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> No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon I have found that one of the best thing a

> No one wants to be the person that stops the speaker every 30 seconds to get clarification on every piece of jargon I have found that one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work (as an SDE) and the trust associated with it is you don't have to worry about proving yourself to anyone, and can afford to look stupid. I actually learned this from Principal engineers who over and over would start questions with "I'm sorry, I'm an idiot who must be missing something obvious, but can you explain this it doesn't make sense to me?" I have found doing this exhilarating and ADDICTIVE, because of how often the question ends up revealing that the person just glossed over something or doesn't understand something themselves. Now instead of trying to understand people, I find myself trying NOT to understand something and make sure I'm not letting any hand waving or imprecision trick me into thinking I understand something when it isn't properly explained.

1123581321 6y ago
I also ask these simple questions and it’s funny to watch the head-nodders rush to prevent the question from being answered by the presenter by jumping in with what is often incorrect information. There is a powerful desire to maintain the illusion that the whole room understands what is being said, to the point defending it can be instinctual. Over time this behavior changes as it becomes known I’ll follow up to a cover-up with even simpler questions. :) Some of them have started asking their own!
cmonnow 6y ago
> one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work.. you don't have to worry about proving yourself to anyone but to reach Senior, you must head nod a lot when you're junior (and then later research it yourself if interested), because otherwise you'll likely be deemed stupid and won't make it to Senior.
- wildpeaks 6y ago
  Not only deemed stupid, it can also be perceived as an attack by making the presenter "look bad" and up in retaliations. People remember how they felt a lot longer than who was factually correct.
larsnystrom 6y ago
I was fairly recently asked what the point of implementing a web application using React was, and what advantages it would bring over just doing it without a framework/UI library. I couldn't really give a proper answer there, at the spot. But that doesn't mean I don't have an answer, it just means I wasn't prepared for the question. Like, how do I explain why locality is helpful? I'd need to spend some serious effort planning how to explain such a concept. And that's just a small part of the answer to the question. My point is that sometimes the answer to the question you're asking is just huge, and requires a lot of context to understand. And providing such answers on the spot is very hard. So I think we should cut people some slack when they can't immediately provide an answer. Sometimes things are just not very obvious. Just to be clear, I don't want to discuss the merits of React here. My point is just that sometimes things are too complex to explain fully in every situation. Everything cannot be understood from first principles. You need abstractions to be productive. By all means, question the abstractions, but perhaps not always?
- deanCommie 6y ago
  I'm really struggling to empathize with your point here. I SUSPECT you are expecting that the questionner is going to hold you to an incredibly high and rigorous bar and in fact I don't think that's true. If you say "It will improve our user's perceived client latency" i expect that is sufficient - IF TRUE. And this is the key. In software everything is a tradeoff. I don't know what the tradeoffs with using React are, but tenerally the industry trend right now is React is worth it. But why? I think it's a fair question to understand that, otherwise you're just cargo culting an architecture without understanding it. BTW blindly following a trend is itself a choice and a tradeoff. You might not need a deeper answer for using React than "A lot of people use React, so if we use React it'll be easier to hire people to continue to make changes." That's a valid technical decision to use something! I'm not a frontend engineer, BTW. However I just googled Javascript Locality and React Locality and found basically nothing reasonable except https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45069206/does-data-locality-matter-in-javascript https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45069206/does-data-local... So I do feel like i'm going to illustrate my point here and ask you "What is locality in this context? Why is it important? Is React the only way to achieve it? What are we choosing as a tradeoff?"

1123581321 6y ago

I also ask these simple questions and it’s funny to watch the head-nodders rush to prevent the question from being answered by the presenter by jumping in with what is often incorrect information. There is a powerful desire to maintain the illusion that the whole room understands what is being said, to the point defending it can be instinctual. Over time this behavior changes as it becomes known I’ll follow up to a cover-up with even simpler questions. :) Some of them have started asking their own!

cmonnow 6y ago

> one of the best thing about attaining Seniority at work.. you don't have to worry about proving yourself to anyone but to reach Senior, you must head nod a lot when you're junior (and then later research it yourself if interested), because otherwise you'll likely be deemed stupid and won't make it to Senior.

wildpeaks 6y ago
Not only deemed stupid, it can also be perceived as an attack by making the presenter "look bad" and up in retaliations. People remember how they felt a lot longer than who was factually correct.

larsnystrom 6y ago

I was fairly recently asked what the point of implementing a web application using React was, and what advantages it would bring over just doing it without a framework/UI library. I couldn't really give a proper answer there, at the spot. But that doesn't mean I don't have an answer, it just means I wasn't prepared for the question. Like, how do I explain why locality is helpful? I'd need to spend some serious effort planning how to explain such a concept. And that's just a small part of the answer to the question. My point is that sometimes the answer to the question you're asking is just huge, and requires a lot of context to understand. And providing such answers on the spot is very hard. So I think we should cut people some slack when they can't immediately provide an answer. Sometimes things are just not very obvious. Just to be clear, I don't want to discuss the merits of React here. My point is just that sometimes things are too complex to explain fully in every situation. Everything cannot be understood from first principles. You need abstractions to be productive. By all means, question the abstractions, but perhaps not always?

deanCommie 6y ago
I'm really struggling to empathize with your point here. I SUSPECT you are expecting that the questionner is going to hold you to an incredibly high and rigorous bar and in fact I don't think that's true. If you say "It will improve our user's perceived client latency" i expect that is sufficient - IF TRUE. And this is the key. In software everything is a tradeoff. I don't know what the tradeoffs with using React are, but tenerally the industry trend right now is React is worth it. But why? I think it's a fair question to understand that, otherwise you're just cargo culting an architecture without understanding it. BTW blindly following a trend is itself a choice and a tradeoff. You might not need a deeper answer for using React than "A lot of people use React, so if we use React it'll be easier to hire people to continue to make changes." That's a valid technical decision to use something! I'm not a frontend engineer, BTW. However I just googled Javascript Locality and React Locality and found basically nothing reasonable except https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45069206/does-data-locality-matter-in-javascript https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45069206/does-data-local... So I do feel like i'm going to illustrate my point here and ask you "What is locality in this context? Why is it important? Is React the only way to achieve it? What are we choosing as a tradeoff?"