6 ms·

It's going to be an unpopular opinion, but software development is an awesome field for BSers. Because most of the people you answer to don't know the details

It's going to be an unpopular opinion, but software development is an awesome field for BSers. Because most of the people you answer to don't know the details of what you do, you can totally make stuff up, explain failures with magic or noise, and pump yourself up by claiming something you did was more difficult than it was, combined with talking like you know everything - the more confident the better. You often get to make your own estimates as well, so moving the button one pixel to the left can be a week. In the last 15 years I've seen this quite a bit with new hires. Self proclaimed experts who can talk extremely convincingly, who have passable domain knowledge, and very little practical ability. The code they write is usually junk, or worse, actively a problem. Because I do not have a forceful personality and our upper management is mostly clueless, these people prosper in the beginning, but eventually they shit where they eat so much that end up creating an unmaintainable morass and choose to move on. Every last of one them. I guess they fall into the "just enough knowledge to be dangerous" category.

flashgordon 4y ago
Add to this the amount of aversion to risk and to getting your hands dirty by pumping out code. It is so weird to see SWEs wanting to get into BFUDs before writing a line of disposable code (at least at big cos). Though I am sensing the perf process incentivizes this (impact and artifacts at all costs).
ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
Managers dont have the time to figure out if someone did something well or poorly. The code works and so they move on. Certain people leave a trail of bad code with nice looking syntax. Working directly with them, it will be obvious, but otherwise forget it, you will never figure it out. All it takes is them speaking well in meetings/good at project planning/BSing some design. The result of their bad code is future changes take 2x-3x as long. But no one can tell if those timelines are just what they are, or that there is a problem with the existing code.
- johngalt_ 4y ago
  I think there is a difference between bad and good places. I have worked in bad places where things worked exactly as you described. Fortunately times have changed, and places I work now care about quality. Most of the time managers used to be engineers and they either know and care about it, or they care and rely on input from other engineers to understand what is going on under the hood.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
    Eh I've seen this even at FAANGs. The thing is, the syntax/design patterns in the code can look clean. But that doesnt mean the abstraction/interface is the right one
    - syntheweave 4y ago
      Every formalization of a workflow is susceptible to this. I recall how when Git started getting widespread adoption, a popular blogpost theme was discussion of cleaning up your commits...which is the kind of thing you can do if you're writing in small increments. But code that "moves mountains" in the architecture, as is often the case in a greenfield project where there's a lot of learning being done, tends to have dirty rip-off-the-bandage moments. If you clean up those kinds of commits, it's not really beneficial to future code archeology. But if you're clocking minimal effort and maximum CYA, it suddenly becomes hugely important to dot the i's and cross the t's, because that looks more professional than a commit log where you iterate on it a bunch and your log is like "maybe it's fixed now?"
ARandomerDude 4y ago
Agree, with the caveat that the more often these BS conversations occur in a group setting, the more likely a BS-er is to be caught by his peers.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  It doesn't matter what the peers think, if the BS-er is manipulating the manager well.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
My thesis is that in software it takes an expert to identify another expert, and outsiders struggle with being able to tell who's full of shit. You end up with pseudo-metrics like lines of code and random inspections of the last bit of code you wrote (e.g. muskian Twitter). An experienced engineer with many products under their belt and tons of coaching of others on their track record will easily tell if someone knows what they're doing, especially if they get to pair program together for even 30 minutes.
- neilv 4y ago
  As soon as you get away from what the interview prep books cover, it's usually pretty easy to tell if someone in your own field is experienced and at least competent, just by talking with them. (Leetcode seems to be an awful predictor of how someone will perform as a software engineer. That students are spending so much time practicing for it, rather than experimenting and building things, is awful. Some of the biggest companies they're applying to were founded by students doing the opposite of practicing for someone else's hazing rituals -- they were experimenting and building.)
  - wildrhythms 4y ago
    I genuinely believe a 15 minute back and forth between an engineer and an interviewee will give a better signal for hiring than any hours+ long Leetcode 'assignment'.
    - mianos 4y ago
      While this may be true, it takes more than just engineering skill for this to work in a predictable manner. Often an engineering interviewer takes their ego into the process and it becomes a competitive game or an opportunity to show how smart they are. I 100% agree with you but it's not as easy and scaleable as it seems.
      - neilv 4y ago
        Agreed, interviewer ego slipping in can be a problem. Interviewer training can help avoid that happening accidentally. (And Leetcode interviews don't avoid the interviewer ego problem. It's purportedly "objective", but the interviewer can easily taint it, accidentally or intentionally. The answer isn't Leetcode, but to train or reign in egos, and then you can use a real conversation.)
rr888 4y ago
> but eventually they shit where they eat so much that end up creating an unmaintainable morass and choose to move on. At a new company with a higher salary. My richest friends are all like this.
- soiler 4y ago
  A lot of mine, too. Sometimes I wish I could be like them, but there's a lot of things I could do if I didn't have moral quandaries about doing them.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    Where is the moral quandary in moving to higher paying jobs? Employment is at will. If your company can't afford to lose you they are welcome to sign you to a long term contract like sports teams do with their players. But they never will because they lose the right to fire you whenever they want. You owe them nothing.
    - soiler 4y ago
      You may never see this, but I want to clarify. I have no qualms about jumping ship; I have and will again. I was referring to the morality of doing bad work and propelling oneself upward on the good work of teammates. Writing code that works but is impossible to maintain and selling oneself as a hero is, in my opinion, a Shitty Thing To Do.
Tade0 4y ago
I've been in teams where more than half of the people were, for lack of a better term, quiet bullshitters. Everything was "difficult" and "required analysis". The code mostly worked, but was full of workarounds that would not have been there if someone spent half an hour reading the library documentation. One thing they didn't do though was stick their head out too much as that was too great a risk to their cushy positions. Why do they do that, one might ask? Turns out they're either busy with house renovation or have some kind of engaging hobby which takes most of their time. I had a guy confess that those three hours between 7am and the end of our standup is the only time he works during the day. He was hard to work with because he would do everything to cover his ass should something go wrong.
- onemoresoop 4y ago
  > I had a guy confess that those three hours between 7am and the end of our standup is the only time he works during the day. He was hard to work with because he would do everything to cover his ass should something go wrong. Three to four hours of deep work could be enough to complete the daily workload. Maybe he was downplaying the other rest of time that didn't feel like he worked at all even though he was in meetings and doing other BS the company required him to do.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    > Three to four hours of deep work could be enough to complete the daily workload... only if you make a case that six to eight hours of deep work is somehow not possible. Perhaps you make a good faith effort to get 6 to 8 but you can't seem to do it, or you're too exhausted after 3 or 4, but you can't simply demand that you should get paid for 8 but you're only going to work for 3 or 4 because that's enough.
    - onemoresoop 4y ago
      > only if you make a case that six to eight hours of deep work is somehow not possible. 6 to 8 hours of deep work is certainly possible but is it sustainable? I don't think so, minds need some slack time, enter a different mode of thinking, etc. For this reason work is chunked into workable amounts which it makes it sustainable as well.
gonzo41 4y ago
I have similar experience. I am always amazed that there's these rockstar personalities that start projects, hit trouble, and then pivot to a new project without every finishing anything. I kind of find it fascinating that these people are always framed as 'the best' etc etc.
- knightofmars 4y ago
  These people are dangerous and the ones I watch for the most. I see them as a somewhat dark manifestation of the "Peter Principle". They are charismatic people full of ambition who want to climb the corporate ladder but lack the skills, leadership ability, and knowledge to actually do so based on merit. Some common behavior I have observed, 1) they never deliver bad news to leadership and are willing to lie or misrepresent to achieve this 2) they never will be responsible for the failing project (which they've caused to fail) and will immediately find a way to move to another project 3) they take credit for all successes regardless of their involvement in those successes 4) over represent their own contributions and constantly talk how busy they are and how little work everyone else is doing. Combining the above they will move from project to project and position to position once a year or sometimes two years leaving the team or some poor soul who was recently promoted to take over their mess. Then when the project continues to fail they can shake their head to their boss and say, "Everything was on track when I left project. They must have really gone away from the original design for this to happen."
pklausler 4y ago
This is why we have to ensure that somebody asks at least one FizzBuzzesque question during interviews, and why you don't want to work at a place that doesn't ask you a FizzBuzzesque question.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jongjong 4y ago
Agreed. Financial success and career progression as a software dev has little to do with your talent. It's more about luck and BS ability. Most successful or fast-growing big tech companies can afford to brute-force every problem by throwing tons of developers at them. Most developers tend to produce code which just barely works and is way overcomplicated but it doesn't matter because most fast-growing companies don't have any issues hiring large numbers of developers to patch up the many mistakes by brute force.
subradios 4y ago
This is encouraged by the incentive structure, ship and gtfo is the way to advance. You will never be punished for shipping, and always punished for not-shipping.
- MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
  I've never seen somebody get fired for too often being late to ship, but I have seen someone get fired for shipping changes that too often break customer workflows.
soiler 4y ago
> moving the button one pixel to the left can be a week As an aside, I always find this to be a funny example, because it's the kind of requirement that reeks of design mistakes (either UI design or code design). How did we end up in a place where a button was 1 pixel out of alignment? It can happen innocently enough with a true "defect", I've seen it, but more often it indicates either A) designers are freeforming everything and wasting massive amounts of time or B) engineers are not using reusable styling frameworks/components. Either way, ending up with a tiny task because a button is 1px out of place probably means you have been wasting hours of work and will continue to waste hours of work if you don't fix it the long way. Doesn't necessarily mean I would stretch that particular ticket out to a week, but I would certainly take a little bit of extra time to make sure we didn't have to fix the exact same problem again next week.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  > designers are freeforming everything and wasting massive amounts of time This is happening at my company. We had built a whole UI library and then the new UI design team came in and started designing everything with zero regard to our existing library. It has been a shitshow. Bonus points because product likes their new designs more than the premade library, so they are fighting hard to throw out the library. Which we basically just finished building. Woohoo!
BSerhere 4y ago
BSer that knows what they’re doing here. Another unpopular opinion; I’ve resorted to BSing these days cause let’s be real; vast majority of these startups are just fiat wealth rockets, hooking people on nation state scrip This whole thread just feels like low effort coder bro chest bumping. Low effort appeal to non-existent authority. What real human problems have you all resolved that lifted the lowest in society without the kowtow to those of high net worth (another appeal to imagined authority)? We’re just high priests avoiding real work of keeping ourselves alive.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  >hooking people on nation state scrip My eyes cannot roll any harder.
  - granshaw 4y ago
    See the word “fiat”… Ok, bro
- redleggedfrog 4y ago
  > What real human problems have you all resolved that lifted the lowest in society without the kowtow to those of high net worth (another appeal to imagined authority)? I'll admit that my profession is no more noble than say, a carpenter, and is primarily to fund my desired lifestyle. But I don't work at a startup and I don't make startup money and I'm certainly not a coder bro (after my time). I can't say I've "resolved" any real human problems either, but I do occasionally try to do something to help. Over the years I've coached youth sports, tutored reading and math for underprivileged or ESL kids, collected food for the local food bank, played harmonica in a jug band at the local old-folks home, taught after-school bike repair, do roadside cleanup, and was going to do books for inmates but it got cancelled due to COVID. And lest you think I'm trying to get into heaven this all comes from my cold dead atheist heart in the chest doing all that bumping. ;^)
Nextgrid 4y ago
Companies are welcome to make their interview processes more stringent to weed out bullshitters but they'd have to raise the salaries until they actually get enough non-BS candidates through the door. That not happening suggests that "BS" is good enough for most companies in which case why should you bust your ass doing any better when it's just more work for yourself and is unlikely to get rewarded adequately? If they're offering "market-rate" salary then they can get "market-rate" quality, and if BS became the new "market-rate" then I don't see anything wrong with that.
- saulpw 4y ago
  No, if anything, higher salaries just attract better bullshitters.
mianos 4y ago
This is even worse when average people strike it lucky and get on a successful project and get promoted. This leads to boundless bullshit and buzzword soup.
9erdelta 4y ago
I think daily stand up even encourages BS. Sometimes you really don't get much done in a day, but during standup it's got to sound like you did _something_ -- so how about some bs.
terminal_d 4y ago
It's the managerial pipeline! Handle it with care because it will never be abolished.

flashgordon 4y ago

Add to this the amount of aversion to risk and to getting your hands dirty by pumping out code. It is so weird to see SWEs wanting to get into BFUDs before writing a line of disposable code (at least at big cos). Though I am sensing the perf process incentivizes this (impact and artifacts at all costs).

ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago

Managers dont have the time to figure out if someone did something well or poorly. The code works and so they move on. Certain people leave a trail of bad code with nice looking syntax. Working directly with them, it will be obvious, but otherwise forget it, you will never figure it out. All it takes is them speaking well in meetings/good at project planning/BSing some design. The result of their bad code is future changes take 2x-3x as long. But no one can tell if those timelines are just what they are, or that there is a problem with the existing code.

johngalt_ 4y ago
I think there is a difference between bad and good places. I have worked in bad places where things worked exactly as you described. Fortunately times have changed, and places I work now care about quality. Most of the time managers used to be engineers and they either know and care about it, or they care and rely on input from other engineers to understand what is going on under the hood.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
  Eh I've seen this even at FAANGs. The thing is, the syntax/design patterns in the code can look clean. But that doesnt mean the abstraction/interface is the right one
  - syntheweave 4y ago
    Every formalization of a workflow is susceptible to this. I recall how when Git started getting widespread adoption, a popular blogpost theme was discussion of cleaning up your commits...which is the kind of thing you can do if you're writing in small increments. But code that "moves mountains" in the architecture, as is often the case in a greenfield project where there's a lot of learning being done, tends to have dirty rip-off-the-bandage moments. If you clean up those kinds of commits, it's not really beneficial to future code archeology. But if you're clocking minimal effort and maximum CYA, it suddenly becomes hugely important to dot the i's and cross the t's, because that looks more professional than a commit log where you iterate on it a bunch and your log is like "maybe it's fixed now?"

ARandomerDude 4y ago

Agree, with the caveat that the more often these BS conversations occur in a group setting, the more likely a BS-er is to be caught by his peers.

BeetleB 4y ago
It doesn't matter what the peers think, if the BS-er is manipulating the manager well.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago

My thesis is that in software it takes an expert to identify another expert, and outsiders struggle with being able to tell who's full of shit. You end up with pseudo-metrics like lines of code and random inspections of the last bit of code you wrote (e.g. muskian Twitter). An experienced engineer with many products under their belt and tons of coaching of others on their track record will easily tell if someone knows what they're doing, especially if they get to pair program together for even 30 minutes.

neilv 4y ago
As soon as you get away from what the interview prep books cover, it's usually pretty easy to tell if someone in your own field is experienced and at least competent, just by talking with them. (Leetcode seems to be an awful predictor of how someone will perform as a software engineer. That students are spending so much time practicing for it, rather than experimenting and building things, is awful. Some of the biggest companies they're applying to were founded by students doing the opposite of practicing for someone else's hazing rituals -- they were experimenting and building.)
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  I genuinely believe a 15 minute back and forth between an engineer and an interviewee will give a better signal for hiring than any hours+ long Leetcode 'assignment'.
  - mianos 4y ago
    While this may be true, it takes more than just engineering skill for this to work in a predictable manner. Often an engineering interviewer takes their ego into the process and it becomes a competitive game or an opportunity to show how smart they are. I 100% agree with you but it's not as easy and scaleable as it seems.
    - neilv 4y ago
      Agreed, interviewer ego slipping in can be a problem. Interviewer training can help avoid that happening accidentally. (And Leetcode interviews don't avoid the interviewer ego problem. It's purportedly "objective", but the interviewer can easily taint it, accidentally or intentionally. The answer isn't Leetcode, but to train or reign in egos, and then you can use a real conversation.)

rr888 4y ago

> but eventually they shit where they eat so much that end up creating an unmaintainable morass and choose to move on. At a new company with a higher salary. My richest friends are all like this.

soiler 4y ago
A lot of mine, too. Sometimes I wish I could be like them, but there's a lot of things I could do if I didn't have moral quandaries about doing them.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  Where is the moral quandary in moving to higher paying jobs? Employment is at will. If your company can't afford to lose you they are welcome to sign you to a long term contract like sports teams do with their players. But they never will because they lose the right to fire you whenever they want. You owe them nothing.
  - soiler 4y ago
    You may never see this, but I want to clarify. I have no qualms about jumping ship; I have and will again. I was referring to the morality of doing bad work and propelling oneself upward on the good work of teammates. Writing code that works but is impossible to maintain and selling oneself as a hero is, in my opinion, a Shitty Thing To Do.

Tade0 4y ago

I've been in teams where more than half of the people were, for lack of a better term, quiet bullshitters. Everything was "difficult" and "required analysis". The code mostly worked, but was full of workarounds that would not have been there if someone spent half an hour reading the library documentation. One thing they didn't do though was stick their head out too much as that was too great a risk to their cushy positions. Why do they do that, one might ask? Turns out they're either busy with house renovation or have some kind of engaging hobby which takes most of their time. I had a guy confess that those three hours between 7am and the end of our standup is the only time he works during the day. He was hard to work with because he would do everything to cover his ass should something go wrong.

onemoresoop 4y ago
> I had a guy confess that those three hours between 7am and the end of our standup is the only time he works during the day. He was hard to work with because he would do everything to cover his ass should something go wrong. Three to four hours of deep work could be enough to complete the daily workload. Maybe he was downplaying the other rest of time that didn't feel like he worked at all even though he was in meetings and doing other BS the company required him to do.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > Three to four hours of deep work could be enough to complete the daily workload... only if you make a case that six to eight hours of deep work is somehow not possible. Perhaps you make a good faith effort to get 6 to 8 but you can't seem to do it, or you're too exhausted after 3 or 4, but you can't simply demand that you should get paid for 8 but you're only going to work for 3 or 4 because that's enough.
  - onemoresoop 4y ago
    > only if you make a case that six to eight hours of deep work is somehow not possible. 6 to 8 hours of deep work is certainly possible but is it sustainable? I don't think so, minds need some slack time, enter a different mode of thinking, etc. For this reason work is chunked into workable amounts which it makes it sustainable as well.

gonzo41 4y ago

I have similar experience. I am always amazed that there's these rockstar personalities that start projects, hit trouble, and then pivot to a new project without every finishing anything. I kind of find it fascinating that these people are always framed as 'the best' etc etc.

knightofmars 4y ago
These people are dangerous and the ones I watch for the most. I see them as a somewhat dark manifestation of the "Peter Principle". They are charismatic people full of ambition who want to climb the corporate ladder but lack the skills, leadership ability, and knowledge to actually do so based on merit. Some common behavior I have observed, 1) they never deliver bad news to leadership and are willing to lie or misrepresent to achieve this 2) they never will be responsible for the failing project (which they've caused to fail) and will immediately find a way to move to another project 3) they take credit for all successes regardless of their involvement in those successes 4) over represent their own contributions and constantly talk how busy they are and how little work everyone else is doing. Combining the above they will move from project to project and position to position once a year or sometimes two years leaving the team or some poor soul who was recently promoted to take over their mess. Then when the project continues to fail they can shake their head to their boss and say, "Everything was on track when I left project. They must have really gone away from the original design for this to happen."

pklausler 4y ago

This is why we have to ensure that somebody asks at least one FizzBuzzesque question during interviews, and why you don't want to work at a place that doesn't ask you a FizzBuzzesque question.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jongjong 4y ago

Agreed. Financial success and career progression as a software dev has little to do with your talent. It's more about luck and BS ability. Most successful or fast-growing big tech companies can afford to brute-force every problem by throwing tons of developers at them. Most developers tend to produce code which just barely works and is way overcomplicated but it doesn't matter because most fast-growing companies don't have any issues hiring large numbers of developers to patch up the many mistakes by brute force.

subradios 4y ago

This is encouraged by the incentive structure, ship and gtfo is the way to advance. You will never be punished for shipping, and always punished for not-shipping.

MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
I've never seen somebody get fired for too often being late to ship, but I have seen someone get fired for shipping changes that too often break customer workflows.

soiler 4y ago

> moving the button one pixel to the left can be a week As an aside, I always find this to be a funny example, because it's the kind of requirement that reeks of design mistakes (either UI design or code design). How did we end up in a place where a button was 1 pixel out of alignment? It can happen innocently enough with a true "defect", I've seen it, but more often it indicates either A) designers are freeforming everything and wasting massive amounts of time or B) engineers are not using reusable styling frameworks/components. Either way, ending up with a tiny task because a button is 1px out of place probably means you have been wasting hours of work and will continue to waste hours of work if you don't fix it the long way. Doesn't necessarily mean I would stretch that particular ticket out to a week, but I would certainly take a little bit of extra time to make sure we didn't have to fix the exact same problem again next week.

bluefirebrand 4y ago
> designers are freeforming everything and wasting massive amounts of time This is happening at my company. We had built a whole UI library and then the new UI design team came in and started designing everything with zero regard to our existing library. It has been a shitshow. Bonus points because product likes their new designs more than the premade library, so they are fighting hard to throw out the library. Which we basically just finished building. Woohoo!

BSerhere 4y ago

BSer that knows what they’re doing here. Another unpopular opinion; I’ve resorted to BSing these days cause let’s be real; vast majority of these startups are just fiat wealth rockets, hooking people on nation state scrip This whole thread just feels like low effort coder bro chest bumping. Low effort appeal to non-existent authority. What real human problems have you all resolved that lifted the lowest in society without the kowtow to those of high net worth (another appeal to imagined authority)? We’re just high priests avoiding real work of keeping ourselves alive.

ProjectArcturis 4y ago
>hooking people on nation state scrip My eyes cannot roll any harder.
- granshaw 4y ago
  See the word “fiat”… Ok, bro
redleggedfrog 4y ago
> What real human problems have you all resolved that lifted the lowest in society without the kowtow to those of high net worth (another appeal to imagined authority)? I'll admit that my profession is no more noble than say, a carpenter, and is primarily to fund my desired lifestyle. But I don't work at a startup and I don't make startup money and I'm certainly not a coder bro (after my time). I can't say I've "resolved" any real human problems either, but I do occasionally try to do something to help. Over the years I've coached youth sports, tutored reading and math for underprivileged or ESL kids, collected food for the local food bank, played harmonica in a jug band at the local old-folks home, taught after-school bike repair, do roadside cleanup, and was going to do books for inmates but it got cancelled due to COVID. And lest you think I'm trying to get into heaven this all comes from my cold dead atheist heart in the chest doing all that bumping. ;^)

Nextgrid 4y ago

Companies are welcome to make their interview processes more stringent to weed out bullshitters but they'd have to raise the salaries until they actually get enough non-BS candidates through the door. That not happening suggests that "BS" is good enough for most companies in which case why should you bust your ass doing any better when it's just more work for yourself and is unlikely to get rewarded adequately? If they're offering "market-rate" salary then they can get "market-rate" quality, and if BS became the new "market-rate" then I don't see anything wrong with that.

saulpw 4y ago
No, if anything, higher salaries just attract better bullshitters.

mianos 4y ago

This is even worse when average people strike it lucky and get on a successful project and get promoted. This leads to boundless bullshit and buzzword soup.

9erdelta 4y ago

I think daily stand up even encourages BS. Sometimes you really don't get much done in a day, but during standup it's got to sound like you did _something_ -- so how about some bs.

terminal_d 4y ago

It's the managerial pipeline! Handle it with care because it will never be abolished.