Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 166 posts

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#71

Post by isostatic »

rntksi wrote: post #62
throwaway7645 wrote: post #58

Slightly off topic, but does anyone know if they still use Perl? I think the BBC iPlayer used it.

I do remember they used Perl for backend, and there was a resident Perl-guru. I'm not sure with all the new Zend engine refactoring whether Perl still lives inside the BBC ...

The BBC is bigger than just the online devs. In news we still have a fair amount of perl, mainly in Nagios checks and other bits of monitoring, but pretty much any news package you see coming in from abroad, and many in the UK, passes through a system with critical perl elements (JFE and davina). PHP is more prevalent for more recent developments - Raven is PHp for example - anything you see edited for the party conferences is recorded and edited on Ravens, whenever you watch Asia Business Report every clip you see is played out of Raven, as are the graphics running on the screens in the studios. The lower third graphics on ABR are casparcg loading templates that are ttraditional perl cgi (mainly just to insert various variables). The news archiving system in bureaus has a perl front end, as does the web part of the video production system. Our offline captioning system (webcap) is perl, and the standard ubuntu build we use on c. 1200 machines has a lot of perl tweaks to configure and monitor.

These are critical systems, but we don't have the resources of online/fmt/digital/whatever, of all those systems only Raven gets any active development (about 2 man months a year), we just don't have the manpower or the time, so don't expect to find a job wanting perl though :)

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#72

Post by rxhernandez »

IncRnd wrote: post #68
spaceseaman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Senior developers mentor, simplify, document, and admit when they don't know the answers. Sadly this is far from my experience as well. It's likely a few toxic work environments. Not to hijack your comment but I would like to offer a specific example I've seen of toxic behavior from senior developers. Many don't actually read the questions you ask of them or trust your knowledge. It's very similar to attitudes I se…

Maybe I read your post wrong, but your post seems to complain that Senior Developers don't believe some Junior hires have minimum competency if they are unable to compile a file. That seems like something a Junior Dev should have mastered during their educational period.

Then you're not senior enough to know enough of the unique problems that come from trying to compile things, especially for embedded devices.

One of the non-embedded cases is compiling boost on a visual studio machine for wrapping python which can be its own special kind of hell. I've seen at least one very respected principal developer wholly screw this up. I can write for hours on those kinds of problems and how to solve them.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#73

Post by isostatic »

DRW_ wrote: post #6
user5994461 wrote: post #4

Isn't the BBC a company where the only senior positions are as a contractor, charging 3 times the amount of their permanent counterpart for much less hassle? I am not sure if the author is trying to write a nice PR piece or is so inexperienced that he believes in all this corporate bullshit he's repeating. ^^

I'm not the author, but I recently joined the BBC as a software engineer and haven't found all that many contractors at all, the ones I have are in regular non-senior positions. It may be the case for 'talent' and management of TV projects (for example), but in the tech departments - your assertion, in my experience seems to be far from true.

I've been here 14 years which is just about long enough to not be a newbie any more. I now plenty of contractors, most are useless. After 5 years one of the few good ones has taken a staff job.

We do seem to be getting better, the recent IR35 rules helped, but we still have contractors employing contractors. At a high level they're typically there to implement some bad idea and the fuck off so everyone can blame them afterwards.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#74

Post by tathougies »

valuearb wrote: post #36

Lots of good stuff in this, but i have a couple of significant nits. First, paired programming is a great way to help a junior learn. But it’s dependent upon their desire, i do it frequently with one whose eyes glaze over when i explain what i’m doing and i know when they start surfing the web while i’m implementing. But otherwise paired programming is just a great way to slow me down. Secondly, the open floor plan t…

Why would you physically do the typing if you're a senior engineer pairing with a more junior developer?

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#75

Post by [deleted] »

eosrei wrote: post #32

> I worked in an all-senior team once. Nobody admitted not understanding something. Everyone wrote overly-complex code just to 1-up each other Sorry to hear about that experience. Those aren't senior developers. There's no room for learning when you think you know everything. Senior developers mentor, simplify, document, and admit when they don't know the answers.

[deleted]

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#76

Post by Swizec »

spaceseaman wrote: post #33
eosrei wrote: post #32

> I worked in an all-senior team once. Nobody admitted not understanding something. Everyone wrote overly-complex code just to 1-up each other Sorry to hear about that experience. Those aren't senior developers. There's no room for learning when you think you know everything. Senior developers mentor, simplify, document, and admit when they don't know the answers.

> Senior developers mentor, simplify, document, and admit when they don't know the answers. Sadly this is far from my experience as well. It's likely a few toxic work environments. Not to hijack your comment but I would like to offer a specific example I've seen of toxic behavior from senior developers. Many don't actually read the questions you ask of them or trust your knowledge. It's very similar to attitudes I se…

> Did you try X?" > "Uh yes I did" (then to be polite I repeat my explanation of doing X)

As somebody who often does this, it’s because 8 times out of 10 it works. Magically when you try again and go meticulously through the steps with someone watching, they work even though they didn’t before. I don’t know why but it works on me too.

I’m not being condescending, I’m trying to be your rubber ducky. Because it works. Many times when you’re explaining it to me, you’ll realize the thing you thought you tried you actually didn’t.

Being your rubber ducky is more important than just telling you the answer (which I often don’t even know so I’m bringing you along to my thought process)

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#77

Post by isostatic »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #5
user5994461 wrote: post #4

Isn't the BBC a company where the only senior positions are as a contractor, charging 3 times the amount of their permanent counterpart for much less hassle? I am not sure if the author is trying to write a nice PR piece or is so inexperienced that he believes in all this corporate bullshit he's repeating. ^^

>Isn't the BBC a company where the only senior positions are as a contractor, charging 3 times the amount of their permanent counterpart for much less hassle? Not really, no.

Digital do seem to have sorted this out, with clear job titles and stuff, at least for programmers, and tech jobs upto band 10. Elsewhere it's not so clear cut. Support have no way to progress past band 8 without going into a terrible management structure. Good engineers are rarely good managers.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#79

Post by [deleted] »

rxhernandez wrote: post #72
IncRnd wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I read your post wrong, but your post seems to complain that Senior Developers don't believe some Junior hires have minimum competency if they are unable to compile a file. That seems like something a Junior Dev should have mastered during their educational period.

Then you're not senior enough to know enough of the unique problems that come from trying to compile things, especially for embedded devices. One of the non-embedded cases is compiling boost on a visual studio machine for wrapping python which can be its own special kind of hell. I've seen at least one very respected principal developer wholly screw this up. I can write for hours on those kinds of problems and how to…

[deleted]

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#80

Post by kogepathic »

klenwell wrote: post #66
spaceseaman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Senior developers mentor, simplify, document, and admit when they don't know the answers. Sadly this is far from my experience as well. It's likely a few toxic work environments. Not to hijack your comment but I would like to offer a specific example I've seen of toxic behavior from senior developers. Many don't actually read the questions you ask of them or trust your knowledge. It's very similar to attitudes I se…

Ha. I can relate. At my last gig, it wasn't the seniors developers (well, it was some of them, too). It was the principal developer. As my supervisor, he told me, a senior developer, I asked too many questions. "A senior developer shouldn't need to ask questions." My questions usually weren't even technical questions but rather questions meant to clarify business specs so that we could make better technical decisions…

> "A senior developer shouldn't need documentation. The knowledge should be in your head."

What?! This guy isn't fit to be principal developer.

Sure, the knowledge should be in your head, but it should also be documented in case you get hit by a bus or go on vacation.

Does no one senior ever stop to think about business continuity? What happens when you onboard someone new? A senior developer is just supposed to drop all their work and get the new person up to speed for a month?

I find that companies with a bad documentation culture see it as a cost center ("this takes so much time") whereas companies with good documentation culture realize that even if it takes time, the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Post reply on HN