FrankyHollywood

Search for a specialized software company helps. Don't go for the standard web bureau building webshops. I used to work in finance, with complicated calculation software, and at the moment I work at a bio-informatics scale-up. Very interesting field, and no average developers here.

I'm in my 40s, and I build software at a scale-up.

They explicitly searched more mature developers, because of several failed projects with large over spending the past years. Management had enough of it, and now wants a more experienced dev team.

And it works quit well I must say, code quality is very high and we make our deadlines. Our product is stable and atmosphere in the office is great actually. Not much stress here, because we don't spend months building some never to be used generic-multipurpose-framework and we don't jump into every new technology which comes around..

Not hiring experienced developers is a big mistake! :)

At the same time, all kids go to school these days. That is a kind of collective parenting. All kids in a country learning the same stuff. Sure, most is about cognitive skill, but you also learn social conventions, manners. And if you have a good teacher, possibly some self esteem and discovery of your talents.

It's so normal, you don't think about it, but it is less than 200 years since every regular kid can attend school. Before that this was only available for the upper class.

> I can be impatient with people. I dislike and distrust bureaucracies. I don't have enough patience for incompetence.

I hire people with these qualities, most intelligent people I know are like this :)

I recognize much of what you say. Worst experience I have is with devs who call themselves 'coach' and know it all. They should be quiet more often.

At the same time, I have this junior dev in my team who is very stubborn and never listens. This is very annoying, she can work days on a single small assignment. When I give advise on how the problem can be tackled I see it is just being ignored.

So, in these cases 'listen more' is good advise :)

> What do you do if you genuinely don't want anything?

Exactly that, people react offended when I say I don't want anything. Nowadays I ask for coffee, or beer. You end up with kilo's of coffee beans, and enough alcohol to get you killed. But, at least it's not more stuff.

Who needs random stuff? Most people don't, so they make up lists and do shopping for each other. It's a waste of time to me.

Kids want stuff, and don't have money, so presents are wonderful and exiting! But why would you want gifts for adults? They even made it a ceremonial obligation at specific moments like birthdays or Christmas,

A spontaneous gift can be fun, someone who knows you well can buy you nice serendipitous gift. But Christmas shopping.... horror! :)

life is a "a big slop of global mutable state" :)

Same can be said for almost any high-school class. In physics and mathematics you learn mostly tricks to get at an answer for a question, where the sole purpose of the question is entertaining students.

Only in my 20s I read biography's from people like Feynman (1) and Erdös (2). Great reads! Really make you exited about math or physics. I wonder if high-school teachers even know these persons. And if they do, why not talk about them?

(1) Surely you're joking mr Feynman

(2) The man who loved only numbers

haha, you gave me a good laugh there, nicely spoken! :)

But you are right. People who are lonely or depressed are better off having some good friends they can call to hang out on a Friday night. Having some huggy colleague or kisses from you aunt don't make you feel better.

My experience is that an intimate relation with someone is nice at first, but as more people have said in this thread, it fades away after some years. I personally never feel better than having a great night with friends.

I had this feeling recently reading Voltaire quotes >200 years old, but could have been written today :) https://www.azquotes.com/author/15138-Voltaire

'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck' is a good read in the same spectrum

"In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do."

Donald Knuth

thx a lot, found some other interesting books along the way!

https://dl.acm.org/acmbooks

With 8 billion people around something bad is always happening every second. For that reasen I uninstalled all news apps years ago.

I'm never bothered with 'breaking news' or anything. I pick a few moments a day to look at some news sites. And I always start with world news, and end with HN, keeps me positive :)

@spinningslate, question, my Windows Phone is end of life in 2 weeks :) I was considering buying a Xperia with Sailfish.

Why you say it's nearing end of useful life? It's still being maintained right?

> "I think if you want to wrangle a suggestion from Scott's book, it's more about making lots of small pokes at a system and seeing how it reacts, and slowly building on positive reactions from the system."

I can feel a bit for it. I have worked on a complex multi-million line codebase. There was this predictible behavior when a new guy came to join us. Many times they had never worked on such a large project.

First they rant about how terrible the system is, than tell us how wrong the system is, followed by advice about how we should use this an this method or design patterns to make things right.

Only after months of working with the code the guy would cool down. When a (software) system is really complex, you have to get familiar with it. No matter how you structure it, a minimum number of logic and dependencies will always exist. Restructuring will not take away the complexity. It's just replacing them.

Offcourse a clear structure is better for you're understanding than a messy one, but even in the most clearly written code a lot of complexity can exist. I think Scott is talking about this, the point beyond clear structure.

thats complexity :)

"The only two benefits of democracy..."

In my opinion the one major benefit of democracy over all other forms is that a terrible leader can be voted away within 4 years. It's a political system with garbage collection :)

Another reason is people don't like sharing. In democracies the majority of people don't vote for a program where they have to pay for others, even if the net result would be in their advantage.

so it's money, and stupidity :)

My son is 10yo, we want to give him a phone when he reaches 12. It's becoming a bit more difficult, a lot of friends already have one so he keeps asking but he just has to wait :)

I'm not to worried about social isolation. This will vary from person to person. The article mentions all the fun things the writer did when she was a teenager. However, when I was young some kids were addicted to gaming on there 486 or 8bit NES, never met any friends. The tone of the article is a bit 'in the old days everything was better'

Not having a phone will cause some isolation as well. A lot of meetups with friends are announced on app-groups. That was actually the moment when I decided to buy a smartphone myself, when I started missing out on parties.

Why is nobody talking about the fact that kids mis a lot of real-life playing outside in the dirt, and sitting behind a screen... on average 6 hours a day.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32067158

Perhaps because it's the easy way, just blame some chemical instead of taking action. If you move to a friendly neighbourhood and have some rules about screentime kids play outside, I know from experience with my own kids.

I'm no expert, but I suspect a strong correlation in autism development and 'hours spend in front of a screen instead of playing outside with peers'.

some day doctors will tell you all about the great health benefits of inhaling nano-plastics! :)

http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/subtheme.php?token=...

It's not so much about which apps you are using, you don't want to isolate yourself. You use whatever communication channel your friends/colleagues use.

For me turning off Wifi, and consciously turning it on a couple of times a day is the big difference. Just like checking mail 15 years ago. You decided when to open Eudora or Hotmail, checked mail, en closed it again.

For me any app I use is like old school mail checking. I decide when to check. My friends know it can take a couple of hours or sometimes days for me to respond. If something is really urgent, they call me :)

A couple of years ago I felt the same way. The first major annoyance I had was the constant flow of 'breaking news'.

I uninstalled my news apps, and instead I actively browse to a news site whenever I want to read the news. In the years following more apps got uninstalled, and I down scaled my phone contract.

Nowadays I never use mobile data, and my WiFi I always off. It became a habit to always actively get my information. So if I want to check my whatsapp messages, I sit down, turn WiFi on, read messages, and turn it off.

I don't even think about it anymore, it's the normal way of handling my phone for years now. This week I read people on average take between 2 and 3 hours a DAY on there phones. That sounds like alien to me, just can't imagine.

"There are no tricks or rules that you can follow to guarantee you will write good software. As Alex Stepanov said, 'think, and then the code will be good.'"

Excellent conclusion, can't think of anything else. I don't know how many times I've seen programmers apply latest patterns and use trendy libraries only to make a terrible mess out of thing.

I literary heard a guy say last week "we should use MongoDb, it is better than SQL". No context, no arguments, just read a blog entry or I don't know what.

There are no golden bullets, think, and then the code will be good :)

Not necessarily, it's just a new random pick :)

Makes me think about Paulos. I read various books of him. He has an interesting view on the world as a mathematician.

http://johnallenpaulos.com/booksandreviews.html

Good question, perhaps I'm still dreaming and wake up tomorrow searching for coconuts on the beach...

The only thing I know is I worked on many projects at many companies for the last 15 years. This gives some confidence :)

Some do, they are curious, and I can teach them a lot. At this very moment I have a junior engineer in my team. He is eager to learn and we do a lot of peer programming which benefits us both (having to explain why choosing some solution is even harder than making it 'by intuition'.

But the ones who don't are more difficult for me. I think some might be shy or unaware things can go better. The most trouble I have is with the really stuborn who don't want to learn, and think they know it all.

I try to avoid these engineers as much as possible, by hiring the ones I think are eager and willing to learn.

"Please stop thinking there are 10x programmers"

I don't really agree, since I consider myself a 10x engineer.

I have countless of examples of guys struggling for 2 months on some project. They get stuck, ask for help and I look at it and build it from scratch in a week.

It's not I'm typing faster, it's more about choosing the right architecture and libraries. You can save insane amounts of time by making the right descisions.

Besides the overall architecture descisions there are a lot of small day to day choices to make. If this value is not valid, do I throw an exception, or silently log something?

In both the small and big design descisions there is always a tradeof. Talent and (years of) experience makes that these descisions come from intuition, which can make you a 10x developer.

you're right, I'm in the middle of a big project where the lead engineer decided 'data duplication is forbidden'. The mess it created is terrible, both in complexity and in performance.

I can't imagine microservice architecture will ever work in a complex domain without every service having most of its dependent data in its own store.

What would help if people don't look at it as 'duplication' but rather 'caching'.