Document why. I can read code. I want to know _why_ this nebulous function called "invert_parameters" that is 200 lines long even exists. Which problem did you have that this function solved? Why was this problem there in the first place? Write some opinions on maybe its intended lifetime of the codebase. Hell, I write comments that apologize, just so that a future reader knows that the code I wrote wasn't meant to be great but that I was in a time crunch or a manager was breathing down my neck, or that some insane downstream/upstream thing did something... well, insane.
Paint some picture of your mindset when writing something, especially if it's non-obvious, as that'll give all the additional context not captured in code, when reading the code.
Obviously this isn't the only good documentation rule, but I wish people - juniors and seniors alike - would do this more often, especially at the workplace.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nmodyl/dru...
> He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.
And... yeah... the reddit post is from 5 years ago when the job market was very, very different.
Ha yup - I've felt this one before :D
On the other hand, I've contacted several of my heroes (not been able to meet as many of them in person) and that's always been an exhilerating, formative experience. I strongly recommend it if you can think of a good reason. (I have a list of heroes I have yet to reach out to because I haven't yet encountered an interesting enough problem to offer them. Several of them unfortunately have an actuarial deadline not too far into the future.)
some are just a bit better at guessing
You can legitly learn how to do things properly and people who learnt to do that do the polar opposite of guessing. It is just that the world of software development has yet to be made liable for their results in the same way as civil or electrical engineers. So in software development many are just guessing because guessing wrong won't ruin their life.
If there's any 20-somethings here that make 6 figures, listen carefully:
1. Max out your 401k, and invest all of it in a target date retirement fund. (Some companies are douches and will assign you mostly their own stock, which when it tanks, there goes your retirement... so check your allocation)
2. Get an HSA and max that out. Invest it all in a target date retirement fund. Do not use any of it, pay for medical expenses with cash and save your receipts. Get reimbursed for the receipts when you retire.
3. Contribute to an IRA and max it out (or backdoor roth when you make enough that that's necessary). Invest it all in a target date retirement fund.
4. Keep 6-12 months of living expenses in a high yield savings account.
Re: cheap hobbies, I used to date a public school teacher. She would save to go on guided trips to Antarctica, Peru, the Galapagos, New Zealand. You can live an amazing life if you plan for it.
Does that mystical creature still exist? Or is it perhaps more likely if one of the pair has a high yield income?
If you earn $100k and are willing to have the median lifestyle, and you can find a spouse that's willing, then the numbers work just fine.
Challenges include lifestyle inflation; housing costs if your six-figure job is in an expensive area; and finding a partner who's willing to be put in what is often a vulnerable and low-status position.
If you’re not one of the senior managers, I don’t think these kinds of long term investments are feasible anymore.
Everything is not perfect in the singular country of Europe, I sure as hell don't want to be relying on only what the state decides it can give me in my old age.
they were being sarcastic.
For investments, you invest post-tax and pay capital gains when withdrawing.
The GP described tax optimizations for the highest earners. The idea that they would be better off in Europe is plainly ridiculous.
People are often quick to dispense technically correct (or mostly correctly) financial advice but rarely is financial mangement simply a technical problem to be solved in someone’s life
Very important detail, FSA is not HSA lol.
While here I am, 39yo, having been in this field for 17 years and worked my way up to a lead, and having worked at banks, fintechs, medtechs and consultancies, am 'only' making roughly €76k/yr.
And this is with pouring personal time into studying and applying latest tech in side projects to stay relevant.
Honestly if the financials of the US tech scene ever normalize to what the rest of the world has, you guys are in for a rude awakening.
Holy crap, you can do this? I always assumed for some reason you had to pay for expenses with an HSA in the year they were incurred.
- Drinking wine solo is odd. Whiskey, vodka, or beer (and if you Russian) is the standard. Spelling mistakes like 'ever thing' support the idea of alcohol induced unordered thoughts, that's good.
- Webdevs would one of the last to consider to be experts.
- While I don't use darkmode, browser extensions solve the unsupported web pages. Dark mode used to be the only possible option on a black/green screen, glad that changed.
- Pharmacist require a degree and quite a few years of studies and exams with tons of organic chemistry.
- HN comments being worthless is an awkward one. Lots of posts (e.g. Apple CEO change) had tons of useless stuff but it's very often the comments would bve better than the post itself.Funny to read from someone else who noticed :) maybe broad appeal of the topic had a big impact
Then you can offload stuff to the DB engine (as it should be), making everything more efficient, less data going between DB and App layers is good for everyone.
Also you get to do cool SQL shit nobody understands and you become invaluable =)
Pharmacists have to get a special degree before they can even get an interview, and I've heard that the education is heavy on organic chemistry. Then you get a job as a cashier selling pills.
> Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless.
You got me.
> Once, someone asked me who I looked up to and I said Conan O’Brien [...]
He wrote for SNL and studied literature at Harvard, so there's probably plenty going on up there.
Conan really handled that disaster with tremendous grace and it paid immediate dividends. I can’t really think of a similar situation in popular culture. It is a good reminder of how to handle oneself especially during turmoil.
It's one thing to write drunk, it's another thing to get drunk to write about being drunk
I would again see Bukowski.
Perhaps he also had fun doing it.
That did not age well.
- I agree, 100%.
And here's a take that a lot of the folks will disagree, and categorically state that these both belong to two entirely different domains: "Rust, is the evolution of Java. Not Kotlin, not Scala, not clojure, but, Rust".
Rust has a similar role to C++ but reads more like Python and Elixir's lovechild.
Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27333260 - May 2021 (494 comments)
1. You'll never be as smart as the smart guys. It's okay to give up.
2. Most likely you'll work with incompetent fools, get used to that.
3. Workplace is the best place to make friends. If someone tells you otherwise it's a psyop to turn you into a robot.
4. Minimize your output while trying to maximize your salary because mythical "job satisfaction" doesn't exist and it makes much more sense to redirect your energy elsewhere.
5. Luck is the most important factor.
There is nothing I've done at work I'm truly proud of. Everything I'm proud of is completely unrelated to work.
Some good points. Laughed at TDD is a cult. I mean a lot of software orgs/cultures are cultish (Agile, Scrum, whatnot). At work I often feel I'm part of a cult.
I've interop'd with JS from Haskell and you can just go full dynamic property access. And gradually add phantom typed APIs around it.
console.log also still works fine
I've been coding professionally for >30 years. I don't think any of my code has survived 5 years in production.
I don't think code quality affected that at all - I know the really, really, shitty code I wrote when learning OOP in the 90's survived for a looong time, while the amazing code I wrote for a startup 2018-2021 died with it.
A lot of code makes a difference but I guess there's a lot that doesn't?
At the time, a lot of it felt "important" and "significant". And some of it probably was at the time, to the businesses I wrote it for. But whether I sweated blood and tears to craft the most elegant and efficient software I was capable of, or I phoned it in and just copy/pasted Stack Overflow answers together until I met some interpretations of a requirement to be able to leave the office on time - really made no difference.
I've been pondering lately, thinking about GenAI and vibe coding, with the very real risk of creating completely unmaintainable codebases - whether that matters, if the code is likely to be retired or rewritten in 3-4 years anyway? My current gig is on to the 4th rewrite of it's web/mobile app backend platform in 15 years, which started out as a Groovy on Grails app, which got rewritten in Java, then rewritten again in Java, and now it's being rewritten in Python. Each rewrite had fairly good reasons at the time, but a huge amount of code here gets thrown away every 4 years or so - which looking back makes me seriously question whether any of it was "of any significance". To be honest, the 2026 Python code really isn't doing anything notably different or more complex than the Perl and JavaScript code I was writing in 1996 - web work is CRUD apps all the way down.
That said, the people who change companies aren't the ones that believe that management ever had the best ideas, or are able to push back on the cult thinking with clarity. Unfortunately, though, it's not necessarily evidence that wins arguments, it's charisma, which is how the cult is started in the first place.
The entire AI ball of wax is built on python (dynamically typed) - or at least a large part of it. It probably needs to move to rust to save on power and compute cost.
Python is also the choice of non-programmers for simple work. Nothing wrong with that. But I wouldn't want e.g. my car's ABS system to be programmed in Python (or my browser or my OS or many other examples).
Design-by-Contract[0] is a formalization of this concept and well worth considering when working in code using mutable types. In addition to pre/post conditions, DbC also reifies class invariants (which transcend method definitions).
Good docs are docs that make it easy to implement the next feature.
From an AI perspective, it's my observation that LLMs often write code with lower quantity / quality docs. At the same time, they are reasonably good at synthesizing / inferring meaning from code that lacks good docs. They often do so internally by forming a chain of thought / reasoning around how the code works. The docs that should be written as part of the code are probably the same things that an LLM would reasonably come to by spending tokens when modifying that code. I believe that this should be trained into model so that future LLM work starts with not having to build up context.
In the absence of that being built in, something I've been experimenting a little with is tuning what I want to see in docs that actually help source control / development. Currently that's at https://github.com/joshka/skills/tree/main/doc-steward - still needs a bunch of work, but it's generally better than nothing. YMMV
Just wait till he hears about Claude Code
this is probably the best truth. after a while it's easy to recognize people that are consistently being their "authentic self" and they're usually the worst.
FFS, be professional at work.
Then again, this person is obviously also lying to claim the engineer title - sit down, "data science!" You're only even here because Product prefers being lied to - so that really sets an ironically honest baseline on how seriously anyone should be taking any of this farrago.