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Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

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Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#331

Post by ferrumfist »

ryandrake wrote: post #293
faizshah wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the opposite of how you should want any knowledge worker to think. If you believe that there’s some innate ability that makes people 10x better at a skill than you rather than hours of practice and study then you are much less likely to acquire that skill or learn those skills efficiently. You need to have a growth mindset to be an effective knowledge worker not a fixed mindset. This is discussed in the book…

As your sports coach always said "You don't need talent to practice!" I'm not a huge believer of some mystical "innate ability" that people sometimes use to explain talent. Imagine a great concert pianist who plays flawlessly. After the concert, someone says, "Oh, you were born with such a wonderful gift of talent!" If I were that pianist, I'd be kind of offended--it totally ignores the decades of daily practice it t…

Talent is used as a label by someone who doesn't understand the practice involved in the given craft.

No one wakes up and paints a masterpiece. It takes years and years of hard work and studying to get to a point before you can even get close to masterpiece level.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#332

Post by Barrin92 »

linuxhansl wrote: post #327
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #310

> “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…

Usually I am more inclined to hire someone who discusses time off during an interview. It shows that they think about their life-work balance. I do not need heroes, I need reliable folks who do not burn themselves out. Or to put it in a cliche... I need people who work to live rather then live to work.

and also importantly people who have family to take care of. If someone comes to me and asks for time off because they have children or partners or parents to take care off and they take that seriously that certainly deserves some respect

would make a better impression on me than someone showing up with a Patrick Bateman business card in hand

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#333

Post by chaoticmass »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #310

> “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…

And then there are cases where you can take PTO, but you end up having to work during that time anyway.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#334

Post by dom96 »

This is a great list, I often wonder how people come up with such lists. Is it a long-term conscious effort to write down points like these as they come to you or do they sit for a few hours and these points come to their mind. I can't imagine being able to compile such a good list in a day.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#335

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #310

> “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…

Someone who replies with that kind of hyperbole is just saying they don’t want anyone who is going to take more than a bare minimum of PTO.

If you’re dealing with a reasonable person, you should be able to preface the question by explaining how having sufficient time off helps you do your best work and avoid burnout, and that you want to clarify expectations up front to make sure that you and the company are an ideal match.

It’s also of course a bit less risky to bring up this sort of thing a bit later in the interview process when you’ve built a bit of a rapport with the interviewer and ideally demonstrated your value somewhat.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#336

Post by barbazoo »

scottious wrote: post #107

> I’d rather someone give me opinions that I violently disagree with than for them to have no opinions at all. I've been a developer for 15 years... anybody else feel like the further they get into their career, the more they want to keep their opinions to themselves? I feel like as a junior dev I had way stronger opinions and I was a lot more vocal about them. Now, I still have opinions, but I've learned that nobody…

For me it's more a matter of putting those opinions into perspective. Example: I still highly value good API design but I'm not getting into debates anymore if an endpoint isn't RESTful or 100% consistent with every other endpoint. It's often just not that important at the end of the day.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#338

Post by _dw7s »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #310

> “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…

Spot on. I always ALWAYS ask about time off during interviews. But I don't ask the manager because I found they always try to stretch the truth or reframe shit.

I just ask the individual contributors how much PTO they've taken in the past 12 months. It's more or less an open question, doesn't necessarily means I'm interested in taking too much PTO. You'd be surprised of how honest people are. I had interviewees even start venting about burnout. Someone from an e-commerce company (not Amazon) told me he's gonna take a month off as he took 0 vacation days for the past 1.5 years (!!!). He admitted he's probably going to get in trouble but he doesn't care anymore.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#339

Post by joelthelion »

quadcore wrote: post #96

The 10x programmer is a silly myth. The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly. You know, 10x is an optimistic number here. Some programmers will do in 1 day what you wont achieve in a life time. And not understanding that makes you a bad programmer by my book simply because this is the foundation of the job. So let…

The confusion is that it's all about what people can and cannot do, not how much code they can write.

If your development needs are mundane crud stuff, you don't need a "10x programmer". If you're doing tricky stuff, on the other hand, you absolutely do.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#340

Post by journey_16162 »

> The 10x programmer is a silly myth. The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly.

I think the 10x programmer myth was never about productivity. The idea is more about creativity. I.e. one creative programmer can create a product that would have never existed otherwise.

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