How to grow into your best developer self
reaktor.com
reaktor.com
Critical thinking is such an important skill for everyone, not just engineers, and this habit all but eliminates it. You go into an article with a framed opinion of what it's trying to convey, and spend the time reading the article looking for confirmation of that opinion rather than thinking critically for yourself.
This might be OK in some communities like HN where people are usually pretty reasonable and the site seems fair. But it becomes a habit and can be dangerous in other places where the top comment could be paid for or manipulated without you knowing, seeding opinions and confirming them as you view the content.
Definitely read the comments. The author is spot on about the gems and lessons to be found. But do it after you've read the article, and thought about what it meant for you.
Totally agree about the top comments. Not that valuable and some times even misleading/manipulated/bought/nasty.
What we really need is to develop our own critical reading skills, how to connect dots on our own etc. I agree that seeing others comments first before starting that process might be a negative for many reasons.
Voting does nothing for this either, as people may upvote a popular lie or misconception, or downvote an uncomfortable truth - I used to see this happen often in the science-based subreddits when I bothered with them on reddit.
I agree. I'm very senior now, bordering on ancient (or at least in the last part of the age tail), and especially over the past 8-10 years (perhaps back to 18 years if you consider the explosion of OOP/OOD and Java to be a tagalong trend) group-think has been a serious problem in development.
The problem with group-think is that that it isn't moderate thinking that is an average of all well-informed people. It can be influenced by a few that have good design skills and say things in a way that people want to believe. I personally have just said whatever came to mind, bullshitting because I was bored, and got many karma points for comments that I'd not thought out, and have definitely seen other comments that were similar. This is especially true when you are shooting down what could be good ideas. A lot of us just like to argue for arguments' sake. Now, a lot of times that is good, but it is very important to try things out that you on your own think are reasonable and see for yourself.
For example, what if HN had been around when PhP was developed and a group of bored naysayers had shot it down because it wasn't organized enough and would promote bad practices. Those things were true- you could write bad PhP code. However, a lot of what exists today was born of people just having fun coding in PhP, and those people wouldn't have learned from their time in PhP, because it never would have come about.
If you think critically, you will not give too much credence to either, no matter what you read first.
Your disagreement makes it sound like he made a universal recommendation for all articles in all circumstances. I didn't read it that way.
He specifically constrained his observation to staying on top of new technical developments in /r/programming and HN:
"When browsing Proggit, I recommend reading the comments before committing fifteen minutes to reading a nicely titled (or click-baited) article."
It looks like his advice meant to be a time management tool instead of a shortcut to disable critical thinking. You have several factors that lead to the comments-first-then-read-article strategy:
1) finite time -- can't possibly read every article -- must prioritize the information overload somehow
2) Sturgeon's Law -- 90% of everything is crap (e.g. clickbait titles)
3) you lack the technical background in the new and unfamiliar topic that's a prerequisite for applying critical reasoning.
>Critical thinking is such an important skill for everyone, not just engineers, and this habit all but eliminates it. [...] But it becomes a habit and can be dangerous in other places ...
I think people can be adaptive and use comments-then-article on certain websites but also use the opposite article-then-comments on other websites.
For online articles of New York Times, Washington Post, and Youtube videos... it makes more sense to consume the content and then look at the comments (or skip the comments altogether since they are often a cesspool of nonsense.) For fast-moving technical crowd-sourced article submissions -- it can be rational to read the comments first.
I often do this on HN just to make sure the article would even be worth reading.
It's a pretty good approximation for boring meetings as you've got a small amount of overall context (article headline::meeting) and small amount of specific context (comment::sentence before your name).
I never found one and I'm 10 years in the game now. So I'm probably cursed to mediocrity, haha.
I've often thought this would be a good social network - online mentoring. Lots of upside for the mentee, not sure about the mentor...
But that will challenging to capture online.
Unless there's some barrier to entry it would be difficult, and it'd probably just end up being a spam or meme fest like LinkedIn or Facebook after a while.
It's not 100% online mentorship though. It's really there to facilitate / manage / help existing mentorship programs at organizations.
We thought about trying to get it to a point where it could work with non-associated mentors/mentees, but it's really a chicken/egg problem at that point.
Then there are people who will mentor you for money. Giles Bowkett (http://gilesbowkett.com) did this a while a go. Not bad option at all. I'd see paying for someone way smarter than my self to teach me as an amazing investment.
But more than 99% of us aren't that lucky and have to try with self study and "grit".
Sure, but mentors help ensure that you learn the right lessons from your struggles, gain the correct habits and don't go down certain silly rabbit holes and waste time.
Personally, I was fortunate enough to have a mentor when I was starting out and it rocketed me to a strong position in my career and I couldn't be more grateful. I try to actively mentor 1 or 2 people a year as a result.
It's been mostly very successful so far.
The omission there is that there are, mostly, concrete goals that the mentee aims to achieve, and the mentor is personally invested in a successful outcome.
Most of us ended up in software development because we were curious about technology in the first place. Learning stuff and tinkering with stuff makes us happy. We should continue to do so.
The section about optimizing your career is also about optimizing your happiness. There will be plenty of times where the sirens try to lure you into taking on tasks which are financially rewarding but boring. Take on some of these but don't get trapped forever in a local minimum. Your strategic goal is to feed your curiosity and your happiness.
The part about finding a mentor I'd phrase more broadly as: find a network. Find friends. Hang out with people who are fun to hang out with and who care about tech and life in general. They'll probably have strong opinions, and so will you. You'll learn a lot from these people; they'll be the mentorship that you need. And why would they want to hang out with you? Because you are bright, curious, and because people that optimize for happiness are great to hang out with.
> clever at achieving one's aims by indirect or deceitful methods
Does it make sense to stay at my job where I am learning well or should I try to switch to a larger tech company since it has a material impact on my financial well being ? I want to raise a family and hope own a home (or rent one near good schools) and I don't see that as being possible in the Bay Area without a Google salary. If I was living in a market like Texas I would stay at my current job because market salaries allow you easily have a middle class family lifestyle (my parents live there and you can easily raise a family on 90k). The Bay Area however is another beast and that 50-60K Google salary difference compounded over many years seems substantial (esp for that mortgage down payment). I don't want to move out of the Bay (my wife is tied here too). What do you guys think - are the financial reasons enough to consider switching jobs for the Bay Area ?
That said I have coworkers that work 60 hour weeks mostly because they're fresh out of school and want to prove themselves.
Keep an eye out for unintended consequences; keep digler999's reply in mind, for instance. But also don't overanalyze; whatever decision you make at this point probably won't be permanent.
Poor souls.
Their checklist shares a lot with mine, and I can only assume money will come with having grown in supportive and great development environments.
>and this is how gamedev is never lacking those new fresh naive developers
I think I know what you mean by this, but just in case, I really think it's the over-representation of SV and startup culture on the Internet. One of the biggest concerns I had before I started working full time as a dev was work/life balance. I listened to the Internet rather than asking peers. It turns out (in my experience) that it's fine in most places. Blogs, Reddit, and HN had me thinking otherwise, and I'm sure the people who drink the SV and startup Kool-Aid are the ones falling prey to this.
You'll get bored anyway if you don't rewrite your program from time to time ;-)
Optimizing for happiness and career path seem like more ideal goals for me personally.
Just some different perspective.
I also sent an email with more details to your contact page before seeing your comment.
I used to send emails to my favorite professors just to say hi, or to ask questions, I'm sure they enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.
I'll gladly hang around to address any questions. It shows that you're genuinely interested in the matter. Don't be afraid of coming across as a beginner either - asking questions is how you learn.
Will I be able to have a more senior developer act as a mentor?
Will I have direct access to more experienced devs on my team?
What opportunites will there be to try something new and get it reviewed?
Are there any tech stack absolutes I will never be able to stray from?
The answers I received were great and ended up being accurate.
It was the first time I had ever decided to choose a company based primarily on the potential for growth and not money/perks/etc.
Smartest decision ever.
If you optimize for salary, you will probably be given more responsibility.