Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer | Hacker News Reader

Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

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> If people are trying to assign blame to a bug or outage, it's time to move on.

This is one of my favorite excerpts. I once worked in a lab where we would have frequent catastrophic failures because there was never any disaster planning or contingency management plan. I personally triaged 3 such incidents alone or with people who happened to be there when the problem arose and attempted to disseminate some suggestions for how to prevent similar problems in the future. No one was interested. People were primarily interested in tearing my head off because I hadn't handled the problem the way they would have done it (of course, they were out drinking beers or sleeping while I was dealing with the issue at 12 AM or on a weekend).

After the third time I said fuck it, the next time there is an issue I am going to insure my own projects are safe and then I'm going home and turning my phone off. Let someone else deal with it. That is the not the culture you want to be promoting.

I was on call as a new developer on a system. I was not given any procedures or trouble shooting documents. I got a call at 1 am, missed it, and waited one minute to see if there was a message. I did see a voicemail, so I started listening and logging on. Before I could even get halfway through, the person called again (why not leave the voicemail on the final attempt?). So I'm looking for the issue/fix for 5 minutes and they tell me they know who the SME is for the functionality, so they will call them. Why even call me if you're just going to call the SME without giving me time to look at it? I got negative feedback from my manager about the way I handled it. So, I asked how I should have handled it without any training or documentation. They said I should have called the SME. Well, I didn't know who the SME was and there's no documentation or list of what who is the SME for which part of the system, nor was I instructed to immediately call the SME. Again, why not just call the SME first if they knew who it was and the SME didn't create documentation because they are "too busy".

How was the interview process before you got hired on? Any warning signs that seem obvious now in retrospect?

> SME didn't create documentation because they are "too busy".

Because they keep getting shoulder tapped to put out fires. Because they’re the only one who knows the system. Because there is no documentation…

Quoting what a HN user said in another post a few months back "if a person can break a system, the system was broken to start with".

Eh, that's a nice thing to say, but it only makes sense at certain scales, and no matter what, there's always a person that can break it.

If any random person can break it, it's already broken.

If any employee can break it, it's probably broken (there are very small scales where even this doesn't apply. Ever worked for a company with less than ten people? There's probably something any employee can break).

If any employee that's an engineer, sysadmin or developer can break it, well now you're at least reducing the problem to a more specific set of people.

If only the people on a specific team responsible for a system can affect the system, now you've reached fairly good point, where there's separation of concerns and you're mitigating the potential problems.

If only a single person can break the system, you've gone to far. That effectively means only a single person can fix or work on the system too, and congratulations, you've engineered yourself into a bus-factor of one. Turn right around and go back to making sure a team can work on this.

Finally, realize that sometimes the thing only one team can break is an underlying dependency for many other things, and they may inadvertently affect those. You can't really engineer yourself out of that problem without making every team and service a silo that going from top to bottom. Got a shared VM infrastuture, whether in house or in the cloud? The people that administer that can cause you problems. Don't ever believe they can't. Your office IT personnel? Yep, they can cause you problems too.

Some problems you fix by making it so they can't happen. Other problems you fix by making it hard to happen and putting provisions in place that mitigate the problems if they do.

What systems are you working on? Many are held together by ritual, and deviating from the ritual causes outages. They’re very fragile in some form (deployment, change, infrastructure, dependencies, etc.). They won’t break if you follow the happy path, but to say they’re so robust that an active attempt at breaking won’t bring them down is ... naive? Not sure if that’s the word I’m looking for.

I say this as someone who’s worked at large tech companies that are “internet scale”.

Maybe. I've seen the opposite, where no one takes responsibility for anything, and it's also bad. In fact, the situation you describe could also be a lack of anyone else taking responsibility for disaster planning and etc.

I think what is needed is a culture of -ownership-. That's basically people saying "I'm responsible". Not one where everyone tries to avoid responsibility, and not one where peopel point fingers.

Why does someone need to take responsibility when you can have a culture of blameless postmortems where everyone focuses on making sure what ever happened never happens again instead? In blameless postmortem culture, everyone is responsible by default

What does it mean to be responsible? Just to say it? Responsibility should be accompanied with fines corresponding to the damage or something like it. Otherwise those are just words. I'm responsible, but I'm not getting any fines if something goes wrong, so whatever, but I'm responsible. Fire me if you want, I'll find new work in a few days, but I was responsible.

It's business owner who's responsible, because ultimately he's getting all the expenses when critical event happens, client leaves, client sues the company, and so on. Other people are not really responsible, they just pretend to be.

So how did it play out? Please, do not let me hanging here.

Honestly, I don't know; I unknowingly followed the author's advice. About half a year after the last incident, a friend who I went to school with called me up and offered me a job at his fledgling biotech. I accepted and never looked back.

This, and the current “sober” posts on r/ExperiencedDevs, makes me think of Herodotus describing the way the Persians made important decisions - once sober, once drunk, and if the drunk and sober decisions were the same they knew it was a good one.

Reminds me of Hemingway's "Write drunk, edit sober."

Not for code tho. I've never seen booze help make good code

Alcohol really does not help me with code either (except maybe a relaxing beer), but Marijuhana works(occasionally). But you really, really need to do the sober clean up part. Otherwise it becomes a mess.

There was an old xkcd about this, though I will admit I have never experienced this:

https://xkcd.com/323/

I find “write sober, review drunk” to be much better advice.

Write code drunk, write tests sober?

The Persians also have an expression for "drunkenness and truthfulness", masti o rasti. مستی و راستی

There’s also Pliny the Elder, in vino veritas (in wine there's truth, for the non-classicists in the audience).

I think Tacitus had a similar anecdote about the Germans.

(Even without getting drunk, I've always found it useful to consider a hard decision once analytically and once intuitively, and if I don't agree with myself, think about it some more.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vino_veritas Is the phrase. Useful if you want to appear cultured at a company party.

This is right for the drunken dev thoughts, but not for the Herodotus example. "In vino veritas" - in wine there is truth - means that people expose their true thoughts when they're drunk rather than the filtered version they might present when sober, but the story of the Persians is more about the fact that there's value in considering both drunk and sober reactions, particularly when they tally.

In Hebrew we have "נכנס יין - יצא סוד", loosely translates to "Wine entered - secret came out".

or "children and drunks tell the truth"

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

I agree but think it is more than just _documentation_: effectively communicating ideas through text was one of the most underrated skills in software engineering. I say "was" as I think there is much more focus on it now with remote work and video call fatigue becoming the norm for many.

The first thing to learn is that there are four types of documentation:

learning-oriented tutorials

goal-oriented how-to guides

understanding-oriented explanations or discussions

information-oriented reference material

https://www.writethedocs.org/videos/eu/2017/the-four-kinds-o...

I would suggest you avoid thinking in too general of terms like this. There are dozens of kinds of docs. It's better to think about the document's specific purpose, audience, what you need to convey, what the audience wants to know, and how they want to absorb it. Then write, then read it as that intended audience, see if that person can make sense of it, and if it provides enough information. If you can't put yourself in their shoes, have the audience proofread it.

Two important lessons I learned:

1. Formatting and direct communication is very useful. It can make the difference between someone stopping and noticing critical information, or skipping it because they're lazy readers.

2. You probably don't know the correct way to convey information, and the audience probably doesn't know how to tell you how to convey it either. You need to listen for when the docs fail: when somebody says they read the docs but still don't know something or don't do something right. That means your doc has a "bug" in how it gets through to the reader. Experiment, change things around, add/remove information, etc until the bug is gone.

Agree with the sibling comment, but a starting point is also just to write docs for your future self, which is usually going to be type 3 or 4. Most of us who have been programming for a few years have had the experience of being mystified by something we ourselves wrote in the past, so it eventually becomes fairly straightforward to predict what kinds of things future-me will need a hand in piecing back together.

And it turns out those kinds of docs are pretty useful to my colleagues in piecing it together also.

In contrast to the current sibling replies, I think this is a very fitting categorization of documentation. Off the top of my head, I can think of several examples where one type of documentation is excellent but others are very lacking, for example:

* Rust Library Documentation: Most libraries have complete and up-to-date reference documentation, but are lacking even basic introductions (tutorials/guides) on how to use the library. This is totally just my personal experience so maybe I've been looking at the wrong crates, but with most of the crates I spend several minutes looking trough all the modules in order to find that all the juicy functions are hidden in the Connection struct, or something similar.

* Linux Kernel Documentation: The Linux kernel has excellent in-depth explanations on several high-level concepts, but on the other hand a little more systematic reference documentation on the supporting library code would help a lot.

* While I can't think of a good example right now, a lot of projects have a few basic getting-started tutorials but don't explain advanced concepts or high-level design at all, leaving you to wade through the sources yourself in order to understand how to actually use them.

I end up reading the source half the time, anyway; documentation is often incomplete, dated, and possibly incorrect. For code, I'd prefer the time go into designing a cleaner interface and making what calls do obvious.

That said, I find high-level documentation for larger systems to be very valuable. I also find Python's docs to be lacking compared to Java's; I'm often left wondering about the definition of what type is returned, exactly what parameters should be, and which exceptions are raised. Java's docs are very explicit about all these things.

>end up reading the source half the time, anyway; documentation is often incomplete, dated, and possibly incorrect.

I'm a pretty firm believer that documentation has to live next to the code. Otherwise it's nearly guaranteed to be out of date and/or incomplete

100%

Thoroughly commented code tends to end up a couple changes out of date. A separate file in the same directory ends up a couple major refactors out of date. A separate file in a separate system ends up a couple company-wide reorgs out of date.

I agree. I'd like my documents to contain overview, intent, and exceptions. The actual implementation I can look up in the code. Also generated stuff is appreciated, like Swagger.

You should be reading the source all of the time. The point of documentation is to tell you what the code doesn't. If it tells you the same, you should delete the documentation.

I just use headerdoc-type stuff. Been doing it for decades.

It works very well, and doesn't really add any overhead to my work.

I write about how I do documentation here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/leaving-a-legacy/

It's a long read, because it's a big topic.

That's useful, but only covers documenting the code, and API usage.

Depending on the project, various other documents may be required, e.g. installation guide, user guide, operations manual, architecture diagrams, networking diagrams, module/component diagrams, information flow diagrams, high-level design, low-level design, docs at various "views" (such as "business view", "information view", "technology view"), design decision tracker, ontology...

One can hope, but sadly I don't think it's going to be an easy shift.

People managing work, from what I've seen, still prefer to babble over their scribbled 5 basic points than taking the time to do their job and create relevant textual information. Then you listen, you take notes, and then you go and produce whatever documentation of the objective is required to at least understand if it's going to work. Of course you still will have gaps in your understanding, so then more calls, and repeat. In the end, unnecessary/missing features, a whole bunch of time wasted in crap, deadlines missed, burnt time, all of which could have been avoided if someone just had taken the time to do their supposed job - this is not to say it wouldn't have to be discussed, or that there's no need for back and forth and calls, etc, it's just instead of starting halfway you start from -50% or something.

Even in outsourcing platforms there's been a shift contrary to that. At least two years ago and before that, video calls or calls weren't really usual unless you were in some months long collaboration - now even there everyone expects video calls on the interview... It doesn't matter if it's a $100 one time job or whatever.

I've seen lack-of-documentation worn as a badge of honor. "I'm moving so fast, I can't waste my time on documentation. That's the next guys problem."

And management is usually/always ok with this short-term optimization.

Also "if the code is clear, it documents itself". Which in my opinion completely misses the point. Good documentation doesn't tell you what the code is doing, it tells you why it's not doing something else.

That's a useful take,

Code says what is done. Docs says why

We had a guy that always opened PRs with no description. Guy always said “read the code”. Manager wouldn’t do shit and he kept doing it until we all just stopped reviewing his code and then he couldn’t merge.

Like dude, tell us why we should read the code in the first place.

But there are circumstances where documentation would be outdated before it is finished.

Trying to write ops documentation on an unfinished project can be this way.

Exactly. That's not a documentation problem, that's a writing problem. A lot of tech people don't enjoy writing, but also they're sometimes not very good at predicting or empathizing with the future reader of their writing. Sometimes that's also manifested in speaking, and failing to context frame concepts, arguments and ideas before jumping into excruciating detail. Senior managers notice this, and this limits your career.

So I argue that the issue is writing skills, of which technical documentation is a subset speciality of writing skills. I will add, similar to math problems or programming, writing wants you to do it over and over so it can get better.

> A lot of tech people don't enjoy writing, but also they're sometimes not very good at predicting or empathizing with the future reader of their writing.

Agreed, wholeheartedly. Will hitchhike on your comment to recommend two things: Brett Victor's pdf stash [1] and, specifically, the Walter Ong essay "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction"[2].

Long story short, we form our audiences by subjecting them to our writing. In writing software documentation, we are implicitly informing the next generation's thought by the simple power dynamic that underlies all technical documentation: "you must understand this in order to do your job properly".

It is no wonder that "form", "inform", and "information" are such closely related words.

We dictate the level of rigor and intelligibility we expect out of our technical documentation, when we write technical documents. It almost sounds like a tautology when put this way, but "bad docs" are exclusively the result of a professional culture that puts up with the existence of bad docs. I've been there; too tired and overworked to care about writing something properly, or wanting to avoid writing a doc enough that I setup some autodoc thing and called it a day. We literally don't get paid for writing documentation.

But good documentation is what made us into good developers (if we are good developers). We should get paid for doing that...

[1] http://worrydream.com/refs/

[2] http://worrydream.com/refs/Ong%20-%20The%20Writer's%20Audien...

> effectively communicating ideas through text was one of the most underrated skills in software engineering

Absolutely. So many hour long meetings could be shortened by better communication skills (just more targeted), or even a small email chain.

Communicating in short form confidently is a skill. Many people, including myself (something I've been working on) struggle with saying something that was a complete idea in a meeting and not stopping because they feel like they need to say more. Short and sweet is the way to go pretty much whenever you can, for technical work that is.

And many many people don't do it well. On both ends. Reading is a skill too.

I find 'small email chains' don't help at all. Too many people just don't read past the first sentence or paragraph. And email is slow.

I usually 'escalate' quickly. Support didn't understand a ticket comment I made on how this isn't a bug or why there really is a workaround for it?

I send them an IM trying to coax it out of them/get them to understand for a few minutes. Doesn't work? Quick call and do screen sharing. Problem usually solved after a few minutes. Problem is they might stay longer than that took just to 'catch up' ;)

This is really not that different from when we were all at the office just that the last part would be walking over to their office and looking at the computer together. In some situations that makes it even easier nowadays because I don't need to take an elevator down 20 stories and back up again after.

Having asynchronous means of communication is great. But as soon as the back and forth is more than maybe twice on each side, there's probably a miscommunication happening somehow that will be much easier to get solved with a really short feedback loop. Some people you have to call right away coz they just type soooooo slowly ;)

Not only in writing but also in plain English. I see situations like described below over and over.

Example 1 - too much details. Morning stand up. Manager: what's the status of that new feature. Senior Engineer: well I tried to call that service but it was timing out so I spoke to Bob and he said to check with DBA on why that stored procedure but it's so slow and turns out index is missing so we tried to add it but mysql and varchar something fckn something...

Dude couldn't you just tell it's delayed due to DB and then expand if needed.

Example 2 - insufficient details I return from the meeting and discover avalanche of emails, chat messages and urgent meeting invite, all with same topic - "Blah service fails, we are blocked" but no details apart from that. On the call I get description of the problem - blah service fails and how everyone is blocked and how infinitely critical it is and what ETA for resolution would be. What endpoint? How does it fail - timeout, connection aborted, 503 response, 200 response but with error message?

I like documentation that starts with a minimal but functional example, followed by the most common additions to improve the solution and finally a complete documentation of all functions.

Having links to actual code, like GoDocs have it, is something I appreciate too.

Effective communicating is a crucial part of every job. I think in software engineering, a lot of us are introverts who want to deprioritize this soft skill, but the truth is still that people matter more than the code.

And communicating gets even more important the higher up you move in your seniority.

Documentation can also be anything. Is it your initial RFC or ADR, or is it a spec? Is it a set of product requirements? Is it inline with your code so it produces a manual when you build it? Is it a set of articles or tutorials written after the fact? Is it a README?

Effectively communicating through text amplified due to WFH. If you can avoid syncing up on video chat and resolve something with a couple of back and forth messages. That's a win

I find documentation to be relatively straightforward to write. The issue for me is sitting down and slogging through the activity, which seems almost antithetical to writing code. It's like doubling the work in a far less rewarding way. And then you have to go back and update it any time the code changes. It's a sort of necessary evil I suppose...I think most of the problem is that devs just can't be fucked to take the time, and I'm often guilty.

>Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

I thought they were going to go the direction of "he's an asshole" and was ready to accept that, but this particular criticism is actually disturbing. People with strong visions can often appear to be "making it up as they go along," when really they are just subpar communicators.

Short story, I am helping my current company switch from a monolith to service-oriented architecture, and in the process have built a framework for spinning up new fully-deployable services from scratch that gets engineers 90% of the way there (minus the business logic). I have a strong vision for how it works and had a dozen-page RFC accepted by the engineering team for it. Yet there are engineers who think I am making it up as I go (I have been asked this indirectly), without any vision guiding the pieces into place. I have chalked up this feedback to me needing to improve my communication of the vision.

So the post's response of "I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us" is disturbing because it makes me realize just how difficult communicating a vision is... if this hero that the poster paid $5k to go see can't even convince one of their fans, what chance do normal people like you and I have of convincing people that we're not making it up as we go?

>EDIT: I realize that I am posting under the assumption that the person's hero does in fact know what he's doing. If he truly is making it up as he goes, the above doesn't apply.

What is wrong with making it up as you go? I mean everything I've ever built I had a notion of what I was doing but most of the real work was in the details. Anyone could say I was making it up as I go. I'd be like yeah, if I knew completely how to do it, I'd already be finished it.

Then there's the times where you think you know exactly what you're doing and after going down a road you realize it's the wrong way. Failing to learn and see the signs and make the embarrassing declaration that you got lost and need to turn around is never good. But some people just keep driving. It's hard though when there's a big line of cars behind you that think you actually know where you are headed.

Nothing wrong with making it up as you go, and I didn't mean to sound like I was knocking it, if I did. Sometimes everyone fumbles around trying to find solutions that work...it's a totally valid way to approach some problems.

Sometimes it's a hybrid of knowing what you are doing but not knowing the implementation specifics. You know you need to connect high-level pieces A, B, and C with specific constraints, but it won't be until you get into the low-level implementation that you'll know if it is indeed possible. I think that's an example of both having a vision and also improvising as you go.

I am concerned about how to effectively communicate visions to people, because it gets everyone rowing in the same direction. If nobody thinks that you have a vision, when you do, there is no reason they should choose your direction vs just do their own thing.

> What is wrong with making it up as you go?

Nothing if you're good at it. But if you're hoping to learn something from someone, it is pretty disappointing. How to make it up as you go along is far less teachable.

It really depends.

I take this really just to mean "everyone has faults".

People often idealize heroes and think of them as beyond human. If you do that and met your hero then your illusion will often be shattered. But the problem is just that you were putting them on an unreasonable pedestal.

Of course some people are frauds and some people have no idea what they are doing but manage to make people think they do. But I didn't read this as being one of those situations. Just someone they saw as beyond human being only human.

I like the phrase “kill your heroes”. Not literally, of course. But in your mind. They are just flawed people like everyone else that happen to have been mythologized. Learning more about your heroes often leads to disappointment.

I have different take on this

I "know" guy who's conference speaker, so he knows other conference speakers, drinks vodka with them and so on.

He says there's significant amount of bullshit aka things that work nice on slides, things that only work cool in theory, but in practice they arent as great

I think that's what OP meant

A common meme I've seen recently is "no one knows what they're doing".

I think people like to believe this because it helps them cope with impostor syndrome, or maybe they think it puts them on even ground with people who do in fact know what they're doing.

My model for people who "know what they're doing" is that they tend to have a well-organized hierarchy of rules. At the base are principles; at the top are opinions.

The foundation tends to be pretty simple, deeply held, and unchanging, while the higher levels are increasingly fluid and specialized. The higher you get on this stack, the more "making it up as you go along" it becomes, but every improvised part is perched on something more stable.

They key to "knowing what you're doing" is organizing this hierarchy well, having the right supports in place to successfully guide improvisation and course-correction while steadily fortifying the foundation.

It's clearly not true in all circumstances. You can bet that an airline pilot has a very clear idea of what they are doing, and so will your dentist. Closer to home there are plenty of sub-fields in software where I'd be completely lost but when (say) we have to add a new endpoint to the webservice I work with, I absolutely don't have to make it up as I go along.

Your assessment of why people like to believe this seems spot on.

Even worst is the meme that “programming is just copy+pasting from stack overflow”

The criticism may depend on different values of "making it up as you go along", i.e., it may not mean so much "just wing it in ignorance" vs something like "even if you have many answers you don't yet have all of them, and new answers generate new questions exponentially...". So, perhaps less "everyone's ignorant" vs "we're all living in a land of many unknowns". But, yeah, he did find it disillusioning, and maybe is over-generalizing from a one-off experience (in contrast, I've done similar and was nothing but impressed, finding it is extremely valuable to learn from the best in a field).

How do you distinguish between what you do and "making it up as you go along"?

IME most people will generally appear to be making things up as they go – even if they have significant relevant experience. Every situation is unique, and experience tends to look more like having a list of techniques with varying degrees of expertise, rather than having a playbook for every situation. You have to look for the expertise rather than raw confidence.

In sports terms it would be something like a baseball pitcher being able to throw a great curveball, a great fastball, and an all right slider, and knowing roughly what situations to use them in. There will still be a high degree of randomness and mistakes will be made.

Agreed. What experience and talent gives you are instincts that improve the chances of whatever it is "you're making up as you go" working well.

I would much rather work with people who have a good track record of making it up as they go as opposed to people coming in with a fixed idea of how something should happen and are more likely to misapply whatever lessons led to those views (probably someone elses anyway).

> built a framework for spinning up new fully-deployable services from scratch that gets engineers 90% of the way there (minus the business logic)

I'm guessing that this was based on first-hand experience building such services and witnessing engineers struggle getting new services up. And not so much that you've had specific training or past experience in developing bootstrapping frameworks. This would be my definition of making it up as you go and is great way to do it. Another way is learning how to make bootstrapping frameworks and applying it wherever you can which doesn't go as well.

Related thing I'd add: be very careful about taking a dream job; I've seen this happen a few times--it's likely to disappoint. Also dating a minor celebrity crush.

In your particular instance, I would have collaborated with a single team to work on converting a single service over to the new framework. Once some success was made, it would be much easier to make traction with other projects and teams. Also, a vision or a plan doesn't mean you're not winging things as you go.

Building a new framework should be way at the bottom of your list of things to consider. If you do, please make it a blackbox. It's tiring how many details one often needs to get into before being able to do something they could have summarized in a sentence the whole time. But this is a general issue!

Also which "hero" is charging 5k for courses and what form does the course take?

(I work at Red Hat, and my programming heroes are also my colleagues.)

I wonder if it was a course at something like a conference? I think those are expensive. I can't imagine anyone is charging 5k that seems absurd

It just means don't blindly trust the experts.

The problem is idealizing such people in the first place. Sure, they may have had incredible achievements, but they're humans at the end of the day.

> Hacker News and r/Programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date, the comments are almost worthless

That's a weird one. I don't know anything about that subreddit, but HN comments are frequently great. I submit stuff because I want there to be HN comments on it for me to read. I typically read the comments first and only bother opening the link if they were interesting.

See: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/

>HN comments are terrible. On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. ...

>And yet, I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical commentary. On topics I'm familiar with, while it's rare that a thread will have even a single comment that's well-informed, when those comments appear, they usually float to the top. On other forums, well-informed comments are either non-existent or get buried by reasonable sounding but totally wrong comments when they appear, and they appear even more rarely than on HN.

Pretty much this. HN is still gazillion times better than everything else on the internet. And that is excluding the absolute gold comment from members that were part of those battle stories.

It is also a reason why I dont want to mention or see HN links in mainstream media. Although I think most reporters sort of know this as well and tend to not mention or link to HN as source.

Obviously HN commenters like us are going to think that. Honestly, I bet even YouTube commenters would say the same about their own community.

That’s not obvious to me at all. I comment on both YouTube and HN, and I don’t feel I’m part of any “community”. I just think the quality of the average, highly upvoted HN comment is about 100 times greater than the equivalent YouTube comment.

I frequently bookmark both an article + its HN thread when the comments are full of related opinions, info, and links.

You should check bitcoin early-days posts

R/crypto has a great community fwiw

>I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

Full stack compresses two jobs into one. It's purely for cost-savings. They're paid so little because companies revert to "well, you can still only do 8 hours, so you do half as much of each", but really that's just them trying to weasel out of paying for knowledge. They also blur the lines by putting full stack along-side other devs, even though the other devs may not have invested the same time to gain as much knowledge as full stack.

When you take a full stack job, you undervalue your knowledge (and the time invested) and are selling it for roughly half of what it's worth.

I've been a "full-stack" developer at large tech companies, and my experience is there at least it means "frontend developer who can put together a basic API server". My fellow full-stack developers and I would spend most of our time building out frontends, which was generally regarded by others as challenging and specialized work, and maybe 20% of the time adding API endpoints to fetch or update some data, which was considered straightforward.[0]

Not having to wait for some other engineer to make the backends made us a lot more efficient. It definitely was rewarding to be able to complete products end-to-end.

Hiring standards and pay were the same as for any engineer, at least in FAANG.

[0] Yeah, occasionally we had to optimize some SQL queries or whatever but we're competent engineers, we can figure it out even if it's not what we do every day.

> my experience [full-stack] means "frontend developer who can put together a basic API server"

This is 100% accurate in my experience too, and it's also true in the other way around: "full-stack" means backend developer who can put a basic SPA using React/Vue.

From the frontend perspective: they call themselves full-stacks for knowing how to spin up a NodeJS HTTP Server powered by Express with MongoDB inserting JSON in the database. But they are missing:

- AWS/cloud computing: not necessarily creating the infrastructure (although that's a must on more senior levels), but how to orchestrate the different components together.

- databases: why SQL/NoSQL, beyond basic SELECTs, knowing how to properly add indexes, debug why queries are slow, modeling, understanding locks implications and transaction levels, and so on.

- tooling: how to set up a bundler, linter and formatter, testing, CI/CD. This overlaps a bit with the responsibilities of the DevOps engineer, but a full-stack should know at least on intermediate level all of those things. I can't say how many times I've seen "senior full-stacks" that had no clue about how webpack worked at all.

From the backend perspective: they call themselves full-stacks for knowing how to spin up a React/Vue app that does basic CRUD operations using forms, powered by a UI framework like Material UI. But they are missing:

- CSS: most will find CSS hard/annoying and won't bother understanding at all how it works even on a fundamental level, will defer to hacks most of the time to make things work, especially when it comes to adjusting for edge cases like responsive design or cross-browser support.

- the DOM: normally they don't understand it at all, or to a very limited extent.

- Web vitals: how to measure and makes things faster and performant—not really including here overly optimized, but just making sure your app is 60fps or close to that most of the time. Usually when things get slow either on the network side or in the app itself, those engineers will blame is the framework/library, not their misusage of it.

Those lists are definitely non-exhaustive, as I didn't even mention more advanced stuff like protocols (how HTTP works? most can't answer), caching, etc etc, but you can get the point I'm trying to make:

The problem with the term full-stack is that only very few engineers really are sufficiently great on both sides of the stack and could say that they mastered both, simply because there's just too much to learn! Frontend has become so much more complex with SPAs compared when it was about rendering static HTML with some CSS and basic behavior with jQuery. Same for backend with the advent of cloud computing and several types of databases.

I've been coding professionally for a decade and I've met only a single engineer that I'd consider him full-stack (he checked all those boxes I mentioned and more). I think I would also include myself, because I spent 50% of my career spent as a front-end engineer, became senior, then I transitioned to back-end engineering because it pays the same or more and it's less stressful (for most of the regular companies that most of us work at). My current title is "principal full stack engineer", but in practice I only do backend/devops, I don't actively code front-end but I keep up with the industry by following the new trends and testing things here and there in personal projects.

Ultimately, I believe for being a full-stack engineer you have to be first a front-end (or back-end engineer) then learn the other, what we have today is most people doing the same from the very beginning of their careers and they either go deep on a single one or in none of them.

There's also an issue with how many full stack web developers who are actually capable of doing all the things he lists.

My experience is that at some scale it works out okay, but beyond a certain point it just falls flat for most. We deal with insanely talented developers, who will trash a database, because it don't understand how it works. Talented JavaScript developers, who don't really understand how HTTP works... or load balancers, or caching... or webservers. Sometimes you get these fantastic software machines as deliverables, complex, you can't monitor them, or configure much, and the it just implements a basic feature of HA-Proxy or Apache, but badly.

My point is that they should be paid poorly, because they fail to be excellent at every part of their job, but rather than: Yes, this should in most cases not even be a job title. If you find someone who can do all of this well, you almost can't overpay, but are you really sure that you want to tie everything up on one person anyway?

It is not 2 jobs in 1.

Full-stack developer knows some frontend, some backend, some sql. They are paid good money because they are convenient, not for their knowledge. A dev who does only one thing knows way more about it that a team of full-stack devs.

Full-stack devs earn a lot and will probably earn only more in the future.

This is mostly a result of tech advancements like cloud infrastructure, tools etc that takes all the hardest things from you - like managing a DB, implementing security, managing infrastructure, deployments etc.

You don't need deep experts because of it, generalists are perfect for quickly shipping new features.

I would do "full-stack" over a decade ago, when there was less of the notion of "front-end engineer" (which still sound a bit ridiculous to me) - the front-end was mostly HTML and CSS. It was a good experience, to go from requirements gathering to the database schema and back to presentation - it helped me see the whole picture.

Why is everyone saying they’re underpaid?

You can make doctor level salary at the ceiling if you move to a FAANG as a full stack dev.

The fact that boot camps even exist shows that it’s not that difficult of a job.

Other industries boot camps don’t even exist.

there is plenty of other software engineering work that is way more complicated than full stack web dev, and there are a lot of web devs.

What common position pays better than full stack?

"Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology."

It sounds great because it is great. I don't make that much and I work on boring systems.

I guess those numbers also explain why the author can recommend maxing out the 401k. People supporting a family on less than $100k don't have $19.5k per year to put into it.

You have a great point, but let's balance this out with a few of the author's other comments.

- OP uses the phrasing senior engineer.

- Never worked for FAANG. This is relevant because $120k + bonus/benefits is basically a FAANG new grad. Fairly normal for SV tech companies.

- Those numbers likely provide a solid standard of living, but as a senior engineer you are likely underpaid.

- Esoteric and proprietary knowledge means if you choose to go elsewhere, you will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to using industry standard tools. There are of course tradeoffs and lots of general learning that comes with experience, but all other things equal it's a disadvantage.

> I guess those numbers also explain why the author can recommend maxing out the 401k

Yes, but again fairly typical for the target audience I think. There are even startups trying to target this market to optimize the flow of money from salary -> 401k -> post tax contributions/megabackdoor -> other investments, brokerage accounts, etc., e.g. https://www.helloplaybook.com/

Just as a sanity check, BLS suggests the median SWE wages work out to ~$110k.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

I'm an intermediate dev, masters degree, 9 years experience, non-FAANG, higher cost of living area (not SV, NYC or NVA), and work with obscure tech and proprietary tools.

It sucks that I suck. Oh well.

>This is relevant because $120k + bonus/benefits is basically a FAANG new grad. Fairly normal for SV tech companies.

There were a few post on HN recently about fresh grad asking for / being paid $200K and anything lower they felt they were feeling lowballed.

For those of us outside US we could never quite grasp whether something is true or not. Salary across the pond is just incomprehensible.

This rings home for me as well. I remember my (now ex) wife saying she was going to quit working and be a stay at home mom the day I hit $100k salary. Effectively cutting it in half economically. I feel like folks who say these kind of recommendations also need to preface the fact that not everyone can afford to. I couldn’t afford to put anything in a 401k for years.

My prior manager said something about everyone should be contributing the max. Easy for him to say as a manager... with a physician as a wife.

> It's not important to do what I like. It's more important to do what I don't hate.

This one has started to dawn on me. I'm never going to love my job as much as I love my personal projects, so a job that I don't get very excited about but doesn't drain my energy is better than one that I get somewhat excited about but does drain my energy (not that it's impossible to have both, but it's rare)

This is a very pessimistic long-term view, in my opinion.

Life is extremely, infinitesimally short. If it's at all possible for you, you should try to spend as much of it as you can doing things you love. I know many people can't, but it's bleak to just give up and permanently settle, I think. (Especially if you don't currently have any dependents who rely on you; it changes the equation if you do.)

I don't look at it that way at all. I'm choosing to conserve my finite energy for the things that matter most. It's all about priorities: of course I would like to have a job that I'm both excited about and not too stressed about, but I can be happy and fulfilled with one that simply doesn't dominate my life (in terms of time or energy, because those are separate things), because my job is not my life. And being uncompromising about having a job that really excites you can force you to make all sorts of other sacrifices (time, stress, risk, maybe even things like money and lifestyle), which is where the prioritization comes in.

This is a very western view on life.

This is a really really big one if you ask me.

It seems to me that many if not most people I meet fall into one of two camps.

The folks that just don't care at all and do the minimal amount of work they can get away with not to get fired. The other side is folks that care so much about it that they spend so much energy on as to ultimately be unhealthy for them and also making it worse for the rest of us (not taking vacation, unpaid overtime etc.

It is very rare to find people that care 100% while at work. But after ~40 hours each week that's it. Sure I'll stay later for that one meeting that's sorta important and needs to start at 4:30p.m. But you better not try that every day from now on. Want me to be on call for a fixed rate that has nothing to do with my salary? I can't log an hour for a 5 minute call at 1am and I can't take time off in lieu? Good luck getting me on that rotation!

I made this exact choice about 5 years ago and my life has dramatically improved.

>> Third party recruiters are leeches

Can confirm this and it was surprise for me when I discovered it. I assumed they would try to maximize $$ in my offer in order to maximize their profit. Yet most of them were trying to get offer accepted as quick as possible. Seems like more offers with less money in each is preferred over less offers with more money in each.

The same dynamic occurs with real estate agents. A successful agent optimises for quick sales, while giving the appearance of trying to get the best price. Very important to know when dealing with agents if either selling or buying a home.

To be more explicit: as a buyer, especially in a tight market, the seller’s agent will often do things or reveal information to the buyers benefit (against the interests of the seller they are supposed to represent).

There are “rules” to how the game is played, and how the information is revealed, and a lot of it seems hidden (in fact I have seen agents that don’t understand the perverse incentives!). A seller’s agent will usually need to make sure they have deniability, and they will prefer options where the vendor remains happy (so the vendor will use them again, and recommend the agent to other sellers).

I have only a very little experience, and none in the USA, but that was what I noticed in my own country.

It surprises me how little effort people put into understanding the game, given that playing it well can easily make the same difference as many years of income.

Some real estate agents will, if asked, agree to a more top-heavy commission -- e.g. instead of x% of the total sale price, y% of the amount over $z. (I don't know the exact details, but my dad did this when selling his flat.)

A quick tip for homebuyers/sellers to save on realtor fees. Contact the title company and they'll gladly tell you what you need to do to close the loan. Maybe not ASAP, but they are more vested in you doing the busy work and doing it right than they are the worthless realtors. Half the time realtors in my state wouldn't even sign the offer to purchase and include their info even though it's illegal and they can lose their license.

Recruiters are like men on dating apps: spam as many people as possible without reading their profiles, treating people like objects

Who hurt you??

That post actually might have started a genre in Reddit. Here's the next ones:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nnw7yd/sob...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/noa841/sup...

I guess there will be more on their way.

> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

Couldn't agree more

Yeah it's striking how this is not the majority opinion even amongst seniors. I'm mid career I still have to ask people very experienced why they always jump on the most long-winded complicated way to solve a problem, often simple enough to require very little.

There is still to this day the idea that we're supposed to plan to future like oracles or pad our resumes on the company's dime.

which is why leetcode makes no sense, as it focuses on premature optimization and writing the most advanced code possible which no freshman will be able to understand, at least not without dissecting it for a few hours first.

Isn't leetcode more about "passing" the technical interview white board questions? Not a reflection of what real world code looks like.

> Algorithms and data strictures are important--to a point

For me, 90% of day-to-day algorithms use is not writing O(nm) or O(n^2) code, and knowing which data structures to use to avoid it (usually a hashtable, occasionally a heap or balanced tree).

It all depends on your use case. If your input is bound to a small N, I’ll take the simplest to understand implementation regardless of algorithmic complexity. Future you and other people will thank you later.

If small-bound is <20 and likely to never be >50, yes. Otherwise, be careful; future people will not thank you for that timebomb.

As the guy who has to deal with your code years later when the company is bigger...please think about the complexity, especially if it is a simple problem. Or not - that’s why I have a job

I don't know why you have been downvoted, you do have a point. Algorithms are tailored towards specific purposes. If you for example have something that runs with an n of about 5, and it's not in a hot path, the clear concise solution may well be better. Besides, with small n there is more to the cost of an algorithm than just its asymptotic growth.

However, to the point of the person you've replied to: It's good to know that stuff to be able to assess the situation in the first place.

I'm fond of saying that one of the big differences between theory and practice in CS is that in practice, we don't immediately drop the coefficients. Instead we study the problem to learn what the coefficients are and use that knowledge to guide our approach. For instance, there are times a linear search will just flat out beat a binary search due to cache effects.

It may also be faster for small N, as the big O notation swallows the constant factor. It’s not accidental that standard lib’s sort algorithms will fall back to simple insertion sort at the end of recursion when n is small. (Though please correct me if I’m wrong, I’ve only once digged into the sort algorithm’s code in cpp and java’s std lib)

in my 25 years of software development, 90% of the time, you don't need to optimize the code and the worst solution in time complexity is totally fine. then there is another 8% of situations where trading in space for time complexity is the solution, i.e. using lookup tables. the remaining 1-2% of the cases you might need a combination of some data structures or containers from the STL or boost (in the case of C++). I've never had to roll some special version of a data structure or container or algorithm myself from scratch, and I work on some really complicated real time software.

> If I didn't learn something from the junior engineer or intern this past month, I wasn't paying attention.

Amen! Not just junior engineers. PMs, analysts, testers. We all have a lot to learn from the rest of the team!

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

The other ones are quite obvious but this is the one that really resonated with me. People, with experience, tend to get more pragmatic and less "academic".

Pragmatic for me is knowing what’s wrong at compile time, and not being told much much later at runtime that I nested this array in a dictionary in an array wrong, or that my string is an integer.

I got older, stopped using python for exactly the reasons above (I just really felt that it was wasting my time for trivial reasons), and found mypy which made it bearable again.

Yeah, I'd be on board with that if 99% of the people talking about typed languages at the moment weren't using Typescript for use cases where you literally get instant feedback from hot reloading as you code.

Every time I see an example of a bug that TS would solve, it's something that I routinely find in 2 seconds by looking 10 degrees to the left at my second monitor and noticing the screen is white and there's some red text in the dev tools. "Compile time" doesn't mean anything if it consistently happens 0.5s before "run time".

Groovy is a dynamic language that runs in the JVM, it lets you put @CompileStatic at the top of every class.

I believe typescript also has options for compiling statically.

> or that my string is an integer

Have you ever considered PHP?

Yeah, the funny thing for me is that I run my business on Haskell exactly for the sake of pragmatism.

The last time I had a job was on a Clojure team, and that team has since abandoned Clojure and some of my former colleagues have come to me and essentially said that they got tired of fighting with runtime errors.

As I got older the more I appreciated static typing and expressive type systems. To each their own.

I keep getting downvoted on Reddit for stating that I personally hate TypeScript to the max. It ruined the beauty of JavaScript (once you know it, anyway, I understand there are difficulties for JS-novices) and I honest to goodness 100% do not EVER find myself thinking: "Gosh, thanks TypeScript!" - on the contrary, it's always: "For fuck's sake you stupid POS TypeScript, you're wasting my time for no benefit at all."

Strong-typed languages (especially in the damn browser) make no sense to me. It's not like we need to manage memory or anything.

20+ Years of experience here, and I hate TS with the passion of a thousand suns.

It might be your strong wording that people are responding to

The benefits of typing are, imo, largely unrelated to needing to manage memory

I disagree on strong typing. I think this is actually a good improvement that prevents many silly mistakes. But static typing and constant (re-)compilation is the part that kills the joy when creating software.

TypeScript isn’t strongly typed when doing “.map” on a non-array crashes at runtime: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55229131/typescript-arra...

> Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

I don't see people commenting on this one! That may be a good thing because it means people are not questioning it :)

I like TDD when I’m mostly dealing with functional/library like code where I have a solid understanding of the interface/api.

Just put all the expected input/outputs in a big table test and iterate.

TDD is awful when you don’t have a clear idea about the interface and need to mock a whole bunch of internals that are likely to change.

Techniques aren't culty, people are. I've been practising TDD for years, but I've only ever heard of this cult in web forums.

Count yourself lucky then. I've tried to work with TDD cult members and it was one of the worst experiences of my professional life. A good sign that people have moved into the cult is when they start saying that people who are not using TDD are "unprofessional" or produce "shit" code.

> The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

I really should

Damnit me too

Do it, if only to find Clojure.

Highly recommend a journalism class at local community college.

Or just learn how to take notes. Notes should be made with the intent that someone new could understand what's going on. With that approach, if you can't make good notes, you're thinking too much about what you know and less about what others don't.

Can you elaborate on that? Why journalism in particular? Have you done this? Are you better at docs?

I studied journalism at college as part of a more general media studies course.

It does help but I am not sure I would describe _my_ education as a panacea.

The main reason it was good was because it helps frame how you think of writing,

The most important things go first. Statement of fact, then you go into what the implications are, then you start introducing less and less relevant elements.

when you’re writing you keep the 5 “W’s” in mind, make sure you answer them. (Who what where when why), for instructive documentation you add: How.

Obviously an education bakes this into you in a better way than I can convey here.

What I learned is probably only decent for writing overviews.

Personally I find structure to be the biggest bottleneck/difficulty when making documentation.

What do others normally struggle with that don’t have this education?

I recommend a class on instructions.

Learning how to write proper instructions is the gateway to proper documentation.

This is good he is not drunk enough to tell the main dark truth - there are no senior engineers, only some people who finally managed how to cope with their imposter syndrome. Oh whait...

If you keep learning and improving, imposter syndrome never goes away. After you settle in, you can get used to what you are capable of. I’ve never lost mine, it’s learn one thing, discover two more you didn’t realize were important that you don’t (yet) know, recursively

> If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

Sometimes fixing the problem will require special access to Production which you don't have, or even a specific role with that extra bit of initiative.

Otherwise i agree 100%.

If you're frequently being paged for stuff you literally can't fix, then the process/monitoring/alerting has broken down somewhere and needs to be fixed. If it can't/won't be fixed, then the company needs to hire ops people whose specific job is to react to and triage system failures -- devs should not be treated as escalation machines. If the process can't be fixed and the company won't hire people to handle the process, then you quit.

> Sometimes fixing the problem will require special access to Production which you don't have

If it's unfixable, that's when you quit

This is true unless you own a meaningful portion of the company (>1%). To dump your entire investment because of extra hours is not a way to get that asymptotic upside.

Maybe... none of this applies to people who own meaningful portions of the companies they work for.

Probably people are honest when they are drunk. There is nothing to argue with any of those comments.

But this one stood out for me!

> Titles mostly don't matter. Principal Distinguished Staff Lead Engineer from Whatever Company, whatever. What did you do and what did you accomplish. That's all people care about.

That's true unless you get acquired. At that point, your title is what your new overlords will use to determine your role, salary, and even whether to lay you off.

I mistakenly asked to be called the "Staff Engineer" as employee #1, I think I'm going to correct to "Principal Engineer" as soon as I can.

I've seen that happen to an excellent domain expert at a company during radical downsizing. Though TBF, that round saw fat, muscle, sinew, and bone cut.

To say nothing of a lot of brain.

> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

This a thousand times. Having empathy for future devs, maintenance, and bug fixes is so important.

Amen. Something bizarre I have noticed though in junior-almost-senior engineers is that they pride themselves in obfuscating and writing "highly complex" logic, with no documentation. It's almost like they are demonstrating their new abilities in the worst way possible. I have been dealing with one of these engineers recently, and they have expressed to me that they love writing <highly problematic, confusing code> because it's so terse. It's been a point of friction, actually, because I have been trying to get other engineers to help on the software they have been contributing to, but it is nearly indecipherable without the original author's help.

Very frustrating.

> Something bizarre I have noticed though in junior-almost-senior engineers is that they pride themselves in obfuscating and writing "highly complex" logic

I think it happens because most measures of code quality are quite fuzzy, but brevity (which is valuable, other things being equal) is relatively objective. "Have I made the code shorter?" is a much easier question to answer than "Have I made the code easier to understand, modify and maintain?"

Amen to that too. That's probably the most complicated part of being a manager or tech lead. You have those amazing junior-almost-senior engineers that could be way more productive and yet deliver better code, purely by "doing less", but the over-engineering gets in the way. You know they could be top-contributors, so you don't want them to leave. But at the same time it's very tiring!

I noticed that they put a lot of their self-worth in the sophistication of their code, so it's difficult to criticise without making them feel bad. You need alternative methods of getting them to "see the light" and write code that's more understandable and maintainable by others.

i was debugging some very terse, elegant, and dense code. i added a bunch of logging throughout to understand what was going wrong.

someone then removed all of my logging because it was ugly.

and then had to put it all back in when another bug was coming from the same terse beautiful code.

I wish more managers and business stakeholders investigated this more carefully. Team members of this type add a shadow overhead that impacts velocity dramatically. It’s always visible to average competent devs on the team, but can be invisible to managers who don’t investigate as to why only one person is particularly productive on the team. Most people won’t go to their bosses and say ‘so and so writes overly complicated code that’s making my life a living hell’.

In fact, I think a third-party auditor would be a valuable service for dev teams to utilize at least once a year. Totally neutral party that can come in and say ‘We’re pretty sure the codebase is too complex and we noticed the commits came from so and so’. The business value here is you can root-cause velocity issues that can come from decent people who need to be reigned in (not necessarily fired).

I’m literally prepared to pay to have these people objectively assessed.

The same goes for junior writers who think that complex sentences and words are a sign of superiority, and later discover that the real (and bigger) challenge is writing clearly.

I think there's an element of pridefulness too, in having the ability to manage dense and intricate stuff at all. They're very smart, and it makes them feel good to be able exercise that and juggle and retain so much context at once. And they don't realize how fragile that juggling is, that it's going to take a ton of effort for them or other people to come back to it.

I think this is more prevalent for some languages/stacks than others, too; there's definitely a cultural aspect fostered the language owners or whoever the leaders are.

> Something bizarre I have noticed though in junior-almost-senior engineers is that they pride themselves in obfuscating and writing "highly complex" logic, with no documentation

I've noticed this too. One thing I've had mild success with is the concept that a particular programming document (especially in functional programming) is really a series of mini-documents. Each mini-document has function-level comments, a signature, body, and returns that tell part of the story of what that function does. The minute that the collective of those fail me and I find myself reverse engineering code, then we have failed the team and cost the company money.

Some complicated things must be done, especially at the size and scale of our products, but complex things are painted with a fine veneer of interfaces and documentation.

I think another exercise that can help is putting junior engineers front and center to architecture. Whether it's exposing them to review, the review process of a Senior engineers design, or putting them front and center to design implications. I've seen having to figure out the difference between a controller and a service cause some really positive abstract thinking that puts people on the order of thinking for the group rather than their own merits.

Sounds like the style in which most Wikipedia articles are written.

I worked with a guy very much in that vein. He had enough years of experience to call himself senior, but it was clear his actual skill level was halfway between junior and senior at best. He wrote the most clever, fancy, opinionated code I've seen in a while, and he wrote a lot of it. I weep for the programmers that will come along in a year or so that have to figure it out.

Sounds to me like you have a bored engineer, and their energy is misdirected :)

Does that matter. A team with a senior/junior separation should have in place a system of peer review where a code not understandable to a peer will not get merged upstream. There would be a CI system with a linter that forbids abusing syntax for writing dense/obscure code. If a code requires documentation there should be in place a doc-coverage tool which forbids new undocumented code from being merged upstream.

If these systems are not in place, and a senior developer can get away with writing overly complex code, then that is the fault of management, not the developer.

It goes too far though. The virtue of simplicity needs to be balanced against the virtue of making proper use of advanced language features.

A first-year student is unlikely to understand C++ template metaprogramming, or just about any Haskell code, but that's not to say they should always be avoided in production code.

> The best code is no code at all

This can be interpreted as advice to avoid the 'inner-platform effect' anti-pattern. Good advice, but personally I'd rather express it in terms of the inner-platform effect.

IME good commenting alleviates a lot of the “problems” with using complex language features. I’m thinking redis style comments (see here[0] for antirez’s philosophy on the issue). If you’re doing something that’s not immediately obvious, explain what you’re doing! That way others can verify it during review, and when someone is reading the code later they can read the comment to understand what’s happening rather than having to parse the code. IMO this applies just as much to simple constructs as to complex ones. Big for loop? Throw a comment at the top telling me what it does so I don’t have to read it when I’m skimming later. Better yet use `map` with a well-named function. Either way, provide a semantically meaningful summary of what’s happening.

[0]: http://antirez.com/news/124

> A first-year student is unlikely to understand C++ template metaprogramming, or just about any Haskell code, but that's not to say they should always be avoided in production code.

They're just the people to read a book on the topic and try to use it everywhere...

There are various universities that teach Haskell or similar languages in first year.

This sentiment is exactly why programming in an org-chart is so much different than programming as an individual.

Don't apply corporate best practice designed to withstand turnover to personal programming - you're leaving abstraction and efficiency on the table.

The better code for your own projects is almost definitely inscrutable to a newcomer a lot of the time. It's okay for there to be prerequisites to understanding.

I agree with this in principle but in practice code I write that’s quick & easy and not very readable is usually not understandable by me in a few months either. So if it’s a personal project I hope to last I still want to keep it simple with my code.

I’m not sure, you can become the newcomer yourself when you have to come back to parts of your code base months later. My experience writing simpler code has been pretty successful to respond to customers wanting random new features.

I disagree strongly with it on multiple fronts. That concern should be secondary to your program actually doing its job well. Your customer will literally not care how elegant or ugly your code is; they just see the end result. And when the program fails them, it really doesn't matter to them whether your juniors understand the code or the error. Moreover, not every abstraction is (or can be expected to be) accessible to an entry level engineer. Some technologies just take a long time to master, and doing that can also require higher-level abstractions.

So I would say great code is code that:

1. Does its job well (robustly, performantly, etc. in whatever proportion is applicable)

2. Is maintainable by engineers with reasonable expertise in the tooling

in that order. If you can manage all that and make it accessible to your junior devs, that will of course make your code greater. But don't lose sight of what your customers care about. Your business isn't there to make you feel good about maintaining code, it's to provide customers with value.

It really does matter to the customer if the junior understands it when the code fails though.

Easy to understand code can be more quickly patched and repaired by anyone on the team. If you don't need to call in the senior who built it two years ago to repair it, and you can have someone do it right away, it is better for the customer.

It depends on what you're optimizing for. I like to think of it this way. A good "programmer" can take ideas and turn them into working software that is performant enough, meets all of the requirements, etc. This is a mostly static operation. A good "engineer" can take ideas and turn them into working software that can be changed, updated, and maintained for years to decades by multiple programmers.

There are code bases at my current employer that are entirely "ok" and still being worked on from before I was able to spell my name. Projects that have had continued development for >20 years by armies of engineers and the code is still readable and simple to understand.

As with all software engineering, it’s all about trade offs and context.

That performant code that you wrote maybe at the expense of readability? It could very well become bad code when you leave the company and it falls to a junior engineer to modify it to fit some changing business requirement. Or, there’s a bug in the code and the amount of time it takes to fix it is a direct function of how quickly and completely that junior engineer can understand the code.

For me, the hard part is knowing when and how to make that trade off. I’ve definitely erred on both sides often enough.

I strongly disagree. You're packing a bunch of different metrics of quality into a single bullet and somehow suggesting those are separate than the second bullet point. Readability is just as dependent a metric as the others. If you make things that are hard to read, I can guarantee they are not going to be robust, as well as likely not performant.

In my experience, the easiest to maintain code is very often the most efficient and robust as well, because people haven't felt the need to hack around it at every corner.

This assumes you are absolutely certain you know what the code should do. And that it does what you think it does. Hence while you might think “performs its task” is an easily defined I’d disagree. I’d take clear code that wasn’t working over code that was hard to reason about and somehow worked every day.

Exactly.

How many entry level engineers come onto a project per year? 5? Is onboarding them onto the project is a deliberate and streamlined way such an undue burden that you must change your programming style to avoid it?

But, I do not know if this metric is quite 'complete'. Because, I am very sure, wrapping concepts in mind is more difficult than understanding the code.

I am not saying the code cannot be made better or more clear. But, it also depends on who you are writing to. Somebody who is not familiar with certain style of programming cannot easily read the code of certain level of complexity.

When I was hacking away my first big program, I could not write functions. Or find reading functions easy. The whole thing was a big wall of glorified assembly sewn together by labels. I am not sure why I was like that then, but I found concepts 'functions' and recursion or any other conceptual stuff really hard. My code was, in its own twisted way, 'most simple' and utterly unreadable.

I find the same sort of difficulties while reading some FP snippets. I confess it was a very short affair, but I had some difficulty reading it and even when I understood, I could not just write or think code in the same style.

There are ways to make your code better, your intentions clear but 'can be understood by a first year CS freshman' is bit abstract criterion.

It is kind of like, vocabulary and prose. You can make your prose clear. But, people have to work on the vocabulary on their own.

> The best code is no code at all.

This is completely agreeable.

Edit : Changed some poor word choices. Added an analogy.

Future devs? More like future me... how can I build this so I can change it or fix it when PM decides against it in 2 weeks?

Absolutely, you need to care for that future dev who's an idiot when writing code today because that's going to be you in a week or two when you've forgotten all about it.

I agree with having empathy for future devs, but I think it only goes so far. I've often seen junior engineers unable to differentiate between code they don't understand and bad code.

Usually they end up thinking they can do a better job, decide to rewrite the thing from scratch, and take 10x longer to rewrite it than they thought it would take. And accomplish nothing in the end, because the thing they rewrote worked in the first place.

Indeed, and during rewriting they realize why the original code was made that way and how it solves the problem more efficiently than their rewrite.

I always say that's too hard for older devs like me to understand. Go easy on the elder abuse.

I think of it as writing code for the computer/compiler, rather than for human readers. If the computer "understands" the code, you think you're done.

I real life working on a team with ever changing code, that is the barest rank minimum.

As a young programmer, I thought I was a master when I got the code to work. Now I know that is just the start. Making it readable and changeable is where real mastery lies.

This is very hard to convey to young fools as I used to be.

There's even more. In the beginning you are proud if the code _works_. Later you find out it's 10x harder to write code that _can't fail_...

Thats what I've noticed with TDD advocates - the amount of code required is enormous and distracts from the flow of control. Everything replaced with mocks and stubs and there's objects replaced with instances from global scope, not very good.

I've been fighting this at my company lately. We have a CDF that _clearly_ rewards people who write really advanced Ruby code. We have a lot of working, but not perfectly architected code that people come back through, pull it out into a module, and add a bunch of "included" and meta-programming.

It works. I look at their code and think "that's neat", but you added 0 functionality while making it hard for the lowest half of the engineers to work with. You could have accomplished the same thing with hard-reference to a class.

Someone please translate that to Latin and start plastering that on office walls so people take it more seriously. It’s going to save all of our mental health in the long run.

It's been seven years since I've tried writing any Latin, so you should assume this is butchered. (edit: I think it's less butchered now)

codex bonus a discipulo prendatur

codex magnus a novo prendatur

codex optimus nullus est

Part of the problem is I couldn't find any good word for "code". "Codex" sounds cool but may not be the best fit here.

EDIT: Forgot a word. Also, I think "prendere" is better for "understood" here than "scire", which is more like "to know".

EDIT2: My friend suggested using the subjunctive for "comprehend" so that it's "may be comprehended" instead of "is comprehended". Also I got the tense wrong initially and I think that's fixed now.

EDIT3: "Ablative agents" are a thing. This is a rough language. Thanks, James.

EDIT4: prendar -> prendatur; aka "oops, should have used third person"

That is frequently misinterpreted to mean use dependencies instead of writing code. It’s all the same to the product.

As a junior, the best I've seen is surfacing the complexity appropriately:

1) Readable Interfaces usable by juniors when parts of the code will be used by lots of devs and will almost certainly change

2) Higher complexity behind the interface for parts of the code that change less often and require more skilled engineers

And complexity needed to make a simple interface is the most forgivable complexity. Simple API, worth some cost to get there.

Came here to post exactly this quote. I've never seen a wiser drunk. So lucid, and so relatable.

I came here to say this. +100 to this.

There is good or bad code - there is only code

"I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly."

- The barrier to entry into webdev is low. You just need a laptop.

- An awful lot of websites seem to have been thrown together by morons; shipped; and never improved.

- For most sites, performance isn't an issue - strong tuning skills for PHP, SQL and Javascript are not an issue.

- A "full-stack webdev" generally doesn't do the full stack - few of my webdev colleagues have been interested in networks, for example.

TBH I don't know. In my last position I was paid £45K; I was the most versatile and experienced developer in the company (12 people). The bosses constantly complained that there was a dire shortage of talent to recruit. They recruited quite a few overseas visitors.

Most of full stack web devs I know know everything but know it anywhere between poorly and ok-ish. It works more or less fine until there is some issue which requires deep knowledge of either of the stacks.

Generally I'd prefer to have front end dev + backend dev in my team over two full stack devs.

> Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

This got me and somehow bloody true.

> Hacker news and /r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless.

Maybe he is on to something.

I think HN is big enough that you're not going to beat the averages with advice from the comments here. They're filled with the kinds of opinions that are more popular on big company teams than good startup teams.

> front end AND back end AND... AND... AND... AND... AND... AND... Seriously, why are [full stack] webdevs paid so little.

Two reasons: 1. everyone calls themselves this these days, and 2. they are often quite weak in each of those parts of the “full stack”

Yeah. I'm nominally a full-stack developer, but I know fuck-all about React; I can maintain an existing project, but it would take me a significant amount of effort and googling to kickstart one from scratch, and diagnosing and debugging issues and writing effective tests is always a struggle.

YUP. They're "two jobs", but I've yet to work with a full stack developer who is master of either. Most commonly they're great at front end, and have a very superficial understanding of how to do anything on the backend, and even then the backend basically has to be node.js for them to contribute. No way am I getting them to change the database schema or build a new service.

Adding on to the thoughts about everyone writing terrible code sometimes, there is also “terrible code makes lots of money”.

Source: over 20 years doing software dev at various companies with terrible code that makes millions. Happily my current job has really great code (imho).

How often do we see a collapsed and failed start up where people will say "Wow there was some good tech at that company". Good code and cool code exist on an independent axis as good business plans.

Here's what I've learned as a senior SWE:

1) People skills dominate quality of work output in terms of value to the business starting at around this level. Really, introverts should avoid programming altogether which is weird because this was one of the few disciplines in which introverts could truly thrive but those days are gone.

2) What company leadership tells you they value has nothing to do with what they actually value. Look instead to what the company punishes you for doing or not doing.

i see nothing i disagree with here.

so either i’m doing OK, or we’re both fucked…

Or you're drunk too.

> If people are trying to assign blame to a bug or outage, it's time to move on.

Cannot agree more especially if you previously had a blame-free culture and it doesn't look like it's returning in a hurry.

I have seen this happen when new management comes in and don't value root cause analysis and look for a person or team to blame to protect themselves.

> Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Just get yourself a drawing tablet and some whiteboard software like Openboard (http://openboard.ch/index.en.html).

> Good people write shitty code. Smart people write shitty code. Good coders and good engineers write shitty code. Don't let code quality be a dependent variable on your self worth.

That's like saying that eminent book authors write shitty books. Sounds like an excuse.

> I've become what I've always hated: someone who works in tech in a career but avoid tech in real life. Maybe that comes with being old.

It's all about finding the right project. REST + CRUD shit gets exhausting after 5 years. There's an entire world of excitement outside of REST + CRUD.

Their are authors I generally enjoy that sometimes write terrible pieces. They just tend to do it less often.

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

I see this in myself also. Static typing is such a fever at work especially amongst juniors and mids. Sometimes it’s almost as if they believe object types will spontaneously change at runtime, unpredictability.

But that’s exactly the point. It is too easy to introduce a code change that effectively will unpredictably (because it was unintended) change a type to something unexpected. And then blow up much later in spectacular ways.

Try writing something asynchronous in python with futures and complex nested data types. See how long you enjoy being told that you’re trying to look up a key in something that doesn’t seem to be a dictionary before you switch to static typing with mypy, and can spend your energy on solving the real problems.

I’ve been programming for way over 20 years, and I do not understand how people enjoy debugging something that the compiler would just tell them.

I get all that, however I am saying that they’re being superstitious about it. I’ve been programming at least 20 years and thoroughly love programming in a dynamic language. My preferred being Common Lisp.

Better refactoring tools alone make static typing worthwhile

I’m operations focused (traditionally Sysadmin but I can code to a decent degree and do professionally) but I suspect we’ve all been bitten by something being inferred we didn’t expect.

YAML interpreting NO (Norway’s country code) as false being the most immediately obvious.

Bash has a lot of these kinds of issues too, I don’t remember all the rules so I quote everything to be safe and still get bitten by variable expansion sometimes.

Types that change depending on what the value is: that scares me.

> I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

AMEN to this. I've been in the industry for 20+ years and at this point I know so many different frameworks (front-end and back-end), databases (SQL and NoSQL), networking protocols, browser differences, ORMs, it goes on and on.

I'm paid what I barely consider adequate.

I think people in the industry are paid based on the potential value they can create (whether real or not), knowing many things or understanding fancy technologies matters little if one can't put them to use for the benefit of the company.

I've helped found multi-million dollar companies that I left before I could "cash out" because they were desktop based companies working with technology I considered growing stale and I wanted to switch to the web.

Now I'm doing the same thing with another company with the web, expect I'm handling everything as a sole-engineer, full stack.

Here I'm dealing with creating an Angular application to replace an aging ASP.Net MVC app, having to rewrite hundreds of SOAP services into a proper REST architecture, and dealing with an Oracle database who's schema we need to keep in place. With a C# .Net Core back-end.

This company needs me, badly, but I doubt this is going to be come a cash cow either (no equity, just a paycheck, and their budget is tight).

Just doing my job as usual.

Value created plus how easy they are to replace (supply and demand).

Also, most companies like to brand themselves as ‘tech’ to signal that they are growth based. Why is Peloton a tech company? They’re not.

A lot of us have jobs because companies need to fulfill the image. It’s half the reason why so many people are allowed to do full-stack when in reality they would have no business dealing with those parts of the stack in a real operation.

So no, you don’t actually deserve more money because you are working on more things in an inconsequential space (e.g What the entire Peloton engineering team does is probably bullshit. You need maybe a few devs).

There are certainly better examples than Peloton, but that’s what came to mind (a home gym tech (lol) company). Can’t wait until Bowflex starts hiring out web developers.

I see where you're coming from, I do all that too. But it's the "jack of all trades" thing. You "know" all that, but do you actually __know__ all that.

I can develop a nice relational database design, write the SQL stored procedures to manipulate it, write a backend API and write the front end SPA for it. I don't think I'm an expert in any of those things though, and if I am then it's more focused on the backend API stuff.

Like, I understand CSS better than most people, but I'm not a guru like some. I can write SQL for anything I need but I couldn't tell you anything about performance tuning my SQL outside of seeks vs scans and the size of a lock.

Understanding the basics of these things isn't really a daunting task and that's why full stack devs aren't paid half a mil a year. But you have to accept at some point that if you're full stack then you're rarely going to be considered an expert in any field. That's not bad though having rounded knowledge is super good.

>You "know" all that, but do you actually __know__ all that.

Companies that underpay fullstack web developers usually don't actually care if their engineers __know__ all that, either. They just want the cheapest, fastest, CRUD app they can demo and ship out ASAP. As a result, these employers fail to recognize (and reward!) the fullstack web developers who do actually __know__ the full stack.

At my last job there was a rockstar web developer engineer who could easily double their compensation by moving to a larger company instead of a startup. My advocacy for them to get a raise or promotion was cast as 'the engineer is complaining again."

From my experience this is true because the team is so focused on getting the backend business logic sorted out, catering to new customer demands, that they develop new features overnight.

Then just assume the front-end will consume it and output a little, inconsequential DOM element here or there.

The issue is in actually using all that knowledge in a single position and creating enough value. Larger organizations have specialized teams that move faster at their function rather than generalized devs.

The way for full-stack devs to profit most is to work at smaller companies and trade that for equity and seniority.

Seriously. Fuck pandas. And fuck dark for encouraging it.

It has one of the more confusing interfaces I've seen, and operator overloading just makes it worse. Numpy, on the other hand, is fairly straightforward and intuitive (and to be fair, a much simpler tool).

They basically created a DSL within Python. It's a total nightmare unless you're someone who uses it in notebooks every day (and it's impossible to typecheck)

Dask

not a single comment in here addressing two of the most important points brought up by the OP. the redditors managed to do it constructively. while gender and racial politics are clearly orthogonal to the concerns of the average HN poster, the tech we build is imbued with them and we are responsible for the issues produced by the lack of their consideration.

> There's not enough women in technology. What a fucked up industry. That needs to change. I've been trying to be more encouraging and helpful to the women engineers in our org, but I don't know what else to do.

> Same with black engineers. What the hell?

I'll start. I have experienced multiple occasions of men being derisive towards women in the workplace, and have been nowhere near forceful enough in shutting it down. I have offered support after the fact, but I need to become more confident at voicing my displeasure in the moment. This applies to all of my male co-workers, and I would bet nearly all of you as well.

If you care about this issue can you consider editing your first paragraph? It's likely to preemptively derail the discussion you're trying to get started.

edit made, I hope that is more palatable.

I don't think derisive attitudes in the workplace adequately explain it, because there are a lot fewer women in CS/engineering school too.

I certainly don't mean to imply that misogyny (which those kind of attitudes are a specific expression of) begins in the workplace. It's just where I currently am in life and where it has been most apparent to me in the past several years. I agree that it starts much earlier and there is significant work to be done at that level as well.

"My self worth is not a function of or correlated with my total compensation. Capitalism is a poor way to determine self-worth."

This is gold. I think the whole industry is failing to value an engineer. For 5+ yoe, I think performance is a function of eagerness to code and innate intelligence. Yet the industry is paying engineers largely on function of yoe

Is this true though? I think engineering salaries very definitely plateau at a certain point, much more so compared to other professions even

> If people are trying to assign blame to a bug or outage, it's time to move on.

All the best outages have unclear blame.

> When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

This is the saddest. One more soul taken by the shrinking of the hacker culture.

I don't know. Possibly it's simply because when you accept a career in the thing you're passionate about the thing you're passionate about becomes work.

Another thought that has occurred to me of late: when I started in this field it was "Computers" (capital "C") — a thing really by nerds, for nerds. Increasingly it's the web, mobile. Our "customers" are increasingly not us and so the decisions that would have come so readily to us on how to proceed, what features to implement are instead handed down to us from design, marketing....

It happened to me too. In fact I'm in the process of leaving the field for something else altogether. I do tend to get weird looks and "whys" when I mention it, but its difficult for me to really explain in a concrete way, but I've just lost all excitement and motivation to do anything with programming (despite my mind still operating in very much a hacker mindset, where I see X and thing "I bet I could make X do Y)

Been doing this professionally 15 years, and still am enamored with tech and programming. I actually avoided getting into the field because I was worried it would ruin my favorite hobby if I did it professionally (which is why I majored in Philosophy instead of CS in college)

I get sick and tired of all the rest of the bullshit, but never with tech and programming itself.

Being the best coder doesn’t make customers want your product. So at a certain point, I got over coding. I am now more interested in business and product managements.

Perhaps because we don't feel productive anymore. 90% of the day is meetings, slack, and dealing with production issues because of the unnecessary complexity, then the last 5%-10% of your time is developing - usually involving getting JSON to and from a database.

The other day, I started playing this game called TIS-100. The game simulates something like assembly programming and I had so much fun with it. Then I realized it’s been nearly half a year that I’ve actually written proper code for something (rather than a GitHub workflow script or account provision mechanism for testing framework) and built something that I was actually proud of.

The love and passion are still there, but their buried under the needs of my current mediocre job. I need to find a position that will let be get back to the task of building things again, rather than just tweaking scripts and keeping the machinery humming.

I think I’d feel that way to if I had stayed in web development (which I only did as a short stint many years ago by now), and I felt it happening already.

It just doesn’t have much to do with computers and technology in the specific ways that I got enamored with computers and technology. Playing with bare metal stuff at work does. Of course, for someone else it might be the opposite.

Is it "the shrinking of the hacker culture"? I've become an expert in 3 different js frameworks in the last 7 years. Its' fucking exhausting.

>> Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

OK, you're drunk.

Really? This one aligns pretty well with what I've learned.

It seems that the entire stack of people in software development is tasked with identifying problems and subdividing them in to smaller problems. This goes for coders structuring lines, architects structuring modules as well as managers structuring teams of architects and coders.

The quality of a software engineer shines through all these layers.

He sounds like me when I'm extremely sober, so surprising to see how unoffensive and tame people's "secret thoughts" are, well at least the ones that get massive upvotes on reddit.

I disagree with the comment regarding the tech stack. It does matter - it only doesn’t if you’re willing to spend more money scaling worse preforming applications.

yeah, it is referenced later on.. it's a drunken post, so a bit disorganized :D

>Being a good engineer means knowing best practices. Being a senior engineer means knowing when to break best practices.

True. You do not know how it is true!

> I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly.

In my experience it’s because they either don’t really know any of the stack well enough to do more than implement someone else’s design, or else they don’t know most of the stack well enough to do even that without very poor, confusing implementations.

I’ll take a backend person and a backend person willing to do front end work before a full stack “dev” any day of the week. And I’d take the full stack dev before a front end one.

> And I’d take the full stack dev before a front end one

So you think one person can't know the entire stack but also half of the stack is not complex/important enough to be worth specializing in?

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages.

Exactly the opposite for me. I just can't stand hovering a variable or a parameter and not getting its exact type, or typing "." after a variable and not having my editor gives me all the available methods on that variable, or running my code just to discover that it instantly crashes because I made a typo or forgot an argument or passed the wrong argument or tried to call a method that doesn't exist on that variable or whatever other issues that happens only with dynamic languages. What a waste of my time.

As I said in another ranty response in this thread, I do not understand how people enjoy spending time debugging trivial issues, that even a simple static type system would just plain tell them at compile time.

I think it's a grass-is-always-greener thing?

Early in your career, you lean into one or the other. And then years later, after you're confident you're right, you find yourself trying the opposite paradigm and liking things about it.

Both have pros and cons, and if there was a correct answer we'd all just go with that one!

> Exactly the opposite for me.

Yeah, same here. I started my career as a huge dynamic languages fan, and Python was my favourite language for over a decade.

But now, after 20 years, I appreciate a static language with proper IDE support and code completion. Offload the work to the computer, that's what we do for a living after all.

However, after spending a year working in Rust, I think this can be taken too far. The safety guarantees in Rust are amazing, but the overhead for contorting programs to a form the borrow checker will accept, and the mental overhead related to async/await compared to goroutines is too much.

My favourite language is now Go, and I find it strikes a good balance between static checks and productivity. Rust is still a more elegant language in many ways with things like generics and iterators and their enum types (algebraic types I think is the term?) and zero-overhead abstractions and clean error handling. Go feels a little hacky by comparison. But it's simple and way more productive for me personally, so I prefer it.

Interestingly Evan Wallace (constexpr here on HN) implemented esbuild in Rust initially, and switched to Go and stayed with it for much the same reasons, but also noted that the Go version performed better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336284

> But at a high-level, Go was much more enjoyable to work with. This is a side project and it has to be fun for me to work on it. The Rust version was actively un-fun for me, both because of all of the workarounds that got in the way and because of the extremely slow compile times.

After a year of working with Rust and switching back to Go, I second this. I'm enjoying programming again and finding it easier to put in long hours.

Agreed. Try going from "I think this is a callback that returns a promise which can return a string or an int?" to "The compiler/IDE are telling me this future can only return an int and won't let me advance until I make my code comply"

Agreed. I did this journey twice. It was all static types when I was in high school and early college. Then I thought I was too smart to need the computer to do all that type checking for me ("I know what my program does, I don't need a compiler's help!") later in college and early in my career. Then I got incredibly sick and tired of working on really big projects in dynamic languages lacking the ergonomics of good static analysis.

I started programming with .Net languages via Visual Studio (which is quite a good IDE), and I disliked dynamic languages exactly for the reasons you list. But nowadays I mostly prefer dynamic, optionally typed languages ala Julia.

Typing a '.' and seeing the members is very nice, except when the type is not concrete and it's not clear what type is actually being returned. Then you'd have to do trial-and-error using a slow compile cycle. In a dynamic language like lisp, you could just `(inspect x)`. In Python, you can just `embed()` and run, e.g., `x.__dict__`.

The IDE telling you about syntax errors and non-existent functions etc is very nice, except when you use macros and meta-programming and now your stupid IDE won't just shut up (I have this problem even with Python in VSCode).

I've been doing TypeScript for 4+ years and been a web developer for 20+ years. And I experience literally zero benefit from TypeScript. Never has it given me anything useful. To me, it's a massive pain in the ass that slows down myself and my team, even if they think it doesn't. They just don't know JavaScript or have shitty quality of code to begin with.

That, and TypeScript generics can get so freaking complex that the code does NOT become simple to read at alllllll. It's a massive waste of time.

Also read: https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-typescript-tax-132ff...

TypeScript, PHP, and Python have support for typing and the commiserate IDE benefits, and I'd imagine these languages account for a super majority of software written in dynamic languages.

Especially the typos part. In Ruby and plain JS sometimes you feel you need unit tests even for the dead simple stuff cause there might be a typo in there... and such tests are an awful chore to write and much more efficiently caught by static typing

Depends on how expressive you are being.

There are some problems where you don't want any barriers to getting your idea out of your head.

No rules are best for new exploratory code.

Types and structure are good for existing code.

I wrote Ada years ago when it was newish, and it was hard.

But working on existing Ada code is wonderful.

Yeah, I loved it when I started because I could easily try things out in JavaScript. Eventually I've come to love Typescript because I don't waste time on dumb things anymore.

The ideal for me would be some strong static typing mode for the main code providing all the guarantees you want and some dynamic typing mode for the tests which lets you test everything well.

The main downside for me of the static typing is that it's close to impossible to provide a good testing experience, DSLs, mocks and spy objects kind of require some form of dynamic typing to be usable.

This man knows how to write good documentation

All of this is quite reasonable.

Why does he hate pandas?

Maybe because they are expensive to breed and keep them alive. Not an expert to say if they are worth or not. Nature wants them out but human wants to keep them.

I assumed it was an autocorrect for Lamda

Rather be sober, guy at courts.

Whiteboard paint exists.

Ive never had a good experience with whiteboard paint. The walls are not smooth so you always leave some residue when removing the ink. Over time it becomes pretty noticeable unless you spend a significant amount of elbow grease cleaning it.

>I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks

hehe, right

> How do you know if you have a good [recruiter]? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

That's ... that's not at all how that works.

No kidding. I've been hired through third party recruiters twice, and both times were fantastic. I am just guessing, but I got the distinct impression that both were doing better and were better compensated working independently (one owned his own business, the other was highly placed) than if they were recruiters for a large company.

OTOH, my experience with same-company recruiters was that they merely existed to act as a simple filter and PR person. They didn't invest anything in me (the candidate) nor really examine if I was a good fit before I got passed further on up the chain.

Now that I really think about it, the quoted advice is pretty much a mirror opposite to my experience.

> If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

Yes, something is wrong. But it could be many things. Here is how you can find out:

1. Is the thing that's broken a bug in your code? Then it's your fault, so fix it. This means you need better testing too, and maybe a redesign to resist failures. Try to get alerts at 9am in dev so that they don't come in at 2am from production.

2. Is the thing that's broken a server thing that Ops is supposed to deal with? Probably you should quit. You can also work with Ops to redesign the server stuff to be something less prone to failure. Often Ops can't do this themselves because they don't know enough about how your apps work. Go talk to them, help them out. Or quit.

3. Is the thing that's broken a false alarm, or not important? Quit. Or work with Ops to create better alarms and tests. Ops doesn't know your app, so you need to help them craft the SLIs and SLOs.

4. Did Ops create all these alerts themselves without your involvement? Quit. Or take ownership of the tests and alerts for your apps.

5. Is it a huge slog to try to figure out how the alerting works, to work with Ops to make changes, to add tests, or to figure out what's broken or not and troubleshoot it? Definitely quit.

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