Things nobody told me about being a software engineer

https://anaulin.org/blog/things-nobody-told-me-about-being-a-software-engineer/

102 114 8 years ago

I'm working in Drupal 8, which makes rule 17 = true.

Insanity• 8 years ago

Don't agree with all the rules, some depend on where you work (e.g, we don't have a lot of tests in our ~30 year old codebase) .

However, Rule #2 is true for me. Accidentally pressing those keybindings in a textfield that does not accept them has become common.

aequitas2• 8 years ago

Try pressing them in other situations and you might be surprised how often they work, Youtube player for example to pause, forward/rewind.

Mc_Big_G2• 8 years ago

How about: When searching for a new job, your previous years of experience, github repos, personal projects, consulting gigs and all other relevant information about your ability to produce quality software will not matter at all compared to your ability to do leetcode style programming challenges.

t0mbstone2• 8 years ago

That depends on the company you are wanting to work at, though. I refuse to work at companies that give those kinds of bullshit puzzle interviews.

maerF0x03• 8 years ago

That's almost the entirety of the bay area.

dominotw2• 8 years ago

I refuse to work at companies that give those kinds of bullshit puzzle interviews.

Good luck finding a job then. All companies of all sizes and locations do this.

jackconnor2• 8 years ago

Isn't this all of them?

president• 8 years ago

"America lacks top notch engineers" - Says every large tech company. It didn't dawn on me until now that, "top notch engineers" really just means "people that are good at passing algorithm interviews". So many people I work with can code every algorithm on leetcode in a jiffy but can't write quality software that works.

mixmastamyk3• 8 years ago

The "tech shortage" in a nutshell.

philwelch3• 8 years ago

previous years of experience, github repos, personal projects, consulting gigs and all other relevant information about your ability

As far as evidence for a hiring decision goes, all of the things you listed are things that can either be easily faked, are hard to verify, or require implicitly trusting another organization. How am I supposed to spend the time reading all the code on your github account and forming a judgment of your ability based on that? Even if I do that, how can I be sure that you're the one who wrote that code? How do I know that your previous employers and clients weren't all bozos or that you didn't slack off and let your teammates do all the work? Even if I call your references, they'll probably just say, "yes, this guy definitely worked here, and by HR policy I'm not allowed to say more". Even if they do say more, how am I supposed to trust them? There's not nearly enough information there to make a hiring decision.

joshwcomeau• 8 years ago

How am I supposed to spend the time reading all the code on your github account

Easy - spend the 45 minutes that you had allotted for whiteboard challenges.

how can I be sure that you're the one who wrote that code?

You can't be, if the Github account has a single repo with a single commit. But impressive OSS has a history of commits, maybe even a community working with the applicant.

As a random example, do you really think it would be possible for someone to fake an account like this? https://github.com/pedronauck

Even if someone went through the trouble to clone someone else's repo, modify all the commit messages to re-attribute them, and modify the code and commit messages enough to make it not obvious plagiarism, do you really think they could bullshit their way through a quick conversation about the code? Spend 20 minutes digging into it, and then ask pertinent questions about decisions made in the architecture. It'll become clear if this person is the author.

It's theoretically possible that someone could put in all the work to pull off a convincing fraud, but do you really think that's likely?

How do I know that your previous employers and clients weren't all bozos or that you didn't slack off and let your teammates do all the work?

It's true that there is no perfect signal here, but the odds of this being true are not 50/50. It's not 100% accurate, but having references and employment history is better than nothing.

---

To be clear, I don't think OSS inspection is perfect as a hiring tool - it biases towards folks with the privilege to spend their free time working on passion projects - and I'd object to it being the sole determining factor. But I think the signal is far stronger than it is from whiteboarding, where the false negative rate is super high (I doubt most competent programmers would accurately showcase their skill in this environment).

There is no perfect hiring practice, but to immediately disregard anything that has even a negligible potential for fraud feels a bit silly to me.

t0mbstone2• 8 years ago

Pretty much all of these ring true for me (20+ years in the industry).

13of40• 8 years ago

Hand-wringing and debating about how we should use the bug reporting system, triage, sprint planning, user stories, burn-down charts, etc. will keep the leads and PMs busy for decades on end, even if the tools never change.

maerF0x03• 8 years ago

That my gender or my age or my ethnicity or my sexual orientation or my weight or my clothes might (will!) have an impact on the perceived quality of the software I build. (Or, in other words, that this is not really a meritocracy, and doing a good job is not nearly enough.)

Does there exist any body of proof around this one? Would like to see it and add it to my corpus of knowledge

luckydata• 8 years ago

go out in the world and pay attention for a few days, you'll get all the proof you need.

lozaning• 8 years ago

Well I certainly hope I havent been growing out this Unix beard for nothing!

mixmastamyk3• 8 years ago

Grey beards no longer allowed at some places, so grab a Just for Men.

Beldin• 8 years ago

Yes. One typical test is to have people evaluate identical resumes, with the thing being checked for constituting the only difference (e.g. "ethnic" ames vs. "regular" names).

Other data points are gathered by studying success at finding internships. A recent study found a rather staggering difference - names indicating local ethnicity got a place in 1-2 letters, while some other ethnicities had to write over 20 (if memory serves).

You'll want to find studies for the country you're living in, as the parameters inevitably vary (e.g. which ethnicities to compare). I don't think the outcomes cary much, but i didn't do a comparative study on the literature.

bytematic• 8 years ago

Maybe names shouldn't be disclosed until the actual hiring is done.

pmiller25• 8 years ago

I am upvoting you, but you didn't actually answer the question. Your examples have to do with getting a job, not perceived quality of work once one has a job. Both are bad, and your examples are arguably worse, but it doesn't shed any light on how one's clothes, name, etc. can affect the perception of one's actual work.

kradroy• 8 years ago

I think this is true for most professions. Just look around you at work. You might see similarities/differences among/between groups: managers vs ICs, senior vs junior, execs vs non-execs. It's not homogenous across professions but will be idiosyncratic to your company or even to your department. There's the adage: "Dress for the job you want, not the job you have." You can liberally interpret the meaning of the word "dress" as more than just clothing.

jfrankamp2• 8 years ago

I suggest going to the Harvard Project Implicit tests and taking a few. After that, study the design of the test. Because humans are the decision makers (not some objective code review acceptance program for example) all you would need to 'prove' is that humans are bad at making objective decisions. We use heuristics consciously and more importantly _unconsciously_ to the detriment of people who don't fit norms.

pacala2• 8 years ago

Also consider alternative perspectives on IAT, for example https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-conscious/20....

Inline excerpts:

The test-retest reliability (repeatability) of the Race IAT is only .42, which falls well below the psychometric standard of .80. Your score on the IAT can fluctuate significantly from one testing to the next. Hart Blanton, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, has noted the ease with which people can decrease their racial bias score “by simply exposing people to pictures of African-Americans enjoying a picnic.”
The validity of IAT scores has also come under scrutiny. In 2013, Frederick Oswald and his research team published a meta-analysis of 46 studies.[1] They found that IAT scores are poor predictors of actual behavior and policy preferences. They also found that IAT scores predicted behaviors and policy preferences no better than scores on simple paper-and-pencil measures of prejudice.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the debate concerns how to interpret IAT scores. Some social psychologists believe the IAT measures prejudice, while others believe the IAT measures our knowledge of common stereotypes.
They then took a version of the Race IAT with Noffians and Fasites standing in for Blacks and Whites, respectively. The students showed a consistent bias against Noffians, not because they perceived Noffians as bad but because they perceived them as bad off.

youeseh2• 8 years ago

Guilt by association. If you belong to a certain group then there will be certain assumptions made about you. It is human nature.

This will happen every time you meet someone new, even when the person belongs to the same group as you.

The question is: what do you want to do about it? Is it a reasonable ask for society to suppress how it identifies you? Should you acknowledge the reality and work with it?

Different groups and communities have approached this issue in different ways: band together and support each other, organize politically, organize protests, use guilt, stay low and work hard, use another strength to gain leverage, etc. Some of these strategies and tactics will gain the community respect. Others will strengthen the stereotype - they may get what they want but will lose something else.

pmiller25• 8 years ago

What clothes will make my manager and coworkers think I write better software? (Serious question.)

Also regarding presentation improving the perceived quality of work, I noticed that when I started writing my homework assignments in LaTeX in grad school (math), I started getting better grades. I don't think my actual quality of work increased, but I was able to get away with less convincing arguments.

zeroname2• 8 years ago

What clothes will make my manager and coworkers think I write better software?

The kind of clothes that they wear. Which is probably not the same kind of clothes.

Mascros• 8 years ago

On mobile so haven't got exact links to hand so you might have to do some googling to find the exact things I mention. There's a study which examined pull requests to certain open source projects on GitHub and compared approval rates for accounts which could be identified as female (name or profile picture) with those of men, and also of those known to belong to females but where you could not tell from the profile. They found interesting differences in approvals ratings.

On a more general note the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg is a good read if you're interested in learning about biases you (whether man or woman) might have. The book is thoroughly cited and aims to be productive rather than an attack on men and does a great job in my opinion. It points out certain things such as how certain traits are seen as positive in men and negative in women and how this manifests itself in the workplace. It definitely helped me spot things I was guilty of without even realising before

maerF0x03• 8 years ago

Thank you for the book recommendation. Added to my reading list

tinnet• 8 years ago

Re #18: It exists, it's called mutation testing, and it's awesome (I only know the Java variant called http://pitest.org)

epmatsw• 8 years ago

Stryker is a JS version. Google has some interesting whitepapers about their usage of mutation testing as well: https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub46584

r-s• 8 years ago

Ruby, too: https://github.com/mbj/mutant I think most languages have something like this now.

redleggedfrog2• 8 years ago

"That my gender or my age or my ethnicity or my sexual orientation or my weight or my clothes might (will!) have an impact on the perceived quality of the software I build."

After nearly three decades writing software, I'd say if that's the case, you're probably at the wrong place. With such circumstances I'd suspect a whole lot of other bad things are probably true, too.

dj-wonk• 8 years ago

I interpret this comment as saying: if you find yourself in that kind of situation, look around and try to find other opportunities. In other words, life is too short.

I also can see the other side: life is often not fair, particularly in the short-run. Life constraints such as geography are real barriers for many people.

redleggedfrog2• 8 years ago

You are not only an excellent interpreter, but an astute reflector.

amelius• 8 years ago

That the new Altavista competitor would become a less bad Microsoft Office. That the new version of My Space would help damage democracies the world over.

And that programmers would get a reputation almost as bad as bankers ...

watwut3• 8 years ago

I think it is more enterpreneurs and startup founders who get all the hate, not so much run of mill programmers.

kenhwang2• 8 years ago

8. That having decent people skills makes my technical skills suspect, in the eyes of some.

I'm questioning how true this is, especially in today's world of whiteboard interviews and open office spaces. My personal experience seems to suggest that better people skills suggest better technical skill, especially to management.

AnimalMuppet3• 8 years ago

Given the author's name, I think she's female. I fear that, for a female, #8 is more likely to be true than for a male.

danielh96• 8 years ago

I feel like they might be referring to peers here rather than management

avgDev• 8 years ago

Not long ago, I failed two sql whiteboard problems and passed 2 c# problems. I was informed by HR that they are making me an offer based on my great people skills, even though I failed their SQL quesitons.

I sucked at white boarding(still do because I don't like grinding leetcode before interviews, and I usually make it known). When I first started interviewing I needed like 10 minutes to come up with palindrome solution even though I did it in school so many times. That time I also received an offer.

Now, that I think of it I my success rate is 75% and that includes a fortune 1k company. However, it is a pretty small sample size. Now, that I think of it I need to interview more.

watwut3• 8 years ago

I have seen that. I also seen people openly talking about social skills being opposite of coding skills and literally making implications about others. I have seen people pretend lower social skill then they actually have.

The most common through is assuming that someone with bad social skills is genius in coding with zero grounds for it. Without seeing code or even talking with those who know his code closely, anything like that. Assumption was that that those people are better in coding because got knows why. I suspect part of it is wish to compensate, but part is stereotype.

Open offices have nothing with it, except making people with poor social skills more actively annoying. Which can cancel some of effect I guess.

uptownfunk• 8 years ago

Very true. Back when I was trying to become a dev I'd show up in a suit and try to be as socially pleasant as possible. When I started dressing more sloppy, not shaving, etc. and being slightly more awkward (mimicing the interviewer) I actually started getting offers..

kenhwang2• 8 years ago

I think that fits into 4 more than 8. You have good enough people skill to recognize that you're different than the interviewer, and then putting up an facade to convince them you're like them.

People with poor people skills incidentally act similar to other people with poor people skills. People with good people skills can choose to act similar to people with poor people skills.

arkh3• 8 years ago

why is this not a standard feature of testing frameworks? I want some way to re-run tests flipping some of the assertions, to make sure they are testing what I think they are.

That's mutation testing and it the next big thing for tests.

wyldfire• 8 years ago

That you can have more than a 100% base salary difference doing the same job, depending on if you work at a small startup or one of the large companies.

Even among and within large companies. Somewhat less so within, usually. But one element of that is the (US?) taboo around sharing compensation info.

rco8786• 8 years ago

PHP is cool again

Come again?

mattmanser4• 8 years ago

Serious question, I've been programming 15 odd years, somewhere around a million people used my code last year, I've written entire sites on my own that happily run today.

I don't write tests. Projects that already had tests, those tests caught a single bug in about 3.5 years of working on that code base.

Yes, 1 bug. We'd have picked it up anyway when actually testing it.

Why do you feel #1 or #16 are actually true?

Am I (and colleagues) a magic snowflake, or are tests a massive waste of time, or is it somewhere in the middle?

youeseh2• 8 years ago

It comes down to the cost of failure. If the cost of failure for a particular module say, payments processing or rocket guidance system, is high then writing tests could be much cheaper than waiting for a failure, especially in production.

pathseeker3• 8 years ago

I've written entire sites on my own that happily run today.

This is probably the key issue. You're either working by yourself or you are on small enough team projects that it's easy to recognize when you are breaking things with a change.

Tests are about rapidly detecting regressions in a programmatic way. It should not require manually testing every time you want to make a small change to the code base and if you depend on reviewers seeing that a change will break something, you are in for a world of hurt on any large project.

Every large project I've been on that has skipped tests has ended up turning into a shitshow where master is broken for days at a time and you can't even tell the cause without hours of manual testing with bisection.

beokop• 8 years ago

if you depend on reviewers seeing that a change will break something, you are in for a world of hurt on any large project.

I don’t agree with this at all. Here’s a counter example: Linux.

I think the real problem here is that people don’t take review seriously and/or just don’t care about the project. We build these complicated, expensive systems that do all the thinking for us, not because it’s better, but because we simply don’t care.

Having tests is better than letting sloppy developers run amok. In my experience though tests aren’t really needed on projects with a maintainer that actually gives a damn.

guscost• 8 years ago

Many if not most tests are a waste of time (especially when the same guarantees are provided by, say, a type system).

That said, automated tests catch a problem that would make it to production just about weekly in my experience. If you're trying to do any kind of HA/CI/CD they're really really helpful. Beyond that, isolated "unit tests" are somewhat helpful too in my experience, but only so far as they allow you to easily run your test suite (and rarely, find bugs faster).

mh8h2• 8 years ago

Writing tests makes me write better software. The resulting test suite is just a nice side effect.

doubleunplussed• 8 years ago

I'm not a professional programmer, but I think it comes down to whether you expect to ever do major refactoring. If requirements change substantially, would you write new code, or would you modify the existing code and attempt to maintain some kind of backward compatibility? If the latter, tests can be worth it.

I have a library that never had any tests until I wanted to re-architect it in a fundamental way whilst porting it from Python 2 to Python 3. Since it was a wire-protocol type of thing, the Python bytes–unicode distinction made this hard. So I wrote tests for each piece of functionality as I ported that piece. I keep the tests around nowadays even though the porting is complete, but am kind of lazy writing ones for new functionality.

Of course tests also seem really important when you're accepting 3rd party contributions to your codebase. I've made what I thought were totally innocuous pull requests to projects only to see in the CI tests that my code causes regressions.

jrvarela56• 8 years ago

Broadly speaking, there are several steps in the development process where defects are caught:

1. During development: you code something, run it, see something fail and fix it. Most people don't consider this part of QA because it's coding/debugging.

2. Code review: a teammate reads your code and catches a bug or an opportunity for a bug to arise.

3. Manual QA: a teammate tries the new feature, finds a defect and reports it.

4. Production: a user reports the error.

5. Monitoring: tools like Sentry may warn you before a user reports the issue.

With your experience, you probably have learned to avoid patterns in your code that make #1 occur often. Maybe you use static typing, linters, an IDE or some other tools to help you avoid silly mistakes.

If you perform code review (#2), then you help less-experienced teammates avoid mistakes even if they haven't learned to avoid error-prone patterns or don't use tooling like you do. They spend more time in #1 than you do.

If you care (above average for developer standards) about your job, you probably manually test the software you make to see how your users experience your creation (#3) before checking-in code, while code-reviewing, and/or afterwards to help testers. This takes time and if you find mistakes, that means other teammates that did this before you invested time also.

If your company releases progressively (using feature flags) you get info from users (#4) and fix before it's considered an issue. Also, if using monitoring tools (#5) you may avoid users ever noticing there was an issue. These all lead to rework and are risky.

I don't have enough information about what process you follow, so I tried making references to generic practices. In theory, writing tests first reduces the amount of time reacting in situations 1-5. I have felt the benefits in my own team and seen them when coaching other teams.

If none of what I have written applies to you and your team, please let me know. Would love to buy you all a meal to hear about what you do to avoid defects in your software. I'm not being snarky here. Have genuinely been asking myself how do these developers I read about online manage to ship bug-free software really fast without writing tests.

mattmanser4• 8 years ago

It's probably a combination of #3 (I always do that now, use the feature I just made/improved/fixed) and that I always make sure I can reliably repro a bug before I try and fix the bug, so I always know it's fixed.

Also a significant majority of my code has been statically typed as you say and I'm moving even more over to static typing now I'm using TS over JS in all new code.

fredifrum5• 8 years ago

You are able to go without tests because you're writing entire apps on your own. You know what each file, class, and module is supposed to do, and how to test it for regressions manually.

If you're working on a large team with a large suite of applications, this isn't the case. Very often I'll need to make changes to code that I don't explicitly own, or that I've never seen before today. If this code doesn't have tests, this is a recipe for disaster. I don't really understand what this code is supposed to do. How do I know that my change didn't break any existing functionality? Is it obvious how or even possible to test the functionality in this file manually? Maybe it's a background job that processes a file off of an SFTP server, how long will it take me to set up a manual test for that?

It's also about iteration time. Automated tests allow to you check the correctness of every single change nearly instantaneously. I don't want to need switch to a browser and wait for a form to submit just to check that my code still works after a minor refactor, or to ensure that my typo was fixed successfully. Tests mean that code is much more likely to be refactored often, and will lead to much cleaner and easier to maintain codebases.

candiodari4• 8 years ago

This argument, and most of the others at this same level, have a glaring error. They only justify integration tests. They do not justify unit tests (in nearly all cases).

Unit tests wouldn't catch the examples you gave:

How do I know that my change didn't break any existing functionality?

You don't. And with many unit tests ... you still don't. A software engineer with a few years experience will know this.

Maybe it's a background job that processes a file off of an SFTP server, how long will it take me to set up a manual test for that?

This especially, no unit test is ever going to catch. This behavior would depend on so many things: encryption, networking, scheduling, starvation, graceful error handling, retry logic ... Not something any amount of unit tests could reasonably verify.

So this must be an argument against unit tests ? And yet, I don't think so.

In practice, you see the opposite. These arguments are designed to force people to write unit tests, and actually used against integration tests (which are complex tests that require tweaking in intelligent ways every time you make a serious change). Of course integration tests and "instantaneous" are usually opposites.

So I don't understand this argument. It only makes sense on the surface. It does not actually work on real large code projects. So I don't understand that you make this argument.

And I especially do not understand that nearly every large company follows advice like this. I mean, I can come up with cynical reasons: "more pointless work with zero verifiable results, but nice "quantifiable" (if meaningless) numbers ! Of course we're in favor !". But really, I cannot come up with a coherent to explain the behavior seen in developers in a large company.

Most statistics about unit tests make no sense. Coverage for instance, says nothing about how many edge cases you handle. Says nothing about many guarantees (like bounded and reasonable allocation for "weird" inputs, same with cpu usage, that it still works together with the OS and other daemons on the system it'll be installed on, ...). Since tests have no "real" purpose for software (they're code that doesn't run) number of tests is meaningless too. Number of lines of test code ... that's beyond useless.

The bigger a piece of software, the more useless unit tests become and the more critical realistic integration tests become ... and the less likely you are to actually find them.

And frankly, for small pieces of code, I find that specialized ways to "test" them that provide actual guarantees of correctness (like Coq) actually work. Unit tests ... never catch edge cases, not even with the best of developers. Of course, even Coq sort-of only makes sure you KNOW about every edge case and requires you to verify it's correctness before letting you pass, so bugs in your understanding of the problem will still be bugs.

But at least you have a theoretical guarantee that a developer actually thought about every edge case. Also, it's pretty hard to use. The language could be clearer, but that's not really the problem. The problem is that Coq WILL show you that no matter how well you think you understand a problem, your understanding is not complete. Often in surprising, interesting ways.

mixmastamyk3• 8 years ago

As always, "it depends." Testing is usually about larger teams, cost of failure, and sleeping better at night during refactors.

If the project is small, fits in one skull, and not critical enough to be maintained/redesigned for years on end tests buy you less.

Also, technology can prevent some classes of problems, such as type checkers, linters, etc. One hopes you are at least using these.

#1 gives the impression the author is using a dynamic "scripting" language, which may require a higher ratio of tests per line as a project matures.

vharuck• 8 years ago

We'd have picked it up anyway when actually testing it.

Why not automate the tests you often run?

JamesBarney• 8 years ago

I've found the sweet spot for tests are

- complex code that will change with definable inputs/outputs that won't

- large projects

I've found they're not nearly as helpful in

- small projects

- UI intensive code

- code where the requirements are ill defined and change often

zeroname2• 8 years ago

Am I (and colleagues) a magic snowflake, or are tests a massive waste of time, or is it somewhere in the middle?

Tests are definitely a massive waste of time if you never need them. Write and forget code exists and can certainly run happily for years. On the other hand, frequently changing something in a large existing codebase, especially without static typing, is almost certainly going to end up more expensive without automated tests.

dougk16• 8 years ago

I'm in the same boat and have thought a lot about it. The biggest correlation I see from automated testing advocates is that they are usually using dynamic languages for non-trivial core business logic. I mean that's pretty much it. If you're using a dynamic language for such things, like anything past 10k lines of code, then I agree, you pretty much need automated tests since they're partially filling in the role of a compiler and type system. It begs the question of why to use dynamic languages for tricky business logic, but that's a whole different flamewar!

If the testing advocates are using something with even a basic compiler/type-system (e.g. Java), then IME it often comes down to not being fluent with the design patterns, tricks, IDE shortcuts/plugins, tools, etc. that compilers and type-systems can provide to work with you to catch bugs at build time. I mention Java because it's a language that allows you to keep writing "dynamic" code and avoid the compiler/type-system to a good degree if you want (and boy do people want to). E.g. passing top-level Object types around and casting, using HashMaps instead of a proper Class, heavy reflection use, "stringly" typing, etc. Unlike say Haskell or Rust which force correctness down your throat to a much higher degree.

Obviously no matter the language choice, their comes a point where automated testing becomes cost-effective (e.g. safety-critical software). At that point however there should be formal methods and such in play also. And I'd say for the majority of us working on CRUD apps, we're not at that cost-effectiveness point.

rorykoehler2• 8 years ago

Testing is for business logic not for seeing if the project will build.

arkh3• 8 years ago

Currently you read a lot about unit testing. Usually used badly (testing solo methods or classes).

What you want is E2E tests: test that your product conforms to its specifications. Automate the test procedure your testers have.

pathseeker3• 8 years ago

Type testing can't catch business logic regressions.

contingencies• 8 years ago

Test interfaces, not implementations.

Mc_Big_G2• 8 years ago

Tests fail all the time during development. Test fails indicate a bug. You fix the bug before you commit. The bug never makes it to prod. It's impossible that only one test ever failed during development.

rorykoehler2• 8 years ago

God help the person who has to pick up after you, do refactoring etc etc. Not writing tests is unprofessional as it introduces risk. If code is being used by 1 person or is some non-critical internal application then fine. If it is being used by 1 million people to earn a living the people responsible should lose their jobs. I spend a significant amount of my time tidying up after people who don't write tests and leave a mess and it's a nightmare (but keeps my family fed, housed and clothed so...).

arkh3• 8 years ago

How much maintenance have those sites seen?

I usually focus on end-to-end tests: when I had a new feature or do some refactoring I don't have to try things manually. I just launch my test suite go prepare some coffee and if the suite passes I'm confident in not having broken anything. Also writing new tests for new features helps thinking about the edge-cases you'll encounter.

When someone reports a bug I reproduce it. Then I write a test reproducing the problem. And at last I correct it. Now I know 6 months or one year from now I won't have a regression and see this bug coming back. People really hate when something they reported months ago is a problem again.

mattmanser4• 8 years ago

Huge amounts, you don't have a million users for failed projects.

I still maintain various code bases for multiple clients that are over 10 years old, at varying levels of TLOC (10k, 100k, million k).

The truth is bugs almost never come back like that. I know because of the thousands, maybe 10s of thousand, of bugs I've fixed over the years.

HereBeBeasties2• 8 years ago

Your code is full of bugs, you just haven't noticed yet.

Whether that matters or not (to you or your end users) is your grey ground in the middle.

It's possible you've only ever worked on things that are simple or obvious enough to not have the need for tests, and that code that never changes. Especially if that's UI code, where you're testing it manually as you write it, you may be able to live with this on small code bases.

If you have never worked in an environment where the benefit of at least some level of automated testing is not blindingly obvious, my advice to you is to stop doing the same thing over and over and find a new job.

mattmanser4• 8 years ago

Projects with unit tests are also riddled with bugs.

I have absolutely no respect for your attitude or your comment. Sanctimonious zealotry like yours should have no place in our industry.

It's disgusting that you think you can tell someone they're shit or trivialize their work because you disagree with their workflow.

suraj• 8 years ago

When I was a rookie programmer 12 years ago, I was assigned a task to optimise a routine. It took current vehicle speed as input, performed integration and calculated total distance traveled. I made a mistake that was let through code review and was caught by an automated test. My calculations were off by 1% which accumulated to a larger amount in 10 minutes. After that incident we never had another bug for 5 years in that module. Does this make the tests invalid? Our does this improve confidence in our code?

azdacha• 8 years ago

There is something in the middle actually. Just write test for the hard tasks or the algos that you implemented your self. (Some stuff that I don't undertand end up much easier to write once I've created some tests to help me iterate faster)

Testing basic class re-use (I'm thinking about serializers, or ViewSets like in django) doesn't make much sense to me, and in fact was 100% automatised.

Those "simple" test end-up being useful when you start hitting your app with the hammer to change a lot of stuff in it. I havn't had any use for these otherwhise.

jackconnor2• 8 years ago

Frontend programmers are very, very undervalued, I 100% agree. This is because they build the things that your user interacts directly with, where the "rubber meets the road", so to speak. Good FE coders are worth their weight in gold, to any company that has users using their software.

mh8h2• 8 years ago

20. That it is all people, all the way down. They are as cute as turtles, but don’t have hard shells.

A thousand times this. I used to be amazed by people's intelligence. Now I am amazed by their kindness.

iam_takada• 8 years ago

This analogy is lost on me. Could you explain?

BerislavLopac• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

nraynaud• 8 years ago

funny how people confuse being told something and integrating it. We're "told" millions of things (more exactly we read all day long), some of it sticks some of it doesn't, it has nothing to do with what we believe is important later in life.

I think we have to stop with those things I wish i was told/nobody told me/I would told my younger self. We just decide some points are salient with experience, and I'm pretty sure the list is different after every decade in life.

obelos• 8 years ago

Regarding #2, I have a harder time switching between touch screen vs. touch pad than I do between text editor key bindings. I seamlessly shift between vi and emacs throughout the day depending on what I'm editing, but put my laptop and tablet side by side and I am forever trying to touch the laptop screen.

watwut3• 8 years ago

That people who write all those cool blogs/talks and people who write good code or manage projects in great way are different in important ways. Meaning what is good tech/code and what is hip on blogs and forums are two distinct groups. Meaning what is good management is completely different then both feel good and look at me I tough bs you find on blogs.

Erem• 8 years ago

The author was maybe the best engineer I've had the pleasure to work with directly in my 13 years in the industry. What a treat to read her internal thoughts on the job. Highly recommend her other posts on e.g. measuring performance of engineers https://anaulin.org/blog/why-do-we-have-performance-evaluati...

poulsbohemian• 8 years ago

On this point about testing... what’s still surprising to me after twenty years of doing this is how many errors aren’t technical errors, but rather because someone forgot / failed to document / communicate how something was supposed to work. So something fails, fingers get pointed in the direction of the technical team, but the root cause is all too human.

purplezooey• 8 years ago

How about: one's abilities count for about 10%, and skill level in high school politics the other 90%.

amriksohata• 8 years ago

The thing no one told me is the number of requirements folk, like ux, ba's that don't understand their role in agile development and responsibilities in getting solid requirements across to developers

websitescenes• 8 years ago

Lost me at #13. CSS is not a programming language, nor is it complex..

klohto• 8 years ago

Article full of hyperboles, without-proof points and self-pity. Doesn't bring anything useful.

Things nobody told me about being a software engineer

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