3 ms·

Your comment reminded me of Edmond Lau's book - The Effective Engineer [1] - where he talks about putting in a good amount of effort into the onboarding process

Your comment reminded me of Edmond Lau's book - The Effective Engineer [1] - where he talks about putting in a good amount of effort into the onboarding process for new engineers. His premise - having a senior engineer spend an hour a day for the first month helping the new employee with explaining the existing abstractions being used, the underlying design of various systems, etc. - would still be only about 20 hours, which is still only 1% of the number of hours that employee will spend in their first year - about 2000 hours. As a result, I believe that armed with that knowledge, the new employee is likely to be much more productive, failing which, at least cause less damage to the code base. I would say that the first example you mention - leaky abstractions et. al. - are just as much (or maybe more) due to poor onboarding as they are due to the frustration of mediocre programmers. There is a lot to be said for good process, which software engineering as a discipline falls short of quite consistently. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-Disproportionate-Meaningful/dp/0996128107/ https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-Dispro...

agentultra 10y ago
Agreed! I would wager that 90% of good software (by a most liberal definition) is designed to be that way by the methods employed to construct it. It's the leaders and managers who set those processes and standards. If they are well versed in the state of the art and understand how to make it work for the business you can end up with crystalline entity software. Most of my job is presently "hacking the process" rather than the code itself so that the team can produce the best, desirable results. I'll check out that book, thanks for the recommendation.

3 ms·

Your comment reminded me of Edmond Lau's book - The Effective Engineer [1] - where he talks about putting in a good amount of effort into the onboarding process

by thr0waway1239 10y ago

agentultra 10y ago
Agreed! I would wager that 90% of good software (by a most liberal definition) is designed to be that way by the methods employed to construct it. It's the leaders and managers who set those processes and standards. If they are well versed in the state of the art and understand how to make it work for the business you can end up with crystalline entity software. Most of my job is presently "hacking the process" rather than the code itself so that the team can produce the best, desirable results. I'll check out that book, thanks for the recommendation.