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Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

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Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#591

Post by bGl2YW5j »

xwolfi wrote: post #391
chaps wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a lot of dev work with non-profits and such. About a year ago I was working on an extremely difficult project as a volunteer where I was insistent that a specific part was vitally important to getting the project to move forward (generalizing tables extraction from scanned OCR docs) and I was spending a lot of time on it. One of the devs I worked with, with 40+ years of experience, basically told me this exact t…

It's a permanent balance. I have to "manage" (but I still am a main contributor) a small team in a big investment bank with angry busy trader-users, irrational "global" management in other continent thinking we're all dumbasses in Asia, and people on loaned rotation. So, like your colleague, I try to strategize delivery. I would never tell a guy not to work on a genius idea that could change the entire paradigm, in f…

Good on you for trusting your team and allowing for such experimentation! We need more people in management with this attitude.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#593

Post by gary_0 »

hatch_q wrote: post #467
quadcore wrote: post #96

The 10x programmer is a silly myth. The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly. You know, 10x is an optimistic number here. Some programmers will do in 1 day what you wont achieve in a life time. And not understanding that makes you a bad programmer by my book simply because this is the foundation of the job. So let…

Author nails it though with: "We should be far more concerned with keeping 0.1x programmers off our teams than finding the mythical 10x programmer."

I agree, because the effort required to filter out a 0.1x programmer is vastly smaller than trying to find a 10x outlier. Way more bang for the buck.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#594

Post by ghaff »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #558
rsj_hn wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people understand that "unlimited" does not mean you can take half the year off. It means there is no hard limit and it is up to a discussion between you and your manager. 8 weeks is pretty generous.

I imagine it's really hard for employers to balance that, though. A good employer wants employees to take the time off they need without worrying about running out of PTO to do the stuff they want. They don't want an employee to ever have to think "Shit, if I take that day off for a dentist appointment, then I won't have enough PTO for that weeklong trip to Hawaii!" But if you try to avoid this scenario by being extr…

I guess to someone in the US, 8 weeks sounds like a lot. But, especially if you consider holidays and sick time, 6-8 weeks total over the course of a year doesn't seem unreasonable. I've been in that range for total nonweekend days off for much of my recent career.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#595

Post by vvanders »

WalterBright wrote: post #415
chaps wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a lot of dev work with non-profits and such. About a year ago I was working on an extremely difficult project as a volunteer where I was insistent that a specific part was vitally important to getting the project to move forward (generalizing tables extraction from scanned OCR docs) and I was spending a lot of time on it. One of the devs I worked with, with 40+ years of experience, basically told me this exact t…

> sometimes Any rule of wisdom, followed blindly, leads to disaster. Don't substitute rules for good judgement.

Or sometimes you have an approach that is high risk/reward. That's totally fine to take as long as your aware of the risk and have mitigations or offramps at the right points if you find the path isn't viable.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#596

Post by diamondo25 »

alerighi wrote: post #506
bingohbangoh wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was some tweet recently that went "Saying 10x engineers don't exist is as true as saying 10x basketball players don't exist or that all writers are basically the same." It's self-evidently not true.

No. It's like saying that a good mechanic can fix a car 10 times faster than another. Even if a good mechanic manages to find the problem in less time than a non experienced one, he still has to do the repair. That is similar to programming: even if you have everything clear in your head, you know how to do every single thing that is written in the requirements of the program, you still have to type it out. A lot of…

IMO having a fancier keyboard that does more clickety-clack will not make you a better programmer. If anything, your co-workers cannot work as good and will have to put more energy to focus.

Experience and the skill to remember or recall well, help a lot with engineering.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#597

Post by btheshoe »

shantnutiwari wrote: post #308

Agree with most of this. > 1. I still don’t know very much Same here, Im still realising how much I dont know. > The 10x programmer is a silly myth. Yes it is. It's a stupid harmful myth. Everyone on HN and Reddit think they are the "10xers", and its used as an excuse to be rude and insufferable. Some time ago, I decided I'd be happy being a 1x programmer[1] > Don’t mistake humility for ignorance Very true. Some of t…

Wow, you are a great writer though. Love your blog!

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#598

Post by RNCTX »

shoo wrote: post #580
RNCTX wrote: post #420

Speaking of iteration, iterating over the most popular replies to this tells me that the points which hit home enough to drive engagement are replies to the effect of: 1) "No, my 37 day interview process is good, actually." 2) "Rails sucks" 3) "Making a thing people would want to use is a bad idea." 4) (two long threads) "The 10x programmer exists, I saw him once at a con." 5) "No one cares what anyone else thinks."…

There's also a path-dependent local optimisation aspect to HN comment threads. All things equal, threads that are higher up the page during the right time window get more eyeballs and more engagement, which might encourage people to hang their replies off the currently-popular thread. If we reran the "experiment" under essentially the same conditions we might find that a different bunch of responses get the most enga…

It's still reflective of reality though!

If I know one thing from working for large corporations, it's that whatever is talked about the most will never change.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#599

Post by protomyth »

Enterprise Software is at the mercy of every bureaucracy that the enterprise must deal with and the interactions between bureaucracies can create incredibly complex non-logical logic.

Just remember, at one point every gallon of biodiesel in the US had its own serial number.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#600

Post by brailsafe »

aosmond wrote: post #473
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #310

> “if they ask about time off in the first interview then they are never going to be there!” The fact that this attitude is common scares me when I'm doing interviews. Time off is incredibly important to me. What's the use of making a great income if you can't get the time off to enjoy it? The culture about the use of PTO varies wildly between companies. A friend of mine worked somewhere that supposedly gave 20 days…

As I once told a boss who tried to cancel my already approved vacation in a former job/company, you can't stop me from going. You can only stop me from coming back. Let me know which you prefer. (I really needed that vacation and I was done with bullshit.)

I recently had a job offer taken away for other atupid reasons that we discussed, but conveniently after I brought up how I should handle billing for time away. Maybe I dodged a bullet.
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