Why I Fire Programmers | Prime Reacts

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[@Trekiros]

Every single time Prime highlights a sentence on his screen but leaves out the first and last letter, a kitten dies

[@keco185]

I can’t unsee this now. It’s literally EVERY TIME

[@XDarkGreyX]

Yeah, it kills me. I got skill issues and fail not to do that, but I feel like he does it on purpose

[@weeb3277]

maybe he never got a proper feedback or he did but is unwilling to grow and change...

[@rawallon]

No they don't, source: I'm a kitten

[@bobanmilisavljevic7857]

Oh no, not a kitten 🙄

[@bobbycrosby9765]

Insertion sort is easy for anyone who played a lot of card games. It was the first sort i naturally reached for when I first learned programming in high school (pre-internet).

[@coyoteden8111]

The caw of satisfaction inspired me to be proud of my work

[@sharkysharkerson]

If someone wrote fast pixel perfect code that was always bug free then he wouldn’t need any feedback or guidance and we should be listening to that person. It’s the bad ones that can’t be guided that are the problem.

[@sharkysharkerson]

@sferavel right. For sure you would want someone who has good architecture ability. Jdsl was an unmaintainable house of cards.

[@rudde7251]

I hate college who just "smile more" but it doesn't reflect their actual mood. They will smile you in the face and you're like yeah, sure I can try that. And then all of a sudden they explode like I TOLD YOU DO THAT AND THAT! Dude chill, I didn't know it was that important to you. This was a dude who asked me to come to the office more and I did come more. But I still prefer staying home as I had it in my contract I could.

[@mumk]

thanks for the bubble sort though, as a noob I appreciate it

[@johnr3936]

Little bikeshedding here but he didn't say he would never a fire someone under those circumstances, just that he has not yet had to.

[@MazerMP]

As a citizen of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania who's living on a very limited budget I felt oddly and personally attacked by the comment. He's right ya know 😅

[@rowdyriemer]

To be fair, I don't think the guy is saying he wouldn't fire someone for incompetence - just that he hasn't. Perhaps so far, it just hasn't been something he needed to do.

[@bonkers_dave]

50 years ago I invented the bubble sort. Thought I was amazing. Then I discovered somebody else thought of it first. I was devastated.

[@Quantris]

and that's why it's called bubble sort instead of bonkers sort

[@malesionator]

Dr. Disrespect of programming ;)

[@NostraDavid2]

Bikeshedding is when you build a Nuclear Reactor, yet keep discussing the color, size and quality of the bike shed right next to it. It's nitpicking on irrelevant details. I have a minor tendency to do this, but my solution is typically to throw a tool at it (ruff is my favorite) such that the solution is easily obtainable. That, and spelling errors. HATE 'EM!

[@gendalfgray7889]

Explain pls why programmers required to write bubble sort every time from scratch?

[@sub-harmonik]

I'm definitely a bikeshedder.. I'm kind of ocd so I'm a bit worried about being able to move past it

[@solidxate]

People generally don't pay enough attention until you take production down one time, it's a rite of passage

[@AHN1444]

what means "pixel perfect" regarding code?

[@haikelareff]

many things

[@Quantris]

it means making a screenshot of your UI match exactly what the designer threw together on their powerpoint slide

[@AHN1444]

ic tnx@@Quantris

[@GeetareMan]

#PomeranianDad is wild lmao

[@dough-pizza]

I am not saying that one shouldn't fire people but just improve your interview process man. I mean just don't ask DSA related stuff unless it's a domain requirement just ask stuff that they'll be expected to do every day! Maybe give them an assignment to take home and complete. Even after doing that if someone's a bad hire then it's just bad luck, you win some and you lose some but half of the time the interview process is shit either they'll hire anyone or no one and then they'll wonder why they keep hiring shitty people

[@terry-]

Great!

[@chemloaf3020]

I do not understand why people use vim 🤔

[@MC_Kun]

20% linked in post review. 80% bubble sort tutorial

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

gotem

[@adammurai1955]

goetm goemt geomt gemot emgot

[@almicc]

@@adammurai1955excellent joke but please can you fix the last line the result should be "egmot"

[@adammurai1955]

@@almicc damn, I was off by one

[@gamebuster800]

the guy: "Write a bubble sort from memory, right now" me, with 13 years of professional experience: "what is a bubble sort again?"

[@vonpitlord1783]

exactly my thought lmao. Just tell me what it does and I'll put it into code, please don't tell me buzzwords. My brain has no space for them.

[@redjoker365]

@@vonpitlord1783 Bubble sort is usually the very first sorting algorithm you get taught in CS classes when you learn about sorting

[@flarebear5346]

That's the point. After a while you kind of forget what the names mean.

[@redjoker365]

@@flarebear5346 To be fair, bubble sort is really only taught as an intro to sorting and algorithm efficiency analysis and the lesson ends with explaining that we don't use bubble sort in production because it's so inefficient. So you might encounter it a couple times in CS classes and then never again afterwards unless you're teaching programming

[@BearMan-li6be]

Bubble sort is default sorting algorithm you do when you don’t know how to do any sorting algorithms When I was in uni in initial data structures class we had to code our own sorting algo and bubblesort was what I accidentally created

[@TheBswan]

Lmao at chat "this is not pythonic enough" at Prime's bubble sort

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

they will always get you

[@Luclecool123]

​@@ThePrimeTimeagenbest way to measure the size of that dict

[@NostraDavid2]

Well, chat wasn't wrong.

[@loogabarooga2812]

It was the swap part numbers[j], numbers[j+1] = numbers[j+1], numbers[j] Very pythonic Also, lol at this dude doing the xor trick

[@EnjoyCocaColaLight]

@@loogabarooga2812 show!

[@Psychobellic]

ahhh linkedin and its ideology juice

[@adamhenriksson6007]

Soulless HR speak and CEO "this is why i'm a good person" pandering distilled, bottled and served to perfection.

[@gustavomezzovilla7248]

The corporative obligatory courses with souless music about beeing communicative kkkkkkk

[@SandraWantsCoke]

why bring juice into this you anti semite!

[@Frontline_view_kaiser]

LinkedIn: The place where you get lectured on morals by a company that sells clusterbombs

[@logank.70]

There was a developer at the company I work for now made such a mess of a project during his time and then left. The quality of the product has become so bad, and customer outrage has become so vocal, that they are threatening to just shut it down. It boggles my mind how somebody who can do so much damage can stick around for so long.

[@fdg-rt2rk]

How was he even allowed to do such a mess in the first place?

[@lucaslopes1260]

Management tends to trust older hires more than new hires. Add in a culture that doesn't value good practices and you get a recipe for disaster.

[@keco185]

And the money the company lost because of it ultimately comes out of your salary

[@razorswc]

​@@fdg-rt2rk there are many companies that do not have quality as a focus during development. They just want the feature done and shipped.

[@logank.70]

@@fdg-rt2rk They had all the confidence in the world but zero competence along with the director of engineering thinking they were good. They had no PR process or gated check-ins in place. There were many times he would write code, not compile, and push. When I started on the team branch policies were put in place which is how I knew he had been doing that the whole time. Multiple times the code review would be "this code doesn't compile" and he would resolve it without doing anything. I just don't understand why we live in an age where firing somebody is a year(s) long process.

[@tc2241]

I think what OP is getting at is that being bad isn’t the issue, it’s being unable to improve. I’ve hired many under developed workers as I saw their potential to grow. I’ve also fired talented individuals because they’re combative and constantly go off on their own. I think the OP just wrote it too “inspirational-ly”, like it’s going to be on a slide during a TED talk

[@googleforcedhandle]

yeah lol, he literally says in his 2nd point that not growing is something worth firing someone off.

[@tc2241]

@@googleforcedhandleyeah, not sure why Prime didn’t get that. Think he was too hung up regarding the skills part.

[@briankarcher8338]

He was just giving himself fellatio.

[@shazam314]

@@googleforcedhandle OP contradicted himself.

[@YT-dr8qi]

You know, growth cannot be infinite. At early steps - yes, you constantly grow. But the knowledge and experience expires. Expectations ate also tend to grow. And the more experience you have and in more areas, the more efforts it takes to just keep it up-to-date. So at some point you can get close to the saturation when a speed of skills expiration almost equals the speed of learning new. In reality such people still continue the developing themselves but the pace of improvement doesn't meet the expectations of others. Especially when someone looks at a novice who progresses at a certain speed in a single area and expects, that a senior with experience in 7 fields will progress at the same speed at each of these 7 fields. Learning never stops. But amount of up-to-date knowledge doesn't grow linearly. At the beginning the growth pace may even increase with years as previous experience helps learning new faster. But on later stages the growth pace slows down and most of the learning efforts can be spent just on keeping at the same level where you was without degrading

[@luccaflower751]

bubblesort is literally the educational example of "this is the intuitive way most new programmers think up a sorting algorithm. now let's move on to actually good algorithms"

[@o1-preview]

Ive nerver had to use a search or sort algorithm in my life in a real world program, someone has already a library for it that you can just import.. same for data structures - the only time I had to use them was in interviews or promotion exams in big companies..

[@luccaflower751]

@@o1-preview i feel like that's kind of missing the point of why you might want to learn these things. learning the implementation of certain data structures and algorithms helps gain an understanding of their characteristics and what they might be good for. a lot of people don't even know of these things in the first place, and don't even think to reach into the standard library for a particular data structure, because they never learned that this particular problem maps really well to that particular data structure.

[@DudeWatIsThis]

@@luccaflower751 The interview: Implement quicksort. Implement djikstra/A*. Spin 4-dimensional matrixes atop each other. Answer "use a hash map instead" when asked how you would optimize something - ANYTHING. The job: Writing "FreeJsonLibraryYouGotFromGitHub.Serialize()" once a week, and knowing when something needs a Visitor instead of regular polymorphism.

[@slayerxyz0]

Bubble sort has some nice properties that can make it faster for small datasets and partially sorted data. Its also generally more cache friendly than other sorting algorithms and better suited to vectorization.

[@chonchjohnch]

@@o1-previewyou aren’t a programmer, you’re someone who imports stuff

[@EpsilonAJS]

The problem with feedback like "you communicate poorly" or "this code is bad" is that they are totally inactionable - they don't teach the person how to improve. And if you have specific, actionable feedback, just give that by itself. Adding the inactionable stuff is plain harmful - it's just offensive venting at that point.

[@JellyMyst]

Wrong.

[@DudeWatIsThis]

But sometimes it can be _very_ hard to tell when someone "communicates poorly" until a huge mess has been made. Communicating poorly doesn't only mean messing up the repo or being an asshole in meetings. I'm in a small team and had a REALLY good programmer who, when the team grew a little, I promoted to handle 2 junior programmers. After that, he just took in all of their work and burned himself to the ground. If they went "Hey boss, can you help me with this?" he would sigh and just say "I'll have a look at it later", and then he'd do it all himself, instead of gently helping them out in their specific issue. He stopped testing thoroughly, the codebase became worse, and he became irritated. His 2 juniors became code monkeys who would fill in Visitor methods, create business classes, prototype the UI, and little else. Eventually he got extremely burned out and left the company. The 2 juniors and I took over his work, and we had to work many months to straighten out his mess. And guess what? Those 2 juniors were pretty smart guys, they just needed a chance. Turns out this guy was just completely inept at handling people, or delegating. And it wasn't just "you communicate poorly", but more like "you think others are stupid and won't be able to do what you do".

[@S-we2gp]

@@JellyMyst lol

[@S-we2gp]

Yeah this is a good point. Granted when i get feedback like that I ask for what specifically they dont like or would change. However its also true the person giving the feedback should have provided the specifics from the beginning. This problem can be solved from both sides, so whenever im on either I try to ensure i solve, I dont expect that from other people (even though you rightly could) I try to be twice as good rather than expecting other people to have these things dialed in. Unless its one of your higher engineers giving crappy feedback to a lower engineer, then you gotta tell them to improve, but since in my mind i always place myself at the top (lol) that i always try to solve these things.

[@DudeWatIsThis]

WTF, youtube deleted my response here but I'm still getting notifications when people talk.

[@JoeJoeTater]

You almost figured it out right at the end. All the "truly fire-able offenses" do just boil down to "we'll fire you if you act autistic"... which is, ya know, bigotry. Firing someone for being autistic is illegal discrimination. "Just smile more" is literally the exact advice given to women for how to "succeed". ("Succeed" here is double speak for "know your place".) How the actual fuck can you say that with a straight face? If you're unironically telling someone to "smile more" as career advice, that should be an immediate red flag telling you to rethink your biases. Engineers are not actors. We don't owe you smiles. Your subordinates are there to do a job and get paid. It's not okay to pressure them into pretending to be your friends under the threat of being fired. Also, "autistic" doesn't need a euphemism. When you say "acoustic" when you really mean "autistic", you're just outing yourself as a bigot. It doesn't need concealing because it's not a bad word to begin with.

[@thechadbuddha]

"i love youuuu" *door slam*

[@mauricio14junior]

ahahahha came for this comment. Thought exactly the same 😂

[@HülyeLó]

That sounded like an *I love you back, but I don't want to talk into your livestream* door slam

[@Th1200]

ahhh linkedin XDDD Most of the posts there could be produced by a llm and the users would not notice...

[@lileightright]

Bro i don’t know whats more impressive: 1-Casually doing bubble sort alg mid stream 2-Being fkn fast in vim 3-Or doing both while casually talking and being hilarious.

[@kr30000]

I have seen a developer with multiple years in the industry write code so slow that if I was a manager, I would have fired them. The person in question wrote a function that took 5 seconds to filter 200 items in a list...I was shocked when I look at the exponential iteration that also recreated the entire array and object in it...just for a filter operation...

[@asdasddas100]

This had to be malicious I refuse to believe it 😭

[@johndoe9604]

that's actually crazy

[@JuusoAlasuutari]

Obviously a plant working for Intel or AMD to boost CPU sales.

[@az8560]

@@asdasddas100 Could easily be a child raised by wild immutability advocates and now trying to adapt to civilization.

[@streettrialsandstuff]

​@@asdasddas100"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

[@Cursed_Crystal]

Im still a student but i joined few years ago one git repo. You could add things to the repo if you got the points you were getting for fixing code. I found small bug that needed a fix that was not too hard. I wrote the fix and got told that i need to change something since its not good. Done it. Then change another thing and another and another. It was frustrating but in the end i see how much they taught me on the way. It does not matter if your code is bad. What matters is that you are willing to listen to others and learn from that

[@JuusoAlasuutari]

You said it. Most code in the world sucks, it's OK to not be an amazing coder. To be human is to have skill issues.

[@neildutoit5177]

When I've fired managers, it's because they were unable to figure out what feedback to provide someone and how to provide it in a way that that individual can use it to grow. jk obvs. I haven't fired managers but I hate this mindset so much. If someone isn't growing it's pretty much always because they aren't being managed properly. Usually some type A personality who doesn't understand that neurodivergent people respond differently and have different needs. Which it's supposed to be your job to understand as a manager.

[@adamnixon5503]

This comment should be pinned to the top. I'd love to see the staff turnover for this Tyke guy! People who claim others can't take feedback can never take feedback themselves. When given the brutal truth back, you are therefore labelled difficult! This video(not Prime's take on the video) is about a guy on a power rush, and with a narrow set of beliefs. Worst kind of person and manager.

[@dtinth]

When I see posts like this, it always reminds me of this quote: “Attitude is no substitute for competence” (Eric S. Raymond, How To Become a Hacker (2001))

[@scahsaint6249]

Eh, good attitude takes you further.

[@dtinth]

@@scahsaint6249 absolutely agree, attitute is also important

[@KarimElHayawan]

Should have written "Attitude is no substitute for aptitude", more rhetorically effective.

[@VivekYadav-ds8oz]

This has definitively been the least contentful and boilerplate Primeagen video I've ever watched.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

is this good or bad?

[@Hapkumdo]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen yes

[@kyguypi]

I've never fired someone for a lack of experience. Because I checked that when I hired them and it's not something that changes unpredictability. I think this guy is that type that really struggles to keep track of which variables are mutating.

[@CanadaWaxSolvent]

I worked with a guy who could give you most detailed and extenisve explanations for anything. The problem was he never really listened to your question, and he talked to everyone like they had never programmed before. So you ask.. do we have an enumeration for this.. and he gives you a long winded explanation of what an API is.

[@abdullaalmosalami]

"You code sucks" or "This code is bad" is an insult. It's pointless. Be specific, be kind, and I promise it won't hurt and will produce better results and won't result in people hating their life. For fuck's sake.

[@ZM-dm3jg]

Writing code to deliver features as fast as possible and let other developers clean-up performance or security or clean code issues got me promoted 4 times in 36 months and tripled my salary.

[@Leonard0F41G]

I bet you made them HATE their jobs

[@kveldulfpride]

When the Peter principle runs past the end line in leagues, matters of managerial grace become weird and eventually breaks companies. It's a systemic issue caused by soft skill focused engineers. Give me real engineers who are not 'humble' for social gains, and I could make a genie.

[@WomboBraker]

he's like the modern street performance artist. Doing programming puzzels for subs ahahahaha THE GOAT

[@SXsoft99]

I have less salary, yes but the costs of living differ from place to place, also work in east Europe for a company in the US (if you don't have sleep at night) you basically have a huge salary

[@CheeseOfMasters]

Not exactly. My brother works in Brazil for a Swiss company but they did lower his income to reflect his costs of living.

[@ohno1052]

​@@CheeseOfMasterswait what the fuck isnt it, like, heavy discrimination and just very greedy stuff?

[@gileee]

​@@ohno1052 Honestly, I don't know what else to expect. Why else would a company from Switzerland hire someone from Brazil? If they were gonna pay someone a Swiss paycheck then they would find someone in Switzerland. I'm in Eastern Europe and many EU and USA companies come here to outsource work because of cheap labour. When covid hit and the cost of living increased our companies increased how much dev cost and the companies went to a different East Europe country where IT isn't in a huge boom and programmers cost less. That's how big companies protect the bottom line. And to be fair their paychecks are still better than any local company and they 100% pay up every month.

[@NihongoWakannai]

​@@ohno1052 welcome to outsourcing

[@weirdboy2214]

Cybersecurity is the better option.

[@davidharting3119]

Prime, if I just read the articles and don’t watch your reaction, will you still be able to afford your extravagant South Dakota lifestyle?

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

yes

[@SnowDaemon]

I mean I heard Netflix pays their Hiring Engineers pretty good lol

[@adi96adi]

3:50 the xor swap attempt 🤣

[@exception05]

I am not on the side of such a manager. This message of his shows how poorly management sometimes understands people, and because of his position and limited short experience, it seems to him that he understands. This thread shows the complexity of human communication, as well as its many facets, and his approach may actually work if he wants to create a company of "Good Happy Slow Shit Code". Programming is not a kindergarten, but a highly profitable and highly competitive environment with enormous stress. It's not for the weak. If his bunch of deadbeats ever screw his business, let's see if he'll be passive-aggressive or actively-aggressive. "If you can't play a man's game, if you can't code shit, you are shit! Hit the bricks, pal, and beat it, cause you are going out!". Anyway I'm against unhealthy toxic environment, also I'm against deciding the fates of programmers this way.

[@jakobstengard3672]

Good good, now rewrite it in ”functional style”. We can’t still be using for loops 2022, that’s not hipster.

[@tanglesites]

That was very cool, PRIMETIME rose to the challenge, if I was not already subscribed that would got me to sub. Awesome!

[@HoRRoRlets]

what is an example of bad code... Self taught, and still working through my own projects...have no idea what is good code... I do look at some of my older projects, and think...that could be done in a better way...and then think about that...

[@adamnixon5503]

Correct answer: Bad code is code that easily breaks down because the engineer has not thought through the problem. He/She has not run through the proper debugger checks like asserts and static analysis. (see Carmack) . Current answer: Bad code is anything your line manager decides is bad code either because he/she(always he) wants to exhibit control or has a narrow way of doing things. Be wary of 'clean code' advocates, and managers like these.

[@DanielEmp]

The criticism => shitty code => criticism => shitty code gave me PTSD. Some people just won't improve, even if they seemingly accept the criticism, then you literally have to solve their F-ing task for them via code review points. Every single time.

[@karlcattegut8100]

That was an L take on the linkedin post. As a (good) manager you don't fire people for writing bad code, you fire them for being unable to improve when you counsel them on writing slow code, or when they delete prod AGAIN. accepting feedback doesn't just mean nodding your head, it means working on the issue. All your examples at the end revolve around making the same mistakes again and again and again. It's not the mistakes that are fireable, its the again and again part, which falls under "They were unable to receive, understand, and grow from feedback" With regards to rude or passive aggressive comments, I think there's a difference between someone whose behaviour is disruptive and someone who is just terse. If a person is disruptive he lowers the teams overall productivity because they have to deal with his shit, and he lowers the psychological safety of the workplace, which has measurable effects on the number of sick days and the amount of burnout happening.

[@donner7708]

Came here to listen to some programming stories and tweets, learned how to bubble sort. 10/10

[@BenKuyt64]

If you are an enjoyable person to work around, but work at 60% capacity compared to your colleagues and co-workers, I'd prefer you over someone who makes work hell but is a fantastic work. I'd rather pick up the slack for the guy that makes work fun and enjoyable (to an extent) than have the guy who makes work insufferable get his shit done on equal footing.

[@gesnow]

Write your bubble sort in COBOL…or RPG…

[@nomoremuda]

feedback strategy i favor -> the Velvet Hammer, very direct, very candid, but doesn't have to be delivered in a harsh or deconstructive manner.... especially if it comes from a good place to improve the person's performance...

[@saltedskin]

so the guy wants code to run faster and he want's his engineers to use bubblesort not to say re-implement bubblesort. find the error.

[@adamnixon5503]

I don't think Tyke takes feedback very well. I'd love to see the staff turnover for those under him!

[@alexsimper4153]

ok half the video is you just doing bubble sort lol

[@brando8314]

I'd like to hear about a time when Prime had to scathingly review a pull request from a senior developer.

[@az8560]

Pixel-perfect is often unachievable, especially with fonts. Designers design something in photoshop with all its fancy font rendering settings, use all the exquisite fonts they have on their computer, adjust kerning or other obscure settings... and then you have a jpg, an application/browser/os which renders fonts differently, and you have to bruteforce through whatever settings you have available to make it at least the same number of lines. Sometimes they just do the same component in their mock-ups differently because they have a luxury of adjusting each individual use case and forgetting what was on the previous screenshot, but it obviously doesn't make sense to have several different implementations just to accommodate their forgetfulness. Sometimes they just completely miss things. I can't imagine someone just firing the implementer instead of communicating about the mismatches first, that just doesn't make sense. Unless you just searching for an excuse to fire somebody.

[@thewiirocks]

In this context, "pixel perfect" usually refers more to getting all the alignments and edges right. If you have multiple content boxes that are supposed too align to the same edges, but one of your boxes is a pixel or two wider, that looks sloppy. Using different padding in each box looks sloppy. Randomly changing font sizes / font families looks sloppy. I've had engineers whine about "who cares if it's off by 1 pixel?!?" As if quality work is not something to be strived for. I get that they don't see it when they're just getting started. But if you've been working on the same product with the same theme for months and you continue to be sloppy with your implementation, we're going to have problems. Of course, your code is probably just as sloppy, soooo....

[@SandraWantsCoke]

it means they are shitty designers.

[@ANONAAAAAAAAA]

The reason why the fired programmers didn't hear the feedbacks and behaved poorly was, maybe, the upstairs and the companies failed to earn respects and full commitments from them. I've yet to see an engineer who cause troubles by his noncooperative attitudes when the team is leaded by competent, respectable engineers.

[@circular17]

I had a collegue, how was bikeshedding, wasn't producing documents on time, was unable to receive remarks and was aggressive. I was not the boss, so obviously I couldn't fire him, but I would definitely have fired him!

[@eppiox]

Only furrys deal in absolutes

[@H4KnSL4K]

Even with copilot disabled, it's really annoying that your editor keeps on popping up 'helpful' (not really) nonsense all the time. Can't it just let you type? Of course the syntax is not valid, you haven't finished typing the freaking line yet!

[@theodorealenas3171]

It's a breath of fresh air to disable it. In Vi, it's normal to write a line of non code at all just to copy and run it as a shell script or what have you, and it's a relief in a way

[@bugfacedog44]

It's called bikeshedding because of this hypothetical scenario: You're on a committee building out a nuclear reactor. No one understands the nuclear reactor so doesn't really have any substantive feedback. But they do understand the bikeshed that will be on premises. You have a 2 hour long meeting about the build-out of the multi-million dollar reactor and spend 20 minutes discussing what color we should paint the bikeshed.

[@KCKingcollin]

I know he basically just said "I don't really want to know about Europe", but I might at least add that Germany has a massive IT market and one of the highest quality of life on average in the world, I guess what I'm saying is that saying "Europe" isn't better, is like saying "the USA" isn't better, we have states and one state can be drastically different then the one next to it, it's kinda like that in Europe too, they have lots of countries, and I don't think it was the best of take considering people (maybe myself included soon) move to Germany for the specific reason of getting a much better job and life in IT

[@wknight8111]

A problem is expecting every developer on your team to be equally good at everything. They're not. People have strengths and weaknesses. I knew a guy who couldn't really create new features quickly and confidently, but he could fix bugs at an alarmingly fast rate. Did I sit him down and complain to him about his new features? No. I assigned him a shitload of our bugs. I knew a lady who could write great code but couldn't really design classes or subsystems. If you gave her an empty scaffold to fill in, she did great with it. Did I chastize her because of her lack of software design skills? No. I accompanied many of the tickets I sent to her with a lot of the top-level design problems already solved, and she blazed through the rest. Sure I wanted to teach and help these developers get better, but I was absolutely not going to ignore the gifts that they had.

[@salzgeist]

I love your reviews, but I think you missed here the point. This article was not about what skills an engineer has today. It was about where an engineer can grow at. You might have forgotten how Bubblesort goes. But if tell you it is important and tomorrow you come back with a solution, than you ARE an engineer. And than you should not be fired.

[@Bolpat]

9:25 My sense is that schools and maybe parents just don’t give harsh feedback anymore. Maybe people feel stuff on a scale that ranges from their worst to their best experience in that domain, so if your worst feedback experience wasn’t horrible, a vaguely subpar feedback feels close to the worst feedback ever. You don’t even need have the experience yourself, you just need to witness it.

[@Blaisem]

That's not really true. Being shit on from a person of authority will never train you to accept being shit on by a peer. One has the privilege to do it, while the other doesn't. I got shit on all the time by teachers and my parents growing up in the 90's, and all these anti-millennial sentiments of people growing up soft because of upbringing are so myopic. I guarantee you engineers in the 70's and 80's were just as ready to throw down over some colleague coming up and saying their code is trash to their face. I still remember in university, the older professors were the absolute prickliest sons of bitches I ever met, even those who had been in the industry. They had enormous egos and pride. Although my time in the industry has mostly involved people in my generation or younger, my few encounters with the previous generation in the wild only reinforced this perception. The generation before simply loves to make themselves out to be heroes, but they're just human. They aggroed each other constantly and can be huge manbabies. I remember a 55-year-old just hanging up on a call because he felt challenged and didn't like it. Fired 2 months later, good riddance.

[@Lodinn]

@@Blaisem That's interesting. It feels like the very perception of authority figures has shifted, and the very notion of the "privilege to criticize" is often rejected these days. A lot of people 30 and younger dismiss the "I'm more experienced/knowledgeable" argument right out of hand. In 90s-early 00s, trashtalking someone's work felt like the norm. That last decade there's an ever-increasing need to sugarcoat everything, essentially "be nice or I won't listen". It is a shift in responsibilities also: we used to have "it's your responsibility to learn", now it's more "it's your responsibility to teach so that I'd understand". Most of the time, it turns out just fine, but the edge cases are pretty noticeable on both sides.

[@Blaisem]

​@@Lodinn It's possible things have changed in the last decade, although if I recall correctly, people were already saying 10-15 years ago that the new generation was back then was already going soft. I can't tell if it's just a perennial perception every 10 years that people want to announce the new generation is soft, and then that new generation 10 years later turns around says the same thing about the next generation. As for missing a privilege to criticize, I don't have any facts to argue against it. I can only say in my personal sphere it hasn't been the case. Bosses are free to offer negative feedback, and people mostly take it when it happens. I mean, they can leave in a huff, but I can't recall it happening. I guess we could have a discussion on what that negative feedback looks like. As a boss, you are responsible for morale, so there's a proper way to deliver the negative feedback. A good boss in a private developmental meeting say your code writing is leading to bugs in production and needs to improve; they shouldn't call you out in the daily and say "hey, Timmy your code lately has been garbage, fix it." On the other hand, I've seen a boss get pissed over a bug(s) and yell at the team, and the person named Timmy knows it's their fault from their commit, and quietly so does everyone else. Timmy then fairly expects punishment through other means like bonus or missed promotions. But hey, maybe what's deemed proper has changed over time. Finally, I will say this interaction has often been unnecessary. Most people around me who haven't left for personal reasons have left due to layoffs, so for all I know the boss doesn't have to give negative feedback, just select the people he doesn't like when it's time for layoffs. Or shuffle them to another team.

[@clovernacknime6984]

@@Blaisem Shitting on people has nothing to do with giving feedback, it's simply an attempt to establish dominance. And of course, when such power games are played using feedback as a cover then feedback itself becomes perceived as an attack which needs to be defended against. The behaviour you described is the end result.

[@adamnixon5503]

He's fired people who were unable to receive feedback? >Yet has no ability to deal with feedback himself. Didn't collaborate well >translation: Didn't respect me enough and see problem 1 above. With all these cases, you are getting one side of the story. Keep in mind Deming 101. When something goes wrong, 80% of the time it's down to a poor system or poor management. Yet 100% of the time the employee is blamed.

[@pbentesio]

I am from Europe. Imagine earning 24k a year for a mid level software development job you could be getting 80-100k a year for in NA... couldn't be me.🙃

[@MarcusXPX]

YOU should not be able to put a bug in production, unless you're only one working. If you're part of the team, there should be PR reviews, unit tests and functional tests running against your code and your PR should not reach production 😅

[@alexandrustefanmiron7723]

A little bit disappointed on your bubble-foo. I was expecting for i=0->len-1 & for j=i+1->len;! basically second for starts where the first one ends.

[@twigsagan3857]

I've never hired someone because they could do any kind of sort, because guess what. When in web development do you do any kind of sort ever? These requirements are dumb. I just look for developers that understand how to scale a solution and think about architecture. Fuck knowledge about algorithms. Never in my 20 years of experience did I need to bubble sort.

[@bobbodaskank]

It can be frustrating working with people who take things personally. I had a job where they made me the head of a team and I got pulled in to talk to a manager about a complaint from a guy on my team that "I keep telling him what to do." I was like "yes, uh... Assigning him work each day is my job." The manager was like "yeah I know, maybe use softer language?" Like, dude

[@zfighter3]

I get my grade 9 students to come up with a way to sort numbers without ever seeing it before. They naturally end up with bubble sort or something very close. If they can all do it without ANY experience, every programmer on the planet should be able to do it from memory. That person just needs higher standards for their employees lol.

[@nijolas.wilson]

I, personally, have never fired an engineer for behaviour but I have fired for skill issues. Have definitely had bad examples of both, but behavioural issues were corrected in my cases. Skill issue was not, I didn't have years to train / retrain. Everyone is expected to be a generally good, mature human at work. Engineers are hired for their skills. It's like saying I've never fired a pilot for crashing a plane, but I have for hitting on the attendants. If you've never had a pilot crash a plane before then you wouldn't have had to fire them for it, but if they did then you absolutely most definitely would fire them. Seems more like an awkward attempt to sound profound than anything genuine. But I've never fired an engineering manager for pretentious tweets, so 🤷

[@sorcdk2880]

So the "not fire because" reasons can be roughly divided into "you were not perfect, and that was never expected in the first place" and "you would not need to fire someone for this, because you would not have hired them in the first place". Code too slow and no bubble sort understanding are very low bars that you can often reasonably guess based on the recruitment process, in the sense that the people who have problems with those kind of things usually do not make it in the first place. On the other hand, design implementation is about as much an art as translating languages are, which means that they are an art that people might not realise at first and just think it is fairly simple to do. One cannot really expect pixel-perfect on such a thing. As for bugs to production, then everyone writes bugs, and it is impossibe to catch all of them. It is just a question of time before you push a bug to production, so firing people for doing it at all would be quite weird. That said, once you stop taking the last to in that "failed to be perfect", you would realise that there are things behind them that are very serious concerns. While one small bug in production might not be much of an issue, a constant stream of bugs or a really nasty bug can cause such huge damage that one would feel very grateful not to be fired. I mean once you have cost the company more than 10 or 100 times your yearly salary to a bug that you are properly responsible for (compare that to "I deleted my test database, but for some reason that was connected to production too", which is probably not your fault), then someone demanding that heads roll and the eyes falling on you would not be that unexpected. Thankfully those situations are rare, so it makes sense that such a person would not have had to fire someone for such a problem.

[@paulholsters7932]

This only works if the rest of the team are normal doesjbags. When they pick on you, all these rules will still lead you to be fired, because they all protect each other. These rules are correct if the team itself is healthy. But these rules do not investigate on that. There is a silent dangerous assumption here. If the rest of the team sabotages you, and you are stuck in the job for some reason, it's hard not to become passive aggresive about things right ... because they are all working will with each other and communicating nice and appreciating each other and telling each other the stuff they need to know to perform well ... except they do not tell it to you and the manager who leads these conversations doesn't have a clue of course. He still believes you don't fit in and it's all you.

[@Bulletstop75]

Anyone who thinks you should implement basic sorting algorithms contained in standard library implementations is a bad programmer. First you're wasting time reimplementing working code and secondly potentially introducing problems. Now the problem arises when you don't understand when to use different sorting algorithms.

[@Sam-qn4ly]

Fire somebody for being bad at programming? impossible, you just make them do testing

[@RFLCPTR]

Americans comparing their salaries to Europeans without realizing how much of that is eaten up by the lack of socialized healthcare and housing lmao

[@christoesh8901]

You mention "what if someone is good at all the bottom stuff (which I would attribute to their ability to learn), but sucks at coding... I would say this person will eventually become a good coder because they listen to others and take feedback better.

[@jordanholtz8130]

Bugless production is a myth, there will always be bugs in production. The time and effort required to find a bug increases exponentially as testing becomes closer to truly exhaustive. After a certain level of testing your return on investment is no longer worth it and the risk is next to none.

[@HrHaakon]

If you have to implement a sort from memory, go with heapsort. Yeet it all into the heap, and pull it out. Just do the recursive data structure, and say it's "good enough".

[@Mehuge]

I once wrote a bug that killed a herd of cows. The bug was caused by an extra 0. I wasn’t fired.

[@MegaMech]

"Our start up needs to let people go. Whoever can't do bubble sort from memory goes." It's a fair cop.

[@idiomaxiom]

Neil Gaiman, Be easy to work with, get work done on time, do great work. You only need two.

[@Chrisxantixemox]

If every time you deploy something into production, it has a bug, then whoever is maintaining the project is at fault for letting you deploy without reviewing your test cases lol.

[@datboi_gee]

talking about americans getting paid 3x the salary of european engineers and some dude in the chat says "it's called hazard pay" go off, king

[@komerczka]

Yeah, here in Europe we did not really had a chance to clear out the whole continent of people, so we can live in underpopulated continent in the fields, that was done about 2000 years ago and now we are stucked with population... I mean we tried hard 2times during the 20th century, but still not hard enough i guess ... In Russia there is a lot of people living in fields in the eastern regions tho ...

[@the_derpler]

Being a youtuber is basically the best practice for bullshit software engineer interviews. It gets you used to performing with a ton of eyes judging you :)

[@Chaddledee]

Presumably if someone was able to receive, understand and grow from feedback, then their code wouldn't be too slow for very long.

[@EnjoyCocaColaLight]

++1 is making me sad.

[@wadecodez]

This is why mental health is a common problem for programmers. All those statements in the blog post were subjective. Not everyone is perfect so if the VP of engineering is not willing to put people through training then these are all personal attacks.

[@TattooGamerGuy]

In the bubble sort you should have made a bool isSorted. Also created a Swap(). Step your game up sir, haha

[@EldenFiend]

Most of the developers I know don't know bubblesort by memory. They don't use it for years, why should they?

[@iAPX432]

Arrogant.

[@AaronHeld]

Smile more. Great thing to say to a developer you manage. Terrible thing to say to a woman you don't know.

[@throwaway3227]

We may have a third of your salaries, but our taxes actually pay for things that benefits us. We also don't have to deal with health insurance.