deilline

I am taking my first steps as a manager and gathering resources about what makes team successful and combining it with my own experience and thoughts.

I recall a blog post I found via HN that had some properties laid out such as vision, competence, resources, and what happens when any one of these is missing. I've searched far and wide and the closest thing is Hackman's 6 Conditions for Team Success, but it doesn't quite feel exactly the same.

Be interested to know if this rings a bell for anyone and what resources you've found valuable on your journey, manager or otherwise.

Has anyone here come up with rules of thumbs or found some good writing for how to use LLMs to balance learning with getting things done?

One possible heuristic is: input task into LLM, let it do the work, and make sure you understand everything it spits back out. One potential drawback is there is some value in having to figure out things yourself. When learning a language like French, you wouldn't get very good at speaking/writing if you told the LLM "write this paragraph for me in French", and went and verified if it was correct. At the same time, it massively accelerates getting things done. You kind of need to fail and have something correct you.

On the other side, something like Advent of Code which is purely self-motivated and for fun, you can write everything yourself, but at the same time, you could just input it into the LLM and get rid of the tedium of typing things out you know will work, especially for the first 10 or so days. This is a fast feedback loop on the "meat" which is "do I know how to solve this problem?".

I'm having a hard time figuring out when to reach for LLMs and when not to.

Hopefully someone who has more understanding of educational pedagogy can chime in :)

Self-explanatory. There has to be a solution to this problem or a reason why it hasn't been solved.

Political mailings, marketing advertisements, etc.

I know there are some projects like SOLID that are meant to somewhat address this, interested if they went anywhere.

Strange question, but I attended a workshop where the facilitator asked the participants to think about "What's the best place you ever worked and why?". It struck me as something I've only implicitly pondered, and never explicitly. I was wondering if people had other questions that helped them reflect on their careers.

"What do you think makes a good programmer?" "Who is the strongest engineer you know and what makes them that way?" "What thing or things are stopping you from achieving the thing you want to achieve?"

I've found watching someone else code is immensely helpful and I was looking for more content like this. I saw some recommended in a different thread, so I thought I'd ask the broader audience.

Most of the content I see is aimed towards beginners so I was looking for context for experienced developers.

I've been looking to take some longer time off in between my current and next role, on the order of 6 months to a year.

Any advice from those who have done it? Did you get bored? Was it worth it? Was it more expensive? Things you found helpful when preparing?

Hi y'all,

A friend of mine with a non-technical background is looking to learn R and apply it to her daily work. She has a background in statistics and clinical research but is non-technical. I was wondering if anyone on this forum has gone through any courses and their experiences with those. The reason I ask is money is a little tight for her so she is trying to do some research before she spends on it.

Cursory google searches for ratings of courses had a lot of companies advertising their own products or courses like Edureka, for instance.

Thanks in advance!

Hi HN,

I am wondering what others look for in their managers, and what kinds of questions you would ask the managers on prospective teams? How would you describe your relationship with your manager?

I ask because I realized in the last few months at my current role (and most of my time at this company), my relationship with my manager was non-existent. I've had 3 managers in the past 3.5 years over 2 teams. I don't think I'm a bad dev, but I am open to that possibility, but that leads me to my next point: I never knew where I stood with my manager. My first (and only) promotion from ~2.5 years ago blind-sided me. I only recently learned how the review process worked and how bonuses were calculated. I never took the initiative to build this relationship, to ask them where I stood, to see if I was on the right track, to request their time. If I could avoid our 1-on-1's, I subconsciously did, because I had nothing to say.

When searching for a new role, I don't want to repeat the same mistakes. I plan on having regularly 1-on-1's and being very explicit with where I stand in relation to promotions, pay, their view of my quality of work, and how my teammates view me--which are all things that I thought were essentially random processes prior to the past couple months.

On this site, it is often said that "people quit managers, not companies". How do you decide if a manager is right for you? I realized as well that I have no idea how to rate the quality of my own managers. I don't know what criteria to judge them if we had a good relationship or bad relationship.

Is it my manager's responsibility as well to build this relationship with me? If I am constantly blindsided by my feedback, that's on both of us? I suppose I am trying to rid myself of guilt, but interested in others' feedback.

Thanks for taking the time to read this! Interested in your responses.