This is kind of why skills are fucking pointless. Why get good at a skill when people don't care about skills.
I'm so happy this country is falling part. I hope we all die very soon
What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
321–330 of 371 posts
Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
#322Something that I find interesting is that career advice coming from professionals having many years of experience focuses almost exclusively on the people aspects and not the technology: communication, trust, teamwork, documentation, clarity. The advice is clear, precise and honest. This is the opposite of what you get from new hires/juniors: they tend to focus on which stacks matter, what to learn, how to develop, d…
This is the exact reason why so many people fail their way to the top. Great excuse for mediocrity. Soon everyone with a job will uterly talentless
Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
#323Something that I find interesting is that career advice coming from professionals having many years of experience focuses almost exclusively on the people aspects and not the technology: communication, trust, teamwork, documentation, clarity. The advice is clear, precise and honest. This is the opposite of what you get from new hires/juniors: they tend to focus on which stacks matter, what to learn, how to develop, d…
What you're saying is important for everyone to internalize. I'll spin it like this: Your job satisfaction/pay are a function of your impact. Your impact is a function of your leverage. If you're a "pure coder" who doesn't have any of the other skills you mentioned, your output is incredibly limited. At best, you produce a day's worth of code in a day, but you also require someone to manage you closely to make sure y…
Having these other skills are equally useless making what you say useless
Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're saying is important for everyone to internalize. I'll spin it like this: Your job satisfaction/pay are a function of your impact. Your impact is a function of your leverage. If you're a "pure coder" who doesn't have any of the other skills you mentioned, your output is incredibly limited. At best, you produce a day's worth of code in a day, but you also require someone to manage you closely to make sure y…
Agree. One of the most important skills is the one he describes like this: >> The more specialized your work, the greater the risk that you will communicate in ways that are incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In my experience (35 years), this isn't just about knowing the right way to describe things, it's also understanding what things to concentrate on when communicating, and what to ignore. If you are a tech pers…
Very well said. It's stuff like this that makes me think all CS majors need some sort of business communications requirement, something to at least give a foundation on how to speak to decision makers.
Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
#325Something that I find interesting is that career advice coming from professionals having many years of experience focuses almost exclusively on the people aspects and not the technology: communication, trust, teamwork, documentation, clarity. The advice is clear, precise and honest. This is the opposite of what you get from new hires/juniors: they tend to focus on which stacks matter, what to learn, how to develop, d…
I really wonder whether this is a symptom of an industry that's bad at evaluating technical ability rather something that should be elevated. IME the best programmers by far are those who solve difficult technical problems quickly, whether or not they're abrasive. I don't like when they're assholes, but it doesn't matter. They still have more impact.
I used to buy into the whole "communication is king" idea but the more I program the more I just don't think it works that way. Most good coders I know communicate clearly as a side effect of being good, even if they're otherwise completely socially crippled, and they're way more productive.
Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Expecting a talented software engineer to "upgrade" to become a manager of a development team makes exactly the same amount of sense as expecting a talented accountant to gain a bit more skill and suddenly become a lawyer.
There are other paths at Google than upgrading to mgmt, but all of them involve "cross-team collaboration" and other quasi-political (with a small-p) aspects. Actually just writing code at Google is, from my experience, a small part of the job and not rewarded. The faster you get out of writing code and get into designing and delegating it, the better you're off. Sucks if you don't like it. Coming up with a way to re…
I think a lot of technical leadership is a side-effect of ability. People with a lot of technical experience are able to view projects at a high level (and judge other programmers accurately) as a side effect of being good. You want them cross-collaborating because they have better eyes than someone without experience. Whether they know to iron their shirts doesn't matter.
Underdiscussed IMO. It's not a dichotomy.
Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
#327What I'd be really interested in is how tech churn is perceived by people older than me. I'm only 30 years in, so I tend to defend my generation's choices such as POSIX, SQL, XML, SOA, Java, and C/C++ before that (plus special-purpose pet peeves of mine such as markup/SGML and logic programming which came before) though I'm also claiming to be proficient in and generally open towards new tech. I consider most of supp…
I think one source of tech churn people don't talk about is just growth. If you're 5x size you were last year, an entire system rewrite is relatively cheap, and if you expect to grow in the future, you can make riskier bets knowing they'll be cheaper to replace down the line. It's not ipso facto irrational. I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of the correlations.
Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
#328Something that I find interesting is that career advice coming from professionals having many years of experience focuses almost exclusively on the people aspects and not the technology: communication, trust, teamwork, documentation, clarity. The advice is clear, precise and honest. This is the opposite of what you get from new hires/juniors: they tend to focus on which stacks matter, what to learn, how to develop, d…
The author doesn't state much about himself, so it's hard to tell from the article who he is and what he's been doing last 10 years. Obviously if he's mostly in the management/not coding he'll not focus on the programming advice.
Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard not to become jaded when every framework turns out to be just another team's personal preferences. I would say the statement is generally true about frameworks, but not true about rails. Perhaps the author did not spend enough time with rails.
Having spent time with Rails, I'd say you're biased. I went from a dotnet shop to a rails shop, and despite the attitude that Rails is "marvelous", I can't help but feel like Rails is the bastard child of ASP.net. It feels incredibly similar to working within the constraints of ASP - the framework knows best. Don't questions their choices. Don't do it any other way. Lock yourself into their good choices. Their choice…
That's too bad. I worked at a dotnet shop when I learned rails (on my own) and it was night and day for me. ASP.NET is a poor framework that was tries to take the windows decktop app experience and port it to web. Turns out that is a bad idea...
Which frameworks do you recommend today?
Re: What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Expecting a talented software engineer to "upgrade" to become a manager of a development team makes exactly the same amount of sense as expecting a talented accountant to gain a bit more skill and suddenly become a lawyer.
It might be closer to a pro athlete retiring from playing and going into coaching, but not so many would be good in that role.
No pro athlete retires from competing because they can make more money as a coach.