "can support a company by themselves" sense and the "mad lone genius" sense. Not all the 10x programmers are good at working with other people or on other people's ideas. 0.1x programmers are often lost or afraid, although they may just be uni…
Also, sometimes it isn’t someone ‘moving fast and breaking things’ - sometimes everyone else gets paralyzed with indecision and can’t even get started. Someone who can sit down and start coding in an ambiguous environment, period, can easily make 10x more value themselves, and allow others to go from .1x to 1-5x merely by being able to pick somewhere to start and just doing it, which allows everyone else to break the…
I once worked on a project where exactly that happened, and I view it as one of my biggest failures of my career. I often wonder why I didn't just sit down one day and type int main( ... and just get on with it.
In the end the project got canned and both contractors terminated early, so I made sure that never happened again.
* companies and/or owners don't care about you. take everything you can get and don't be shy about it. don't listen to them when they continually tell you that you're "highly paid"
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Agreed, I don't know why the industry (or people?) in general have a problem with accepting this abilities gap. It's as if the notion of people being arbitrarily born more or less with a knack for something is evil. Let me tell you the story of when I realized I was (at best), a "not-mediocre" dev: 1. I've been programming for fun even as a kid. That's what got me into it: If you count kid-programming as "programming…
Totally agree with you. I’m in the same category and have had to accept my fate to some degree. I keep improving relative to myself, but that’s all I can reasonably do. What gets me is when I meet many of these “innate talent” coders I get to hear phrases like: “I just want to work with the best possible team…” And then from their behaviour, you see how they get irritated with the regular folks and try and convince e…
See also: Asking very old people how they managed to win so long.
> “if they ask about time off in the first interview then they are never going to be there!” The fact that this attitude is common scares me when I'm doing interviews. Time off is incredibly important to me. What's the use of making a great income if you can't get the time off to enjoy it? The culture about the use of PTO varies wildly between companies. A friend of mine worked somewhere that supposedly gave 20 days…
Yeah, if I ever discovered that a potential employer took this view of PTO then I wouldn't want to work there anyway. Huge red flag.
> “if they ask about time off in the first interview then they are never going to be there!” The fact that this attitude is common scares me when I'm doing interviews. Time off is incredibly important to me. What's the use of making a great income if you can't get the time off to enjoy it? The culture about the use of PTO varies wildly between companies. A friend of mine worked somewhere that supposedly gave 20 days…
I've also worked on teams that, same as your friend, heavily implied that taking longer leave breaks were a no-go.
As with all things, it's a balance.