How to -10x Engineer Correctly

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[@farqueueman]

I recommend creating a random letter generator and deploying it so it inserts random characters on the entire code base... Immediately achieve -100x engineer status ♥

[@daves.software]

19:55

[@k98killer]

“I used to say that when being CEO at Apple wasn’t fun anymore, I’d quit. But now I’ve changed my mind - when being CEO isn’t fun anymore, I’ll just fire people until it is fun again.” -- Michael Scott, CEO of Apple, regarding the massive layoffs undertaken to solve the bozo explosion, a few months before he got fired for it

[@DontThinkSo11]

Regarding your semver story: defaults ARE part of the interface. If you change defaults, you're changing how someone has to call your function in order to get the same behavior. That's the definition of an interface change.

[@darioabbece3948]

You could do this:

[@ISKLEMMI]

"The interface didn't change."

[@T1Oracle]

I met an engineer like this. They promoted him to principal engineer. He doesn't write code, he just rejects everyone else's code and gets a nice bonus for it. Obfuscating requirements just makes all of that easier.

[@therealestsnake]

That test one was soul crushing. I had a coworker who wrote some absolutely horrible test code, so that when I fixed an issue, the entire test file broke and complained. I had to completely rip out the mocking and re-do the file. Great fun!

[@mattius17]

The closest thing I've seen to the perfect bug was in a geometric unit test with bad randomisation. It almost never failed when running tests locally, but in the CI pipeline it seemed to almost always fail on master (never on a branch). The fun thing was that rather than generating 10k random polygons, it would generate the same random polygon 10k times 😅 so you had to be really (un)lucky to reproduce it

[@christsciple]

Dude I once had a job that had me work across a dozen different departments, each with their own rituals, scrum masters, traditions, and software. Every day I had to deal with a hodgepodge of different jira boards and weird other facilitation dependencies that I never care enough to learn the names to. I spent 3/4 of my time simply in pointless meetings, "social times", and trying to update my tasks across everything rather than actually developing and architecting software. Quit after 6 months. Had me wanting to go back to VBA development

[@karmatraining]

Can we talk about how this is literally also a playbook for extremely high job security for chaotic neutral types

[@shadamethyst1258]

Speaking of the true magic bug, I had that at work. Sometimes builds would fail because they included invalid code, but when running the build again it would work.

[@attilasedon9593]

The

[@KayOScode]

I fully agree with your take on threading. I did this a while back on a brute force keyboard layout optimizer. I wrote incredibly optimized code for one thread, but I allowed the isolation of state resources in such a way I can just run it on however many threads I want without an issue. I got insane performance doing that

[@vitalyl1327]

I believe the funny myth of 10x engineers appeared simply because of the existence of the 0.1x engineers (thanks to all those bootcamps and alike).

[@lucaslopes1260]

Take the logarithm of a random number between 0 and 1, and say it is negative. Every number in this interval has a negative log. But sometimes you'll get a number so close to zero, its log will be a huge negative number, causing an overflow.

[@4cps777]

prime rediscovering unix philosophy for multithreading

[@vytah]

The fear of experiencing that semver story is why we never bump dependencies without testing. Dependencies are pinned to exact versions, periodically updated in a batch, ran through integration tests, and then allowed to mature on test servers till the next release. We don't rush the process unless there's a CVE affecting our codebase.

[@aredrih6723]

On the subject of weird c causing random crash,there was the underhanded c contest.

[@acasualviewer5861]

The original research by Tom Demarco that referred to some engineers being 10x more productive than others had more to do with environment than skill, computer language or years of experience. The book "Peopleware" describes this. And it recommends people having private, quiet offices.