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IMO the bigger divide is between West Coast and East Coast programming styles. I think California developers tend to be more forward-thinking, and embrace a “m
by dcolkitt 6y ago
IMO the bigger divide is between West Coast and East Coast programming styles.
I think California developers tend to be more forward-thinking, and embrace a “move fast and break things” style. Whereas East Coast devs tend to be more academic, structured and top-down.
Speculatively, I’d attribute this to the lack of non compete enforceability in California. Innovation tends to diffuse a lot faster, and that’s rewarded more of a forward-thinking culture. Then again, if there was a piece of code that could kill me if it fails, I’d go with an engineer in Boston before one from Palo Alto.
- frockington1 6y agoYou touched on it in your post but I think industry plays a big role in the differences. East coast has more financial and medical based industries (broad generalization with several hundred counter examples) so you're going to have a slower more deliberate pace than something like slack or uber
- jhayward 6y agoI've seen this as well. The West coast division of the large company I worked at tended somewhat toward 'architecture astronaut' situations, highly abstract languages and tools and was fairly cavalier toward error cases and operational considerations. The East coast was very opinionated about handling every single error case with case-specific logic, deviated very little from plain-old-C / non-threaded implementations and had copious operational input and tools/insight, etc. Both had their strengths and could get caught up in cultural blindness to the others. It was an interesting challenge.
- mcint 6y agoThis sounds like the age old "Do the right thing" vs "Worse is better". MIT (vs Princeton) Stanford (vs Berkeley) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better