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Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

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Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#431

Post by odiroot »

734129837261 wrote: post #296
odiroot wrote: post #178

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me. The other ones are quite obvious but this is the one that really resonated with me. People, with experience, tend to get more pragmatic and less "academic".

I keep getting downvoted on Reddit for stating that I personally hate TypeScript to the max. It ruined the beauty of JavaScript (once you know it, anyway, I understand there are difficulties for JS-novices) and I honest to goodness 100% do not EVER find myself thinking: "Gosh, thanks TypeScript!" - on the contrary, it's always: "For fuck's sake you stupid POS TypeScript, you're wasting my time for no benefit at all."…

I disagree on strong typing. I think this is actually a good improvement that prevents many silly mistakes. But static typing and constant (re-)compilation is the part that kills the joy when creating software.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#432

Post by ksec »

bombcar wrote: post #422
OJFord wrote: post #333

> 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 othe…

Pretty much this. HN is still gazillion times better than everything else on the internet. And that is excluding the absolute gold comment from members that were part of those battle stories.

It is also a reason why I dont want to mention or see HN links in mainstream media. Although I think most reporters sort of know this as well and tend to not mention or link to HN as source.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#433

Post by ksec »

alexeldeib wrote: post #290
giantg2 wrote: post #264

"Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology." It sounds great because it is great. I don't make that much and I work on boring systems. I guess those numbers also explain why the author can recommend maxing out the 401k. People supporting a family on less than $100k don't have $19.5k per year to put into it.

You have a great point, but let's balance this out with a few of the author's other comments. - OP uses the phrasing senior engineer. - Never worked for FAANG. This is relevant because $120k + bonus/benefits is basically a FAANG new grad. Fairly normal for SV tech companies. - Those numbers likely provide a solid standard of living, but as a senior engineer you are likely underpaid. - Esoteric and proprietary knowled…

>This is relevant because $120k + bonus/benefits is basically a FAANG new grad. Fairly normal for SV tech companies.

There were a few post on HN recently about fresh grad asking for / being paid $200K and anything lower they felt they were feeling lowballed.

For those of us outside US we could never quite grasp whether something is true or not. Salary across the pond is just incomprehensible.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#434

Post by sime2009 »

l0b0 wrote: post #312
josalhor wrote: post #305

> Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult. I don't see people commenting on this one! That may be a good thing because it means people are not questioning it :)

Techniques aren't culty, people are. I've been practising TDD for years, but I've only ever heard of this cult in web forums.

Count yourself lucky then. I've tried to work with TDD cult members and it was one of the worst experiences of my professional life. A good sign that people have moved into the cult is when they start saying that people who are not using TDD are "unprofessional" or produce "shit" code.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#435

Post by brundolf »

meowface wrote: post #399
brundolf wrote: post #216

> 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.)

I don't look at it that way at all. I'm choosing to conserve my finite energy for the things that matter most. It's all about priorities: of course I would like to have a job that I'm both excited about and not too stressed about, but I can be happy and fulfilled with one that simply doesn't dominate my life (in terms of time or energy, because those are separate things), because my job is not my life. And being uncompromising about having a job that really excites you can force you to make all sorts of other sacrifices (time, stress, risk, maybe even things like money and lifestyle), which is where the prioritization comes in.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#436

Post by hutzlibu »

javagram wrote: post #342
hutzlibu wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For some the productivity drops to zero without stack overflow." And it is bad to be a newb? And even for experienced devs to go to stackoverflow regulary ... isn't it productive, to not always reinvent the wheel? I can solve allmost everything on my own. But if I have a new problem, I assume someone else already had - I would be stupid, to figure it out on my own, when I could get a working solution in 5 min googli…

The issue does arise when you aren’t able to understand the problem space enough to realize that what you copied from stack overflow has a mistake or doesn’t fit the requirement you need (e.g. perhaps it doesn’t match your error handling architecture or so on). That said, stack overflow can be a great source and I’ve written plenty of code with a comment pointing to a SO link to further explain a pattern or snippet f…

"The issue does arise when you aren’t able to understand the problem space enough to realize that what you copied from stack overflow has a mistake or doesn’t fit the requirement you need "

Yeah sure. A stupid programmer will remain a stupid programmer, even if he reaches a certain productivity by living off of stackoverflow ...

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#437

Post by antod »

staysaasy wrote: post #405
daenz wrote: post #18

>Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us. I thought they were going to go the direction of "he's an asshole" and was ready to accept that, but this particular criticism is actually disturbing. People with strong visions can often appear to be "making it up as they go along,…

IME most people will generally appear to be making things up as they go – even if they have significant relevant experience. Every situation is unique, and experience tends to look more like having a list of techniques with varying degrees of expertise, rather than having a playbook for every situation. You have to look for the expertise rather than raw confidence. In sports terms it would be something like a basebal…

Agreed. What experience and talent gives you are instincts that improve the chances of whatever it is "you're making up as you go" working well.

I would much rather work with people who have a good track record of making it up as they go as opposed to people coming in with a fixed idea of how something should happen and are more likely to misapply whatever lessons led to those views (probably someone elses anyway).

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#438

Post by vbezhenar »

lostcolony wrote: post #402
OminousWeapons wrote: post #268

> 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…

Maybe. I've seen the opposite, where no one takes responsibility for anything, and it's also bad. In fact, the situation you describe could also be a lack of anyone else taking responsibility for disaster planning and etc. I think what is needed is a culture of -ownership-. That's basically people saying "I'm responsible". Not one where everyone tries to avoid responsibility, and not one where peopel point fingers.

What does it mean to be responsible? Just to say it? Responsibility should be accompanied with fines corresponding to the damage or something like it. Otherwise those are just words. I'm responsible, but I'm not getting any fines if something goes wrong, so whatever, but I'm responsible. Fire me if you want, I'll find new work in a few days, but I was responsible.

It's business owner who's responsible, because ultimately he's getting all the expenses when critical event happens, client leaves, client sues the company, and so on. Other people are not really responsible, they just pretend to be.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#439

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

edoceo wrote: post #292
topkai22 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh the Ballmer peak definitely exists for POCs, school work and side projects. A couple beers in and then you lose the fear of doing something stupid and start cranking out code. Not sure about producfion code though, the values are different

I'll admit to banging out v0.0.0 code with a buzz. Mostly it's comments and shit-code as documentation. Sober eyes and test cases before production. So maybe write drunk, edit sober does work

Write drunk, test sober?

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#440

Post by kaba0 »

dmlittle wrote: post #212
dehrmann wrote: post #169

> Algorithms and data strictures are important--to a point For me, 90% of day-to-day algorithms use is not writing O(nm) or O(n^2) code, and knowing which data structures to use to avoid it (usually a hashtable, occasionally a heap or balanced tree).

It all depends on your use case. If your input is bound to a small N, I’ll take the simplest to understand implementation regardless of algorithmic complexity. Future you and other people will thank you later.

It may also be faster for small N, as the big O notation swallows the constant factor. It’s not accidental that standard lib’s sort algorithms will fall back to simple insertion sort at the end of recursion when n is small. (Though please correct me if I’m wrong, I’ve only once digged into the sort algorithm’s code in cpp and java’s std lib)
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