January 2023
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January 14, 2023
Ask HN: Strategies for working with engineers that are too smart?
482 by throwitawaaay | 460 comments on Hacker News.
There are a couple of engineers on my current team that I can only describe as being a little too smart for their own good, and I'm struggling a bit with how to work with them. I've worked with this sort of engineer on previous teams as well, and they all share a few traits: - They're brilliant, I mean very smart people (in an almost academic way?) - They have a big appetite for adding complexity to systems - They also have a big appetite for adding work to their own plates - Their code has no consistent style I work in embedded systems, so I'm generally writing C for resource-constrained systems. This sort of environment is rife with footguns, and I spend most of my time just trying to avoid those. A big part of that is keeping the things that my team controls as simple as possible, and while we are resource constrained, it's a balance. The tension comes when someone's more than happy to, for example, implement a complex caching scheme from scratch to save a few hundred bytes here, a handful of microwatts there. To me, adding that type of complexity for those sorts of performance improvements is missing the forest for the trees. When an engineer like this proposes something that adds unnecessary complexity, it's usually hard to argue with. The proposed change typically does indeed make the system objectively better, and they're the one taking responsibility for doing the work and ensuring its correctness. But the overall system becomes a little more brittle, and a little harder to reason about, two things that are much more difficult to measure than memory and power. Here's an example: an engineer on my current team recently proposed adding a significant feature to a module I wrote to make something dynamic that's currently statically defined at compile time. I pointed out that we could just change a couple entries in a static table to accomplish his goals, and we were able to avoid the extra work. What was notable, though, was his immediate willingness to write that feature. Maybe I'm lazy, but I'd sit there and think of half a dozen other ways to do it before settling on changing the module itself. But because he's smart enough to easily reason about a complicated solution, and he's willing to take on the extra work, he stopped there without weighing it against the larger system. Have you worked with engineers like this? Do you have any thoughts on how to work with them in a productive and friendly way? -- One more example if you feel like reading more: In a past role, I got into a debate about code style with the smartest person I've ever worked with. It boiled down to me advocating for more whitespace in his code and him arguing that adding whitespace made the code harder to read. It took a bit, but eventually I came to understand that he is so good at reading code that he just wants it all laid out in front of him as densely as possible. He can effectively run it in his head, as long as he can see it. That was baffling to me, I walked away thinking that I must be pretty bad at reading code. I use a very consistent style with long variable and function names, I keep my solutions as simple as I can, and I use whitespace generously to provide visual cues about the code's structure. All of this is to minimize the amount of brainpower I needed to understand my code, so I can put that energy toward thinking about the problem itself.

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January 13, 2023
Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
532 by throwwwwaway | 493 comments on Hacker News.
I have come to a realization that I don't really enjoy Software Engineering(& the processes that it comes with) but I do love programming & solving problems. Finding and fixing bugs is a lot of fun. Incidence response is a lot of fun. Hacking on new projects is a lot of fun. Writing unit tests is fun too. Refactoring, rewriting, sprint, agile, rearchitecting things etc aren't that fun. I like a few languages and I am not too keen on learning new paradigms or languages unless I have to. I'd rather get to value now by making something that just works(and is adequately tested) than engineer something thats future proof but takes longer to get out. What are some good jobs for a person like this?

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January 02, 2023
Airbnb removed my negative review
557 by luminaobscura | 326 comments on Hacker News.
I recently had a bad airbnb experience. During check in the host requested a cash deposit. this wasn't explained in the listing or prior to arrival. i couldn't check in and went elsewhere. Then i posted a review* giving these details. Airbnb removed my below review because "The review didn’t have enough relevant information to help the Airbnb community make informed booking or hosting decisions." The rating of the place went back up after removal. The host still have "superhost" status. Needless to say, i no longer trust airbnb reviews. *my full review was: I wasn't able to check in because [Host] requested 300 USD security deposit during check in. I told her - I don't have that much cash on me. - That is against AirBnB rules. - This should have been explained in airbnb listing. She can't just surprise guests with this at the last minute. She didn't listen. She said: "my house my rules", "you can't tell me how to run my business", "if you don't like it, you can cancel". I told her if i cancel, i don't get full refund so she should cancel. she said she won't cancel and me not getting refund is not her problem. I think she counts on the fact that guests typically wouldn't want to cancel in the last minute. you can see in some other reviews people had to agree to paying her this deposit. But i didn't want to cave in and called AirBnB. Thankfully, airbnb fully refunded the payment and i was able to find another accomodation in the last minute. I don't recommend this host unless you want a stressful start for your vacation.

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January 02, 2023
Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
465 by luuuzeta | 681 comments on Hacker News.
I'm reading Petzold's Code [1], and it dawned on me that I didn't understand logic gates intuitively until now. I took a Computer Architecture course back in college, and I understood what logic gates meant in boolean algebra but not empirically. Petzold clarified this for me by going from the empirical to the theoretical using a lightbulb, a battery, wires, and relays (which he introduces when he talks about the telegraph as a way to amplify a signal). Another concept is the relationship between current, voltage, and resistance. For example, I always failed to understand why longer wires mean more resistance while thicker wires mean less resistance. [1]: https://ift.tt/hfzqJSy

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