"Your developers come in at 9:15 and leave before 6 and don't check work email at night: Hard"
Am I the only person who find this attitude obnoxious? I know -- and I'd like to include myself -- some good devs who don't sell 24x7 to our employers.
edit: in particular, I don't check work email at night. I don't do ops. People should write better code or hire a different engineer.
Some of the most productive times I've ever had writing code was when I arrived at work at 10, and left at 5:30. I didn't really get started until about 11, and usually had an unproductive period around 1 till 3 as I ate and digested lunch. But the work I did do in those ~4 hours was some of the stuff I'm most proud of ever doing. I still got some looks leaving in the evening from the managing director, but the way I saw it, it was pointless continuing when I was tired - I always got better ideas the next day anyway after sleeping on the current problems.
I came here to comment on the same thing. Even if I happen to check work email some night or weekend that I'm more bored than usual, I make a point to not reply.
Oh, and this was similarly obnoxious (if not said tongue-in-cheek): Your developers stare blankly or say 3 "Hail Marys" when they hear the name "Zed Shaw": Scala == Hard
Dude, seriously? Since when are programmers judged by their propensity to keep up with the latest gossip about the most loud-mouthed self-important subculture celebrities ?
> Oh, and this was similarly obnoxious (if not said tongue-in-cheek): Your developers stare blankly or say 3 "Hail Marys" when they hear the name "Zed Shaw": Scala == Hard
That basically means if you follow technical news, and cutting edge stuff, you have most likely heard of him - for his software(mongrel2, lamson), his books, his essays(rails is a ghetto, programming motherfuckers). Mongrel was a big deal some time back, and still is in the rails world, and rails is a big deal; all these factors kinda make Zed a known name.
If you don't know Zed, that's not a big deal - no one gives a fuck about Zed. But not knowing Zed here is weakly implying(not necessarily though) you have been living under a rock and you aren't familiar with Rails, Mongrel2 etc, which is not a good thing IMO.
Cutting edge means "latest or advanced stage of development". Rails was miles ahead of existing frameworks when it first came into scene. Rails was cutting edge, and it needed a stable application server - mongrel filled that niche.
And a small niche in the computing world can very well be cutting edge.
Please. Zed's fame (or rather notoriety) doesn't come from Mongrel (never heard of lamson) and afaik his main association with Rails is the famous rant. Can you name off the top of your head some of the core developers of FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, JBoss, Hadoop, Gnome and a dozen others more important FOSS projects? I can't, and yet this doesn't say anything about both the significance of said projects and my familiarity with them.
Significance - no. Familiarity - I'd say yes. Unfortunately I don't know the projects you mentioned that well, so I can't say anything about them. But from the projects I do deal with (either developers or people related to project in some way):
- Python: van Rossum, Beazley, ...
- Mono: de Icaza
- Mysql: Monty Widenius
- Ruby: Katz, Shaw, Bini, ...
- Chef: Matt Ray
...
Yes - I do believe that if you claim serious knowledge about some project, but can't name anyone involved into that project in one way or another, there's something weird going on. Typically you'd run into some reoccurring name while looking through bugs, mailing lists, manuals, etc.
> I do believe that if you claim serious knowledge about some project, but can't name anyone involved into that project in one way or another, there's something weird going on.
Even if this is true (which is debatable at best), it's a long stretch from the blogger's aphorism "If you don't know $VOCAL_DIVA_PROGRAMMER, Scala==hard". He obviously doesn't imply you should be familiar with Mongrel to have a chance to become good in Scala.
All this nonsense would be unnecessary if the author made his point by mentioning, say, "referential transparency" or "map-reduce" instead of "Zed Shaw".
I agree with your opinion this part of the article is silly/wrong. Then again, I was responding directly to the parent's claim, rather than "commending on the article through responding to the parent" ;)
> Can you name off the top of your head some of the core developers of FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, JBoss, Hadoop, Gnome and a dozen others more important FOSS projects? I can't, and yet this doesn't say anything about both the significance of said projects and my familiarity with them.
It's more like there is an important project, and there is a loud mouth, and you use that project - you have most likely heard of the loudmouth. Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman etc. are known because the projects they work on are important and we use them, and they are vocal, and sometimes arrogant about their projects.
Though Zed isn't in the same league, the same goes for him. He was associated with an important project, and he created controversy while he was associated with that project. You can write articles on "Rails is a ghetto" or "Django is a ghetto" or "Java sucks", and you won't be getting any coverage unless you already are a somewhat known name in the community. Zed's notoriety doesn't directly stem from the essay.
> It's more like there is an important project, and there is a loud mouth, and you use that project - you have most likely heard of the loudmouth.
True, but the point is many/most people have heard of Zed without knowing or ever using his project(s). On the other hand the number of people who know Linus as the creator of Linux is orders of magnitude larger than those who also happen to know he's sometimes arrogant.
No need to rubbish Zed. You can like Zed like I do, and still not make any conclusion from the fact that a developer doesn't know who he is. Except, maybe, that said developer doesn't read Hacker News either.
I agree. If he means developers who only spent time on programming related things during the 9-5 and not during their free time, maybe I can understand. Good developers should be passionate and will probably spend their free time learning and coding (not necessarily work related) but to say the only good developers are ones that are slaves to their job is ridiculous to me.
It's the trendy thing to do these days. You can especially see it on HN there is a lot of bashing of programmers that don't code outside of work and/or only work 40 hours per week.
Programming is a creative endeavour. All these accomplished and renowned 9-5 programmers must hang out at the end of the rainbow with all the accomplished 9-5 painters, musicians, etc. I'm not saying there aren't any - some people really just have a knack for it. I'm saying they are the exception and not the rule.
At work you're often focused on completing tasks on time. Good employers understand that you need to develop skills and will allow you to do so on the clock. Many people are not fortunate enough to work at such places and if they don't sharpen their skills outside of work then their skills dull with time. Novices that work at such places will have a very hard time progressing in such an environment if they don't take the initiative in their spare time.
Working with developers that are more skilled than you are is also a good way to learn and improve. If you don't get that at work then you better find or start an OSS project or something to contribute to.
Sorry for replying to myself. I want to mention that not everyone needs the Sistine Chapel, that is there's a lot of room for all skill levels. The guy closer to the other end of the spectrum who knows just enough PHP to hack something together still has a skill that others, who perhaps do not need a Michelangelo, are happy to pay him for. There's nothing wrong with that.
When most of us use the word "good" in this context we mean significantly better than average. I think it comes across as an implication that if one isn't a "good" dev then they're bad but that's not what I intend at all. In fact what many of us mean by "good" is probably closer to "best".
That's odd, since “overtime is bad, more time is not more productivity” seems to be all the mantra.
The thing is, that for a young, smart person, mechanically giving up 50, 60, heck, 100 hours per week is not that hard, but it gives the nice “hero” feeling, social kudos.
Empirically, in full-time scenario (30+ hours per week), there is no difference in velocity of development work with more time spent; yet, there are toxic social effects.
Basically: what do the people who bash “undertimers” think?
Exactly what I was going to point out also. Maybe the OP was throwing in some humor? The only reason I say this is that it seems like all other criteria are also not very concrete. For eg, following so and so on twitter, lunch-time discussions - as opposed to having a good understanding of type systems, functional programming etc.
Being an extremely effective professional programmer (as opposed to a competent one) requires you to learn and do some things that you won't learn in school, and also that no sensible person would pay you for. This is just fact and people who don't like it either may accept being just competent or are in the wrong career.
What does that have to do with regularly burning the midnight oil for no tangible reason? I study computer science and new technologies when off the job, but you won't catch me dead working on company code after hours.
I can understand expecting a good dev to be interested in programming outside of work but expecting someone to give some company hours for free? Sounds like the guy is clueless. It's hard to imagine anything else he says will be useful given that sentence.
Am I the only person who find this attitude obnoxious? I know -- and I'd like to include myself -- some good devs who don't sell 24x7 to our employers.
edit: in particular, I don't check work email at night. I don't do ops. People should write better code or hire a different engineer.