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It's not "all of us". Even if one intends to be a developer for life (nothing wrong with it) social skills are definitely incredibly useful. Dare I say as important as programming skills.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:26
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pigdog posted:It's not "all of us". Even if one intends to be a developer for life (nothing wrong with it) social skills are definitely incredibly useful. Dare I say equally as important as programming skills. Probably more so, to be quite honest. What can one really good developer accomplish? You aren't engineering your own pipeline for data at any appreciable speed. Certainly not doing UI work. Maybe writing a REST API to feed a front-end but you still have to hammer out contracts and such to communicate with the rest of the system if there's anything beyond the most very simplistic CRUD functionality.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:27
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Pollyanna posted:There’s nothing wrong with it - everyone has their spot. If it’s in your purview it can be useful, if not it’s not. I do take offense to “neckbeard with a paycheck” as a pejorative cause that’s all of us and if you don’t think it applies to you then you are wrong as hell. Just lol if you think being able to shave, clean and groom daily as well as being able to handle social situations isn't extremely important in having upward mobility in any computer touching career (or, to be honest, any career).
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Mar 6, 2018 16:44
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rt4 clearly was referring to people who couldn't communicate well with others. So... Pollyanna posted:as a pejorative cause that’s all of us and if you don’t think it applies to you then you are wrong as hell. ...this is very wrong.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:39
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Why is there anything wrong with "neckbeard with a paycheck" as long as the neckbeard understands goals of the team and works well alone and with others to meet them? Why are you insisting on taking offense here? Given the context of training how to relate to business concerns and the folks who have them, stuffing ‘understands the goals of the team’ in there is missing the point.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:42
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JawnV6 posted:Why are you insisting on taking offense here? Given the context of training how to relate to business concerns and the folks who have them, stuffing ‘understands the goals of the team’ in there is missing the point. rt4 posted:I guess when I think "neckbeard" I'm not thinking of someone who understand the goals of the team and works well with others to meet them. We already addressed this why are you bringing it up again dude lol I didn't "miss the point", neckbeard is a dumb term to use in this situation. Period. The point otherwise was fine.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:52
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BurntCornMuffin posted:Just lol if you think being able to shave, clean and groom daily as well as being able to handle social situations isn't extremely important in having upward mobility in any computer touching career (or, to be honest, any career). And it’s surprising to me how few people can actually handle this
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Mar 6, 2018 18:04
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Good Will Hrunting posted:We already addressed this why are you bringing it up again dude lol I didn't "miss the point", neckbeard is a dumb term to use in this situation. Period. The point otherwise was fine.
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Mar 6, 2018 18:09
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JawnV6 posted:Maybe let context span a sentence or two, perhaps even across a line break, and link the training to the, uh, slur that you're really up in arms about. The context makes my quote even worse you dolt. It insinuates that all the people with those issues are neckbeards. Guess what, they aint! I was suggesting there's nothing wrong with being a dude who sits in the corner and writes code as long as you can communicate it. I could have said "staff level programmer" but you're really blowing this poo poo out of proportion and for what? Literally nothing beyond quoting the neckbeard part even touched on me being up in arms with the word choice or the connotation. Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Mar 6, 2018 |
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Mar 6, 2018 18:14
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Minor derail to this: So I applied, within 12 hours got phone staged and was at the end of the phone interview i'll be progressing to second stage  straight to DevOps manager role too.Now for my spanner to contribute: Code is a massive loving liability; each line carries a tax of maintenance, communication, QA and potential future impact. Ergo: code monkeys are inherently full of risk as they will just throw poo poo at a wall to satisfy requirements. If you can solve problems by deleting code, or avoiding code and then communicating that benefit then your/your orgs world gets a little bit better. That all requires huge amount of social skills, thinking outside of your code repository, and understanding where the real pain lies. There's caveats as with everything; you can't add new features by erasing another  but you can gain a greater perspective on the people and the system just by talking before smashing your fingers on a keyboard.
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Mar 6, 2018 18:36
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I was suggesting there's nothing wrong with being a dude who sits in the corner and writes code as long as you can communicate it. So, in some abstract sense, you would be a fan of teaching technical people how to talk to business people and learning to tell them not about the neat software you built but how it's useful and how it makes the business better.
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Mar 6, 2018 18:41
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JawnV6 posted:learning to tell them not about the neat software you built but how it's useful and how it makes the business better. While maybe ideal, why does everyone need to do this? If you're an engineer good at explaining technical things with zero interest in talking about """Bussiness poo poo""" just explain the technical to your PM or whatever and let them explain the rest.
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Mar 6, 2018 19:52
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This is the oldie career advice thread. If you care about advancement in any technical track (as an IC or manger) then it's wise to be mindful of the broader impact of your work on the business, and to learn how to communicate its value in an accessible way.
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Mar 6, 2018 20:29
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Good Will Hrunting posted:While maybe ideal, why does everyone need to do this? If you're an engineer good at explaining technical things with zero interest in talking about """Bussiness poo poo""" just explain the technical to your PM or whatever and let them explain the rest. This statement is a red flag in my interviewees. Knowing the business poo poo and being able to discuss it intelligently helps you find context in what you are doing and to build code that actually meets your customers needs and make to helpful recommendations. Just hammering out what they tell you to do without thought demonstrates no initiative or interest, frequently wastes time as you implement the wrong thing based on a bad spec, or implement it in a way that harms the overall function of the app. Regardless of their technical skills, I've found people like this to be so consistently damaging to projects that I push for code review and governance mostly to protect the project tech debt and my productivity from such loose cannons and hotshots (not that it isn't a good practice anyway, but my early experiences with particularly lovely code monkeys make my drive to accomplish this rather personal).
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Mar 6, 2018 20:38
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what if you don't want to advance down those paths, tho
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Mar 6, 2018 20:40
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BurntCornMuffin posted:Knowing the business poo poo and being able to discuss it intelligently Well, of course. Domain knowledge is absolutely not the same as talking about your work in a fluffy, sales-pitchy type way and pandering to execs with details about the market and your competition which are the vibes I was getting from other people's advice. Sure, there are paths for the latter. But only the former is necessary in my opinion. I'd be glad to elaborate with what I'm trying to convey but I think we're all on a different page and confusing domain knowledge versus something like depth and breadth of the market you're writing software for.
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Mar 6, 2018 20:47
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Good Will Hrunting posted:what if you don't want to advance down those paths, tho Then there's no paths to advance down. Sitting in a corner churning out code for no purpose is not useful, an engineer above the most junior level needs to be able to think about the goals they're trying to accomplish
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Mar 6, 2018 20:49
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This is probably the most spergtastic conversation that could have resulted from me trying to say "there's nothing wrong with wanting to be just an engineer for life". That is also, in my opinion, a perfectly valid topic to discuss in this thread, is it not?
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Mar 6, 2018 20:54
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Good Will Hrunting posted:This is probably the most spergtastic conversation that could have resulted from me trying to say "there's nothing wrong with wanting to be just an engineer for life". That is also, in my opinion, a perfectly valid topic to discuss in this thread, is it not? Engineer for life doesn't mean not caring about what you're trying to build's goals though. There is something wrong with not wanting to care about the point of your work if you want any career growth (or do something useful).
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Mar 6, 2018 20:58
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Domain knowledge is absolutely not the same as talking about your work in a fluffy, sales-pitchy type way and pandering to execs with details about the market and your competition which are the vibes I was getting from other people's advice. Knowing how your work impacts the business is domain knowledge. The goal isn't to fellate an executive, it's to have situational awareness of your work's role and impact. Which, coming full circle, has the side effect of looking pretty drat good if you can confidently put a dollar sign or positive influence as a result of your work on a resume.
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Mar 6, 2018 21:03
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Good Will Hrunting posted:This is probably the most spergtastic conversation that could have resulted from me trying to say "there's nothing wrong with wanting to be just an engineer for life". That is also, in my opinion, a perfectly valid topic to discuss in this thread, is it not? Big tech companies all have engineering ladders, so you can continue to get promoted to higher levels without having to transfer to management. However, if you look at the descriptions for the tiers of the ladder, as you get to higher levels, the scope and vagueness of the problems you're expected to tackle increases, while the actual direct code contributions you make generally decreases. The super-high-level engineers aren't spending their time churning out code; they're figuring out what kinds of designs will actually work for the problems the business needs to solve, working to generate a spec, writing design docs, and making sure the lower-level engineers who actually do the implementation aren't blocked, confused, overworked, etc. There's still a lot of highly-technical work there, especially in terms of design docs and specs, it's just not code. If you want to continue writing code, there'll generally be a place for you on the ladder. Big tech needs a lot of code, after all, and there are a lot of people who just want to write code. However, "just write code" is not sufficient to get promoted past a certain point, so in a sense your career will stagnate. You can still work on interesting projects, be inordinately well-paid compared to your average office worker, etc., but the scope of your responsibilities and compensation will not increase. Plenty of people are just fine with that; others want to climb as high as they can. If you're confident you know what you want, then by all means go for it and forget about the other options.
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Mar 6, 2018 21:12
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:If you want to continue writing code, there'll generally be a place for you on the ladder. Big tech needs a lot of code, after all, and there are a lot of people who just want to write code. However, "just write code" is not sufficient to get promoted past a certain point, so in a sense your career will stagnate. You can still work on interesting projects, be inordinately well-paid compared to your average office worker, etc., but the scope of your responsibilities and compensation will not increase. Plenty of people are just fine with that; others want to climb as high as they can. If you're confident you know what you want, then by all means go for it and forget about the other options.  This is literally exactly what I was trying to say, in a way more passive-aggressive and less succinct way. I blame having closed too many lil' win tickets too quickly and having nothing to do in the backlog for the rest of the day. And avoiding a migration to JUnit5.TooMuchAbstraction posted:The super-high-level engineers aren't spending their time churning out code; they're figuring out what kinds of designs will actually work for the problems the business needs to solve, working to generate a spec, writing design docs, and making sure the lower-level engineers who actually do the implementation aren't blocked, confused, overworked, etc. There's still a lot of highly-technical work there, especially in terms of design docs and specs, it's just not code. Also, you have just summed up why my current team is failing to operate at an even remotely efficient level. A discussion we've had with the new lead, actually. It's insanely good when someone gets hired for a position above you that can actually address problems, and all of that ^ on the managerial and organizational size is what our VP is totally neglecting to do. He isn't even a team lead. He's a renegade coder with a fancy title.
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Mar 6, 2018 21:18
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Good Will Hrunting posted:what if you don't want to advance down those paths, tho You're free to limit your career however you see fit. I won't stop you! Part of rising to solid senior level and tech leadership is appreciating the business value of you & your teams technical efforts and being able to translate across that layer. Hardline stance is fine I suppose, but don't come whining back to the thread when a "weaker" coder rises faster because they understand how to
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Mar 7, 2018 00:45
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Why are you still posting about a hypothetical I raised that is literally unrelated to myself, whomst has expressed interest in becoming a product manager because I see how poorly interfacing between developers is across all of my jobs and teams so far? You're giving poo poo to someone who posted this:pigdog posted:It's not "all of us". Even if one intends to be a developer for life (nothing wrong with it) social skills are definitely incredibly useful. Dare I say as important as programming skills. Good Will Hrunting posted:Probably more so, to be quite honest. What can one really good developer accomplish? You aren't engineering your own pipeline for data at any appreciable speed. Certainly not doing UI work. Maybe writing a REST API to feed a front-end but you still have to hammer out contracts and such to communicate with the rest of the system if there's anything beyond the most very simplistic CRUD functionality. On the same page you're posting on. I mean lmfao ffs I've done nothing but complain about how my old team lead cannot communicate specs and requirements and chews me out for trying to speak to other teams and do specs on my own and improve that process so we have less tech debt and team churn but yes I'm the problem!!!! Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Mar 7, 2018 |
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Mar 7, 2018 01:09
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Why are you still posting about a hypothetical I raised that is literally unrelated to myself, whomst has expressed interest in becoming a product manager because I see how poorly interfacing between developers is across all of my jobs and teams so far? You're giving poo poo to someone who posted this: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/whomst
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Mar 7, 2018 01:13
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Whomstdve thought you'd live up to your poster name in one mere post.
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Mar 7, 2018 01:17
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Whomstdve thought you'd live up to your poster name in one mere post. Whomstd've thought thou wouldst be more deserving mine moniker.
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Mar 7, 2018 01:26
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Good Will Hrunting posted:Why are you still posting about a hypothetical I raised that is literally unrelated to myself, whomst has expressed interest in becoming a product manager because I see how poorly interfacing between developers is across all of my jobs and teams so far? You're giving poo poo to someone who posted this:
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Mar 7, 2018 02:33
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Watching y'all argue past each other is getting real old. Everyone's always wrong on the Internet, there's no need to try to prove it. Especially since y'all's proofs are always wrong too.
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Mar 7, 2018 03:36
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Good Will Hrunting posted:what if you don't want to advance down those paths, tho Hey here's the original post that you quoted: rt4 posted:Everyone in this line of work with career ambitions beyond "neckbeard with a paycheck" should read it. This entire conversation started with the same if, inverted. You're talking past each other, as far as I can tell in large part because you may have misinterpreted the original post. Trivially rephrase the above as "if you have career ambitions beyond narrowly scoped technical work", and let's set aside the neckbeard term. Are we all cool?
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Mar 7, 2018 03:58
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Steve French posted:Are we all cool? No, you're all neckbeards
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Mar 7, 2018 04:07
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rt4 posted:No, you're all neckbeards Ahem, I am a bureaucrat, thank you very much
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Mar 7, 2018 04:12
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Steve French posted:Ahem, I am a bureaucrat, thank you very much A person can be multiple kinds of garbage. I have nothing against bureaucrats.
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Mar 7, 2018 04:40
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pigdog posted:It's not "all of us". Even if one intends to be a developer for life (nothing wrong with it) social skills are definitely incredibly useful. Dare I say as important as programming skills. what's the point, there's no cross-transfer of skills from the social domain to the programming one. as someone who's forced to think from the company's viewpoint, i think one's more useful to the organization when their self-development time is dedicated to their coding skills.
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Mar 7, 2018 08:39
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Fututor Magnus posted:what's the point, there's no cross-transfer of skills from the social domain to the programming one. as someone who's forced to think from the company's viewpoint, i think one's more useful to the organization when their self-development time is dedicated to their coding skills. Programming is not done in a vacuum. Because it's done with other people, skills dealing with those people are good to have and develop. And if you genuinely think that these are all unimportant (or not skills), I'd rather work with people who are strong with these skills than a brilliant coder who's bad at all of the soft skills, and I think most people would, too.
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Mar 7, 2018 13:29
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Conway's law:quote:"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." Software development is fundamentally a social activity. There's just no getting around that. If you want to contribute at a level beyond coding to someone else's specs, your soft skills are what are going to make the difference. And yes, you can spend the rest of your career just programming, but that can work against you. If you're looking for a job with twenty years of work history but only five to ten years of experience, you're going to have a tough search.
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Mar 7, 2018 15:56
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Steve French posted:Are we all cool? I'm cool. You and TMA are right. Plus, I'd rather go back to detailing how poor upper management is to not take action and try to rectify how egregiously our """VP""" is absolutely cannibalizing not just an entire team, product, or vertical at this point but really the entire sub-organization of the company. It's pretty much the exact example of above, a complete lack of business understanding or value added or prioritization on his behalf. A direct quote when we had our shouting match was "You don't need to understand the details of the business side - you need to abstract these things away sometimes and write code". Yesterday, some of our sales and sales engineering team were in the bathroom while I was also in the bathroom and they asked "Hey man, how are you guys progressing on that product roadmap? When can we start pushing some of the things on it, we're eager to get in front of clients!" and I just chortled briefly before asking what product roadmap they were talking about because we aren't at all privy to that and evidently neither is our lead.
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Mar 7, 2018 16:11
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Fututor Magnus posted:what's the point, there's no cross-transfer of skills from the social domain to the programming one. as someone who's forced to think from the company's viewpoint, Is "the company" whose viewpoint you are thinking from one of those sweat shop type environments where devs are expected to scribe designs into code for 12 hours a day and expressly forbidden from taking part in the design process, caring about the context of the work, discussing the needs of customer, or having ideas? Because that's usually what I find when I hear someone say that.
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Mar 7, 2018 16:18
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Watching y'all argue past each other is getting real old. Everyone's always wrong on the Internet, there's no need to try to prove it. Especially since y'all's proofs are always wrong too. I legit can't keep track of what "hypothetical" neckbeard NPC's we're discussing GWH has/has not hosed and when I see poo poo advice I'm going to drop commentary. If that happens to be a hypothetical "bad" dev I fail to see a problem in explaining why a prevalent viewpoint in our industry is wrong and GWH is free to not take attacks on his hypothetical creations personally. I find the suggestion that I should be keeping a spreadsheet of exactly what dev practices are in posts I'm not quoting is laughable.
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Mar 7, 2018 21:12
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I dunno, man, it's just kinda boring to read.
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Mar 7, 2018 21:49
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