Let me explain. Coding is the easiest because it's the most fun I get from my job. I don't have to talk to most people, I can have my alone time just writing code, cleaning it up, making it beautiful and lean, refactor as I like, whine about the unit tests taking more time than coding, and go home feeling like I've accomplished a lot. It's easy because that's all I have to focus on. Give it two weeks of junior devs telling me my coding style is outdated, and I've already adapted to the new meta.
System design at scale? Just trying to convince a separate team to work with us is a nightmare that I get insomnia from.
Coding is the easiest part of my job. FWIW I was just like you when I was a junior dev. Wondering why senior devs and engineering directors can't code. Now I know they can, but their time is better used to negotiate projects so that the junior devs can have their fun. Then I have to take time out to mentor junior devs on how to talk to people without being condescending, because that gets absolutely nothing accomplished in a large company.
Maybe the directors at your particular company can code. But a lot of them really don't. They don't understand the technical aspects of the problem and this results in bad decisions.
I've had someone who drives expensive cars tell me to change a simple line based streaming text format to XML to "make networking more unified across the company projects". He suggested to add a 120 KLOC XML library that does memory allocations right and left to our <10K line embedded project with soft real time requirements.
To set the level of experience, that same person claimed in the same meeting that UDP wouldn't lose packets on a local connection. And when I didn't obey he played a power game.
The better a product is factored, the more all aspects of development are interdependent. Creating isolated work packages leads to a badly factored product with lots of duplication, creating bloat and bugs and preventing important features and optimizations. That's why sometimes, small teams of really smart hard working guys can be extremely productive in comparison.
That said, team size can be increased, while smartness and hard workingness of the team can generally not be increased, and a lot of tasks can also just be grinded through, or they need to be grinded through because there is no realistic way to avoid it.
> Give it two weeks of junior devs telling me my coding style is outdated, and I've already adapted to the new meta.
Brilliant! I always say that I know how to code, I just need time to figure out how you code so I can match the style. "Adapt to the new meta" is a great way to put it :)
When I'm coding these days I feel guilty, like I'm wasting my time doing something fun when I should be doing real work!
At my former company, a 60 person startup, my CTO - a 55 year old guy - could code, design AWS architecture, do data analytics using Redshift (an OLAP database) and Athena (Apache Presto) and would often do POCs to research an idea and throw it over to wall to me to make it production ready.
It was a godsend when I was already overloaded with work and technology research. I was New when it came to cloud at the time.
On the other hand, his value add to the company and even to me wasn’t that he could code and design. He was a force multiplier by talking technical to our customers (B2B), mentoring, working with the owners, setting priorities based on the business needs etc.
I’ve had plenty of managers who could code and would rather spend fine coding than doing their job as a manager - career development, navigating through the political landscape, protecting their team from organizational bullshit and being “strategic”.
Coding is easy. At my current job in consulting, a hands on coding project is much easier than my more strategic consulting projects where I’m working with multiple teams, dealing with CTOs, CFOs, architecture review boards, dealing with fiefdoms where the “DevOps” team doesn’t want to give the developers the leeway they need to do their jobs efficiently and where tte developers want Admin access to everything and make a mess, etc.
That's a really bad faith take of that comment. I'd translate it as "in a place where most people are experienced programmers, communication becomes the main bottleneck."
dang|2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dumpster_fire|2 years ago
System design at scale? Just trying to convince a separate team to work with us is a nightmare that I get insomnia from.
Coding is the easiest part of my job. FWIW I was just like you when I was a junior dev. Wondering why senior devs and engineering directors can't code. Now I know they can, but their time is better used to negotiate projects so that the junior devs can have their fun. Then I have to take time out to mentor junior devs on how to talk to people without being condescending, because that gets absolutely nothing accomplished in a large company.
jstimpfle|2 years ago
I've had someone who drives expensive cars tell me to change a simple line based streaming text format to XML to "make networking more unified across the company projects". He suggested to add a 120 KLOC XML library that does memory allocations right and left to our <10K line embedded project with soft real time requirements.
To set the level of experience, that same person claimed in the same meeting that UDP wouldn't lose packets on a local connection. And when I didn't obey he played a power game.
The better a product is factored, the more all aspects of development are interdependent. Creating isolated work packages leads to a badly factored product with lots of duplication, creating bloat and bugs and preventing important features and optimizations. That's why sometimes, small teams of really smart hard working guys can be extremely productive in comparison.
That said, team size can be increased, while smartness and hard workingness of the team can generally not be increased, and a lot of tasks can also just be grinded through, or they need to be grinded through because there is no realistic way to avoid it.
gilbetron|2 years ago
Brilliant! I always say that I know how to code, I just need time to figure out how you code so I can match the style. "Adapt to the new meta" is a great way to put it :)
When I'm coding these days I feel guilty, like I'm wasting my time doing something fun when I should be doing real work!
scarface_74|2 years ago
It was a godsend when I was already overloaded with work and technology research. I was New when it came to cloud at the time.
On the other hand, his value add to the company and even to me wasn’t that he could code and design. He was a force multiplier by talking technical to our customers (B2B), mentoring, working with the owners, setting priorities based on the business needs etc.
I’ve had plenty of managers who could code and would rather spend fine coding than doing their job as a manager - career development, navigating through the political landscape, protecting their team from organizational bullshit and being “strategic”.
Coding is easy. At my current job in consulting, a hands on coding project is much easier than my more strategic consulting projects where I’m working with multiple teams, dealing with CTOs, CFOs, architecture review boards, dealing with fiefdoms where the “DevOps” team doesn’t want to give the developers the leeway they need to do their jobs efficiently and where tte developers want Admin access to everything and make a mess, etc.
bombolo|2 years ago
Let me translate: "My work is difficult and important. What other people do is easy and a 3yrs old could do it".
I'm ready to bet his architecture is bad and the coders deviate all the time to make it work.
diegoperini|2 years ago