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Experts have it easy (2024)

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Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#61

Post by smitelli »

rightbyte wrote: post #57
joenot443 wrote: post #47

This is a really good article. There's a quality in strong developers which is difficult to select for in an interview but wildly valuable once they're up and running; maybe the best word is "scrappiness". When I interview juniors or interns, one of the questions I like to ask is something like this- "You've got two computer, one Linux one Windows. There's 50gb of files on the Windows machine which need to be moved t…

You'd probably need to put the HD in the other machine. What is the "scrappy" way to do it?

I have been nerd-sniped into conjuring up a less-traveled-path technique:

Portable Python on the Windows computer. `python -m http.server`. On the Linux computer, something like `wget -mkp` followed by `find … -delete` to get rid of the index files.

(Lots of disks are soldered in nowadays, or the procedure might require multiple M2 slots that the destination mobo might not have. Is your company IT department happy to know their hardware is being disassembled?)

I have not benchmarked to see if this would sustain the 120 Mbps the original scenario would require.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#62

Post by sdenton4 »

smitelli wrote: post #61
rightbyte wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd probably need to put the HD in the other machine. What is the "scrappy" way to do it?

I have been nerd-sniped into conjuring up a less-traveled-path technique: Portable Python on the Windows computer. `python -m http.server`. On the Linux computer, something like `wget -mkp` followed by `find … -delete` to get rid of the index files. (Lots of disks are soldered in nowadays, or the procedure might require multiple M2 slots that the destination mobo might not have. Is your company IT department happy to…

Or set up SFTP on the Linux machine, and find whatever Windows crapware that's able to connect to it... Filezilla, maybe?

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#63

Post by lisper »

beyarkay wrote: post #50

(author here) Okay I know this is how the internet works, but I posted my essay here a month ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43664345 ) and it died a silent death. Excited to read the comments! But damn the internet is unintelligible sometimes.

A new submission on HN typically has 20-30 minutes on the New page before it drops off the bottom. It is pretty much luck of the draw whether or not anyone notices it during that time window.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#64

Post by layer8 »

joenot443 wrote: post #59
rightbyte wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd probably need to put the HD in the other machine. What is the "scrappy" way to do it?

That is the scrappy way :) I think sometimes we forget there are plenty of engineers out there whose experience interfacing with a computer begins and ends at the KBM. "Put the HD in the other machine" isn't super obvious to every junior, though I wish it was!

Also, engineers who only ever worked with non-user-servicable laptops.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#65

Post by hansvm »

edelbitter wrote: post #5

> unguided “water-cooler” interaction This meme needs to stop. Knowledge transfer from experts to novices is way too important to be left to chance. And thanks to pre-pivot StackOverflow we even have considerable data on how much better it can be done, at least for white collar industries. Reducing the effort of experts to give advice, and enlarging the audience benefiting from a singular effort to write it down is o…

Not really. It's the same reason formal lectures are so much less valuable than one-on-one mentoring. An expert's value doesn't come from a bundle of facts, but from being able to figure out which facts you need to hear right this second given your current background, and figuring out how to present them so that you in particular can apply them. Having a motivating problem to discuss also helps both parties appropriately engage.

You can reduce the chance element a bit by having dedicated pairing time or something, and writing things down is better than nothing, but if you want to level up your juniors as fast as possible you'll definitely want some of that water cooler time.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#66

Post by tikhonj »

joenot443 wrote: post #47

This is a really good article. There's a quality in strong developers which is difficult to select for in an interview but wildly valuable once they're up and running; maybe the best word is "scrappiness". When I interview juniors or interns, one of the questions I like to ask is something like this- "You've got two computer, one Linux one Windows. There's 50gb of files on the Windows machine which need to be moved t…

This is a fun question.

But the fact that "move a medium sized file from one machine to another" is still a fun question is also a pretty damning indictment of our industry :P

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#67

Post by jffhn »

MichaelRo wrote: post #8

As a "senior" (expert) software developer you got a slight edge over a junior as long as you work in the same domain of expertise. As soon as you change project, you're at loss. General intelligence helps but can't make up for domain-specific expertise. Example: move from accounting software to map navigation software. Clueless. Move from map navigation software to financial software. Within financial software move f…

Domains are often not very deep, as a lot of people need to understand them.

I've seen smart people quickly figure things out and propose upgrades in a matter of weeks, on points lifelong experts overlooked, or were too lazy to dig.

Reminds me of a company that was looking for people good in both the domain and software, to bridge the experts/devs gap (which is often a bottleneck, information flow between brains being slow and unreliable). They found out that it was much easier to teach the domain to devs, than to teach software to domain experts, i.e. that software was the hard skill.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#68

Post by dmd »

joenot443 wrote: post #58
qiine wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

soOo how do you do it ? ;p

Well, the answer I love them to start with is asking if they're single-bay computers and if not, why they can't just turn off both machines and stick the HDDs in the same box :) It's also a great signal if they can follow this up by noting that the Windows drive is probably formatted in NTFS so the Linux instance will need drivers to support it. Otherwise, a wired network + SMB/Samba is a fine solution too, though mu…

> the Windows drive is probably formatted in NTFS so the Linux instance will need drivers to support it

This hasn't been true for decades now, thankfully! Read-only NTFS support has been built into the kernel for a quarter century already (1997, 2.1.74, and a better one in 2002, 2.5.11) - and full read-write support for 4 years now (2021, 5.15).

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#69

Post by blululu »

tikhonj wrote: post #66
joenot443 wrote: post #47

This is a really good article. There's a quality in strong developers which is difficult to select for in an interview but wildly valuable once they're up and running; maybe the best word is "scrappiness". When I interview juniors or interns, one of the questions I like to ask is something like this- "You've got two computer, one Linux one Windows. There's 50gb of files on the Windows machine which need to be moved t…

This is a fun question. But the fact that "move a medium sized file from one machine to another" is still a fun question is also a pretty damning indictment of our industry :P

I would say that the fact that this question is more relevant to actual job performance than ~90% of leet code questions that I have been asked would be an even stronger indictment of the industry.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#70

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

9dev wrote: post #2

> Having someone who’s happy to spend time “just talking”, without any specific goal to solve, will go a long way. This is actually something I love doing with our junior developers: Often they have a question every once in a while, or they don't have any questions for too long so I ask them what they're doing currently. Both often leads to me taking a look, and discovering that they're like five miles deep into a de…

You sound like someone that I'd like working with.
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