Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

johndcook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 101 posts

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#51

Post by watwut »

thinkloop wrote: post #30

There is something that doesn't ring completely true about this. While I agree coding is not about coming up with some ninja recursive one line function that solves all the problems, reducing it to a simple matter of organization is not quite right either. Yes it is about organization, but there is a component of wizardry too. It takes a lot of intelligence, skill, experience and talent to be able to identify and mod…

> The top guys do the tricky work of architecting and modeling the system, while the juniors fill it in until enough new information is revealed for the seniors to improve/change/update it as needed.

If that is how it works, I did not really experienced it. In one place where they attempted this, senior ended completely out of touch with his architecture problems - because it was only juniors experiencing them and never him. In big corporations, architect does super uber high level and negotiations.

Big refactoring and architectural changes were done by seniors and require experience, of course. But that is only part of what senior does, a lot of if is using existing architecture. Also, juniors can grow into such senior only by taking on larger and larger tasks - you don't get there by filling small boxes without doing own decisions, mistakes and living with them.

The biggest problems, especially in larger projects, are organizational one. As in, algorithms part is what is often done by juniors, who often actually can do them well being just out of school and being trained in them lately. And also who have bigger uninterrupted chunks of time then seniors.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#52

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

thinkloop wrote: post #30

There is something that doesn't ring completely true about this. While I agree coding is not about coming up with some ninja recursive one line function that solves all the problems, reducing it to a simple matter of organization is not quite right either. Yes it is about organization, but there is a component of wizardry too. It takes a lot of intelligence, skill, experience and talent to be able to identify and mod…

But that’s the point.

There are algorithms for sorting with known properties. There are no algorithms for problem analysis - just a lot of tradition (e.g. “refactoring”) which is hand-wavey even when it’s done well, and actually adds complexity when done badly.

The kind of problem segmentation => simplest solution we’re talking about isn’t even mentioned on most CS courses, and certainly isn’t taught in any useful way - possibly because it hasn’t been researched or understood.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#53

Post by watwut »

oggyhead wrote: post #12

I don't understand this! Math is a super set of algorithmic wizardry and if you include heuristics in algorithmic wizardry (why would you not?),isn't organizational skills a part of the Algorithmic Wizardry? So he's saying that knowing all skills in the subset is better than knowing all the skills in the set? And that's just the headline

> isn't organizational skills a part of the Algorithmic Wizardry

No, because organizational skill involves also following (not required for algorithmic wizardry):

* Solving same situation consistently the same way.

* Differentiating between important for maintenance and unimportant.

* Ability to plan - think in advance about how much time people need to answer your questions and giving them time. Realize that other people are not available at your whim.

* Negotiation, understanding what other people mean and being able to express what you mean the way others understand.

* Being able to do also boring parts, not just fun stuff. Keeping up work even if nobody controls you.

* Being able to know what is "good enough". Organize work the way that most important parts are done first, don't just follow what is fun.

* Writing the code the way other people not just understand it. So that tests are possible and actually write tests.

There are many people, algorithmic wizards or not, who cant do the above. That is why agile have standups and jira tasks with max 0.5 day size by the way, because way too many people never finish tasks they are assigned to without being checked on every day.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#54

Post by rimliu »

groby_b wrote: post #44
serpix wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- what do you like doing? - how are you as a person, a coworker - are you able to ask for help? - can you hold a conversation? - how do you learn? - describe a failure in your career and how it went from there all this is for the interviewer and the interviewee to get to know each other each other and see if the candidate is a good fit for the company culture and values. If the recruitment lets in a narcissist or tox…

These would be perfect questions, if candidates didn't lie. They do. All the time. More often than you'd think about something as trivial as "can you actually write code". And so, you'll need to demonstrate your skills. Find a better way with an extremely low false positive rate, and you can make a fortune consulting and implementing that. It's not like anybody likes doing these interviews.

  > And so, you'll need to demonstrate your skills
Alas, the skills you are asked to demonstrate have very little to do with the actual skills required for the job you are interviewing for.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#56

Post by snarfy »

oggyhead wrote: post #15
oggyhead wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organization is a mathematical and algorithmic problem regardless of the context. And if you think people go to school so that they mug up algorithms, you're missing the point of school. You go to school to learn how to problem-solve, how to model problems mathematically and incidentally become aware of a repo of solved problems which may help you in your own problem solving adventures.

This is what I read in this article. The author has a problem with people thinking that rote-learnt algorithms is the best thing ever, and proceeds to say nope a stash of the most subjective heuristics to produce 'good code' is wayyyy better. All in all the way I see it, the author is proposing to supplant a shittty misconception with a bs idea that is nice short term solution but a complete disaster in the long term…

When it's both, they call it a craft. Good craftsmanship is the art. Knowledge of the trade is the discipline.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#57

Post by jjm »

prewett wrote: post #16
racer-v wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the massive amount of churn in the web world is the exception rather than the rule. If you learned C programming 40 years ago it would still be relevant today. Even Android is almost 10 years old now.

If you learned Ada, Modula-2, Pascal, or BASIC, though, it might not be so relevant. COBOL, FORTRAN, Smalltalk, and Perl 5 are somewhat useful, akin to, maybe, jQuery in the web world.

JQuery is not a language. Like saying I “cuisine art” to a chef. Riiiiiight.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#58

Post by collyw »

nafey wrote: post #8
lopmotr wrote: post #6

I work on math-heavy engineering software where it can take a month to learn how some clever algorithm works and I'd say organizing the code is still equally as important as that. I've thrown away big clever algorithms when I found libraries that did it for me and did it better than I could.

But most people are not doing that in their careers. It's mostly CRUD applications that they are building

I am working on CRUD just now. Its amazing how complex some people manage to make simple things. Keeps me in a somewhat unsatisfying job though.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#59

Post by collyw »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #36

The tough truth is that you need to be able to do both, or your skillset will never be complete. If you specialise in algorithms, you might never be able to put a bunch of them together to build a system that works and does something interesting. If you focus on architecture but never understand how to read and implement algorithms and how to evaluate them, you will always be limited in what your systems can achieve…

The only times I have needed to implement a sort algorithm are for interview questions in 15 years.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#60

Post by jakelazaroff »

ndh2 wrote: post #55

Does this promo piece add anything to the original blog post that it feeds on? I didn't notice anything. Why not link the blog instead? http://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html

Side note for anyone who hasn't heard of the original blog before: it's fantastic. Well worth a few hours browsing through its archives.
Post reply on HN