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Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Personally - I don't see a lot of value in this list (I read all 50 items and watched the video and I regret wasting the time).

There are certainly some valuable concepts - but the presentation is fairly incoherent (including the video of the talk he gives) and not particularly helpful.

Many of these items are utterly unrelated: Some are fairly specific to gaming (profiling/memory layout/timing) some are basic professional expectations (I can schedule my time well). In neither case is there real advice for people who actually struggle with some of these areas.

My item number 51 would be... "I can articulate my point in a more compelling manner than an incoherent collection of 50 things I don't like"

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I think it has a so what problem. It sounds nice but then so...? I failed to understand what exactly the author wanted to convince people to do. Expectations - for who? Let's say someone does exactly this, then failed to actually ship something that people want then it's as useless as not knowing the list at all.

> I failed to understand what exactly the author wanted to convince people to do.

He’s writing a list as part of his imaginary shower argument with his boss and coworkers as to why they are all inferior and he’s perfect and why all the problems they are facing are easily attributed to his list of 50 points of things he feels he does that they are failing to live up to.

At least that’s my take away.

If he's arguing with his boss in the shower, that may indicate he's a bad communicator.

If he’s arguing with his boss in the shower he’s probably going to be fired for inappropriate behaviour.

Or one of them is just bad at managing expectations.

Oh good. I had a feeling it was that and didn't bother reading it.

Mind that this instinct was born from prior experience with my own imaginary shower arguments.

I loved the early and often emphasis on communication.

That gets swept under the rug far too often.

This list makes it clear that communication (of designs, of status, of workarounds, etc) is vital for the professional software engineer.

Does it? Almost every day we get articles on every existing medium regarding the importance of communication. Even the tech circles in 4chan parrot it. Yes, the place known for anti-social recluses parrots it, too.

And it's showing. There is so much emphasis on communication, people started equating quantity to quality. "Just talk more, that's what great communication is about" wouldn't be an observation too far from the truth.

Far too little is invested into researching what makes quality communication. It's just the same old rational arguments against rational arguments, day in, day out. For a field entirely about managing and sharing information, be it to machines or to people, that's pathetic.

If you only compare the sermon to the hymns, it does seem a little redundant. But if I look around my workplace, clear, frequent communication is absolutely a huge need.

Again, this is purely anecdotal and at best rational only. Our field is already loaded with rationality, and most of our "this is clearly better" cases fail to reveal any improvements in case studies.

If people are so certain it is better and believe it is important, let them stake money on it and do research. Until then, the cat is both dead and alive.

You're kidding, right? Nearly every book I've read on management emphasizes communication all the way down. It just comes in many forms.

Clear lines of communication

Culture of communication

Strong vision and storytelling

Open discussions and inclusive of disagreements

Managing "up"

etc

Kind of ironic to have communication emphasized so much by someone who can’t concisely and clearly communicate his expectations.

Most of the points seem to be 'Do I have situational awareness of how what I'm doing fits into the bigger picture.' Generally a good thing to have.

Not just that, but also "am I in the habit of doing things that are conducive to situational awareness" which is perhaps the even more important bit! You can have all the situational awareness in the world now, but when it really matters is when the context changes.

No disagreement, but I'd suggest that situational awareness is an ongoing thing, so if you don't notice when context changes, you never really had situational awareness.

One funny thing about situational awareness is that when you lose it, you don't always know, because, well, you've lost your SA.

Put differently, something you consistently find when you postmortem incidents where people have lost their SA is that they thought at the time they had full SA. They only notice they've lost it when things are clearly going downhill.

So it's important to regularly re-ground yourself with reality even if you think you don't need it. That's a critical component of maintaining SA.

I found some value in this list (read it, but didn't watch) but I agree that 50 unorganized bullet points is too much. I think they could break it down into 6 or 7 larger themes: communication, being a good citizen, using a systematic development process, investing in developer tools, understanding real world end-user requirements, technical requirements, and data flows. All good advice, maybe not the best delivery.

I see it as a list of helpful reminders. It's hard to do everything on this list perfectly, for example I'd give myself a B average.

Profiling, memory layout, and timing is specific to gaming? That’s funny because I’ve had to do all three and I don’t make games for a living.

I find it ironic that the lists focused so much in communication, and yet it had me confused and lost (ie: It failed to communicate to me what this list is about).

Communication is hard.

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