Scams In Software Engineering

Now that Prime quit his job to focus on making videos, I'll have to quit my job to focus on watching Prime

Prime turns 4 min video into 31 min long. This is almost 10x developer and streamer 😅

A lot of great tech entrepreneurs dropped out of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. However, they also got accepted into Hardvard, MIT, Stanford, etc.

My experience from doing a CS degree decades ago, core subjects aside, even if you know more than the lecturers about some things, it fills in a lot of holes in your knowledge you don’t know about. Being self taught is great but you don’t know what you don’t know.

I was told if I learned Rust, Linux, and Neovim... I would have a moustache like Prime. It's been 6 months. STILL no moustache! #SCAMMED🤦🏿

"Pull request the size of Epst*in's list" — that's a killer line right there

prime calling frontend glue engineering and moments later getting hit by the same line for backend had me dying 😂

Candidate: yeh so this is how you build an engine.. Interviewer: but can you build an engine in reverse order?

The easiest way to have a consensus is to make everybody angry.

I recently had an idea to have a coding interview structured like so: 1) Your company has a little dummy project in a currently used stack (maybe multiple projects so the interviewer can choose which one to use in the interview) 2) In each of a dummy projects you have some amount of small tickets, like ones you evaluate around 1 or 2 in the sprint planning 3) When the interview starts, the interviewer gives the person the project, lets him onboard for some amount of time (e.g 15 minutes) and then gives the person one of the tasks. 4) The goal of the interview is to not watch how well a given person studied his binary tree conversion, or how well he knows the nitty-gritty of given technologies, but how he actually WORKS and SOLVES the given task, which is what a technical interview should be doing in a first place. If anybody encountered a similar interview structure or (for some miracle) has it in their own company, please let me know, it would be interesting get some feedback on the idea

I personally value the experience of writing C compiler 100x more than random boot camps or software engineering degrees.

Clean Code was helpful, even instrumental, in my early years of SWE. I propose a rule to maintain society's sanity: if you haven't read the book, be skeptical of hot-takes about the book I have read (and re-read) Clean Code, so to follow my own rule, I'll just speak to that one. It is extremely simplistic to reduce the entire concept to a simple rule of "4 to 6 lines". I just flipped through the section on functions, and I couldn't actually find the "4-6 lines" rule anywhere. He does say they should be small as possible, but the main focus is on things like: - functions should do one thing - one level of abstraction per function - use descriptive names - limit the number of arguments as much as possible - limit unintuitive side effects These concepts are generally agreed on, with some nuance at the edges. It is sad how often "the baby is thrown out with the bath water" due to this telephone-game of influencers riffing off of lame takes that are super reduced versions of good ideas - to the point of not resembling the original.

I fully agree that programming trade schools are awesome. In Poland you can choose between regular high schools and "vocational high schools". Regular high schools take 3 years while vocational high schools take 4 years to finish. A vocational high school has everything that a regular high school has plus additional subjects specific to a particular profession. They are more challenging because you have to learn so much stuff but it's OP in my opinion. You also have a practical and theoretical exam regarding your profession at the end and you receive an official license from the government. I finished a vocational high school focused on IT and it was great. We had a little bit of everything, computer networks, operating systems, databases, HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, C++. It was an amazing head start. It certainly made me a more well rounded engineer. Later on when I went to uni I was sooo ahead of my peers. I also managed to get my first programming job right after graduating from high school. The knowledge I gained in high school made it incredibly easier to understand the things they showed us at uni. These schools have started to become quite popular in Poland. It's an awesome idea but still needs to be improved. The teaching could be certainly better but if you're motivated you can achieve great things.

In the UK university is basically just the subject you applied for. I was shocked when I heard American Universities do tons of side subjects that are not related to the main degree. Also while it's not needed to have a CS degree I can nearly always tell when someone does and they're usually better / more well rounded.

I learned programming like a slow burn, and being able to combine knowledge of so many different technology concepts now is extremely valuable. Knowing Linux, networking, virtualization, security, scripting, THEN programming feels so much better.

SCRUM has never been agile, is just recursive waterfall. Agile is about prioritizing people over process, and SCRUM is about prioritizing process over people. You should read the manifest and check how many of the statements do fit SCRUM.

Context is everything. Hard/fast rules are usually based in some truth but fail to live up to hype because each project and each feature has its own context which will steer experienced engineers somewhere in between the "rule" and some opposite of that rule. However, rules are useful to learn when starting out. You can better "break" the rules once you've had some experience following them.

The agile manifesto was created at a meeting of "lightweight method leaders". One of these so called "light" methods was extreme programming. I feel like a lot of the current agile process schemes like SAFe just cannot be characterized as "lightweight" just by the amount of text required to describe it.

Most universities in Norway have a mandatory class called Examen Philosophicum where you get an introduction to philosophy - as well as one called Examen Facultatum that introduces you to the scholarly tradition of your faculty, they're half a semester each. They sound like a good alternative to what Prime had to take :p

"Money made including time being laid off average out to be equal working at McDonald" so true lol