6 ms·

Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming. You can only understand them because you lived those situations, which implies experience you don

• gofreddygo 2y ago
  Fine advice (better than OP). This works till you realize you're burned out, plus didn't get that promo, instead going to that bikeshedding worthless co-worker who's clearly less deserving. Motivation, productivity go out the window. You don't give a sh*t about the work, team, code quality, made up deadlines or real issues. Real maturity comes now. You learn to appreciate your limits, see what really matters despite what's being said and observe who make the calls and what their agenda is. And finally, when you've picked a path and it seems like it works, you'll find equilibrium, somewhere between an idealistic comment on a PR and your next interview. Till something else like health or kids rock the boat. Take it easy, you matter more to you than your work. 15 years on, only ones who will remember the weekends you spent at work are your family and kids. Get out more, find solace in the varied arts. Enjoy you painless body till it lasts. Make the weekdays show up between weekends not the other way. Laugh more. Eat well. Feel your surroundings. Make friends, keep friends. Make memories. Don't throw your life away chasing menial pursuits. If a piece of work is really that substantial and meaningful, it will show itself as such. Don't go looking for it.
• johnisgood 2y ago
  I have a very severe case of impostor syndrome. :(
  • lioeters 2y ago
    In a world of imposters, the half decent imposter is king.
  • bregma 2y ago
    Don't worry, you're not a real imposter. You've just inadvertently ended up in a position where you're expected to be one. Just fake it until you actually become a true imposter.
  • BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    You probably are. But most of your colleagues as well :) Most adults are kids in big meat suits, they fake it a lot. I started to live like I was not completely worthless at 35. Not saying that to be proud of it, just stating that if you think humanity should do better, the first person you'll judge is you. It will be glaringly obvious you are not meeting your own standards. The higher your standard, the longer it will take for you to reach them. And the way to get there faster is to ignore the shame, and do it anyway. Because if you don't, your growth will be slower, and you will do more damage for longer. Real life means real consequences. It will make you more tolerant of others as well. Way more tolerant.
• graypegg 2y ago
  A bit snarky, but I would add - don’t read opinions from a list and take it as gospel. Adapt to the jobs you’re in, and you’ll develop your own opinions, but now with experience to explain why. Opinions are formed by getting repeatedly hit with the consequences of your (and other’s) decisions, and everyone just has to take enough hits till the pattern seeking area of your brain takes over.
  • BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    I agree, and would say is equivalent to: > - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding.
    • graypegg 2y ago
      Yes true. Mostly just opining on the “list of everything you gotta’ know” is a bit TOO concrete IMO. (As opposed to too abstract) I was quoting out of similar things years ago at the start of my career, “it should be done this way because X said it” didn’t help me at all. It feels like insulation against being called too junior, since, you can just wholesale adopt someone else’s list of ideas and you’re good. But making mistakes because you’re new to the career is precisely what forms the base of those opinions in the first place.
  • efortis 2y ago
    I agree, form your opinions when you have enough information. For example, if you can’t decide between two data structures or tech, pick one and add a comment: // I’m not sure
  • FLT8 2y ago
    Maybe add to that: try to stay long enough in a role to really feel the consequences of your actions. Even better if you're on pager for a while too. I know it's not trendy to stay in a job for long these days, and conventional wisdom is it's not great for your salary either, but one thing it will do is allow you to understand whether decisions you made were actually good or not. There are roles I've been in where it's only been years later that the true impact of decisions made was actually apparent. I'm glad I hung around long enough to experience that.
• dano 2y ago
  * This * - The users don't care about the tech. They care about the result.
  • bdw5204 2y ago
    To the extent users do care about the tech, they care about performance not how "clean" the code is or whether you're using the newest framework. Users hate when software is slow or uses an exorbitant amount of memory.
    • bazoom42 2y ago
      Most users have no idea how much memory a piece of software uses. They care about user experience though which means they will care if the UI hangs or is unresponsive.
      • graypegg 2y ago
        Bingo. I’d go further and say they don’t care about your application at all. They just want to do something, and your application’s quality is measured by how little it stands in the way of accomplishing that. The sad fact is this encapsulates features (ease of development, a framework probably does help you ship faster), adaptability (clean abstractions that are easy to work with), and performance. Finding that balance is always going to be hard but they’re all important!
    • dano 2y ago
      Yeah, I totally agree. Those other factors are internal optimizations. What gets me is when a team wants to switch horses to new tech and do a forklift upgrade just to implement something using the new hotness.
    • imhoguy 2y ago
      And if the product is aimed at prousers/communities who extend the functionality themselves with their own commands, scripts and plugins.
  • CM30 2y ago
• marcusbuffett 2y ago
  These seem just as abstract as mine, if not more so, plus at least I provided examples where I could. Feels weird to criticize my post for general advice + examples, then come up with your own general advice without examples. Also this was just an analogy I know, but doctors definitely don’t hurt people for years while trying to save them, very different profession from ours, if anything doctors earlier in their career have been shown to have better results.
  • aniviacat 2y ago
    I think you are trying to address different audiences. While your tips are mostly targeted at people who are already working as programmers, the parent comment's tips are mostly targeted at complete beginners. E.g. this tip: - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding. is directly addressing a common mistake for absolute beginners. Many beginners will read (or worse yet, watch) loads of coding tutorials while doing little themsves. It is an issue a complete beginner encounters and understands. Your tip on the other hand: > If you (or your team) are shooting yourselves in the foot constantly, fix the gun is addressing people working on medium to large projects with internal tooling. That is not a situation a complete beginner finds themselves in; it's a situation someone who already works in programming for a while finds themselves in. I wouldn't necessarily say your tips are too abstract; they are simply too high level for a complete beginner. That is not necessarily a bad thing; perhaps the you of 15 years ago already had the basic understanding necessary to be able to comprehend and make use of your tips.
  • aiisjustanif 2y ago
    I really liked “You should know all the major shortcuts in your editor. You should be a confident and fast typist. You should know your OS well. You should be proficient in the shell. You should know how to use the browser dev tools effectively.” Typing skills are severely underrated in order to professions and roles adject to our professions like PM.
  • imhoguy 2y ago
    I think you both provide some kind of generational advice, like parent serving kid with life advice. Unfortunatelly, or fortunatelly, they will have to learn it by experiencing own failures first.
• penteract 2y ago
  > There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding. This may be good advice for yourself in the past, and for many people at lots of times, but I'd hesitate to give it as general advice. Reading code others have written should not be understated as way to learn valuable things from fundamental patterns and algorithms to language features and idioms. If you have a job in a team, this may happen anyway, but it's possible to write lots of code without realizing there's a better way.
  • ffsm8 2y ago
    But you're not going to realize which way it's better unless you've written the bad code before.
    • BiteCode_dev 2y ago
      Tangential, but I think that's the problem with trying to learn from design patterns. I read about them and tried to apply them. That's backward and didn't produce anything good. I started to understand them by doing it the other way around: - Coding, solving problems. - Reading other people's sources. - Then reinventing half a terrible design pattern. - Later on, looking at a book: "ohhh, that's what I tried to do" or "ohhh, hence the snippet in that source". - Now I can discuss with people about the pattern and name my code entities according to that. Design patterns are a communication tool.
  • supriyo-biswas 2y ago
    Although, I should point out that reading code is not the same as reading tutorials. Reading code occurs with a kind of intent and focus that is missing when you don’t know much, and thus you may end up falling into the trap of studying multiple tutorials without really trying out much yourself.
    • penteract 2y ago
      Tutorials include some code which is intended to be exemplary and simple enough for a new programmer to make sense of, so I wouldn't discount it as a part of reading code. Practical code does not always have those properties, although you'd certainly be missing a lot if you only read code from tutorials. I completely agree with the claim "There is no substitute for doing", and I might even say that code you read without running and tweaking it doesn't count.
• ourmandave 2y ago
  Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. You'll reach the level you want to avoid doing all this. What if future you has reached that level and people on your team are shipping spaghetti?
  • rileymat2 2y ago
    I feel like this is bad advice, really, you need to be obsessed with quality and growth, but you can't let that stop you from shipping. Try for clean to the best of your ability in the time constraints you have, but accept that it will be dirty.
    • graypegg 2y ago
      I think aiming for clean is good, but it’s really hard to pin down what clean means when you’re starting out. I feel like just emulating what you see in your first few jobs is ideal. (As in, ask coworkers who know the thing you’re working on) It could be great code to be inspired from, or mediocre. Either way you get some input about what decisions result in what outcomes, and what the outcome “feels” like. And if it comes time to change one or many of those decisions later on in this codebase, the person doing it gets a uniform codebase to work from! Unique abstractions and fixes in random places makes refactoring harder.
    • BiteCode_dev 2y ago
      Obsession will stop you from shipping. Or it's not an obsession. It's caring. Very few people can pull off a Steve Job level of nitpicking and actually finish a project. I certainly couldn't, and that advice is for young me.
  • intelVISA 2y ago
    Then you find a new team, else you can do the classic 'making one trivial hill your Happy Path and be prepared to die on it' routine.
• jameshart 2y ago
  > You have imposter syndrome because you are an imposter. You are really bad. It's ok, doctors hurt people for years while learning to save them What in the medical malpractice?
  • ponector 2y ago
    A recent Johns Hopkins study claims more than 250,000 people in the U.S. die every year from medical errors. It is ok to be an imposter.
    • jameshart 2y ago
      Is it your impression that the medical profession thinks that’s ok?
      • whamlastxmas 2y ago
        The medical industrial complex clearly thinks it is, otherwise there would drastically lower patient loads, allow more spots for medical school, and provide better working conditions that would allow for fewer mistakes. None of this is happening and is an implicit acceptance of medical error deaths
      • 4RealFreedom 2y ago
        Yes. Nothing is perfect. The remedy they've chosen is to rely on insurance. There is a reason we call doctor's offices 'practices'.
        • thfuran 2y ago
          There is, but it's not what you're implying.
        • switch007 2y ago
          You think they're called practices because of the less common usage of the term to mean an amateur learning something, to imply they're inexperienced/without training? Rather than it being the place where a practitioner works? ("someone whose regular work has involved a lot of training")
• thfuran 2y ago
  >Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be mad at you, and they are right. But do it anyway. Yes, reboot the servers with users on it. Yes commit the spaghetti. You'll reach the level you want to avoid doing all this. I think you're likely to reach that level a lot faster by trying and failing than by not trying at all.
• cm2187 2y ago
  A way to rephrase your point about complexity is this wonderful quote "Developers are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame, often with the same outcome" (Neal Ford)
  • spoiler 2y ago
    I've experienced this too, but I never understood why this phenomenon happens. Is it because we start adding abstractions before we understand the problems? Like, there's a certain threshold where keep things too simple makes them too complex, so people start introducing abstractions to reduce complexity. But often it's the wrong abstractions and then we accidentally end up with worse complexity that's harder to unravel. There must be a term for this waves hand thing? Edit: gosh typical on phones is hard
    • devctx 2y ago
      The commonly used term, also mentioned by Fred Brooks, is accidental complexity. Accidental highlights the non intentional nature of devs introducing complexity.
      • spoiler 2y ago
        Isn't accidental complexity just complexity that's not part of the problem domain? Say in the context of serving content/downloads, accidentally complexity would be caching, proxies, CDNs (etc). Basically stuff that we have to deal with to handle or optimise downloads, but isn't inherently part of the "just downloading files" problem?
    • layer8 2y ago
      It’s because when you’re in the middle of things with a lot of context in your head, adding another little wrinkle feels like a negligible complication (in particular if the new wrinkle is ostensibly to reduce some complexity, or to ship more quickly), but those complications accumulate up to the limits of any developer’s comprehension (and beyond) rather sooner than later. Hence developers tend to work close to the limit of what they can handle in terms of complexity, which for anyone who hasn’t all the same context in their head (like the developers themselves some time later) is really more than they can handle in an effective manner. From another perspective, this is a form of entropy: There are many more ways to increase complexity than to reduce it. This is also the reason why biological life has been getting more complex over time, the only criterion being if it’s fit to survive and reproduce.
• Zenzero 2y ago
  > It's ok, doctors hurt people for years while learning to save them. Modern medical education doesn't work this way.
  • BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    Yeah, I'm surrounded with medical professionals. It totally does. They make grave mistakes all the time. And they hide them. They lie about them. They have their ego and career on the line. And they don't have enough resources at their disposal, not enough hours, too many patients, and they are exhausted. In short, they are humans in a human system.
    • Zenzero 2y ago
      > Yeah, I'm surrounded with medical professionals In fact you are. You're speaking to one. Your original statement completely ignores the massive amount of barriers put up during your training. From my own experience I can tell you that students are usually quite self aware that they are learning and on a short leash. The most egregious mistakes I've seen were almost always a result of understaffing and gaps stemming from leadership issues coming from the top down. The small mistakes and cut corners are from tired overworked people. Nobody accepts "hurting people" as a component of training. It's an absurd statement.
• TheRoque 2y ago
  I never really got the "it's ok to be an imposter", "it's ok to be bad" part... And the internet is full of people saying things like "I am a developer and I have no idea what I'm doing haha". Seriously, you might be inexperienced or not know everything, but you should clearly not be an imposter and you should be confident in your ability to improve and understand what you don't understand yet. Take responsabilities and ownership in what you do, don't get behind the easy excuse that it's too complicated. You are the professional and you are getting paid for this.
• DrBazza 2y ago
  From 30+ years of dev work: > - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding. I'd rephrase that as "just write something!" Many times I find myself being the classic example of 'perfect is the enemy of good' - I'll think about the perfect solution, rather than write something *now*, that works, and refactor towards perfect. TDD and all that. Other things: - Beware the beta and the boss. If it works, it will invariably get shipped if your manager sees it. Many managers cannot put a value on the future cost of maintaining something that's barely good enough. - Classic Confucius: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." If you're interested enough to read about some tech/language/framework, write something (again!). - Learn at least one other language and ecosystem in addition to your main one. Even if it is syntactically similar (C++, Java, C#, for example).
• neilv 2y ago
  > Doing something for the hell of it is worth it. Just make it separate from the point above so they don't conflict. This is a great use for new, standalone open source modules: feel free to experiment with styles or techniques or goals that you wouldn't want to justify. (Or for experiments that you start and then abandon without ever showing anyone.) For example, when I was making lots of packages to help build out the Racket ecosystem, I'd already made an HTML-writing package, but I felt a craving to do one that used syntax extension at compile time, rather than dynamic s-expressions. So I just did it, as a separate package: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-template/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-template/ I don't recall anyone saying they saw value in it, but I like it, and I scratched that itch, and added another skill to my programming mental bag of tricks.
• karmakaze 2y ago
  Most of these lists do not advise on "programming" the task but rather "programming" the job/position. There's no problem with that, I'd just wish it was labelled "software engineering advice" or "advice for programmers". Few of the points are about programming itself and the list is overall pretty good. Consider this just a rant from an older programmer who hasn't fully recognized that 'programming' is now largely a social endeavor with online info for everything, language and library ecosystems, etc. I wonder how much of this information I would have internalized if it were all available in my time. Seems like the kind of thing I might read and nod in agreement and forget to apply when relevant without some hard earned run-ins (which is how I'd picked them up). As for actual programming advice, the thing I'd highlight is to look at the data first and foremost. It goes from initial conditions to post conditions. The differences are what your program/function does, but both the pre/post conditions should be able to be fully described as a valid static state. Once you understand that, the problem, the code is largely plumbing with a small part that applies the functional transformation. There's so much focus on the form and style of "the code" that seems to consider it the main thing rather than an artifact of getting the main thing done: think any time there seems to be fancy abstractions that don't provide value to offset its complexity. To relate it to a point in the post, if you can't connect the difficulty you're having with the logical transformation that needs to be done (e.g. from database state to state), it's likely self-inflicted (or it could be due to a poor choice of database schema). Similarly for poor choices of request/response formats--basically bad plumbing between systems (and not intrinsically hard because of the information being handled).
• jerf 2y ago
  "Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming." I have come to the conclusion that the use of these sorts of posts is not that the reader, young or otherwise, will instantly and correctly apply all the lessons to their lives. It's more about sensitizing people to problems they may not currently see, and solutions they may not currently be aware of. It's about shortening the learning curve, rather than eliminating it. A 1-year programmer is not going to read themselves into a 20-year programmer, no matter what they read. But at the 5 year level I think you'll see a lot of difference between someone who never considers their craft and never pushes themselves, just keeps their heads down and doing the next bug, and the person who has even just occasionally read this sort of post, pondered how it may apply to their current situation, and taken out of it what they can... which may be something completely different than what they take out if they read the exact same post two years later.
  • password4321 2y ago
    Yes, countering "you don't know what you don't know"
• ryandrake 2y ago
  > - The users don't care about the tech. They care about the result. Seasoned, grownup engineers and tech business leaders are forgetting this, even today. Users don't care that your product is made with AI, but techies just will not shut up about Generative AI, LLMs, Transformers and all this shit that should be implementation details. Users don't care about any of what goes into the sausage.
  • bazoom42 2y ago
    Investors care though, and for many startups the customer they need to appeal to is investors.
    • ryandrake 2y ago
      I don't understand why investors care, either. Product A is made with traditional algorithms, product B is made with AI and LLMs, product C is made with literal magic and wizardry. But they all do exactly the same thing. Why does an investor prefer to invest in product B?
• khana 2y ago
  [dead]
• YZF 2y ago
  I like this but I think all advice suffers from the problem of the people needing it being incapable of using it and the people who are capable of using it already know it. You learn by doing x time. There's also a place for study, reading, etc. to supplement this. This is true in software development. It's true in martial arts. It's true in chess. (the 3 things I've invested some effort in progressing in). I've taught martial arts but there's no magic advice I can give people that will instantly take them to the next level, they need to experience and work through things to progress. Having a teacher helps (a lot).