Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
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Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
#2Not medium link: https://alexlakatos.com/coding/2020/11/17/ten-things-learned...
Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
#3Good read, especially the part about soft skills. Sometimes it seems to me like it's almost impossible to change them. It's "easy" to learn something hard and defined, like coding. But changing how you communicate? How you react to conflict? Your body language? It's even harder if you're trying to change these soft behaviors of someone else, like a partner.
Not sure what the takeaway is here, just wanted to express my thoughts on it. Soft behaviors seem both like some enormous formless cloud that you can't really define and a rock-solid mountain you have little hope of moving.
Also, reading this on his own website instead of on medium is a much better experience, definitely recommend.
Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
#4Googling how to bubble sort seems a bit extreme. I'm not much for Cracking the Code Interview type questions but this would certainly be a red flag.
Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
#5I tend to disagree with many of the sentiments. In particular, many software folks don’t know the most rudimentary data structures and algorithms. Those should be memorized, frankly. Lately I have been exploring old programming books on archive.org and realize how downhill the industry has gone from fundamental principles, which leads to “language-z” zealots to satisfy some business need.
The author mentions COBOL as being antiquated and irrelevant but in all honesty, modern languages don’t improve upon much. Underneath all the layers people add to modern languages (so the rest of the developer community can push buttons without even the faintest idea) lies assembly language and the machine.
Knowledge of the systems is abstracted away so much that people are focusing on mastering the wrong thing. One should be able to implement algorithms in C or COBOL or even assembly. Otherwise, it’s like learning to google the notes of a concerto without understanding the chords, scales, harmony, melody, etc.
Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
#6Googling how to bubble sort seems a bit extreme. I'm not much for Cracking the Code Interview type questions but this would certainly be a red flag.
A lot of people would google FizzBuzz unfortunately.
Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
#7I tend to disagree with many of the sentiments. In particular, many software folks don’t know the most rudimentary data structures and algorithms. Those should be memorized, frankly. Lately I have been exploring old programming books on archive.org and realize how downhill the industry has gone from fundamental principles, which leads to “language-z” zealots to satisfy some business need. The author mentions COBOL as…
I forget what I don't use. Should I rememorize those things every 6 months?
Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
#8Off-topic comment: I was having some trouble understanding the text. The author would start explaining some advice and I didn’t know which advice he was referring to. Like ”This is one I struggle with the most”, “this” what? I would go back to the previous paragraph and there was no reference, worst, apparently it was another topic!
Then it hit me, the images with words on it every few paragraphs were the pieces of advice! They were not ads or merely unimportant illustrations, they were the titles! I unconsciously ignored them all on first read, banner-blindness or something like that.
I actually scanned the post for bullet points the moment I opened the page and couldn’t find them. Because the bullet points were designed as images.
Important to notice that now, looking at them as bullet points, I like the design. They useful mini-posters. But they had this side-effect on me of magically becoming invisible.
Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
#9An observation: a lot of these---especially 'soft skills'---can't be properly learned earlier. They're a side effect of experience, and the 10 years doing the job is the only way to properly get them. The things I most often hear from potential employers when we ask what we should focus on more in teaching them are "soft skills" and "troubleshooting". My response is now to ask which of the long list of technical skills we teach we should drop or reduce in favour of more soft skills (none) and to remind them that when they say they need employees who are good with team-mates and clients and good troubleshooters, what they're describing is an employee with experience and I simply can't generate that in a two-year program. Fundamentally, that part of the education is the on-the-job part, and it can't be skipped.
We do work at those, but fundamentally, skills at (1) working well with a variety of people and (2) understanding systems and their interactions well enough to hypothesize and test for causes of faults are both things you can have more or less talent in, but they're fundamentally skills that come as the result of substantial experience working with different people and working with complicated systems.
You probably can't properly learn these without spending the ten years, but you can choose jobs and colleagues and experiences that will help you learn them better. Better to focus on emulating how people learned these skills than trying to skip the hard part.
Re: Things I Wish I’d Learned Sooner After Being a Developer for 10 Years
#10Googling how to bubble sort seems a bit extreme. I'm not much for Cracking the Code Interview type questions but this would certainly be a red flag.
I'd have to google "bubble sort" to even remember what it is; but I don't think that has any bearing on whether I'd understand it once I remembered what it was.