In my experience, a lot of developers (senior or not) are really bad at (1) thinking clearly and (2) communicating clearly. Which is reflected in the software they write. If your thinking is messy, your code will be messy too.
Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
351–360 of 361 posts
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#352Because 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…
I don't think I can agree with you here because a lot of these things that people know but that is supposedly hard to dress in words, is very often just positions that someone holds arbitrarily, so is difficult to impossible to explain. The positions do not have explanations because they are not held for good reason.
I say this as someone with 3 decades of professional experience. That does not make me right, please do tell me that I am in fact wrong! It does mean that I might be one of these guys with positions that should be challenged, however.
You know what? I welcome this. Explain to me why I am wrong, let's do it your way, dear youngin!
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately that's not the case. There are many senior and above level engineers out there who are unskilled communicators but very technically skilled.
In which case maybe they're best suited to not leading a team.
100%! Just pointing out how the reality of things doesn't match our desires.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#354Because 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…
I'm going to get downvoted to hell for this, but you described the exact reason why education is a waste of time.
Some people manage to go through the whole education system without learning much, others go through exactly the same program and learn a ton, way more than required.
Guess which of those people say education is a waste of time.
Basic Education is about bringing the average up, make sure everyone can read and do basic math etc. Beyond that it's the same thing just at a higher level. Most people who graduate with a bachelors of computer science or similar won't be great programmers. That's why we call them great, they're better than the rest. Most people don't have greatness in them. No amount of education can change that. Those who do have what it takes will naturally succeed because that's who they are. They will study and do the required material and when they're done with that they will spend their free time learning even more because they want it. Some will do so even without a formal education but I don't think that's the case for most.
If you manage to go through 3-5+ years where your only job is to learn stuff, without learning stuff, then you have no one to blame but yourself.
And if you can do it without going to university, go ahead. I'm pretty sure the failure rate for that path is a lot higher but it's certainly an option.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it’s the arrogance of youth. It’s just that this generation and honestly a big cohort of millennials are not used to gleaning information from people. A stunning number of people have been raised/educated solely by the internet. That’s the source for knowledge, not other people.
> A stunning number of people have been raised/educated solely by the internet. That’s the source for knowledge, not other people. On the internet you can learn from and sometimes interact with the best of the best, so the barrier of entry for what constitutes an "expert" is rised much higher.
There have been many epochs of "The Internet" throughout the years. Living through the internet of my youth (the beginnings) was a VERY different experience than what it is today with my kids.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a junior I will share my perspective from the other side. Companies have outlandish hiring practices. They want juniors who already know everything. That's why admitting that you don't know something is seen as showing weakness to the company in the eyes of a junior. Also, not knowing things will actively keep you from getting promoted. I'm sure it's not like that everywhere but it's juniors playing the corpo game…
One of my favorite senior developer stances is "I should be annoyed by how many questions you're asking me"
I want folks to ask questions as much as possible. When it becomes too much I just implement "office hours"
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#357What 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…
you have HN, there is always someone here, my friend :).
Online communities really do work. That said I don't think "Ask HN" is exactly a bastion of insight and growth opportunities, unless you're a founder I guess.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is focused on communication flow for small data-only loops: it is much easier to reason about items = [ this for iterator ] because you immediatelly see what type of data ends up in `items`. Syntax inversion overhead is very much paid for with this benefit IMO. Again the bigger problem is the 'if', including in comprehensions.
> you immediatelly see But that's simply not true at all. Let's start with token by token: items You have no clue what type of data ends up in `items`, or that something should end up in `items` at all. This is obvious. items = You have no clue what type of data ends up in `items`. You just know now, that something will end up there. items = [ You only know that a list will be in `items`. Not what will be in the list…
If you named your variables properly and your editor supported type hints, you'd have none of these issues: I used generic names for demonstration.
Compare it to
family_adults = [ person for person in family_members if person.age >= 18 ]
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel that is a bit of a false history. OOP was invented by people trying to simulate physical systems, e.g. Stroustup, the Simula people and their contemporaries not business people. Arguably it was popularized later by business people and enterprise Java developers. But that happened way later. I do not think OOP ever really worked out well as can be evidenced by it no longer being as popular and people having alm…
This is also a bit of a false history. OOP was squarely invented with Smalltalk. The term was literally conceived for Smalltalk to describe its unique (at the time) programming model. While objects most certainly predate Smalltalk, it was Smalltalk that first started exploring how objects could be oriented. OOP didn't really take off either, but mostly because it is hard to optimize and impossible to type.
I will have to just disagree with you here. Simula had OOP before Smalltalk existed and both Smalltalk and later C++ arose out of Simula.
Re: Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always had excellent model building functionality for abstractions and got the "physics" of a subject rather quickly, be it economics, biology, certain mathematical subjects and more. Then, I met software and computer science abstractions, they all seemed so arbitrary to me, I often didn't even understand what the recipe was supposed to cook. And though I have gotten better over time (and can now write good solu…
your "physics" grounding is exactly why it feels so odd - software is by its nature anti-physicalist math and logic are closer to a basis for software abstraction - but they were scary to business people so a "fake language" was invented atop them - you have "objects" that don't actually exist as objects, they are just "type based dispatch/selection mechanism for functions", "classes" that are firstly "producers of t…
fwiw "This paper has described ThingLab, a simulation laboratory."
https://worrydream.com/refs/Borning_1981_-_The_Programming_L...