All of this is quite reasonable.
Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
421–430 of 510 posts
Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
#422> Hacker News and r/Programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date, the comments are almost worthless That's a weird one. I don't know anything about that subreddit, but HN comments are frequently great. I submit stuff because I want there to be HN comments on it for me to read. I typically read the comments first and only bother opening the link if they were interesting.
See: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/
>HN comments are terrible. On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. ...
>And yet, I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical commentary. On topics I'm familiar with, while it's rare that a thread will have even a single comment that's well-informed, when those comments appear, they usually float to the top. On other forums, well-informed comments are either non-existent or get buried by reasonable sounding but totally wrong comments when they appear, and they appear even more rarely than on HN.
Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
#423Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does someone need to take responsibility when you can have a culture of blameless postmortems where everyone focuses on making sure what ever happened never happens again instead? In blameless postmortem culture, everyone is responsible by default
"Everyone focuses" = nothing gets done. I've been at places like that, where a post-mortem happens, a course of action is decided on...and then no one owns actually carrying out that course of action. You could argue that "It should be assigned" - yeah, it should. But assigning it implies either "here is the team that is responsible for it", i.e., this is the team responsible and they need to be told to fix their shi…
The people most capable of taking the action items are assigned it. This could be expertise, resourcing, proximity, etc..
In an open discussion of the root cause, many times the issue is across multiple services / organizations within a company. You’d assign tasks appropriately across teams as needed. The key is to find and create actionables to address the root cause, not to punish / blame individuals.
Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
#425This, and the current “sober” posts on r/ExperiencedDevs, makes me think of Herodotus describing the way the Persians made important decisions - once sober, once drunk, and if the drunk and sober decisions were the same they knew it was a good one.
The Persians also have an expression for "drunkenness and truthfulness", masti o rasti. مستی و راستی
There’s also Pliny the Elder, in vino veritas (in wine there's truth, for the non-classicists in the audience).
Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've personally witnessed friends doing this as a man. A bit sad, and certainly not true of all men, but it's not false.
Interesting must be a strategy towards women selecting the top 10% only so men are not getting any matches. Getting matched before reading profiles saves tons time kind of makes sense. Then you can review and filter afterwards. Why is that sad? Have you ever heard of speed dating? Similiar concept.
Well I've witnessed people not even looking much at the photos. Men do get matches, and I don't really agree with how factual or defined your initial statement is. I guess it's sad because of how arbitrary the selection is.
Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
#427> If people are trying to assign blame to a bug or outage, it's time to move on. This is one of my favorite excerpts. I once worked in a lab where we would have frequent catastrophic failures because there was never any disaster planning or contingency management plan. I personally triaged 3 such incidents alone or with people who happened to be there when the problem arose and attempted to disseminate some suggestio…
Quoting what a HN user said in another post a few months back "if a person can break a system, the system was broken to start with".
What systems are you working on? Many are held together by ritual, and deviating from the ritual causes outages. They’re very fragile in some form (deployment, change, infrastructure, dependencies, etc.). They won’t break if you follow the happy path, but to say they’re so robust that an active attempt at breaking won’t bring them down is ... naive? Not sure if that’s the word I’m looking for.
I say this as someone who’s worked at large tech companies that are “internet scale”.
Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
#428> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all. Couldn't agree more
Yeah it's striking how this is not the majority opinion even amongst seniors. I'm mid career I still have to ask people very experienced why they always jump on the most long-winded complicated way to solve a problem, often simple enough to require very little.
There is still to this day the idea that we're supposed to plan to future like oracles or pad our resumes on the company's dime.
Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
#429> Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks. Just get yourself a drawing tablet and some whiteboard software like Openboard ( http://openboard.ch/index.en.html ). > Good people write shitty code. Smart people write shitty code. Good coders and good engineers write shitty code. Don't let code quality be a dependent variable on your self worth. That's like saying that eminent book authors write shitty…
Their are authors I generally enjoy that sometimes write terrible pieces. They just tend to do it less often.
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Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
#430> It's not important to do what I like. It's more important to do what I don't hate. This one has started to dawn on me. I'm never going to love my job as much as I love my personal projects, so a job that I don't get very excited about but doesn't drain my energy is better than one that I get somewhat excited about but does drain my energy (not that it's impossible to have both, but it's rare)
This is a very pessimistic long-term view, in my opinion. Life is extremely, infinitesimally short. If it's at all possible for you, you should try to spend as much of it as you can doing things you love. I know many people can't, but it's bleak to just give up and permanently settle, I think. (Especially if you don't currently have any dependents who rely on you; it changes the equation if you do.)
This is a very western view on life.