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Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

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Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

#51

Post by aiisjustanif »

ajarmst wrote: post #32
ajarmst wrote: post #9

An observation: a lot of these---especially 'soft skills'---can't be properly learned earlier. They're a side effect of experience, and the 10 years doing the job is the only way to properly get them. The things I most often hear from potential employers when we ask what we should focus on more in teaching them are "soft skills" and "troubleshooting". My response is now to ask which of the long list of technical skil…

An aphorism I occasionally use (I can be tedious): "the only way to make a twenty-year old comfortable leading a meeting is to wait until they're a thirty-year old." Doesn't stop us from forcing the poor bastards to do public-speaking assignments or dropping them into "teams" of completely inexperienced people they've never met with no leaders in the name of ephemeral "soft-skills."

This is such a self-fulfilling prophecy it hurts. Especially having been in leadership programs with other engineers in my early 20’s and go on to see them have some of the best soft skills in my later years. After 3 Fortune 100 companies, I have met a magnitude more of software engineers and infrastructure engineers over 40 that refuse to speak up and refuse lead because they see same thing over and over again, new older leadership comes in tries to change things a bit, they just keep developing software, and question why does it matter to lead or communicate.

I currently work on a team of 10 engineers and 2 of them over 50, asked me what was GraphQL, when I did a public demo on GraphQL APIs around it. We are in a department that runs an e-commerce product with 30mil+ monthly visitors. How does a 25, 26, 27, year old automatically mean bad at public speaking...? Personally, my best manager has be 28 years old.

Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

#52

Post by rightbyte »

Quite broad advice that just seems bad for new programmers.

Like, ask for help? You need to learn to solve stuff without disturbing the team.

Vote with your feet? Juniors are not in the position to do that.

People can't read your mind? Actually people are quite good at reading your mind and alot of things are supposed to be said by indirect hints to save face.

Soft skills? Way overrated - just don't be toxic and avoid obvoius trouble.

Know your worth? Build a brand? Say no?

This guy is just listing stuff he gets away with by not being new to the field. The advice would be worthless to himself when he bagan ...

Edit: The one advice I would like to have had is "no-one will notice if you give 110% or keep a 60% substainable pace. Relax and keep grinding".

Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

#53

Post by leshow »

scarmig wrote: post #49
leshow wrote: post #31

> I come from a culture that values memorisation over creativity and problem-solving. Fuck that. To this day, I still Google how to bubble sort. I really hope this is hyperbole, but you should never use bubble sort. I can't think of a single legitimate reason you'd want to use it. Insertion sort, is a good O(n^2) sort to know.

If you're working with rotating drum memory, bubble sort provides the best real world performance for any kind of data set that would fit on it.

Do I need to specify that I'm talking about modern computers? That's an interesting bit of trivia though.

Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

#54

Post by aiisjustanif »

ajarmst wrote: post #9

An observation: a lot of these---especially 'soft skills'---can't be properly learned earlier. They're a side effect of experience, and the 10 years doing the job is the only way to properly get them. The things I most often hear from potential employers when we ask what we should focus on more in teaching them are "soft skills" and "troubleshooting". My response is now to ask which of the long list of technical skil…

As a counter observation: I agree with you but I don’t think it takes 10 years, but it’s not a bad estimate. Being deeply involved in teams working important products for your company can speed this up.

Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

#55

Post by mewpmewp2 »

leetcrew wrote: post #23
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forget what I don't use. Should I rememorize those things every 6 months?

99% of the data structure decisions I make at work are whether I should use a vector, a tree, a hashmap, or (very rarely) a list. the standard library implementation of whatever I choose is almost always sufficient. I wouldn't expect the average programmer to be able to implement all of these on the spot, but if you don't use them enough to understand the basic trade-offs, I have to wonder wtf you are doing all day?

I do APIs and Web Apps. I only learned the definitions for the data structures you mentioned for work interviews. Otherwise I wouldn't even know what they mean. But also above post mentioned memorising algorithms, so they seem to expect memorisation beyond knowing trade offs of the features your programming language provides.

They suggested one should have to know how to implement algorithms in Assembly to be useful.

Also the article author mentioned bubble sort as an example. Do you really need to know bubble sort by heart?

Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

#56

Post by mgkimsal »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #16

> “ Don’t like your new boss? Just quit. Enough people do it, and their boss will fix it. You don’t like your company’s policies around privacy, diversity, inclusion, human rights? Quit.” This is psycho advice. It ranks up there with the crazy myths about just being able to instantly get new software jobs (when the actual time of job searches is usually longer than 6 months, despite the tone deaf wave of gainsaying c…

The text ran the same section below that said "have something else lined up first" so the advice wasn't "quit at the drop of a hat".

And I do agree that it's rarely going to lead to any sort of corporate change. I worked at a place with around ... ~20 IT folks. New CEO came in, and within 9 months, 8 of the 20 had left or were leaving (I was one of them). I'd reached out to the previous CEO (who still owned the company, had interviewed me, and was one of the reasons I'd taken the job) and said "something's wrong here". "I don't want to hear it - talk to New CEO". "New CEO is the problem..." "Don't want to hear it...". So... loads of people left. It wasn't until New CEO tried to get rid of one person in particular did alarm bells finally go off, and owner/CEO came back and booted New CEO. So... change happened eventually, but not in reaction to 40% of the IT staff leaving in less than a year.

Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

#57

Post by deckard1 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #26
davzie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a family, my preference is that I can work from home to be around my family more. I feel this is more valuable to them than some more money in our savings account but that’s just me. To each their own!

Had a colleague die a few years ago. He'd lost some project work, and let his life insurance lapse. Had a heart attack just a few weeks later, and left a wife and 3 kids with very little. He worked from home and spent time with them, but had hit a point where money was a problem. The story sticks with me because he'd contacted me just a couple months before he died asking if I had any work/referrals, and I had nothin…

> I'm actually amazed at how many folks work for decades, then something happens, and there's a gofundme set up for the family to help with day to day bills.

Not to go all Bernie Sanders on you, but... welcome to America?

Maybe you don't live in the US. But here in the US, a single medical bill can wipe you out. And because we value free market healthcare, that means you don't know what the price will be until after you receive treatment. You won't know if you're covered or denied coverage until after the incident. Because that's how the Free Market(tm) works.

Be thankful if you've never had the luxury of spending months battling a massive bill you received because one of the ten random people you saw one night in a hospital was out-of-network despite being at an in-network hospital.

You don't have to be a full blown socialist to see how fucked America is.

Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

#58

Post by marta_morena_28 »

jzoch wrote: post #50
ajarmst wrote: post #9

An observation: a lot of these---especially 'soft skills'---can't be properly learned earlier. They're a side effect of experience, and the 10 years doing the job is the only way to properly get them. The things I most often hear from potential employers when we ask what we should focus on more in teaching them are "soft skills" and "troubleshooting". My response is now to ask which of the long list of technical skil…

I think they can be taught. By setting out to teach rather than boast about experience, ive seen senior developers instilling better soft-skills in new grads. A lot of new grads just aren't thinking about this stuff as much as the tech but once you take them under your wing and walk them through how the presentation of an idea will let it be received better regardless of technical merit they begin to see it. It may t…

I would argue: There is NO shortcut for experience. But not all experience is created equal. Telling someone HOW to do things right (we are talking soft skills, for hard skills its a bit different), is not helpful. You need to expose them to situations where they have weaknesses, and then coach them how to overcome the problems they face. I.e. there is a fine line between "telling people what to do", which is ineffective short-term and contraproductive long-term; and "exposing people to situations that make them behave wrong", which is the most effective learning tool, that doesn't have drawbacks, outside of the short-term (because you know that this person will not do the job right, but you also know they are not going to do it wrong another time, plus they will learn how to recognize other similar situations and avoid making this mistake there as well).

The best thing universities can do is to instill an understanding of soft skills in people. They should come out of university knowing:

* How important soft skills are

* That they are the differentiator between senior and junior

* How to best learn them (don't hunt highest pay, hunt highest experience gain)

* etc.

Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years

#60

Post by ajarmst »

Smaug123 wrote: post #41
ajarmst wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An aphorism I occasionally use (I can be tedious): "the only way to make a twenty-year old comfortable leading a meeting is to wait until they're a thirty-year old." Doesn't stop us from forcing the poor bastards to do public-speaking assignments or dropping them into "teams" of completely inexperienced people they've never met with no leaders in the name of ephemeral "soft-skills."

I am only 26, and I know I'm not good at management, but I don't think that's really true. During secondary school, I took part in Model United Nations conferences, and after the first two or three, I was magically completely happy standing up in front of a large audience of peers being asked awkward questions. There are a bunch of required skills that you can simply train (e.g. with Toastmasters), even if you can't…

That's a fair point, but note that you're describing the sort of experience that is real, and therefore valuable. Model United Nations is one thing, 'give a two minute speech on a topic of your choice, and we're going to grade your slide deck' is another. Extra-curricular things like toastmasters and Model UN and things like apprenticeships, internships and co-op are ways of acquiring more real experience earlier, not a replacement for real experience. Sadly, programs that provide that sort of experience are among the first casualties of budget or other pressures.
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