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>Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes

• booleandilemma 5y ago
  A common meme I've seen recently is "no one knows what they're doing". I think people like to believe this because it helps them cope with impostor syndrome, or maybe they think it puts them on even ground with people who do in fact know what they're doing.
  • WJW 5y ago
    It's clearly not true in all circumstances. You can bet that an airline pilot has a very clear idea of what they are doing, and so will your dentist. Closer to home there are plenty of sub-fields in software where I'd be completely lost but when (say) we have to add a new endpoint to the webservice I work with, I absolutely don't have to make it up as I go along. Your assessment of why people like to believe this seems spot on.
  • andreilys 5y ago
    Even worst is the meme that “programming is just copy+pasting from stack overflow”
    • user_50123890 5y ago
      Because good senior programmers are rare (as can be observed if you post a job listing). Most of this stuff comes from students / junior developers, where yes, they probably visit stack overflow every 20 minutes
      • MikeDelta 5y ago
        They should try programming on an airplane or without internet connection. For some the productivity drops to zero without stack overflow.
        • convolvatron 5y ago
          i grew up a long time before stack overflow. actually used man pages and read books. there is just _no way_ to program in Rust or Go without access to a search engine and the package libraries.
          • emidln 5y ago
            I've done various rust and clojure projects by downloading a lot of git repos ahead of time for reference while on a long-haul flight. This works pretty well, but you need to do a bit of research ahead of time on which libraries you might want access to. This is probably slower, as you have to read source code and think more about the type signatures (rather than looking at some misc example), but if you have 15 hours, what else are you going to do?
          • sethammons 5y ago
            You can spin up godoc locally and access it locally fyi. Wont help pull in a new package. And you can always drill down into the stdlib implementation right from your editor if you have jump to declaration. I wrote a custom consensus protocol implementation in Go on a flight for work sans wifi.
  • mortenjorck 5y ago
    My model for people who "know what they're doing" is that they tend to have a well-organized hierarchy of rules. At the base are principles; at the top are opinions. The foundation tends to be pretty simple, deeply held, and unchanging, while the higher levels are increasingly fluid and specialized. The higher you get on this stack, the more "making it up as you go along" it becomes, but every improvised part is perched on something more stable. They key to "knowing what you're doing" is organizing this hierarchy well, having the right supports in place to successfully guide improvisation and course-correction while steadily fortifying the foundation.
• the-pigeon 5y ago
  It really depends. I take this really just to mean "everyone has faults". People often idealize heroes and think of them as beyond human. If you do that and met your hero then your illusion will often be shattered. But the problem is just that you were putting them on an unreasonable pedestal. Of course some people are frauds and some people have no idea what they are doing but manage to make people think they do. But I didn't read this as being one of those situations. Just someone they saw as beyond human being only human.
  • bitexploder 5y ago
    I like the phrase “kill your heroes”. Not literally, of course. But in your mind. They are just flawed people like everyone else that happen to have been mythologized. Learning more about your heroes often leads to disappointment.
    • vlunkr 5y ago
      I've recently found a podcast called "your favorite band sucks" that's along these lines. They have real criticisms of popular bands, but it's also a bit tounge-in-cheek. It's a nice contrast to the typical worship of rock bands. I think it's healthy to be able to enjoy something, or be inspired by someone, without buying into the mythology.
• swader999 5y ago
  What is wrong with making it up as you go? I mean everything I've ever built I had a notion of what I was doing but most of the real work was in the details. Anyone could say I was making it up as I go. I'd be like yeah, if I knew completely how to do it, I'd already be finished it. Then there's the times where you think you know exactly what you're doing and after going down a road you realize it's the wrong way. Failing to learn and see the signs and make the embarrassing declaration that you got lost and need to turn around is never good. But some people just keep driving. It's hard though when there's a big line of cars behind you that think you actually know where you are headed.
  • daenz 5y ago
    Nothing wrong with making it up as you go, and I didn't mean to sound like I was knocking it, if I did. Sometimes everyone fumbles around trying to find solutions that work...it's a totally valid way to approach some problems. Sometimes it's a hybrid of knowing what you are doing but not knowing the implementation specifics. You know you need to connect high-level pieces A, B, and C with specific constraints, but it won't be until you get into the low-level implementation that you'll know if it is indeed possible. I think that's an example of both having a vision and also improvising as you go. I am concerned about how to effectively communicate visions to people, because it gets everyone rowing in the same direction. If nobody thinks that you have a vision, when you do, there is no reason they should choose your direction vs just do their own thing.
    • swader999 5y ago
      Ok this is helpful. If people are doing their own thing and not following the established, agreed on (or even dictated) way or vision, then you need to figure out why if you are the lead. Maybe it is communication related. Does everyone know that this is the way they should do something? But they still don't? Have you created docs and edicts around these areas? Have you been assertive in code reviews? Have you been proactive and requested design sessions before a lot of work was done? Has a decision been formally communicated? I see this step not happening enough, people are hesitant to be authoritative after a discussion on architectural concerns. If you are the lead, that needs to happen. Most of the time it's simply a case of them not knowing how to do it. People are afraid to show their lack of skill and knowledge and ask for help. They get deadline pressure and deliver their default way. Have you provided a feature or cut through the system that shows this vision for people to follow? Maybe example code, resources on the web that go very deep into the ideas and tactics? Have you paired with them to help them get started or get over obstacles. Perhaps pair your most senior person with juniors for a while to get them on the same page and capable with this vision.
• deleted 5y ago
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• toss1 5y ago
  The criticism may depend on different values of "making it up as you go along", i.e., it may not mean so much "just wing it in ignorance" vs something like "even if you have many answers you don't yet have all of them, and new answers generate new questions exponentially...". So, perhaps less "everyone's ignorant" vs "we're all living in a land of many unknowns". But, yeah, he did find it disillusioning, and maybe is over-generalizing from a one-off experience (in contrast, I've done similar and was nothing but impressed, finding it is extremely valuable to learn from the best in a field). How do you distinguish between what you do and "making it up as you go along"?
• karmakaze 5y ago
  > built a framework for spinning up new fully-deployable services from scratch that gets engineers 90% of the way there (minus the business logic) I'm guessing that this was based on first-hand experience building such services and witnessing engineers struggle getting new services up. And not so much that you've had specific training or past experience in developing bootstrapping frameworks. This would be my definition of making it up as you go and is great way to do it. Another way is learning how to make bootstrapping frameworks and applying it wherever you can which doesn't go as well.
• gher-shyu3i 5y ago
  The problem is idealizing such people in the first place. Sure, they may have had incredible achievements, but they're humans at the end of the day.
• rwmj 5y ago
  Also which "hero" is charging 5k for courses and what form does the course take? (I work at Red Hat, and my programming heroes are also my colleagues.)
  • tayo42 5y ago
    I wonder if it was a course at something like a conference? I think those are expensive. I can't imagine anyone is charging 5k that seems absurd
• dehrmann 5y ago
  Related thing I'd add: be very careful about taking a dream job; I've seen this happen a few times--it's likely to disappoint. Also dating a minor celebrity crush.
• tester756 5y ago
  I have different take on this I "know" guy who's conference speaker, so he knows other conference speakers, drinks vodka with them and so on. He says there's significant amount of bullshit aka things that work nice on slides, things that only work cool in theory, but in practice they arent as great I think that's what OP meant
• thisismyswamp 5y ago
  Building a new framework should be way at the bottom of your list of things to consider. If you do, please make it a blackbox. It's tiring how many details one often needs to get into before being able to do something they could have summarized in a sentence the whole time. But this is a general issue!
• ww520 5y ago
  It just means don't blindly trust the experts.
• tomnipotent 5y ago
  In your particular instance, I would have collaborated with a single team to work on converting a single service over to the new framework. Once some success was made, it would be much easier to make traction with other projects and teams. Also, a vision or a plan doesn't mean you're not winging things as you go.
• staysaasy 5y ago
  IME most people will generally appear to be making things up as they go – even if they have significant relevant experience. Every situation is unique, and experience tends to look more like having a list of techniques with varying degrees of expertise, rather than having a playbook for every situation. You have to look for the expertise rather than raw confidence. In sports terms it would be something like a baseball pitcher being able to throw a great curveball, a great fastball, and an all right slider, and knowing roughly what situations to use them in. There will still be a high degree of randomness and mistakes will be made.
  • antod 5y ago
    Agreed. What experience and talent gives you are instincts that improve the chances of whatever it is "you're making up as you go" working well. I would much rather work with people who have a good track record of making it up as they go as opposed to people coming in with a fixed idea of how something should happen and are more likely to misapply whatever lessons led to those views (probably someone elses anyway).