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How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

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Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#71

Post by BurningFrog »

gigatexal wrote: post #9

I’ve been in a rut lately. Missing obvious things, shipping less than my best code. It’s come to my attention that I’m not as good at programming as I am at crafting database queries and tuning them but that’s such a small niche given how easy it is to pick up SQL that I’m having an existential crisis. So I’m working on getting better and getting more confident.

> So I’m working on getting better and getting more confident.

FWIW, I'd say the most important characteristic of terrible programmers is their supreme unearned confidence!

Which is to say: Focus on getting better. The confidence is secondary.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#72

Post by gabrielblack »

> Only learn something new when forced

This could be devastating, much more in little/medium company. I know of successful companies (I mean company with successful products ) with a C/C++ stack they considered "good enough" so they didn't change anything: the C++ standards, architecture, structures. Often that line of conduct was supported by a management looking any change or improvement as a cost. The result is always the same: a day they wake-up realizing that the "product" is a pile of crappy legacy code. I know some cases. One of those company was bought by a bigger company that asked to modify the stack to modern standards with disastrous results because the programmers wasn't skilled to port the code base to modern standards/architectures. In another case, the owners sold the entire division to another company, interested to the clients more than to the product and, after checking the status of the code base, the buyers hired a group of consultants that rewrote all in Java, with results that you can imagine.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#73

Post by throwaway0990 »

cge42 wrote: post #11
anon91831837 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a terrible, second-stringer attitude. Curiosity and obsession are a couple of the key differentiators between a workaday jobber in it for the money (like many who flocked to tech in the dot-com times) and a badass. TBH, if someone's only in it for the money, they're wasting their life in the wrong field when they could be doing something else such that their morale and satisfaction would be greater.

Ahh yes, I'll be sure to let consults notes Distinguished Scientist at NVIDIA and adjunct professor at the University of Utah Peter Shirley that he's a second-stringer and not nearly "badass" enough for Hacker News commentator anon91831837 and he's wasting his life in the wrong field.

It is not like distinguished scientist credentials necessarily correlate with exceptional code quality or software development practices. And it is not like NVIDIA is particularly known to be a place that excels at such.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#74

Post by sixtypoundhound »

This is probably really bad but I totally empathize (and agree?)

KISS => everyone should do this

YAGNI => 95% of the shit I add is ignored (and I've got fairly objective proof that I can develop good projects)

ALAN => Master SQL, one scripting language, and how to use Stack Overflow. You'll be the most useful dev on the team.

I agree with most of the rest.

Bonus point: never be afraid to tell a business person that what they want is an exceptionally bad idea. it usually is.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#75

Post by gigatexal »

BurningFrog wrote: post #71
gigatexal wrote: post #9

I’ve been in a rut lately. Missing obvious things, shipping less than my best code. It’s come to my attention that I’m not as good at programming as I am at crafting database queries and tuning them but that’s such a small niche given how easy it is to pick up SQL that I’m having an existential crisis. So I’m working on getting better and getting more confident.

> So I’m working on getting better and getting more confident. FWIW, I'd say the most important characteristic of terrible programmers is their supreme unearned confidence! Which is to say: Focus on getting better. The confidence is secondary.

The confidence is for sanity reasons purely. There’s nothing more demoralizing than agreeing to do a seemingly simple task and then failing. So I’m getting better so that I have the confidence in my self

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#76

Post by [deleted] »

jugg1es wrote: post #21

This is such a bizarre post. If you have the self-awareness to admit this about yourself, you are probably not a poor programmer. Poor programmers do things like allowing an incoming request to spin up unlimited concurrent threads. Poor programmers erroneously throw exceptions on any operational deviation - even it if can be handled without error. Most importantly - poor programmers do not learn from their mistakes a…

[deleted]

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#77

Post by overgard »

The "Avoid Learning Anything New" advice is insane. (Well, practically all of it is, but that one really stands out).

I think the exact opposite advice is far better: never assume the way you know how to do something is best, and always be on the lookout for what others are doing that might be better.

Here's the thing about learning: the more you learn, the easier learning the next thing becomes. You form links, insights on relationships, new concepts that apply to old things, etc. If this guy thinks learning is such a burden, it's probably because he refuses to learn anything in the first place.

If he thinks he's a poor programmer, it probably has less to do with innate ability and 100% to do with the attitudes he gives as "advice" in this blog.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#78

Post by [deleted] »

anon91831837 wrote: post #5
albertoCaroM wrote: post #4

ALAN. Avoid Learning Anything New Terrible advice and mindset, It's good to learn for pleasure or curiosity. This way, you can enjoy reading SICP, effective java, code complete... Or you can use a new system, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS. Doing it you model your thoughts and mind, learn new ways, practices, or patterns, you don’t have to use then only for having learned, but even so, they will be useful to you.

Yes, it's a terrible, second-stringer attitude. Curiosity and obsession are a couple of the key differentiators between a workaday jobber in it for the money (like many who flocked to tech in the dot-com times) and a badass. TBH, if someone's only in it for the money, they're wasting their life in the wrong field when they could be doing something else such that their morale and satisfaction would be greater.

[deleted]

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#79

Post by disjhshava »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #27
jugg1es wrote: post #21

This is such a bizarre post. If you have the self-awareness to admit this about yourself, you are probably not a poor programmer. Poor programmers do things like allowing an incoming request to spin up unlimited concurrent threads. Poor programmers erroneously throw exceptions on any operational deviation - even it if can be handled without error. Most importantly - poor programmers do not learn from their mistakes a…

Why should being aware of how lacking you are as a programmer have much bearing on whether you're good or not? When I started programming seriously I had a mentor who gave me a long list of my shortcomings. It's taken years of hard, dedicated work to rectify most of those problems and I still have a huge distance to cover to be as good as I want to be. Being a good programmer is a skillet acquired with hard, concentr…

In general, people tend to be overconfident in their beliefs and too slow to incorporate new information. There is experimental evidence to back this up (pdf warning: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Baruch_Fischhoff/publica...). I think this applies to engineers as well as anyone else.

Re: How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer

#80

Post by KirinDave »

solveit wrote: post #34
KirinDave wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All new ideas are bad" seems equally bad as advice.

"Wait for technologies to mature" sounds like a great heuristic for people who need to build things that actually work.

It also sounds like an excellent recipie for being utterly beholden to every industry trend that gains critical mass despite numerous examples of how sub-optimal it is.

It's a strategy for a big corporate hiring committee, not an individual worker.

Of course the actual successful software companies "build the next proven thing" so even for them, this "wait and see" strategy is clearly not effective.

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