News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad. Parent comment

Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by dionidium on Friday August 19, 2022 @10:19AM (#32521277)
I used to work with a guy who took "gets shit done" to a level I'd never seen before. It changed the way I look at programming. He was actually a pretty good engineer. Wrote good-enough code. But he wasn't precious about anything and he didn't care all that much about finding the 100%-guaranteed-socially-approved-correct way to do things. What he had was an incredible ability to diagnose and fix problems quickly, strong intuition about how to architect greenfield projects, and the complete confidence of his bosses, with whom he very quickly earned a reputation as the person to go to when something absolutely needed to get done. He knew what to prioritize. He knew which parts of the code to plow through and which to take his time on. He knew exactly where in the code to start looking when a bug came in. And he knew which things were important to management and which weren't.

I learned way more from him than I ever have from the kind of peers who have opinions about how to structure every line of code.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by alexashka on Friday August 19, 2022 @11:18AM (#32522059)
He is almost certainly way above a pretty good engineer.

Nobody can quantify 'good-enough code' but everyone can quantify meeting a deadline.

How much engineering is anyone really doing anyhow - or are we calling using React to build yet another set of forms users fill out with some error handling engineering nowadays? :)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by enraged_camel on Friday August 19, 2022 @10:45AM (#32521634)
In my experience it is useful to have such people on the team, but if they make up most of the team then the codebase becomes a gigantic mess over time, and it negatively impacts everyone else.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by skrtskrt on Friday August 19, 2022 @12:10PM (#32522814)
Yep I tend to be more on the spectrum of focusing on code & architecture quality over raw productivity, and I find the "plow through it and get it done" engineer to be the perfect foil to have on my team.

Ultimately it gets done faster than it would if the whole team was my personality, but with higher quality than if the whole team was their personality.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by pablok2 on Friday August 19, 2022 @01:25PM (#32523785)
If you're lucky enough to have someone buy into a centralized code/arch strategy then this is idea, the issues arrive when the code/arch strategy isn't a hard sell for the plow engineers.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by mmmpop on Friday August 19, 2022 @11:16AM (#32522042)
Perhaps but having "that programmer that management likes" is worth 10x more than whatever mess is generally being made.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by bick_nyers on Saturday August 20, 2022 @02:06PM (#32533987)
I consider myself a plow engineer, and I definitely agree with you, a team full of people like me would descend a codebase too deep into chaos. A dance between balance of order and chaos is ideal, as too much of the other has significant negative side-effects.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by cpeterso on Friday August 19, 2022 @12:23PM (#32523007)
Fixing bad code is easier than fixing bad architecture. And if your architecture is modular and cleanly decoupled, then the bad code’s impact can be contained.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by yodsanklai on Friday August 19, 2022 @02:09PM (#32524318)
This is a good point. Modularity is the key to managing complexity. Unfortunately, I think writing a good architecture is harder than writing good code at the local level (because most developers have less experience at writing code in the large). And projects with a good initial architecture tend to diverge as developers add new features and introduce new dependencies. They often don't understand the original design and want/need to get things done quickly.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by ignoramous on Friday August 19, 2022 @10:35AM (#32521491)
If I may, you should encourage your ex team-mate to share their side of things: https://staffeng.com/stories
[ Parent | on HN ]