I would also not judge you for having your own preferences and opinions. I too prefer working in an office to remote work, but when I say this out loud other developers take it as advocating RTO or saying remote work is worse when it just doesn't suit my personality. I get that it's a touchy subject but there is no need to get up in my face about it.
You mention bullying and brigading and that seems to be an unfortunate reality of this industry. I suspect there is a lot of insecurity and imposter syndrome that causes people to write hyper-confident blog posts about why they are better without AI and how their tests have 100% coverage and how (unfashionable language which half the world uses) is garbage etc. Maybe if we all follow your example and be candid everyone could chill out a bit.
I'll go next: despite trying several times, I have never successfully written anything more complicated than Fibonnacci in Lisp or Haskell. I know it's clean and pure and all that, but my brain just won't work that way.
This blog post does pretty much the opposite though; its analysis of remote work is pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth. It was an especially weird editorial choice to make use of the "general" second person given how much outside of that one paragraph was written in the first person. In an article that's ostensibly trying to be humble and vulnerable like you mention, it just comes across as patronizing. I can't say I'm surprised that the author might have been judged for expressing this opinion because it's not about their personal preference, but a judgement of its own.
I think a lot of people genuinely struggle with the idea that sometimes how something is said can matter just as much as what's being said. Being correct and being respectful are orthogonal concepts even when talking about objective truth rather than opinions; if someone asks what 7 times 9 is, there's a difference between telling them "63" and "Well, obviously it's fucking 63, duh!". For a subjective topic like remote work that some people's lives have been quite significantly affected by, it's even more important to put some effort into understanding how one's words will come across, because if the phrasing is poor, people aren't necessarily going to feel the need to go out of their way to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. I can't know what exactly the author was thinking when writing that paragraph, but I also can't distinguish between whether they have the same viewpoint as you but communicated it poorly or if they genuinely think that there's some sort of objective truth than I'm worse at my job working remotely than I would be working in person. Given the amount of care I've put into addressing many of the exact issues they've raised due to needing to work remotely because of a medical condition of an immediate family member, it was quite hard for me not to have an immediate strong angry reaction to how flippant they seem to be with what's at best their phrasing of their opinions. My point is that it's a lot more work to actually care about how one's point comes across than it is to claim that people are overreacting after the fact, and it's worth considering how much of the reaction the author mentions having gotten in the past is reflective of this.
The 7 times 9 analogy doesn't track it all. 7x9 = 63 is an objective fact by definition. His thoughts on remote work are an opinion by definition. If other people decide that what he says is dogmatic, blame it on their own lack of critical thinking skills.
The meta-point of the article is that we should express are thoughts without qualifiers and embellishments to manipulate other people's perceptions of us.
In my experience this is a common failure point among tech/analytical folks (myself included) which leads to their words and actions being genrally misconstrued and effectively misunderstood by the larger segement of the population which is rarely able or disposed to handling communications without embellishments.
I hadn't until a joined a lisp based project. Learned a ton. My brain didn't work that way at first either, but working with it every day I eventually got it.
We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help.
I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but I'm certain that merely blaming "remote work" isn't it.
Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote.
Chatrooms have evolved in a really interesting way. I think the first generation to have them didn't fully understand how "public" they were. Maybe there are more people in the more recent generations that have a more visceral understanding of online "publicness" as they have grown up with (and perhaps have been burned by) those concepts from the very beginning. Maybe they have a better understanding of the permanence of online utterances and therefore have a more conservative approach to interacting on what feels like the permanent public ledger.
Maybe it's because the concept of pseudonyms has devolved since the early days. Corporate social media has an interest in doxing its users to advertise to and control them but pre-corporate social media was filled with anonymous usernames. Posting in a large group under your permanent forever name is much scarier than posting under an anonymous, temporary identity. One of the things I advocate people do is post online anonymously, instead of with their real name. It alleviates a lot of the fear of speaking your truth, which we need more of!
There is something there. The ability to try on identities in a safe environment before you discover which one you really identify with. It's much harder to do this with your real name. Your past comes with a lot of baggage and people who know you don't want you to change because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
Smartphones changed that with Youtube and Facebook. Youtube incentivized you to use a Google account, and Facebook wouldn't let you use it anonymously without an account. Because you could use one account to log into multiple places people could track you across websites. People could make archives, screenshots, and transcriptions of anything you had done with those linked accounts. With this change there was no safe corner to hide if you said something stupid. And because so many people were foolish enough to tie their real identities to these online accounts with their real names or pictures of themselves, it gave a way for particularly unruly people to track these individuals even offline. There was now a real danger if you said something stupid, because instead of just getting your post deleted or starting a derailment in the thread people could harass you at your home, get you fired, and even send the police to terrorize you in the middle of the night via SWAT raids. It's no longer just one person calling you out. It's now hundreds, maybe even thousands, all armed with information.
And this is why I say it's stupid to require phone numbers and real names to sign up for insignificant things like being able to view someone bake a duck shaped cake live over the internet.
It also has access to our internal wikis, GitHub, and other internal tools.
Use tools for what they are good for and create a culture that makes each tool work best for your organization.
They would be right: HR will get access to everything you ever posted in a company chat if they have a reason to check. Some people don’t care, some… do.
I think this is merely the shift from doing this as a hobby, to doing this for work. Random coding problems mixed with banter I posted or answered on IRC back in the day? Purely hobby stuff, things I done after school instead of doing my homework. No stakes beyond the community itself, I could disengage at any moment, nobody would care - there was no commitment of any kind involved.
Today? Even if we switched back from Slack/Teams/whatnot to IRC, the fact remains, the other people are my co-workers, and we're talking about work, and it's all made of commitments and I can't disengage, or else I starve.
That changes the dynamic quite a bit.
People weren’t assholes and/or snowflakes in those days. Implicit in being on the net was that you were fairly well behaved.
For the 70s, I would agree with you. But the moment home users, and particularly kids, gained access to the internet, you started to see a subculture of trolling.
Source: I was one of those 80s kids. It’s not something I’m proud of, but writing bots to troll message boards and scrapers for porn and warez played just as significant role in my journey into my IT profession as writing games on 8bit micros.
And everyone was in on it. We were all trolling, and being trolled, and perfectly well aware of what trolling was. But now people deliberately target and exploit the vulnerable on the internet.
I feel like the only thing you needed before was a fairly thick skin, but now you need a lawyer and a smorgasboard of security.
The main difference is that more spaces were quasi-professional and non-pseudonymous, in that one largely got one’s internet access and identity (IP address, email address, invitation) from the institution of higher learning one attended or worked for. So there were direct, two or three degrees separation consequences (my boss knows someone at your institution) in those spaces. I suppose this is what you are referring to.
(In my early era of commercial internet work I can remember a colleague shutting down an accidentally abusive scraping bot by working out who was likely to be the boss of the person running it and phoning them up)
But away from those spaces were many places that were just as bad as they are now.
The internet has always (in my time of using it, which is all of my adult life as someone who is over half a century old) demonstrated that a good culture is a question of starting conditions and quick maintenance actions.
A non-trivial amount of the worst behaviour I have personally witnessed on the internet happened before the year 2000.
Kind of a ship of theseus situation culture wise - when the original leaders are all gone, did they pick good successors to fill their spots? Very often not.
At first they said it was "great". But it soon turned sour and resulted in "it seems like you spend too much time answering questions", and I should "focus" and "free up" that time to work on my assigned tasks.
Well, I don't answer anything anymore. In fact nobody does. It used to be that you got precise technical answers from someone directly working on the tool or problem you asked about. The previous CEO would sometime even answer themself. Not anymore.
Now people ask, but nobody answers. The rest has devolved into LinkedIn style self-promotions and announcements.
Have a senior leadership team and want them to not tell you bad news when you are the CEO/Leader? Then link their salary/performance to metrics like number of production incidents their team has. Suddenly the number of incidents that you know of decreases.
If that does not work to isolate you as the leader from thr reality of your company then link their salaries to a metric like number of projects finished before or at deadline and watch how tech debt increases multiple folds and how everything is suddenly estimates are increasing all over the place.
Want people not to ask meaningful hard questions in All Hands? Just make sure anyone that seems critical be labeled as not culture fit and done. All questions are positive and nice. Make sure to always ask for name and disable any anonymous questions asked.
Not trying to say metrics are bad or they should not be used. But they are not pure functions :) they do have side effects and sometimes very large ones.
There's nothing new here, there's no problem to solve. Doesn't matter if you're anonymous or publicly identifiable. 90% of people don't contribute, they just consume. 9% contribute occasionally. And 1% are regular contributors.
The 1% or 90-9-1 rule is pretty well known.
I believe the change is largely demographic, and I'm NOT referring to gender/nationality/age/race. Rather to the personality of people working in tech today. Long ago tech people were almost exclusively sourced from the weird kids who couldn't/didn't read the room and other things of that nature, they just said stuff, asked stupid questions because they wanted to know. Most people don't do that, so if tech is now made of more "commonly adjusted" people, then there will be less dexterity in navigating a less social and more (actual) productivity focused medium (remote/async comms).
As much as I hate RTO, chat/video really does have lower social clue information density
I couldn't agree more. I pushed to get the place I worked for to use Slack when it first launched, moving us off AIM (ha!). Our use of Slack when we shared an office in the twenty-teens was so much better than the use I've seen of Slack/competitors on fully-remote teams.
I wonder if it's because the failure mode was, as you said, to "drop by." Now the failure mode is... just failure.
My team rooms are pretty dead. I'll send stuff there but by and large the team simply doesn't use chat functions.
Arbitrary discretion in the exercise of power is the bedrock of our society.
I’ve managed to be invited or told of them after ingratiating myself to the teams, or more often, after quitting and getting invited as one of the “good ones”
They all know that every word on company shit is being monitored
It’d be like using Blind as your company chat - nobody goes on there to say how great their experience has been, and the tone infects everything else.
But maybe I’m just not very fun at parties…
This should be avoided at all costs by creating a culture that is receptive to people’s concerns and doesn’t do stupid things without explanation - but I get how difficult that is in reality and most orgs end up messing this up.
Notification fatigue is a thing and people are just used to ignoring notifications and messages nowadays which ends up with slow responses and poor communication all around.
I'm currently in feeling things out phase with my current team, and people seem really laid back about responding to messages - but it also seems like we're getting stuff done. Hard to figure.
It requires to be comfortable exposing lack of knowledge or saying weird things to peers, and be confident it will be taken in good faith. As you point out, that requires a whole level of culture building.
The same people DMing however will also extol the virtues of posting in public and lament why there is not more conversation happening in the open.
There's no question! It absolutely is.
IRC selects for people who like chatting and communicating via text.
I think the mistake made with remote work was assuming that everyone could easily work that way.
The best experiences I had with remote work were pre-COVID, when the teams working remote were carefully selected for having good remote work abilities and anyone who couldn’t handle it was kicked back to the office (or out of the company)
Then something changed during COVID and remote work was treated as something everyone could do equally well. The remote teams I worked with were now a mix of people who could work well remotely and people who wanted to work remote but tried to force communication to happen like we were back in the office: Meetings for everything. Demands to “jump on a quick call” when a few Slack messages would have done the job. Then there were the people who read “Four Hour Work Week” and thought they were going to do their jobs from their iPhone while traveling the world or at the ski resort.
I don’t know. Having seen the before and after it doesn’t feel so surprising that remote work faltered when applied indiscriminately to everyone. The best remote teams I work with to this day are still the ones who know how to communicate in that old school IRC style where communication flowed easily and everyone was on the same page, not trying to play office games through Slack.
I think the realization was more that some people are simply there, either at the office or at home. Of course the experiment worked fine. Those people were already not doing much. Not doing much in a different location makes no difference.
Note that these days, the Mozilla community has moved to Matrix, which also works very well for these things.
Consider the effort to accommodate those preferences though. Accommodating a video call preference is easy. Same for chat. Accommodating a preference for face-to-face requires spending an hour (2x average US commute) traveling to meet you. That's quite a significant ask of the other person.
In electronic chat I can ask someone to explain their question and wait for it in writing. In person, I often have to listen to them stumble over the concept because they didn’t think about what they wanted to ask before asking it.
In a video call I can clearly see the other person’s screen and zoom in on what I’m trying to look at. In person I have to lean over their desk and squint at the right angle.
Living beings do it all kinda ways. Bees waggle their butts, crickets rub their legs, geese honk, snakes hiss, some fish detect electrical signals. And to collaborate, the bees' dance indicates a flight path, birds singing indicates interest in mating, the snake's hiss and the geese's honk tells you to watch out. You use the tools you have and develop collaboration with them. There's clearly no right way, there's just ways.
But tomorrow morning, would you wanna learn to honk at people, or rub your legs, or waggle your butt, to order a latte at Starbucks? It'd be awkward, weird, painful, and unnecessary. So if you were asked to, you'd probably not try very hard to adapt to it. And if everybody you knew were in the same boat, all being forced to change with no real guidance, kinda not trying that hard to make it work? It would suck for everybody.
People just don't like changing what they're used to. They probably don't even mean to fight it. But we do like culture we're already familiar with. Change is hard, not changing is easy. We like easy. So people who grew up with remote work (on IRC, mailing lists, etc) find it easy, even more productive. But a company that's thrown into it without a healthy established culture are going to be swimming upstream indefinitely.
This is sort of the point. Remote tools work great when you have spent a lot of time building relationships and rapport with the people involved. That's hard to do in professional settings, and extremely hard to do in remote professional settings.
Letting teams that know each other well work remotely works great. Building teams remotely is very hard.
I'm a diehard for remote work, but we have to be realistic abouts limitations.
Text requires correctness to some extent; bullshitters will just yap away for hours and nobody can point to one piece of text and say "Here, this is where you are objectively wrong, and/or misrepresenting things".
The unfortunate reality of remote work is there's a lot of zoom meetings where yappers in high places will BS away -- a lot more "important" zoom meetings than "important chats", especially in public.
Perhaps it’s useful to have these people in the office, in a room of mirrors, where they can listen to themselves talk all day. There’s a subset of people who have weaseled their way into tech coming from the world of hyper-anxious very public social media engagement that simply make life miserable for everyone else.
That’s pretty weird and uncomfortable and I don’t know that I would want to work with someone like that in or out of office.
Sure it applies to things like random people on social media and such, but after a mutual exchange or two you should be over it.
Obviously the help also came with you bonding and chit chatting about other stuff, I miss it.
I get the feeling there are a lot of people who are developers by trade who are following what they feel they should do to progress their career rather than what they should do to work on something that interests them. Sure, the industry isn't what it used to be in terms of job market, but for a good long while there it was relatively easy to find something that interests you if you were competent. But if you're not interested in what you're working on, I find it strange to write a blog about the C#/.NET journey. I'm asking these questions genuinely: Was this a self imposed expectation for career reasons? To have a tech blog? Are you actually interested in programming or is this something you found that you're decent at and knew there were career opportunities?
About SQL knowledge, over the many years in this profession, I've re-learned SQL three times. This is because I'm a generalist, and there were large portions of time where I just didn't need to know it. But surely, in all your years of experience, you must have realized: You will never know or recall everything you learn or even scratch the surface of what you haven't. Even if you did remember everything about SQL when you learned it, you're going to have to relearn it anyway. Everytime I touch Postgres there's loads new features out. That is how any maintained software is. That is just the job, as far as I'm concerned. Very few people have the luxury of being able to hyper specialize and looking things up isn't just important, it is necessary, because being an encyclopedia of product development isn't why you're employed. The knowledge and expertise you are paid for isn't SQL syntax or how well you know C#, it is your ability to apply technology to solve problems and effectively work within a team to do so (a tangent, but this is why in the long wrong AI won't replace you).
I don't mean to preach or give a tome of a message. I am _genuinely_ interested in your perspective. I have bounced around a lot in my career but generally have to mentor folks and I'd love to chat more about this particular struggle because I hear it frequently. Especially from those who seem to have a bit of an identity crisis in their profession.
When I was in school, I discovered that I studied more effectively and efficiently when I'm surrounded by other students who's also studying.
Then at work, I found I worked much more productively if my coworkers are all doing their work.
It's not just simply peer pressure, it's an atmosphere effect, it tell you "hey, this place is for doing this thing, now you do it too", it makes you concentrate. Sometimes being concentrated is a good thing.
I feel much the same as the article author in that
"this place is for doing this thing, now you do it too"
Is somehow powerfully motivating. But at least for me it's about the place, not the other people in the place.
I had the same covid-related journey from an office worker to unexpectedly fully remote. But I'm also lucky/privileged enough to be able to dedicate a room in my house that's quite separate from the rest of the house, and for me that's "where I work". I had coworkers who started out having to work from their kitchen table, some with housemates or children around - pretty sure that would have completely killed my productivity.
I do sometimes resent losing that room, effectively subsidising my boss by relieving his office rent costs. It used to be my "workshop" where I used my 3D printers, built drones, tinkered with electronics, and repaired stuff that broke - and I just don't do those things much any more because going into that room now feels way to much like "work" not "hobby or play".
Doors are a necessity in the work place and I hate open offices. 1 other person is okay but I'd rather a small room than no room.
A door let's be close out the rest of the world when I'm in the zone. There's time for collaboration but there's time for isolation. In a physical place I can turn off all notifications and close my door. I can make a space where there's low physical distractions like noise or people walking in front of my desk (or talking 5 feet away...) A slack setting of "away" is interpreted as either "eh, they'll probably answer" or "they forgot to turn it back off" (or they don't notice/care)[0,1]. But a physical door, people are much more cautious about knocking on it when it's usually open. It's not the same thing as a busy sign.
But I also don't think a door should be usually closed. It should usually be open. Indie collaboration but also respect your coworkers. A door is a great communication tool that you just can't get online.
[0] and for the love of god, do not hit me up with "hey". It's an asynchronous messaging system. I'll read the notification as it comes across my screen. Don't try to become synchronous with me that way. Call me, physically find me, or ask when I'm free for a call.
[1] seriously, my time is just as valuable as yours. To me it's even more valuable.
I much prefer working with people who can just be honest about what they don't know, it's way better than pretending to know or trying to save face, and generally people in the former camp seem to have higher EQ.
- I blog with my real name, which includes an uncommon first name. It's easy for hiring managers to search the web for.
- My blog is linked from the website I host on the domain name I use for my email address, including for job applications. Anybody I email is likely to follow that thread.
Would it make more sense to ask how to apply git rebase in certain scenarios?
If they can get away with a query that takes 2s to return a single row, they will be quite content and will not be bothered to look at the query plan.
It's a shame, because everything could be a little better with hardly any effort.
A few years ago I was the TL on a FAANG Android project, where for a few months I was doing more spreadsheet/TPM work than usual, and didn't have much time for coding. Once we had a meeting where I ended up coding in Kotlin live in front of a dozen younger devs to discuss the implementation of some feature. My work background is Android and Java/Kotlin, but at the time I was mostly coding in C on the side, and in the moment my brain just forgot what the syntax in Kotlin is for a "switch-case" statement, so I wrote "switch", "match", etc, struggling like a first year student, while everyone watched me fumble, until I just gave up and said: "oh my god, I'm forgetting Kotlin. What the hell is the switch keyword in Kotlin called?". Then someone said: "it's when".
I felt old and a little embarrassed, but mostly I was surprised at how quickly I could forget a programming language I used daily.
I notice that general concepts usually stick better in my brain than specific things like your example with ‘when’. Even those are pruned down a bit after long enough though.
The inflection point will be when business hires an AI to fill a managerial role. AI will discriminate against hiring human developers.
Since you’re so familiar with the process, I suggest you start positioning yourself as an AI development efficiency management consultant or similar.
Dude, your employer is toxic AF. Look for a new job starting today.
That's not how I operate, unfortunately. I dislike people more when they are physically close to me; when they're not I tend to remember their good sides, their humor. When they're in the vicinity all I see are repeat patterns -- ticks, the way some pick their nose or check their chair before getting seated, the fact that some people go get a coffee at exactly the same time every day. It gets old very fast.
I wish we'd be more open about our flaws and knowledge gaps in general. I think we'd all benefit.
I used to also fear appearing incompetent if I admitted to not knowing too many things, so I would avoid showing my knowledge gaps whenever possible.
However, this colleague was the exact opposite. He would gleefully tell people he had no idea how to do certain things, would be a ready listener when the person he was talking to explained how it worked, and would heap praise on the person for their knowledge and teaching skills. He would always defer to other people as experts when he didn’t know, and would make sure our bosses and coworkers knew who had helped him and how much they knew about the topic.
What I saw and experienced was that this did NOT, in any way shape or form, make people think less of him. It did the exact opposite. First, it made people REALLY happy to help him with stuff; he made you feel so smart and capable when you explained things and helped him, everyone jumped at the opportunity to show him things. He learned so much because he made everyone excited to teach him, and made his coworkers feel smart and appreciated for their knowledge.
And then, when he did speak with confidence on a subject, everyone knew he wasn’t bullshitting, because we knew he never faked it. Since he gave everyone else the chances to be the expert and deferred all the time, you didn’t get the one-upmanship you often get when tech people are trying to prove their bonafides. People were happy to listen to him because he first listened to them.
I have really tried to emulate him in my career. I go out of my way to praise and thank people who help me, always try to immediately admit where my skills and experience lack, and don’t try to prove myself in subjects I don’t really know that well. It has worked well for me in my career, as well.
I'm surprised at this statement. My team pair a lot - at least half of the time - and the majority is remote.
We find it much more comfortable to pair remotely on our own setups than crowded around a single desk and keyboard.
I wonder why our experiences are so different.
I work remote and wouldn't have it any other way, but I'll admit there are culture things I miss since I really love my team. As an employee? My employer gets way more value from me without the bullshit of going to an office.
Reading what he wrote about remote work in particular is so strange to me, even though I am fully aware that I've got colleagues that seemingly mirror his views.
On this anonymous platform I feel comfortable pointing out that this isn't an artifact of remote work whatsoever.
If you weren't like this before, and only noticed yourself becoming like that... I'm afraid you've just changed. Accepting people/coworkers along with their flaws is a conscious decision you need to make. You likely just weren't able to see their shortcomings earlier in your life, likely because you haven't been negatively effected by actions like they're taking.
Let's say you have a colleague that always does as little as they can get away with. Everyone will know such a person. Eventually you get the ability to tell quickly when a person is like that. And then you will either start to see them as a negative or just accept this about them - because it doesn't make them into a bag person and you can still joke with them and learn from each other.
I don't know if I could tell you with confidence the proper way to get a string length in any language. Is it a global function or an object method or property? Is it length or count or size? I have to look it up or rely on intellisense every time. I do too much bouncing between languages.
Well, I know it in BASIC. Len().
They don't even have a main() any more, it's great
def main(): # code
The dunder syntax you see around isn't required.
(obviously it's not but it is super nice that main in Rust is just:)
fn main() {
}I had the sweetest manager once. Someone stared talking about iphone and she [1] casually asked "what is iphone?" (this is after 6-7 months after iPhone was launched). Everyone's jaw dropped ... what? In which world u live in? ... to which she said with a wide smile and not an ounce of embarrassment .. "what? I don't know what iphone is?"
But she was otherwise so good in every other aspect ...
[1] She is/was mother of 4 kids and that left her very little time for anything else.
I love software development but recently I have being doing too much data analysis and nothing too exciting.
I get afraid of getting the basics wrong when I go long streaks like that. I appreciate the fact that you showed that to others. This is healthy for everyone. We are living in a society where faking it is so common that people cannot just bear to be themselves anymore
This is from uncle bob. I hate the argument by people that 100% leads to "bad quality tests". Not doing it leads to bad quality code, people who don't care about quality of code, and hence dont write tests, suddenly start to care about quality of tests.
If you tell people that 95% is just as inadequate as 0%, they'll tend towards 0%.
1. The getters and setters are not called anywhere in application logic. In that case, delete the getters / setters and get to 100%.
2. The getters and setters are called somewhere in the application logic. In that case, they should have already been covered in the test for the application.
There is really no excuse to not write tests to get to 100%.
While I do appreciate this joke (and I do hope this is a joke), I've recently had a project majorly held up because a lead dev didn't understand SQL. It's great to admit gaps but it's equally important to close those gaps.
> As a hiring manager I interviewed software engineers and tried to filter for object-oriented knowledge. Retroactively, it’s clear I was hypocritical.
As some one who has been on the other side of "rejected by an interviewer who didn't understand the thing they've interviewed you about" I, again, appreciate the transparency, but I'm not entirely feeling that the lesson has been learned in the case.
There was a time in my life where I felt ashamed that I didn't know calculus... so I learned calculus and my life has been better for it. While refusing to admit ignorance of a topic is particular problem in tech, confessing that you don't know something and gleefully stopping there is not much better. Holding people up to a standard you do not hold yourself to is a major problem in this field. The technical people I've learned the most from hold you to a high standard and hold themselves to an even higher one.
Of course not every engineer has to hold themselves to a high standard, but if you want to write a blog about a topic, then part of the requirements here is that you do hold yourself to a high standard. Yes, we all have gaps, and we shouldn't let shame get in the way of learning, but we shouldn't let shamelessness about what we don't know limit us either.
For automated testing, I'm in the middle of reading Developer Testing by Alexander Tarlinder, with xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros coming close behind. I'm also working through Test-Driven Development: By Example with my wife as we have time.
For SQL, I read Grokking Relational Database Design by Qiang Hao last winter, and I started SQL Queries for Mere Mortals by John Viescas this week. Sadly, my flub with "left inner join" was not a joke.
For OOP, I've been on a whirlwind tour: OOA&D With Applications by Booch et al., Object Thinking by David West, POODR and 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz, Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans, IDDD and DDDD by Vaughn Vernon, Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen, Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin, and Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck. Still on the docket are Design Patterns by the Gang of Four, PoEAA by Martin Fowler, Smalltalk, Objects, and Design by Chamond Liu, and Object Design by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.
> confessing that you don't know something and gleefully stopping there is not much better [...] we shouldn't let shamelessness about what we don't know limit us either
I promise you, this was not gleeful and this was not shameless. Shame and fear affected me for months on these issues. And I'm not stopping there... From the end of the article: "I’m going to continue to work on skill building, but now I feel free to write about it. If [...] you’d like to help me fill [my knowledge gaps], [...]"
> if you want to write a blog about a topic, then part of the requirements here is that you do hold yourself to a high standard
A high standard of writing, maybe. But plenty of great stories come from those who are striving for a high standard, not just those already in the upper echelon. It's what makes this place different from academic journals.
It's easy to feel dumb on the internet, around every corner there are people pointing out your mistakes and they seem to know it all. But it's often just by chance, of course there is someone out there that know this exact thing you got wrong. You did the rare thing what no one does in tech, you said what you don't know, all the _experts_ out there simply hide that.
The other issue is also that people try to overwhelm you with their questionable knowledge. I find that quite problematic with OOP. I've smoked a lot of the OOP crack, but I feel more efficient without all the rituals and dogmas. Knowing all the bells and whistles of smart OOP stuff will just cause more shame, because with every piece of code you will think "oh I have to do it that way or people will hate me".
That being said, I usually prefer to know the essence of something. There are many ways to testing, but if you know what it's conceptually doing, then you can write your own test lib. It's not hard, neither magic. But elaborate frameworks and ritualized concepts often lead you away from the gist of things. You are supposed to do things how they've imagined it for you, if you don't, feel shame.
My suggestion is using Khan Academy if you want to better your math knowledge. It's really quiet good for that sort of thing. It was just starting to take off when I finished my degree. I wish it was available before then.
I learned way more reading crafting interpreters than I did in my compiler class for example.
But I also do read textbooks for fun… Now that I have a few decades of experience in a lot of these subjects I get way more out of the books. And I can start to understand more of the meta information. Like, of all the things the author could’ve used as an example, why did they pick that. Also, it’s hugely interesting for me to look at the homework problems and theorize why this particular problem was picked. Especially fun for electrical engineering books. But ya, I’m weird like that.
Without making judgment on the actions of any involved party, I do wonder why the author would choose to bring up this incident and submit it as part of a story to a site where there is a significant overlap in readership.
Honestly, if there's any chance the content they posted on your profile before locking you out comes close to defamation, I'd consider talking to a lawyer about it. It could be that getting one to send them a cease-and-desist letter on your behalf could take care of the problem.
I've generally found conversation there to be more respectful than HN, rather than less, when discussions get heated - so I had high hopes it would be a different site, but alas.
This leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
Edit: you know what, screw it. In the spirit of "no more self censorship", here's the link: https://lobste.rs/~7u026ne9se
Sadly, it seems like nothing was learned, since he settles only for diminishing his culpability in anti-social behaviour. He goes so far as to describe, in his blog post, his code as an "AI-assisted patch". When you profess that you don't even know the language of the code that the LLM generated, there is no "assistance" about it, you're at the deepest end of vibe coding. And in submitting it to an open-source project, you're making a maintainer spend more time and effort reviewing it than you did prompting it, which is not sustainable. Moreover, if the maintainer wanted a pure-LLM-generated solution, there was nothing stopping them from hopping over and typing in a prompt themselves.
In fact, most of the comments were purely a debate with no direct attacks at all. The extent of "not respectful comments" I see are something like...
So your original comment that you "didn't want to hype up AI" was a lie, you really just wanted to pretend it was your own work and didn't want the project to be able to make a choice about it. There are good reasons why projects may not want to accept code generated by AI. They may not care. But by consciously choosing not to disclose that, you took that choice away from the project. That's pretty lousy behavior if you ask me.
> you're advocating for a toxicly positive carebear forum
Please stop putting words in my mouth.
The problem with if-else chains is it's easy for a programmer to forget to handle a case that another developer added in the called component. Unit tests can't help a spec miscommunication. But, visitor pattern can as it forces the handling logic to be complete.
Hence my example at the end using discriminated unions and exhaustive pattern matching in F#. Much, much simpler with the same benefits.
The monolith to microservices trend was one great example of this.
Taking a switch statement and spreading it out over 3x classes is not a general improvement, it is very context specific. It makes the code difficult to navigate because what used to all be in one spot and easy to read is now spread out who-knows-where and there might be a special case lurking somewhere.
I don't fear they'll deny others the opportunity for remote work. The company is "headquartered" in California, but I don't know if they even lease an office anymore. The CTO lives in the upper midwest, the architect lives on the east coast, my manager lives along the Mississippi River, and I live in the Ozarks.
> enjoy the benefits more than you suffer the drawbacks
Yes. I'm sorry, I thought I made that clear in the post. The benefits of remote work include, but are not limited to: no stress or time from commuting, an opportunity for geographic arbitrage, and the ability to build a better lifestyle around the lack of a commute. Beyond just the remote worker themself, a society that transitioned all office work to remote would also gain more benefits: more efficient use of real estate with entire office buildings rendered unnecessary, less chance of land value distortion due to centralization of workers, and less pollution due to fewer commutes.
I'm glad to also criticize in-office work for having other drawbacks. For example, I was rear-ended commuting to work more than once, the family needed the expense of two cars, we spent more on clothing, and the ambient level of noise being above 35 dBA was annoying.
And I want to offer some contrast—not as a rebuttal, but just as a reminder that there’s lots of different ways to navigate this strange field.
The _majority_ of the paid code delivery I’ve done for a decade+ has been in Ruby. (The balance has been a mix of mostly devops and some TS/JS and Elixir.)
Remote work has been an utter boon. Admittedly, I do feel like it’s got worse since Covid. But I’ve been able to work with people all across the globe without uprooting my family and leaving my community, and conversely can travel without having to leave my job or clientele.
And I do find that some places benefit from thinking hard about their process. Small senior teams do great with Shape Up. Projects where you have a non-negotiable scope (replatforms) and work streams that are more reactive than planned do better with kanban than something involving estimates.
That’s not to say the author’s wrong! Again, just that the world is wide and experiences differ.
Some context here: I’ve consulted full time almost continuously since 2018, which certainly colors my experience.
> And yet, my lack of awareness of polymorphism showed me I’ve been writing little more than structured programs. That I could replace conditionals and case staments with specialized classes had never crossed my mind.
> Polymorphism is covered in every college OO course.
Consider yourself blessed then because you're in for one hell of a ride if you pursue that path to its extreme. For me, it was the opposite: been taught OOP, I had to unlearn most of it to be able to better structure my mind and how I think about programs.
You should know what polymorphism is (also, there's static, dynamic, ad hoc, single dispatch, multiple dispatch), but I don't think it's a weakness if you have not been using it that much (the real weakness is over-using it and making a clusterfuck out of your code.)
Which is a long-winded way of saying that you could be doing much worse, if that makes you feel any better, lol.
A “Confessions of a Software Developer” website where devs can come in and make anonymous confessions.
0. anti-excellence:
0.a. slobs/jerks who didn't care about system or code entropy, or the effects of their carelessness on other developers, users, or other stakeholders
0.b. uncurious people who lacked knowledge and didn't care about learning because it was "just a job to them"
1. "competitive" egotists who sought to exert force, control, or domination of "their way" rather than collaborative experimentation
Furthermore, environments that reward impact and achievement to maximize credit for performance review seldom reward refactoring, training, or any sort of deep problem solving or presentation of tools, methodology, or experience.
A good reminder that everything we say/hear/write/read exists in the unseen context of all the things we believe we should not say.
Being bad at problem solving with people far away is just another problem you can solve with practice. Same as being bad at problem solving even when help is right next to you.
Yes, "remote work sucks" is reductive, but I elaborated beyond the heading. Also, I wouldn't disagree with "office work sucks." Remote work simply has its warts, too.
> just another problem you can solve with practice
Perhaps, but practice alone clearly isn't enough. I've been working remotely since 2020 and it hasn't gotten more enjoyable. I would love to solve that problem, though. I read Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried in the past, but that was written a long time ago. I've added more recent works (Effective Remote Work by James Stanier and The Async-First Playbook by Sumeet Gayathri Moghe) to my reading list.
I'm honestly so confused by this. Has the author never worked in an office before? Building a grudge for someone that you are forced to work with and sit next to all day is one of the classic office dilemmas. Being forced to be around them all day can really build resentment to people
Work sucks in general. Remote work is of course not perfect, but its problems need to be compared against non-remote work problems..
And this is my biggest complaint about arguments about remote working. People turn it into something that’s evidence-based when actually it’s a deeply subjective topic and thus different personality types thrive in different working environments.
Thus it is always going to be an emotional argument rather than a fact-based discussion.
It’s like asking someone what their favourite food is. They might be able to explain why they like the dish, but that doesn’t translate to that meal being everyone’s favourite.
Unlike OP though, I cannot be as open about these companies as we would definitely not have any clients left after.
Also, I am not sure how not touching computers after work is a bad thing; people can have families and other hobbies?
No not bad per se, but it did clearly show that, without on the job courses, why all of them are stuck in the early 2000s tech wise.
Some people start with a company and get lucky with early success and then get restricted because of that success: get new clients via existing, everyone likes it and asks for new features and without noticing it you might find yourself 15 years down the road with ancient tech and no one understanding anything current. Then you can still thrive if your clients like it... we have similar clients: a 1980s factory, another 1980s factory, a logistics app from the 1990s etc. Things deeply ingrained in some vertical, expensive but better priced than the SAPs etc of this world so it keeps going and going.
Every ounce of data proves this statement wrong. If you feel like you work better non-remote then do it. Don’t shill it as a panacea. I’ve been remote for 11 years now and if I wasn’t I wouldn’t have been able to take care of my family, go back to school part time, work on my health with better meals and reasonable gym hours, etc. even IF in office was better for the employer (even though all data says it’s not in terms of productivity) it is unequivocally better for the employees life to work remote as much as humanly possible.
This hot take is just simply insane. Humanity had no problem coordinating massive projects over IRC and mailing lists. It’s clear the author is a “nu-coder”.
> Every ounce of data proves this statement wrong
There is no need for hyperbole. Because one thing we can all agree on is that remote work eliminates commutes, by definition.
Ever heard of flu season? What if you have a family and don't want to bring diseases home?
> Attempts to represent ideas spatially get mutilated by online whiteboard and sticky note software.
Right... like, the Linux kernel team? Or any of the major open source key pieces of technology you use? Built by large teams that worked remotely for decades even when tools where orders of magnitude worse than the current state of the art? Some of them never meeting each other in person?
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Remote work DOESN'T suck. YOU make it suck.
Remote work is great if you care about shipping.
Want to go for coffee or want to talk about our weekends? No thanks.
Did you see the distracting thing outside the building? No, I didn't because I don't have to go there anymore.
Is the heat too high or too low? It's your own home, just adjust it to YOUR convenience.
Worried about your pets being alone? Just be next to them. I care more about my pets than some stranger from work.
Want to be loud and flex about random stuff? Log into LinkedIn and talk to the other geniuses like you while I focus on doing my job.
Most people SUCK at drawing, suck at calligraphy and their whiteboard diagrams SUCK. Therefore, whiteboards SUCK. Unless you have great calligraphy and drawing skills, whiteboards are not helpful. You are just sad because you are not getting attention by being in front of other people looking at you.
Tell us more?
On the positive side... Seeing how people respond to pressure (done within some bounds) might be useful information. Watching people dig deeper into their problem-solving toolkit (and even their determination and resolve) might be informative. But I have not recently reviewed interviewing research, so I don't know how strong the causal connections are between observing these things in an interview and on-the-job performance.
On the negative side: If one is primarily interested in finding flaws as some sort of intrinsically valuable thing or to boost one's own ego, these are probably hints to look closely at oneself and reflect and make sense of what is going on inside.