tikhonj

15 ms·

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by tikhonj 1y ago
the best manager I ever had was a VP who came from a banking background—the key thing was not that he had written a lot of production software himself, but that he had seen what great software looks like (apparently he worked closely with
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by tikhonj 1y ago
well, maybe that explains why I've gravitated hard away from general-purpose backend work :) I've had a great time on teams where folks can go off and build great tools/libraries/etc that others can use and adapt, withou
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by tikhonj 1y ago
it's real impact, but it requires folks to be able to confidently talk about counterfactuals—"we would have wasted X days if not for..."—which I've found to be really hard at most places the exception was places where le
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by tikhonj 1y ago
the real problem is not that we can't measure productivity, but that we can't even fully define an abstract productivity metric—what does "productivity" even mean? we can come up with some notion that talks about the n
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by tikhonj 1y ago
possibly we're saying the same things in different ways, or maybe it's just hard to pin the difference down in a words what do you mean by "the smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team" in
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by tikhonj 1y ago
I dunno, almost all the brilliant engineers I've known have also been great team players and mentors. Not all, but I'd say it's pretty correlated. The reason brilliant assholes stand out is one of those statistical paradoxes
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by tikhonj 1y ago
> The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team. I see where this is coming from, but it's also pretty sad. In my experience, it tends to create environments where engineers are second-class citizens
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by tikhonj 1y ago
100%. I've taken to using intentionally fuzzy phrases to describe productivity/impact/effectiveness/whatever. Like, "in a holistic accounting, person X did a great job". It's not necessarily—in fact, nece
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by tikhonj 1y ago
I definitely agree that the best teams have cultures that make even normal engineers incredibly effective compared to the status quo. Managers definitely put too much stock in hiring and "engineering quality" compared to culture,
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by tikhonj 1y ago
This is a great example where humor can help: I love http.cat because the whimsy makes it easier to look up and remember status codes. Not exactly the same as jokes in code, but an example of how more humor can be better than less humor f
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by tikhonj 1y ago
They don't hurt, and it's fun to come across them. If the funny thing is used in one place, it can be memorable and easier to search for. If it's the equivalent of "error [error]" or whatever, I honestly don't
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by tikhonj 1y ago
But a wholly non-funny "Invariant Violated" message would be no better. The problem isn't that the message is funny, but that it does not contain the information you need to understand what's going on. The whimsy is just
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by tikhonj 1y ago
Meta Llama, Author of Harry Potter
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by tikhonj 1y ago
We already have more insta feed or video games than you can eat. We've been inundated with optimized slop ever since social media became a commercial force, and the ages of cheap TV and tabloids wasn't that different either. To
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by tikhonj 1y ago
Pretty much everyone makes modifications to their homes— arranging furniture, choosing decorations, storing tools and implements and books and... I've been to hotel rooms that looked identical to each other. I've never been to any
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by tikhonj 1y ago
The motivation is doing research to better understand AI? People's time and attention is not fungible—especially in inherently creative pursuits like research—and the mindset in your comment is exactly the sort of superficial administr
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by tikhonj 1y ago
unluckily, too many corporate managers seem to think they are :/
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by tikhonj 1y ago
I don't like talking about "complexity" any more because while almost everyone agrees it is "bad", people have radically different ideas of what it means . "Complexity" in software conflates several disti
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by tikhonj 1y ago
It's used for both which consistently confuses logic that guess programming language purely based on file extensions.
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by tikhonj 1y ago
Companies that have an average churn of more than 7%—which is most of them—have no place worrying about some 50-year-old retiring. Not that that stops managers, of course...
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by tikhonj 1y ago
Sure, but modern societies have solved the problem of needing to work until you're 70. Working until 65 or whatever still sucks, but 5 years is 5 years is not nothing.
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by tikhonj 1y ago
The real question—to which I have absolutely no answer—is not about syntax, it's about concepts: what is a better way to think about higher-dimensional arrays rather than loops and indices? I'm convinced that something better ex
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by tikhonj 1y ago
unfamiliar languages are practically unreadable
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by tikhonj 1y ago
> AI isn’t replacing us. It’s relieving us - of repetition, boilerplate, tedium. My problem with current AI is that it isn't relieving us of boilerplate, it's making boilerplate cheaper to write . And when you make something
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by tikhonj 1y ago
Good example for sums: you can write a property that checks whether the sum of a list is the same before and after you randomly shuffle the elements. In practice sum is a sufficiently well-understood function that this property will only ca
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by tikhonj 1y ago
Those grouping words are silly trivia, but if you want to see folks using lots of specialized snow-words casually, just hang out on the skiing subreddit :) (Well, maybe during the North American skiing season more than in late May.)
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by tikhonj 1y ago
I wrote some property-based tests for a parsing library. Eventually one of the tests for case-insensitive parsing failed... because it hit the letter "Ǆ" which has upper, lower and title-case. The funny thing is that the parsing
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by tikhonj 1y ago
Yeah, 100%. I worded my comment a bit awkwardly, but that's exactly what I was getting at too :)
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by tikhonj 1y ago
This is a fun question. But the fact that "move a medium sized file from one machine to another" is still a fun question is also a pretty damning indictment of our industry :P
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by tikhonj 1y ago
What's worse for motivation than taking longer? Boredom? Feeling like what you're doing is low-quality or superficial? Doing something artificial for purely external reasons like grades or exams? Can't speak for anyone else,

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