Be Less Technical • Hacker News Board

Re: Be Less Technical

#71

Post by chefandy » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

asddubs wrote: post #68

chefandy wrote: post #62

Well-put. I participated in a protracted comment thread several weeks ago about the use of 'number' in HTML input field 'type' attributes. The problem was inexperienced HTML writers using 'type=number' for phone numbers, order numbers, social security numbers, account numbers, etc. The resulting interface elements— e.g. increment/decrement— are designed for elements like quantities and are more harmful than helpful w…

yeah, i suppose it should have been called type=amount

I like 'amount.' I was thinking 'quantity' or something like that but that wouldn't make sense for, say, frequency in a wavelength or something.

Re: Be Less Technical

#72

Post by unfocussed_mike » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

jmchuster wrote: post #70

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend towards the view that I do not understand any given thing until I can teach it.

I wonder how strong of a signal that is for a good engineer. There have always been people who've stood out as wanting to teach, wanting to mentor. Is it too much of my own bias to say that good engineers are good teachers?

I think that for example good designers are usually good teachers, so maybe.

Good design and good engineering explains itself; especially engineering that interfaces with other stuff. Well-designed things need less documentation.

Both, I think, require the same focus on clarity of intention as a good teacher.

Re: Be Less Technical

#73

Post by raffraffraff » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 6:27 AM UTC

vishnugupta wrote: post #63

raffraffraff wrote: post #10

Where I work now, it's a shitshow. To a (technical) outsider who wasn't with the company when they built everything, the original requirements and constraints are not obvious. The solution was lazily built in an ad-hoc fashion, so requirements continuously emerged out of the need to work around the failings of some other foundational system that was badly implemented. Suddenly you're being asked for a zero latency re…

This is indeed a big challenge for seniors hires. They are expected to understand the domain, product, and business context to create impact in little time. I experienced this myself twice, failed miserably once and just about hung on second time. I've also seen quite a few senior ICs being let go within 4-6 months because they just couldn't get their head around the mess. The obvious response of "document everything…

> I just don't know how to tackle it beyond putting in hard grunt work to understand the system.

My team are simply replacing large chunks of infrastructure with properly built & documented infrastructure as code. If anyone has a problem, we're asking for a bake-off between this (sensible stuff) and that (wherever-the-hell mess you've got there).