> Negativity begets negativity
I think this is coming from a very common and fundamentally misguided premise - the obsessive focus on emotional valence, on whether we're being positive or negative. The real problem is not whether we are being positive or negative, it's the rush to attach emotional valence to things we have not adequately understood or described. As C. S. Lewis said, "the human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value." This rush to emotional endpoints is the root of both toxic negativity and toxic positivity.
Instead of taking positivity and negativity as endpoints, take them as prompts to better understand your surroundings. You are feeling bad about something - why? What about it makes you feel that way? Would improving it cost more than it would benefit? Is it the least bad of the alternatives?
A willingness to feel and acknowledge and investigate your negative emotions is a superpower. It gives you x-ray vision into things that very few other people have. They look away from problems and let them fester because they've been taught to be allergic to negativity. The ability to look at problems is inseparable from what the author points out is a very important trait, the ability to roll up your sleeves and get stuff done.
One think I would say the article is wrong on, though - snark doesn't have to lead to cynicism. At my place, we talk a fair amount of smack, but it's just entertainment. (One difference - the smack is self-directed at least as often as it's directed at any particular other person.)
I have success stories from my personal experience doing this.
Being technically fearless is also a trait I've identified in engineers I enjoy working with. It's hard to quantify how you gain this. I think it's a combination of strong fundamentals and deep curiosity. It forms when things stop being magic.
Maybe it's because I started using computers as a child (~9 years old or so) but I always had the mindset to just try things out. You cannot really break the computer or delete stuff. Every tool will always put a very clear warning before you do sth stupid. And if you are really unsure with some action, just make a backup before. Reinstalling Windows every so often was anyway the norm in my youth.
And just trying things out, clicking through the menu, through the actions, just playing around, make some dummy playground, this is often how I discovered the functionality of most tools. This is a very effective way to get familiar with most tools.
But others, when they say they don't know how to do X in tool Y, they never have just tried around. And when I ask them why they have not, they tell me that they are afraid of breaking or deleting sth.
With coding, it's very much the same. And now that we have Git, with some backup somewhere remote, and hopefully a test suite, maybe even with CI, it's even much less of an issue if you break sth because it always can be undone and you normally should notice with the tests (or if you don't, you can blame the incomplete tests).
Btw, regarding reading other code bases: I very much can recommend that. You will most likely learn a lot. And there are many great open source projects where you can just dive in.
The real skill lies in trying things systematically, carefully, querying your mental model of the system and invalidating hypotheses along the way.
An example is being comfortable reading a dependency's source code. Once you realize you can do this by going to Github/Gilab - or even navigating to where a function is defined via your editor - you realize it's all layers 'down' and you can go in there as far as you want. Another example is using dev tools to prettify the code (but it's rarely readable).
Another thing is the payoff: how often can you deep dive and make changes to solve your problem? This determines if the reading through a huge library is worth it.
Starts with curiosity but requires lots of time available and a bit of confidence that the endeavor could lead to a solution.
I'm not sure I agree on lack of deadline pressure.
There's a virtuous cycle somewhere if I squint that's fundamentals -> makes it easier to find where the problem is -> makes you more willing to dive deeper -> leads to stronger fundamentals. In parallel maybe, curiosity -> dive deeper reading other people's code / learning about software -> stronger fundamentals
This all leads to things like "I bet this is a network or protocol level issue in this dependency" -> even in someone else's large, open source codebase, I can quickly track down the problem without needing to understand the entire structure, for example. But gaining that ability to intuit takes time, especially for newer engineers.
Edit:
Technically fearless though isn't really the above example for me, it's more, if the business needs it, and we want to allocate resources, there's nothing I can't build or learn how to build in a reasonable amount of time. When you're layers and layers of abstractions up, you're constrained at each layer on what you're allowed to build. Perhaps a simple definition of being technically fearless is the ability to drop down layers of abstraction as needed to solve problems.
I think John Carmack[1] is technically fearless, for example. Known for video games, but I would hire John in any domain and have no doubt he'd be successful.
This hit a little too close to home.
> Typing can be the bottleneck Agree! Learning touch typing (at 30 :)) was a big relief for my fingers and wrists. Also it's important to have a good mechanical or scissor keyboard so that typing actually feels good.
> Hiring is hard And it's like dating: you only get to know the people who you actually hire and never learn what would have happened to the people that you have rejected. That is some selection bias in the system.
It is a bit connected to fearlessness, because you need to be a little fearless to start something without knowing where it will go. I think fearlessness originates from a trust in oneself, and maybe the universe too haha
Three points I think are undervalued in my experience:
> Typing can be the bottleneck
> The most important trait in developers: rolling up their sleeves because it has to get done
> Nothing really matters, except bringing value to the customer
I often feel the code needed to deliver value is not that complex and most senior folks can do it, but in an effort to "save time" on typing, they try to design something complex and debate endlessly, when what's really needed is rolling up your sleeves, getting it done, then saying "oh that? I finished coding it and it works, let's ship it already"
(edit: formatting)
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definitely helps me get focused the next day
good code can give you a lot of headaches if the external business environment sees qualitative changes while that sloppy code over there is has being going hassle free for the last 6 years because the end-goal and patterns that it needs to fulfill didn't change much during that period.
> When you’re glueing other people’s code together, there’s a very real danger that the glue is where complexity will accumulate. But glue code is the last place where you want your complexity to live. It hides complexity. What you want is to make complexity as visible as you can, shining a light on it with the hope that it turns into dust and disappears.
The mechanism for this is fairly obvious: it is usually convenient to put new functionality next to existing one because it allows you to reuse things that maybe should not be reused. The more diverse a big lump of code, the more potential future functionality is convenient to add to the lump.
This is a reason to be very vigilant against this type of accidental reuse and incohesive modules. It's a reinforcing feedback loop that needs a balancing mechanism.
> Every additional line of code you don’t need is ballast. It weighs your codebase down, making it harder to steer and change direction if you need to
So code as mass is the scalar part of the momentum. So the directional part is where this code is going in "purpose space".
i am programming (and-all-that-goes-with-it = mostly-mentoring, both downwards and upwards) for 35 years... and it is somewhat difficult for me to tell the things you wrote there, to my pupils/students/team/s, because i have kind-of found them loooong time ago, and since then have much further understanding, and now i consider them obvious/intrinsic and don't even think about them... and they are not obvious at all.
And yes, i still love programmming very much (although sometimes it is about programming the people. But not direct, it's more like building a language, to enable further things with it :).
Now, if it's only one thing from me: it's all about people. okay, Mostly about some-people somewhere in the chain. Not about code/architecture/....
have fun
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