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

Post by lazide » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

me_me_me wrote: post #659

lazide wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever had a date where the first thing someone talks about is something like having babies, or going on and on about their ex, or they want to know how much you make in the first 15 minutes? It is not a pleasant feeling, and makes it pretty clear what their priorities are (and aren’t). Namely that having some idea who YOU are and if they like you doesn’t really matter much. If someone starts the interview pro…

Interview is not a date. Its a formal meeting where parties are trying to acheive something concrete. Hire a good employee, find a good job. If someone starts off with asking about essential thing that is important factor for them it means that its a dealbreaker issue for them. Whats the point of interview if they know there is no flexi time, and you only look for flexitime jobs?? Its actually a matter-of-fact approa…

Post by chaps » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #549

chaps wrote: post #184

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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…

minuscule anecdote: my most cherished lines of code were an 8 lines vba excel macro to count duplicates for a non tech colleague. Turned her day from hell to cool (she had to filter duplicates by hand and quadratic formulas over 2000+ lines spreadsheet. That's what computers are for.

Post by lostlogin » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 8:50 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #490

cat199 wrote: post #390

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plenty of people have families and abuse the crap out of them, and people without families that want one still need to socialize enough to meet people to eventually have a family book != cover

We interviewed someone a while back and she said (without being asked - asking questions on this line is illegal) she was prepared to leave her husband and kids to move here. It didn't affect our results, but we all agreed in the discussion after that was a negative sign if we were allowed to consider it. She probably would have been good, I hope her search went well.

Post by chaps » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 9:01 PM UTC

superpope99 wrote: post #684

quickthrower2 wrote: post #576

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Predicting the future is hard. You were both right. You only have the outcome to judge the decision, not the full probability distribution.

This is so important - it's so hard to gauge what another person's mental model of a scenario is compared to yours. As in - perhaps OP and 40+ year person had the same, accurate mental model of the probability distribution of success, but OP and 40+ had different attitudes towards risk/reward. Or perhaps the OP happened to have a much more realistic picture of the probability of success, and 40+ was unnecessarily pes…

Post by cutemonster » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #644

BeetleB wrote: post #519

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> This thread's extensive non-quantitative usage from many people is evidence of that. Even putting aside comments like mine complaining about the actual number, this thread's extensive use of 10x to mean as many different things is a good reason to avoid the term altogether. The whole thread is just "10x programmers don't exist because X" and "10x programmers exist because Y", where X and Y are unrelated. > "10x man…

> It sounds like 10x is the equivalent of putting 2.0 on everything (and also as meaningless) What do you mean by that ? If I write a cooking book titled, "pizza 2.0" everyone in the world will understand what the 2.0 means.