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**Break:** \[21:51\] |
**Jerod Santo:** One thing Dillon Bork said in the chat which I would love to pull into this, which I think is a great point - he says the danger of paint by number in his opinion is that it can lead to a cargo-culting of the various patterns and idioms without any insight or understanding about why the things are done... |
\[24:12\] That being said, sometimes you just have to follow the other person's path until you realize when it doesn't actually work for you. I'm totally fine with cargo-culting some sort of rule... I was gonna say the Law of Demeter, but that one's too hard to explain. What's a very simple -- DRY, right? Everyone can ... |
So I think it's okay to go through that process of, like I was saying in the post, go ahead and paint by numbers for a little while. Don't live there, don't stay there, but until you can start to realize actually blue doesn't look great on the number four. A little bit lighter blue would look nicer there. You start to ... |
**Kris Brandow:** Yeah. And there's something you've said a while back, when we were talking about Leslie Lamport and his path of like "Okay, I'm a mathematician that stumbled into computer science, and then I was studying physics, and then I realized that this distributed database someone's trying to build is actually... |
I think for me personally - it's kind of funny that you say like "Oh, we're not really people like Leslie Lamport." I think my own path through computer science is very similar to the one that Leslie Lamport has taken, and the way that he approached everything. I am - as we know from this podcast - a very heavy analogy... |
**Jerod Santo:** You're a writer. |
**Kris Brandow:** I'm at my core a writer that happens to write programming languages... And I think that is a very distinct path for me, and that has resulted in me, in my career - like, I was never a junior engineer. I've never been like an SE1, or an SE2. I've never had that experience. I don't quite understand what... |
I think we've mentioned this in an episode a while back, but I think that's actually an important differentiation and distinction that we need to make as an industry, that goes along with this kind of thought process of incremental progress of - there are some people who are those Leslie Lamports, who are the people th... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Kris Brandow:** And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being the person that paints in all of the colors to make the beautiful portrait at the end of the day. Because starting with a blank canvas is very intense, and it takes a lot of energy to sit down and figure all the things ou... |
\[28:19\] Your marketing company needs a website; we don't need to spin up a whole new custom Go backend... Just go use a framework. Just go use WordPress, or Drupal, or Wix.com, or something. You don't need to do all of the intense effort. But I think we do, as an industry, have to start realizing that these are not t... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** But what about resume-driven development? I need to build a brand new framework for this website. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** That's true. |
**Kris Brandow:** Kubernetes-driven development. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and then we find out in the big tech co's there's now promotion-driven development, which drives all sorts of new projects, because you can't get promoted working on the current project, even though the value is there... And these are incentive structures that people are realizing are misaligned ... |
Some people - actually, that's the advice they're looking for. It's like, "Hey, I wanna be a software engineer. Y'all have been doing it for all these years... I'm trying to break in. What do I do? Where do I start?" And again, unfortunately, the answer to that still can be "It depends" or "Just pick React." I'm just k... |
**Kris Brandow:** Oh, Lord, Jerod... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sorry, I am from JS Party, so I had to get at something... |
**Kris Brandow:** You've been spending a little too much time on that, on that topic there |
**Jerod Santo:** I think Ian disagrees with something Kris said, because he had a funky look on his face, and then Johnny talked. So Ian, do you wanna say something? |
**Ian Lopshire:** Yeah. Let's go back to that idea that these don't stack, that they're beside each other. I kind of disagree with that on a lot of levels... But let's just take Go, the language, for example. That didn't come out of academics; that came out of a bunch of people's years of experience, knowing how a lang... |
I think they can be beside each other, but it definitely does stack. Gaining context and experience does allow you to contribute more later. |
**Kris Brandow:** Yes, but I would say that looking along the dimension of time is likely going to walk you into problem areas... Because it's like, the reason the founders of Go were so great at creating this language that we have is more because of the experiences they have, not so much the length of time of those ex... |
So I think we overweight time too much of the time, and that has resulted in us as an industry just saying "Okay, just grind for a few more years." And then you see things on job posts that are like "Okay, we need 70 years of experience in this, or 10 years of experience in that." And I think that's exactly the thing I... |
**Ian Lopshire:** I'll agree that time doesn't mean much there, but by experience I mean like quantity of... I don't even know how to say it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Some other measure that's not time... \[laughter\] |
**Ian Lopshire:** \[32:14\] No, it's not time. It's like -- |
**Jerod Santo:** What he means is like 10,000 hours... \[laughter\] |
**Ian Lopshire:** No... By experience I mean like a base of knowledge. Like, yeah, if you do the same thing every day, you're not growing and learning. But if you're gaining new experiences, that is experience. It's new experience. It's not length of time doing a certain thing. |
**Kris Brandow:** Right. |
**Jerod Santo:** So on our job postings we have to say "Seven years of experiences..." \[laughter\] I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just saying it's really hard to quantify this thing if it's not time-based. |
**Ian Lopshire:** Yeah, time is like a good analog, but it's not the thing. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's a proxy. |
**Ian Lopshire:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Kris Brandow:** Yeah, I think that's also what I was trying to get at there... Maybe we just shouldn't use time, because it's too easy for us to gamify it. It's too easy for us to sit there and be like... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you just wait. |
**Kris Brandow:** "Oh, you've been around for ten years, so obviously, you can design systems now." It's like, please, don't... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I mean, isn't that a fair assumption to make though? We don't have better heuristics for that, so... There's an assumption that you must make as an employer, or a hiring manager, managing director, whatever, that given enough time, somebody has seen enough kinds of problems that they are experien... |
So it's possible for years to have gone by, for you to not grow as an engineer. And mind you, they were great coders. If I give them a specific tasks, with specifics on "This is what I want you to do. Do this, do this here, go find out what you need to find out there, what you need to fix is over here..." Very specific... |
So it's one of those things where if you've been experienced enough -- let's use that example... Somebody comes to me and says "Hey, design a web scraper", and they give me the parameters and they say "Hey, this is what it needs to do etc." The first thing I do, I'm like, okay, I go to Google and say-- |
**Jerod Santo:** "npm install a web scraper." \[laughter\] |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Right? Right?! I mean, why am I gonna reinvent that wheel? I've got better things to do with my time. I need you to be experienced enough to recognize that. And go get a damn package off the internet that does this. I don't need you, as a junior developer, reinventing that wheel. That's not where... |
So that kind of judgment I think is what comes with time. You've seen a few patterns, you've been coding for a while, so you know how to deal with syntax, and you've been around other people who know what they're doing, so you pick up some of the tricks of the trade, that kind of thing... And then you allow time to all... |
And again, I'm biased because I've been doing this for a while, and I can say that "Okay, yeah, time has added so much to my skills", and whatever it is... But I think in my experience you need the time to grow. |
**Kris Brandow:** I wonder if this has to do with where in the industry each of us is positioned... It's interesting to me that you, Johnny and Jerod, had never heard of Leslie Lamport before; I think part of it is before I've spent so much time in distributed systems that it's just like "Oh, yeah, Lamport clocks. Lesl... |
\[36:10\] But I think distributed systems specifically is one of those areas where it really isn't the amount of time that matters nearly as much as like the knowledge that you have obtained. And you can obtain that knowledge very quickly, but it takes a -- people's brains are different, so your ability to understand t... |
I think part of the problem here ultimately is that -- it's like we're trying to storypoint right now. We're trying to reduce a huge space of things down into a single entity... And it's like, how you gain experience as a frontend engineer is vastly different than how you gain it as a backend engineer, and it's differe... |
**Jerod Santo:** It seems like what you're arguing for mostly is for diversity of experience... Because the unique perspective is what sometimes - and in the case of Leslie Lamport - actually leads to the innovation. Looking at it from a perspective that nobody else looked at it from, because of his background. Or beca... |
**Kris Brandow:** And this is why you're the producer. You've put that perfectly, you know? \[laughter\] |
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