Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Senior Engineer
15 points by zdw 3 hours ago | 6 comments

sitzkrieg 53 minutes ago
“a new job in two weeks.” heh, yeah everyone was opining expertise back then when employees had control of the market.
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GenericDev 15 minutes ago
[dead]
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MathMonkeyMan 37 minutes ago
> Algorithms and data strictures are important — to a point. I don’t see pharmacist interviews test trivia about organic chemistry. There’s something fucked with our industry’s interview process.

Pharmacists have to get a special degree before they can even get an interview, and I've heard that the education is heavy on organic chemistry. Then you get a job as a cashier selling pills.

> Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless.

You got me.

> Once, someone asked me who I looked up to and I said Conan O’Brien [...]

He wrote for SNL and studied literature at Harvard, so there's probably plenty going on up there.

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ferguess_k 3 hours ago
This genuinely looks like that I wrote it...until I saw that LISP line, definitely not me. But do agree with a lot of items in the list, and I happen to be a DE, too.
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dognotdog 10 minutes ago
I am a big fan of learning LISP, at least once. Going through SICP after more than a decade of writing code for a living was probably the single best thing I did to deepen my understanding of a lot of compsci concepts, data structures, and how to think about software. For me, at least, it was very much a seeing the matrix for the first time kind of moment. My LISP use has quickly declined, but I've dabbled in dozens of programming languages since then, and I do attribute not feeling lost to that experience.
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YZF 51 minutes ago
Lost me at dynamic languages. Don't build anything of any significance in dynamic languages! ;)

Some good points. Laughed at TDD is a cult. I mean a lot of software orgs/cultures are cultish (Agile, Scrum, whatnot). At work I often feel I'm part of a cult.

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atomicnumber3 38 minutes ago
On the contrary, I find "The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me." is exactly my sentiment too, with a caveat. I really like gradual typing, like python has. And not like ruby has (where it's either RBS files and it's tucked away, or it's sorbet and it's weird).
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