Hacker News Reader

Comment by meisterbrendan | Hacker News Reader

Is this true? It seems, from the comments from the SREs in this thread, that these puzzles are highly relevant to this functional role.

View on HN

Saying it's agism is ridiculous. Google SDEs here, the amount of time I spend on whiteboards solving design problems with my teammates very often out weights my coding time. Whiteboards are incredibly powerful tool.

You don't hand a car engineer manufacturing tools on day one of making a car, you need him to produce a design/blueprint first.

Companies rarely ever hand automotive engineers, or other types of engineers for that matter, manufacturing tools. Software is fairly unique in that the engineers are actually creating or modifying the actual production products.

When you work on a large scale problem you WANT to get a consensus of the large picture first, and that's why whiteboard is so handy. We don't jump straight into implementation since it's very often trivial and it's always much easier to improve and refactor implementation than the design/interface of a system itself.

Yes, I agree with you. My point was that software engineering is unique in that they are the ones who end up building the implementation. Automotive engineers never touch the implementation. Their only product is the design, schematics, and blueprints.

The amount of time you spend writing code on a whiteboard outweighs 'coding time'?

Really?

Let's be clear: whiteboards are a fine tool for design, problem analysis, architecture, etc. etc. People take issue with "write me bubble sort up here on this whiteboard."

The amount of time we spend "designing" on the whiteboard very often outweights coding, yes.

The implementation part of "software engineer" very often is much easier and sometimes even trivial when compare to the design/architecture of the entire system. Implementation is also very easy to improve upon and refactor out, if you have a good design to begin with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com