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One of the most enjoyable aspects of my career has been teaching and mentoring engineers with little experience. Everybody starts somewhere, and I would never w

One of the most enjoyable aspects of my career has been teaching and mentoring engineers with little experience. Everybody starts somewhere, and I would never want to suggest an organization I’m a part of ought to bar a healthy, tempered number of less experienced folk. But, organizations aren’t charities, right? I might like mentoring, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for a company to make. Fortunately, there are a plethora of incredibly bright and talented individuals who really can move the needle in your business in a short amount of time. You wouldn’t see it from number-of-years worked, but you’ll find out by investing your time and energy in them. With this attitude and managerial philosophy in mind, I find that you inevitably build stronger, more loyal, more flexible, and exceptionally competent teams this way.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Well, sure. My main point isn't that you shouldn't train hires (you can't really expect to not train new hires). It's that I don't think it's worth it to sacrifice your team's internal productivity for the sake of speeding up the onboarding process and/or making it cheaper - which is what IMO the article is essentially suggesting. The article is about Haskell, but this advice - make code newbie-friendly, avoid "clever" code - keeps popping up again and again. The extent to what's considered "clever" varies between jobs, languages and programming communities. As an example, when my old Java job was grudgingly upgrading from Java 7 to Java 8, my boss took me to the side, and said to me: "I knew you'll be happy about the transition, but if you could, perhaps consider refraining from using lambda expressions; I know you understand them, but some of your colleagues do not". I didn't comply; instead, I've explained lambdas to people in my project. It took few minutes, they understood it almost immediately, and we continued using full feature set of Java 8 just fine. The practice eventually spread around, and the other day I saw a particular developer my boss was worried about, going around the office full of excitement, telling everyone about the cool things he's just learned about Java 8 (namely, lambdas and streams API). Soon thereafter, everyone was using these features, and they've lost their status as "clever code". So, to put my point another way, perhaps instead of worrying about the code being friendly to experienced developers, one should take the time to teach the new employees - just like you are doing.
- SaxonRobber 7y ago
  Lambdas shouldn’t be considered clever. What did these people learn in school?
- clarry 7y ago
  I fully agree with this. I haven't really seen code that is 1) actually useful but 2) so clever that you can't quickly explain why or how it works (or just let the person reading it figure it out or ask stackoverflow...). So I don't really even know what people mean by clever code.
  - Viliam1234 7y ago
    In my experience, a big danger is when someone higher in the company hierarchy is a former developer who no longer writes code. Such person will perceive the new language features or libraries as "too clever, and not really necessary", will voice their opinion loudly, and you can't make them learn and find out that it's actually simple and useful. (And, yes, lambdas in Java 8 were an example of that.)
    - tabtab 7y ago
      Find good examples that you can defend well, and overwhelm them with practical and relevant examples.
- tabtab 7y ago
  In my opinion, Java wouldn't need to use lambdas as often if it had a more powerful object model. You'd define methods instead of pass lambda's as parameters. Lambda's are often a band-aid for a weak object model. For example, if I want to define an "on click" GUI event handler for a given button, the more natural approach would be to define an "onClick" method for that button's object. But you can't do that in Java in a simple way the way you could in say SmallTalk. Thus, one typically has to send a lambda to a "listener" object, which is unnatural.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Well, sure. My main point isn't that you shouldn't train hires (you can't really expect to not train new hires). It's that I don't think it's worth it to sacrifice your team's internal productivity for the sake of speeding up the onboarding process and/or making it cheaper - which is what IMO the article is essentially suggesting. The article is about Haskell, but this advice - make code newbie-friendly, avoid "clever" code - keeps popping up again and again. The extent to what's considered "clever" varies between jobs, languages and programming communities. As an example, when my old Java job was grudgingly upgrading from Java 7 to Java 8, my boss took me to the side, and said to me: "I knew you'll be happy about the transition, but if you could, perhaps consider refraining from using lambda expressions; I know you understand them, but some of your colleagues do not". I didn't comply; instead, I've explained lambdas to people in my project. It took few minutes, they understood it almost immediately, and we continued using full feature set of Java 8 just fine. The practice eventually spread around, and the other day I saw a particular developer my boss was worried about, going around the office full of excitement, telling everyone about the cool things he's just learned about Java 8 (namely, lambdas and streams API). Soon thereafter, everyone was using these features, and they've lost their status as "clever code". So, to put my point another way, perhaps instead of worrying about the code being friendly to experienced developers, one should take the time to teach the new employees - just like you are doing.

SaxonRobber 7y ago
Lambdas shouldn’t be considered clever. What did these people learn in school?
clarry 7y ago
I fully agree with this. I haven't really seen code that is 1) actually useful but 2) so clever that you can't quickly explain why or how it works (or just let the person reading it figure it out or ask stackoverflow...). So I don't really even know what people mean by clever code.
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  In my experience, a big danger is when someone higher in the company hierarchy is a former developer who no longer writes code. Such person will perceive the new language features or libraries as "too clever, and not really necessary", will voice their opinion loudly, and you can't make them learn and find out that it's actually simple and useful. (And, yes, lambdas in Java 8 were an example of that.)
  - tabtab 7y ago
    Find good examples that you can defend well, and overwhelm them with practical and relevant examples.
tabtab 7y ago
In my opinion, Java wouldn't need to use lambdas as often if it had a more powerful object model. You'd define methods instead of pass lambda's as parameters. Lambda's are often a band-aid for a weak object model. For example, if I want to define an "on click" GUI event handler for a given button, the more natural approach would be to define an "onClick" method for that button's object. But you can't do that in Java in a simple way the way you could in say SmallTalk. Thus, one typically has to send a lambda to a "listener" object, which is unnatural.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago