Ask HN: Greybeard cowboy coder looking for advice on being more professional

I think being a "Cowboy Coder" is problematic in a professional environment.

Being on the both sides, I know how hard is to work with the cowboy coders / lone wolfs, especially if they're introverted.

Inheriting a project written by a cowboy coder might be a nightmare.

Obviously I don't know your background and skillset, so the stuff written below may not apply to you.

You need to learn how to communicate clearly and collaborate with the management and the team members.

You need to learn modern SDLC methods and techniques (basic project management such as Kanban, documenation, clear commit messages, Pull Requests, TDD, CI/CD, IaC[1]/DevOps, etc.)

Coding assignments should be the easy part.

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1. Infrastructure as Code

Thank you. This is the kind of feedback I'm looking for.

It might also be a good idea to also try and get some experience as a PM, to better integrate an understanding of the other side of the fence and the right focal point to approach it from.

Here is one idea:

Have a look at some of the problems that are surfacing in the tech community or new products that are being launched.

Examples: Twitter, all the stable diffusion front-ends, etc.,

Find a stack that lies at the intersection of demand and your preference. (Flutter, React/React Native, Remix or SwiftUI / Kotlin) and get your solution done. Showcase that on Github, Hacker News, your resume.

1. This will bring you up to date and renew your self-confidence as you have something tangible to say that your knowledge has been filled. 2. Instead of doing a myriad of take-home assessments, you can lead with this project and its open source code. If the company's stack is similar, it would be silly for them to assess you again and if they do, you are already prepared for it.

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It is rare to find a team without a cowboy coder. In most teams they are assets as long as they are not asshats as well.

Good luck.

First: congratulations, you've done the hard part (accepting there's a challenge that you need to overcome). Seriously, you probably feel like you're at the bottom of a very deep hole, but that acceptance gives you the opportunity to start climbing. Also, 16 years is not "greybeard" territory. At all. You have plenty of time.

Second: you're looking at a journey of continuing self-discovery. There is no "one technique fits all". Don't judge yourself for not reacting well to any particular thing; use it as a way to better understand yourself - your current strengths, your biases, your blind spots, etc. Was the thing annoyingly obvious? Did you feel like the presenter was patronising you? Did it all go 'way over your head because you couldn't work out the basic premise?

Going wide, especially while you are trying to find yourself, may help you find a thread, or a style, or a philosophy that resonates with (or delightfully challenges) you.

With that said, I am a big, big fan of Plauger's 'Programming on Purpose' books. Nothing is perfect, but he does a remarkably good job of laying out basic principles - building blocks - that can help you go from programming intuitively ("cowboy style") to making software in a deliberate and intentional way. Because the books are collections of magazine columns, they're easily digestible in small pieces - good for reading on transit, over a cup of coffee, etc.

The coding challenges are only worthwhile if you're going to interview at a place that interviews that way. Otherwise they're mostly a waste of your time. If they "don't look like anything I've encountered in my career so far", that's telling you something - that as professional development, they're not getting you anywhere that's actually useful in your career.

Sorry, I think I worded that part wrong. The "coding challenges" I referred to were given to me by potential employers after the first round of interviews. I guess I should have called the "assessments" rather than "challenges". I'll make an edit.

That's maybe a different problem. If their assessments are stuff that looks completely unlike what you've worked on before, are you switching fields? If you're in web programming, are you switching to embedded or databases or something? Or are they just using different frameworks or styles or something that you need to catch up on?

The one that really threw me was a pretty advanced calculus problem. I took some in high school, but this was pretty far beyond my knowledge and had to take a couple days to even understand the requirements. I imagine I would have learned this if I had a comp sci degree, but being self-taught, I never learned that level of calculus.

It's unclear to me what kind of position/stack you are applying for. But I would say if you're finding "pretty advanced calculus problems" in your interview coding challenges, that you may either be applying for positions that require that kind of mathmatic thinking, or the companies themselves do not know how to select relevant gate problems for hiring candidates. It's probably a bit of both, but I would take those as signs that maybe they aren't the kind of company that you want to work for. I have only been a dev professionally for 4+ years, but can say I've been on the other side as the interviewer. The LeetCode/HackerRank hiring code challenges are not without their flaws, but at the same time, there is necessity for assessing candidate's skills in problem solving and their ability to work through coding challenges.

Honestly, someone who is 16 years deep in their software dev/eng. career I would expect to utilize their contact network to find potential jobs above relying on coding challenges and applications. I would expect you to be a Senior level dev who can orchestraste teams and a bit of product/project mangement, if in addition to working on code yourself, demonstrating system and software architecture level prowess and aptitude. These are not so much things that can be solved mathmatically/programattically in a coding interview per ce, unless a hyper-focused chunk is being used as the challenge. But I'm just in the peanut gallery... My advice is to use your network and taylor your resume, use a resume service if you need to -- they can be 3x-10x their weight in making you more attractive as a candidate, as well as perhaps take a new approach towards finding positions to apply to.

Maybe even reach out to people in the past you have worked with and let them know you are looking, and if you have positions you are applying to, pass them the link to the job description and ask if these seem like descriptions of a job that would be appropriate for you. As introverted as so many of us are, we tend to think that we should know how to do everything ourselves. Sometimes, if not many times, we need another set of eyes and perspective on our approach.

I’d echo what others have said about leetcode exercises: their relevance to the actual job is tenuous at best. After 20+ years as a full-stack dev, I can say that when it comes to technical interviews, the degree of difficulty has more to do with the number of candidates than the actual job requirements. Ivies, MIT, etc. have similar problems.

TL;DR: Decide which kind of companies you want to work for. Find out what their technical interviews are like and reverse engineer your prep from there.

Its easier if you are working on some specific problems. There are too many tools. Too many framework. And most of them do exactly the same things. Once you know how one works its not that hard to understand what the others are doing.

So pick a popular well known open source project and take a look at their github repos. Almost all will have their website code on github as a separate repo too. Look at the issue list and dive into the code to try to fix it. If you get stuck ask a questions framed as 'how do i do x its not documented can you guys explain or give me a link etc'. Once you have some interaction going, it will pull you in.

Check out The Impostor's Handbook: 2-parts on various CS concepts in human-readable language.

Also, I'd look into modern practices around the tech stack / programming language of your choice: code linters, debug tools, static analysis tools, refactoring tools, various command line tools, build/packagement tools, etc.

Also familiarize yourself with the CI/CD tools/approaches in your field.

Lastly, find one or more opensource projects with decent QA practices and start contributing to get into the habit of following prescribed tools, code standards, automated testing, etc.

Good luck.

This book looks very neat. I don't know JS, but I will try to go through it. Thanks for sharing!

In no particular order:

Code Complete, Steve McConnell

The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

Programming Pearls, John Bentley

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Harold Abelson

I would start with "The Pragmatic Programmer". It's how I became a "professional" programmer. "Code Complete" is a book on construction. I dip into it when my IF statement has too many conditionals in the test. That sort of thing.

I'd also recommend "The Career Programmer": The only book I've seen that deals with a realistic view of programming in a corporate environment. For example, what to do when your boss stops you in the hall and asks, "We need a tool to do X. How soon can you get that done?" It's subtitled "Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World", which is _just_ what you need to break free of the fantasy land that books and classes put you in. (APress publishes this.)

And don't be fooled by the title: "My Job Went to India And All I Got Was This Lousy Shirt". It's the distilled experience of a programmer who spent a year (or two?) in India when his company outsourced code, and sent him to manage the new group. There are some really important tactics inside, like the chapter on "reading the boss's mind". You don't really, of course, but it explains how to capitalize on "wouldn't it be nice if we..." throw-away comments in meetings. (Pragmatic Programmers publish(ed) this one.)

Oh, and don't be shy about using the Internet Archive to sample all the books recommended in this thread. I haven't seen any bad recommendations, but you don't want to spend more money or read more pages than necessary. The IA will help you decide which books answer your needs the best.

Good luck!

What kind of challenges were you given? Might help if you can point specifically to where the gaps are.

The one that really threw me was writing a function to solve a pretty advanced calculus problem. My degree isn't in CS, so I only took high school calculus and it's been so long since then it took me a couple days of study to even understand the challenge. I was interviewing for a front-end position, so it seems like overkill but I'm not going to fault them for looking for someone of that level.

These comments are great, but to get a job, you can’t casually read Code Complete.

1. Cracking the coding interview 2. Leetcode 3. System design

CTCI will give you the key of the land. The following two will you get a job.

Timebox 60 days. I got FAANG offer doing this and some other offers.

Are they even hiring at this time?

What type of organization have you been applying to? (E.g. Google, Netflix types? Enterprise business types? Start-ups?)

What type of work have you been doing the last 16 years? (E.g. PHP web dev, Enterprise Java/.Net, etc.)

I do not understand what you mean by "cowboy" coder. Can you also talk a bit about what tech stacks are you familiar with and where you want to specialize? That would help getting a more useful path.

Highly recommend the online courses from “Frontened Masters.” The courses are exceptional and provide modern templates, tooling, and workflows. Other courses focus on solving specific problems while these courses teach you how to build a modern application end-to-end solving problems along the way and providing a broader context as to <i>why</i> a particular solution is appropriate.

> why

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

"Text surrounded by asterisks is italicized"

You are the hero this world needs

CS50[0]

Some good book recommendations[1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mAITcNt710

[1] https://teachyourselfcs.com/

I forgot one book. The Elements of Programming Style, Kernighan and Plauger