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**Jerod Santo:** Well, I think when you take the diverse perspectives and then you also give them experience - like, let's all get the experience - I think they all get better. I think he would confess that he's probably better at everything he did when he was in the business for 25 years than when he was in it for fiv... |
So a lot of new things, new techniques, new frameworks, thinking about it differently, come out of people who are 21, 22, or three years into the business. Maybe you're not actually young, but young to the industry. |
**Ian Lopshire:** So just kind of riffing on something you said... I think the one piece that you're discounting about time is you might be able to gain all this knowledge very quickly, but what time does provide is opportunity to have decisions that you thought were good, turn out to be bad... And without that time as... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I wish I could find some of the people that have written software I've inherited, and be like "Look. Look at what you've done. Look at what you did." \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** "Look how bad this idea was." That would be a cool reality show... It's like, Johnny just chases down people that used to work on software and shows them the ramifications of their decision-making. That would be a good show. "Look at what you did...!" \[laughs\] |
**Kris Brandow:** \[40:02\] The thing I just thought of when you were saying that, Ian, is like - time is a useful way of comparing yourself, and on your own trajectory. So it's like, you at one year of experience versus you at ten years of experience, or ten years of doing this, hopefully you have acquired a lot more ... |
I think the thing I'm pushing against is that that's not comparable between people. I think that's the issue at hand - ten years of my experience is very different from ten years of Johnny's experience, or Jerod, or your experience. That's different, and that has a factor of what is the industry like over the course of... |
I think part of the thing that I disliked about this kind of incremental thinking approach to our industry and the way that we kind of ramp up engineers from SE1 to SE2, to senior, to staff etc. is that a lot of the times when you're in those lower roles, you're kind of indoctrinated into the way of doing things that e... |
And I've seen at a number of companies I've been at, this attempted to happen. We've even had someone -- a senior in a company I was talking to, and my philosophy is just hire good people, hire people that are curious and wanna learn, and you'll do well. And he was like shocked at this. "We can't do that. My philosophy... |
**Jerod Santo:** I understand where you're coming from. I don't know if in practice it works out that way all that much, because you yourself buck against that. Maybe you go through it for a little while and you're like "Well, this is BS. I'm not gonna do it that way. This way is better." And I think that people that h... |
But that brings me to Sandi Metz's rules. Are you guys familiar with these? Sandi Metz is a great OOP teacher/programmer, very experienced. She teaches people how to do object-oriented programming... And she has rules that she just hands out to new developers. And the rules are "Classes can be no longer than 100 lines ... |
Most of her work I think is in Java and Ruby, most of her experience and the most people she's teaching. "Pass no more than 4 parameters into a method; hash options are parameters." This to me is paint by numbers, to a certain degree... And I would never follow any of these. But... Okay, a couple of them. 4 parameters ... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** \[44:15\] And you need time for that understanding. |
**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. |
**Kris Brandow:** I feel like the last part of what you said there is the crucial part. Like "Use these until you can basically articulate why they're wrong." And I think there is some form of time component to that, but I think some people will be able to do that much quicker than other people. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Kris Brandow:** This is just me begin very, like, "I'm glad I never started off as a junior engineer, and I don't want people that are like me to have to slog through that", when they're like "No, but I wanna go design things", and people are like "But you don't know enough. You haven't been around long enough." It's... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, when I was green behind the ears - or wet behind the ears; I don't know how these sayings go. When I was green, I wanted rules. I wanted structure, because I didn't know how to do it otherwise. So I was happy to have them. And that's why in that chat I did say "Some people just wanna paint by num... |
**Kris Brandow:** You'd be surprised... I've met a number of people in my career that have just -- they're literally just like "Just give me the task. I will do it. That's all I wanna do." |
**Jerod Santo:** I have, too. I've never understood those people, but I'm happy that they're happy. I totally get it. But I think you should want to advance. I don't know... From my perspective, you should wanna go on from there. If you don't, Godspeed. |
**Kris Brandow:** Once again, diversity of perspectives. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Kris Brandow:** Like what you've just said, of when you started, you wanted a nice set of rules. I think the thing that actually got me to be in this industry long-term was that in the beginning there weren't any rules, and I had to figure all of this stuff out. And even though I was quite literally screaming at my c... |
So I think at the end of the day what we're all saying here is diversity matters, and understanding that we are all different, and we have different backgrounds, and there's no single type of engineer at the end of the day. And we should have roles in organizations and promotional paths that allow us to be the diverse ... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** But we won't. We're a cog in a machine somewhere, and we just -- \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Unfortunately, there's a lot of work to be had in turning spreadsheets into web forms... And that's what a lot of our jobs are. Take this spreadsheet, put it on the web. |
**Kris Brandow:** Spreadsheets though... Let me tell you, spreadsheets are one of the most advanced forms of programming that is out there. |
**Jerod Santo:** I don't disagree. |
**Kris Brandow:** People are like, "Oh, you just write Excel." I'm like, "Have you tried building something good in Excel?" |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I've seen enterprise-scale software built in Excel, my friend. You have not seen software until you've seen software written in Excel. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I've seen efforts to replace Excel with custom software written to do the exact same thing, but the people won't adopt it because they're just -- they built that Excel themselves... Like, "No, this is how I do my job. Don't make me do my job some other way." |
**Kris Brandow:** And half the time that custom software doesn't even do everything the Excel does. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's what they're saying. \[laughter\] |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[48:04\] That's their own point. "This is worse off than what I have now." |
**Kris Brandow:** I feel like Excel is like a peak of programming. It's just like, I don't know, this is like this super-dynamic, instant compilation and -- you just start plugging in some formulas and you can just do some crazy stuff. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Yup. |
**Kris Brandow:** If you couldn't tell, I just built out an entire system using -- not Excel, but Google Sheets. So I am very hyped on the spreadsheet train right now. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Hey man, spreadsheets will get you a long way. Don't sleep on spreadsheets. Look at Airtable - they built an entire business around spreadsheets... \[laughs\] I mean, come on... You know. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Kris Brandow:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Break:** \[48:39\] |
**Kris Brandow:** Alright, so we've gotta get to our last segment, but does anybody have anything else they wanna say before we jump into that? |
**Jerod Santo:** I think the coding versus programmer distinction is kind of silly. |
**Kris Brandow:** Oh, come on, Jerod. Now we have to -- |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Disagree. I disagree. Hard disagree. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Should I save that for unpopular opinions? \[laughter\] No, we've gotta move on. Well, I mean, we should play maybe a little bit of the audio from Leslie Lamport, or at least let people go listen to what he had to say about it... And Johnny described it a little bit, but he does make this distinction b... |
**Leslie Lamport:** People confuse programming with coding. Coding is to programming what typing is to writing. Writing is something that involves mental effort. You're thinking about what you're going to say. The words have some importance, but in some sense even they are secondary to the ideas. In the same way, progr... |
If people are trying to learn programming by being taught to code - well, they're being taught writing by being taught how to type. And that doesn't make much sense. |
**Jerod Santo:** And I think he elucidated it in a way that was okay... I think that these are interchangeable terms that mean different things to different people, and we end up splitting hairs and inventing our own definitions of the words in order to kind of do a weird form of gatekeeping where we're like "You're no... |
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