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Cognitive load is what matters

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Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#91

Post by mdaniel »

figassis wrote: post #58
Buttons840 wrote: post #4

I'm probably one of the "smart developers" with quirks. I try to build abstractions. I'm both bothered and intrigued by the industry returning to, what I call, "pile-of-if-statements architecture". It's really easy to think it's simple, and it's really easy to think you understand, and it's really easy to close your assigned Jira tickets; so I understand why people like it. People get assigned a task, they look aroun…

Abstractions are ok, SomethingFactories are stupid. If your code is more abstractions than actual logic and you need logic to manage the abstractions (eg. FactoryFactories, 2+ inheritance levels), you should rethink your strategy.

I had previously thought SomethingFactory was abstracting away the logic for the "new" keyword, but for people who dislike inversion of control frameworks

I'm firmly in the "DI||GTFO" camp, so I don't meant to advocate for the Factory pattern but saying that only abstractions that you like are ok starts to generate PR email threads

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#92

Post by marginalia_nu »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #33
marginalia_nu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes intelligence to see where to make a change though. If you make a change at the wrong place, you add more complexity than if you put the change in the right place. You often see the same thing with junior developers, in that case due to a limited mental model of the code. You give them a task that from a senior developer would result in a 2 line diff and they come back changing 45 lines.

?? I suspect that we agree with each other and you misread my earlier comment.

Yeah maybe, there were a lot of negations in there...

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#93

Post by energy123 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #4

I'm probably one of the "smart developers" with quirks. I try to build abstractions. I'm both bothered and intrigued by the industry returning to, what I call, "pile-of-if-statements architecture". It's really easy to think it's simple, and it's really easy to think you understand, and it's really easy to close your assigned Jira tickets; so I understand why people like it. People get assigned a task, they look aroun…

Better when those if statements are before any loops

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#95

Post by freshtake »

noen wrote: post #18

This article reminds me of my early days at Microsoft. I spent 8 years in the Developer Division (DevDiv). Microsoft had three personas for software engineers that were eventually retired for a much more complex persona framework called people in context (the irony in relation to this article isn’t lost on me). But those original personas still stick with me and have been incredibly valuable in my career to understan…

The best engineers are all three, and can turn up or down these tendencies depending on what's required for the project, business, or personal goals. These should not be fixed in proportion over time, as they are each useful in different circumstances.

I spent time at Microsoft as well, and one of the things I noticed was folks who spent time in different disciplines (e.g. dev, test, pgm) seemed to be especially great at tailoring these qualities to their needs. If you're working on optimizing a compiler, you probably need a bit more Einstein and Mort than Elvis. If you're working on a game engine you may need a different combination.

The quantities of each (or whether these are the correct archetypes) is certainly debatable, but understanding that you need all of them in different proportions over time is important, IMHO.

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#96

Post by layer8 »

> Then QA engineers come into play: "Hey, I got 403 status, is that expired token or not enough access?"

To be fair, the HTTP status line allows for arbitrary informational text, so something like “HTTP/1.1 401 JWT token expired” would be perfectly allowable.

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#97

Post by purplezooey »

noen wrote: post #18

This article reminds me of my early days at Microsoft. I spent 8 years in the Developer Division (DevDiv). Microsoft had three personas for software engineers that were eventually retired for a much more complex persona framework called people in context (the irony in relation to this article isn’t lost on me). But those original personas still stick with me and have been incredibly valuable in my career to understan…

Perhaps best modeled as a waveform that starts before morning coffee. Each engineer has a vector of spectral magnitudes.

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#98

Post by NeutralForest »

mdaniel wrote: post #88
Disposal8433 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> three personas for software engineers The kind of psycho-bullshit that we should stay away from, and wouldn't happen if we respected each other. Coming from Microsoft is not surprising though.

For my frame of reference, do you think the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are psycho-bullshit, too? Because I had characterized personas as a very similar "of course it's a generalization" and OP even said themselves "every engineer is a mix" but if you're coming from stance that bucketing people is disrespectful, then your perspective on MBTI would help me digest your stance

I've seen those kinds of tests described as astrology for business guys. Sounds about right.

Re: Cognitive load is what matters

#99

Post by mdaniel »

supportengineer wrote: post #63

Large software projects built by humans will always be doomed to fail, because humans like to build the new, and nobody likes to maintain the old.

I'm pretty sure this entire thread is filled with "nobody likes to maintain the pile of ifs", since I doubt very seriously it's the age that jams people up, it's finding the correct place to make a surgical change that only produces the net-new behavior without blowing up the world. I guess the rest of that is that often the older a codebase is, the more revenue stream in impacts if something goes wrong
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