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Learning the basics of shell scripting has been super valuable to my career. The only time I found it to be a liability was when I was pair programming. My pa

Learning the basics of shell scripting has been super valuable to my career. The only time I found it to be a liability was when I was pair programming. My pair couldn't read a shell script to save their life & had very little interest in learning. When I tried explaining it line by line, they stopped wanting to pair because I was apparently making them feel stupid. They actually reported me to management for being an arrogant mansplainer. I'm pretty sure that was the beginning of the company deciding I was not a culture fit :P I had to learn how to, and how not to, work with someone less experienced in a certain topic after that.

ecshafer 5y ago
This seems like its more of a hacker vs non-hacker mindset. Those of us that grew up with messing with computers and such daily, if we didn't know what the script did, would probably really appreciate someone giving an in depth explanation of the script line by line. People that want to just be hand held, and are not interested in how things actually work, wouldn't appreciate that. Sounds like the pair programmer was the latter.
tomcam 5y ago
I would love to hear how that resolved ultimately. And yet I am also a little bit scared as well. I feel like there are at least two or three stories simmering under the surface of that incident.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  Like any story like this, you needed to be there to get the context. One of the downsides of pair programming is that it's great when you both have complimentary skillsets. It's less productive when no one knows what the heck is going on. In this case, the task was to benchmark how many writes one could make to Kafka using our monolith. They wanted to see at least 10K/writes per second. The only problem was no one knew how to use Kafka (well), including the person who was asking for it. So I wrote some gnarly looking Bash code to fire up Kafka, Zookeeper, the app, etc. Some people wanted to use Docker, but I didn't see the value in using a slower VM w/ limited resources. I wanted to use as much CPU as possible. My pair didn't know Docker, Bash, or Kafka. I lost my pair somewhere around talking about having to clean up zombie processes. It went downhill from there.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing. Man I always love working with people smarter than I am, although I always feel a little bad for them. But it’s like leaving money on the table to not learn these things.
HarryHirsch 5y ago
There was that incident when my students marched off to the Dean, complaining that I learned them too much. The kids have been screwed over by persistent underfunding of public schools and insist that they continue to be screwed further - what they want isn't an education but a degree certificate. Yes, cultural fit is real, and it isn't always about white men drinking craft beer.
burnished 5y ago
Could be more about how you communicate rather than what you are communicating. I love it when people explain difficult or unknown things to me, but if some one sounds like I'm burdening them or that they are incredibly displeased then it becomes a different experience. I'm aware that the other person in your story could easily be the 'difficult one', but your post doesn't make it clear that you understand the way you communicate can be super important too. Not trying to accuse you of anything, just want to point out a super easy avenue of mistake.

ecshafer 5y ago

This seems like its more of a hacker vs non-hacker mindset. Those of us that grew up with messing with computers and such daily, if we didn't know what the script did, would probably really appreciate someone giving an in depth explanation of the script line by line. People that want to just be hand held, and are not interested in how things actually work, wouldn't appreciate that. Sounds like the pair programmer was the latter.

tomcam 5y ago

I would love to hear how that resolved ultimately. And yet I am also a little bit scared as well. I feel like there are at least two or three stories simmering under the surface of that incident.

devoutsalsa 5y ago
Like any story like this, you needed to be there to get the context. One of the downsides of pair programming is that it's great when you both have complimentary skillsets. It's less productive when no one knows what the heck is going on. In this case, the task was to benchmark how many writes one could make to Kafka using our monolith. They wanted to see at least 10K/writes per second. The only problem was no one knew how to use Kafka (well), including the person who was asking for it. So I wrote some gnarly looking Bash code to fire up Kafka, Zookeeper, the app, etc. Some people wanted to use Docker, but I didn't see the value in using a slower VM w/ limited resources. I wanted to use as much CPU as possible. My pair didn't know Docker, Bash, or Kafka. I lost my pair somewhere around talking about having to clean up zombie processes. It went downhill from there.
- tomcam 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Man I always love working with people smarter than I am, although I always feel a little bad for them. But it’s like leaving money on the table to not learn these things.

HarryHirsch 5y ago

There was that incident when my students marched off to the Dean, complaining that I learned them too much. The kids have been screwed over by persistent underfunding of public schools and insist that they continue to be screwed further - what they want isn't an education but a degree certificate. Yes, cultural fit is real, and it isn't always about white men drinking craft beer.

burnished 5y ago

Could be more about how you communicate rather than what you are communicating. I love it when people explain difficult or unknown things to me, but if some one sounds like I'm burdening them or that they are incredibly displeased then it becomes a different experience. I'm aware that the other person in your story could easily be the 'difficult one', but your post doesn't make it clear that you understand the way you communicate can be super important too. Not trying to accuse you of anything, just want to point out a super easy avenue of mistake.