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Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

stkbailey.substack.com

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Re: Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

#51

Post by politician »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #46
dgb23 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a very similar experience as you. But I think you're being too humble. Whether you wrote 15 applications or just one or two, does that really matter? Designing, exploring, writing, iterating on and maintaining these applications _for years_ have given you insights, battle scars and tacit knowledge that can only be gained through experience and continuous learning. Not to mention the different environments techn…

Yeah I don't deny I'm a far better programmer now than 10 years ago, and may even be better than the average in some respect, but most of it is as you say tacit knowledge. I don't have any catchy slogans or rules to teach. I also understand that there is so much I don't know. Even if I hone my skills until the day I die, I'll never be so certain I know the best approach as I was when I was younger.

Does every artist die a failure?

There is the work you do for money for food and rent, but there is also the work you do for yourself to improve your own craft. Often on the same project.

I think you’re describing the disappointing but grounding perspective gained as one gets older and wiser.

Re: Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

#52

Post by arethuza »

cratermoon wrote: post #42
arethuza wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over-architecting a design to be flexible in one way can be a huge problem when changes come along and they are for fundamentally different kinds of changes than were expected when the design was created - this can actually be worse than having an under-architected system.

"premature optimization is the root of all evil" The phrase conjures up images of tight code that executes the minimum number of instructions with the least possible memory use and efficient reads and writes. In a piece of code that's executed maybe once in blue moon. Nobody bothered to profile the program and find out where the real hotspots are, so someone optimized the wrong thing. Writing code designed to be flex…

YAGNI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it

Re: Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

#53

Post by edgyquant »

dgb23 wrote: post #40
noobker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This transition from junior to senior includes another important skillset: balancing social dynamics against engineering realities. The key is illustrated in the book club parable: The elitism is directed outside of the group and becomes only a means of alleviating the fear of judgement for misjudging the paper. The grad student's approach clearly communicates the socially agreed upon reality: the whole paper is crap…

My mantra related to that is "be mean to the code and nice with to programmer". In order to learn and make things better you _have to_ be critical. But the way things are communicated is very important so everyone is on board. "We could do better here" - no matter who exactly was responsible in the past. "This made sense at the time but with what we learned..." - remind each other that improvement and learning is par…

This works great until you get an engineer who pushes back constantly claiming it’s a time trade off or that this code is correct and you just don’t understand it. Sometimes humor doesn’t cut it.

Re: Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

#54

Post by AndrewPGameDev »

The reason why I can agree with this post, and find it useful, is that the author purposefully limits it to the "mid-career" phase. I think that if you want to grow from the "mid-career" phase to the "end-career" phase you have to put aside your elitism more and more. When you read the Nature papers as an expert you do so in a way that is both extremely directed and, at the same time, extremely open-minded to what you find. You can't truly grasp open-mindedness if you think you are better than other people.

Re: Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

#55

Post by Retric »

edgyquant wrote: post #53
dgb23 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mantra related to that is "be mean to the code and nice with to programmer". In order to learn and make things better you _have to_ be critical. But the way things are communicated is very important so everyone is on board. "We could do better here" - no matter who exactly was responsible in the past. "This made sense at the time but with what we learned..." - remind each other that improvement and learning is par…

This works great until you get an engineer who pushes back constantly claiming it’s a time trade off or that this code is correct and you just don’t understand it. Sometimes humor doesn’t cut it.

Yea, some people can be unbelievably toxic.

Re: Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

#56

Post by plaguepilled »

edgyquant wrote: post #53
dgb23 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mantra related to that is "be mean to the code and nice with to programmer". In order to learn and make things better you _have to_ be critical. But the way things are communicated is very important so everyone is on board. "We could do better here" - no matter who exactly was responsible in the past. "This made sense at the time but with what we learned..." - remind each other that improvement and learning is par…

This works great until you get an engineer who pushes back constantly claiming it’s a time trade off or that this code is correct and you just don’t understand it. Sometimes humor doesn’t cut it.

I have worked with a few such "strong personalities" and while I agree they can be slow on receiving criticism, I disagree that one should therefore resign to more forceful communication.

There are many alternative avenues in a professional setting when presented with an opportunity to argue, even if you're being blocked by a superior.

The crucial thing to remember is you cannot ensure your "social workaround" will work, but you can always ensure you act professionally. Whether that impacts the sprint is a matter of circumstance, but mild, cheery professionalism always improves the workplace culture.

Re: Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

#57

Post by thwayunion »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #34

I see a lot more elitism in relative beginners. Mid-career people tend to be more understanding and less judgmental.

The elitism tends to show up once you've been around the block a few times but before your ego and position is secure. Years 6-8 or so; ie, post-doc age. Not really properly mid-career, at least outside of "retire at 35" FAANG world.

Re: Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

#58

Post by dkarl »

plaguepilled wrote: post #30

Interestingly, I feel like this sort of attitude is a real issue at the precise moment the author describes it as a boon. When you are early to mid career, it is crucial to look for ways to amplify the good you can do in your workplace and solidify your brand as an individual. To do this, you should be looking, ironically, to elevate others. Doing so is the only way to build a reputation that people are going to acti…

I think early to mid is too soon to be focused on others' work. Early to mid, you should be focused on the quality of your own work, because you're still developing your taste and judgment, and you need the direct and vivid feedback you get from immersing yourself in the consequences of the decisions you make. A huge trap in software development is to get disconnected from feedback and be a slave to rumor, ideology, and religious "best practices." The air is full of bullshit (in no small part because everyone is trying to "solidify their brand as an individual" and "amplify the good they do" before they actually learn the job) and the best way to learn how to sort through it is by grounding yourself in the consequences of making this decisions versus that one, choosing this approach versus that one.

If you start "amplifying" too early, you won't be amplifying selectively, and your coworkers would be just as well off sorting through search results themselves.

(Of course it's a progressive transition, and you're never too inexperienced to advise a coworker not to force-push master or submit a PR with failing tests.)

Re: Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

#59

Post by twobitshifter »

Maybe this helps in some places, but the negativity described here will not win you any friends when the subject is your coworker’s pull request and not a random journal article. I always try to see other perspectives and understand why a choice was made and get people to think instead of judging what’s been done. Working with “the smartest person in the room” who believes there’s only one right way to accomplish a goal can be hell. People often mistake confidence for leadership.

Re: Elitism as the mid-career growth engine

#60

Post by hot_gril »

shubb wrote: post #6

Earlier in my career I felt a lot of disgust at bad code and bad solutions. Sometimes it tye badness was really effort due to unfamiliarity or not instantly understanding what I was looking at.my laziness. Sometimes it was because it disagreed with what ever framework or methodology I was using to give me confidence in the face of ignorance. I feel like an imposter but at least I know design patterns so this guy who…

I'm a young guy working with way more tenured and experienced programmers who didn't want management positions, preferring to code. Respectfully to them, I can't stand what they do. They obsess over details that do NOT matter to the business, and our whole department is paralyzed like this. Meanwhile big-picture things like internal APIs are either neglected or too big-brained for anyone to understand. I think they're just too skilled, and we need some worse coders with smaller egos to get the job done.

For example, they swear by writing low-volume web backends in C++ "for performance" and object to any kind of framework. Ironically, having to move more slowly and carefully as a result has led to big compute inefficiencies, on top of the more important hit to dev productivity.

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