Comment by arcticfox
8 years ago
The article is about how to make a positive impact as soon as possible, impressing people is only a side effect of that.
It sounds like you're looking for ticket monkeys; the article is about how to become more than that for the people that aspire to that.
The fact that you call your new hires "newbies" and don't expect them to make suggestions for a year is a huge red flag for me. Either you didn't understand that the article is targeted towards experienced professionals switching jobs (first sentence), or you think that a professional will take an entire year to understand your org and be more productive than work on tickets.
Most devs that I know worth their salt are comfortable switching jobs every 2 years or so (whether they choose to or not). The contrast between that and not even being expected to think for a year is massive.
It sometimes seems like we software developers travel in really distinct worlds.
People who have an established pattern of changing jobs every 2 years won’t even get an interview in my org, and they definitely need at least a year before they understand the problem space well enough for their offers of major architecture changes to be welcome.
The idea is that coming in and working on the problems you’re assigned is good because you can more deeply understand the problem space AND make things better.
I expect this, better and faster and with more humility and wisdom, from senior engineers. That doesn’t make anyone a ticket monkey in my book, it makes them effective at their very highly paid job.
As an aside, I highly recommend the article’s strategy for appearing (and hopefully actually being) wise and humble, as long as you’re getting your assigned, bare minimum work done.
Anyway, it sounds like maybe we mutually wouldn’t want to work with one another, which is why it seems like we live in different worlds to me.
> they definitely need at least a year before they understand the problem space well enough for their offers of major architecture changes to be welcome.
I think there's a role for humility on both sides. In my current role, I was an experienced hire. After a month on the job my manager and his manager pulled me aside and said "What are we doing wrong?"
The interesting thing was that when I told them that I thought their module system was seemed backwards, the response was "Yeah, we know. It's a quirk of history that it ended up that way, and we've got a plan to fix it. Anything else?"
They very much valued a fresh set of eyes to ensure that they weren't missing something they had become house-blind to. At the same time, as a set of fresh eyes your attitude should be one of questioning, "Why are we doing it that way?" rather than "We're doing it wrong" or "This way is better".
Remember Chesterton's Fence.
Here's the trick: Every weird architecture exists for a reason, good or bad. If it looks wrong to a newbie, maybe the newbie misunderstands it, or maybe the business can't afford to build something better (and it's good enough as is), or maybe it really is wrong but the people who built it like it, so what good will come of you you trying to change it? Your newbie ideas only help if the veterans want new ideas and also your newbie ideas are better than their veteran ideas. That's possible but rare.
This is an excellent tool for the manager toolbox, thanks for sharing. Agreed that it’s great to get the fresh eyes benefits recorded/locked down.
The key is understanding that your teammates are probably pretty smart, you can learn a lot from them. You’re probably really smart, too, better to show your new team this with actions and quiet side conversations than showy pushes for unwelcome change, at least for the first year.
I do this every time we get a new developer, even a fresh-faced intern. Show them the basics of our project, turn them loose to go learn as much as they can, and then follow-up with "what did not make sense to you?"
Fresh eyes are incredibly valuable and you only get that once from each person before they become just as jaded as the rest of the team ;)
There's another facet to this story that's not getting discussed: that of path dependence.
The OP is Silicon Valley royalty. This matters. His site is pretty humble, but this guy was like, employee #10 at facebook and is probably worth high 8/low 9 figures. He is respected in a way most people aren't.
Boz can come in and start making these changes. Most people can't. We need to talk about this more. We labor under this bizarre illusion of non-hierarchical workplaces in Silicon Valley, when the reality is and always has been, some people have more influence than others.
I find it helpful to keep in mind the circumstances about the advice-giver as much as the advice itself. I'm not saying there aren't good nuggets of advice to glean. But who you are and your track record really matter in Silicon Valley and we should acknowledge that. It's not as much of a pure idea meritocracy as people think/pretend.
After a while I started thinking "flat org" meant "it takes longer to figure out who makes the decision."
After a while longer, I changed that to "regardless of the org structure, the org chart doesn't fully capture who has influence and who doesn't."
1 reply →
The flip side of this is demonstrating humility and being a ticket monkey for a year, only to slowly realize you've been taken advantage of, and as you approach year #2 realizing that neither you nor anyone on the "ticket monkey" team ever has or ever will move to the new development group. I once had the experience of being duped by a company that (accidentally, or maliciously) advertised two Developer positions when in actuality they wanted one Junior Developer and one mid-level Developer. Our resumes ranked similarly so they arbitrarily put one of us on the ticket-monkey team and the other on the new development team. I should have either raised hell or gone elsewhere when I found out the level I received was not the one in my offer letter (the pay, while the same, was already below-market anyway), but like a chump I took it as a character building opportunity and thought I would work my way up. What I learned was that that strategy works in a dysfunctional company about as well as it works in a dysfunctional relationship.
> they definitely need at least a year before they understand the problem space well enough for their offers of major architecture changes to be welcome.
No offense intended, because I don't know your situation, but as someone who has worked in several industries, every time I've heard that kind of phrase it's boiled down to some combination of unnecessary complexity (of architecture and/or process) and undocumented tribal knowledge.
I can't imagine any problem space that would take a senior developer a full year to become competent.
Competency != suggest major changes to architecture.
In fact suggesting major changes to architecture is a strong signal of an immature developer. There are times when major changes in architecture are warranted, but they are suggested far more often than that. The implications of the suggestions usually mean rewriting lots of code just to stand still.
2 replies →
> I can't imagine any problem space that would take a senior developer a full year to become competent.
I am somewhat arbitrarily latching onto your statement as a place to respond. But my thoughts are swirling around many other posts in this whole thread... I think "problem space" conflates too many different aspects of real world work which can all require significant time to comprehend as a new member of a team.
Any non-trivial project must include hysteresis in planning and management, meaning that an architecture encodes a number of economic decisions and strategic positions. Hardly anybody would look at a long-lived project and declare that they would build it the same way if starting from a blank slate that day, but this is irrelevant when considering overall engineering costs and risks. Things must be far worse than "not ideal" before it makes sense to invest in rebuilding existing functionality rather than maintaining it.
Secondly, the actual "problem space" is what gets assigned to subject matter experts in very large organizations but must also be understood by those making engineering decisions. I don't think that there is such thing as a "senior developer" who can waltz in and start declaring how to solve problems without learning this subject matter, and it can certainly take years to acquire such expertise. You can't just know how to build things to spec, but must have an appreciation for which things to build, and what business purposes are being served. Often, a worthwhile rearchitecture is not simply refactoring the code that performs the same thing, but refactoring the entire solution to address subject matter problems in an entirely different way. Sometimes, the subject matter is highly technical (like physical problems, or logistical optimization, or machine vision) and sometimes it has much larger social components (knowing the customer/user and their requirements or limitations).
Finally, there is a third space of expertise which gets to the heart of some complex projects. A deep understanding of how an engineering organization functions and of its members can be another realm of subject matter expertise. You can't appreciate the economic and application decisions encoded in the architecture if you aren't aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the team. Sometimes, a senior person with deep technical knowledge can be faced with the worst truth of all: a better technical approach that you are well acquainted with is simply inappropriate for a project that does not have the staff nor the will to build and maintain it. Decisions are hardly ever so modular and independent that we can satisfy all participants without compromise.
2 replies →
I started working in finance (fixed income derivatives) about a year ago, and i'm still getting my head round the domain. There are certainly some things i understand now, and i have a rough map of the space, but there's a lot i don't know, and a lot of important stuff i don't have an intuitive feel for yet.
> at least a year before they understand the problem space well enough
I'm curious what domain you're in? I get the sense that different real-world topics account for much of the difference between developer 'worlds'.
I remember talking to a few rocketry companies in college (not SpaceX), and they were overt about wanting someone who would start out doing rote work and already had substantial expertise in their C package of choice. I certainly cant blame them; their risk profile is fundamentally different than almost any other software domain. (The exceptions, like military and aviation use, also tend to be pretty hard-nosed.)
"Not doing assigned work" is obviously a terrible trait basically anywhere, but the other divide here is really interesting to me. There are a lot of very successful companies which hire 2-year-turnover staff and assume they'll get the same, and then there are companies like yours with 'dark matter developers' who would never cross paths with that.
> People who have an established pattern of changing jobs every 2 years won’t even get an interview in my org
2 years? Most of the companies and projects I joined were long gone and dead 2 years down the road. Different industries indeed.
A matter of perspective. Everyone I have met with a cycle time of 1-2 years tends to be a low-value contributor. I get the feeling they move often because that's about how long it takes their team and management to conclude they aren't worth investing any more patience in. Some people only have interview skills.
But, I have not worked in a startup environment for almost 20 years so maybe in the right environment it is totally normal to expect people to jump around that often. I would advise being careful about keeping that up if you ever plan to move to a more stable part of the world because it is a stain on your resume.
4 replies →
>they definitely need at least a year before they understand the problem space well enough for their offers of major architecture changes to be welcome.
IME, hubris usually correlates with architectural problems and higher than normal technical debt.
I can't see any good reason to analyze ideas about architectural overhauls on anything other than their technical merits. If there's a reason relating to the problem space for rejecting one particular idea that's fine, but unless your architecture is completely fucked that should be very rare.
It's perfectly normal to tear out the badly written guts of a software system and build up a better version, and a deep understanding of requirements should not really be required to do that in most cases.
Participating in conversations is great! Critiques should certainly be evaluated on the merits.
Precipitating new conversations with strong implication there’s a better way is less welcome. You can only have “we need to rewrite this” conversations about your core area so often per year before you get a jaded burned out team. New people should wait for those conversations at the team’s natural pace.
3 replies →
Unless your system is much bigger than 1M LOC I seriously doubt that an experienced good programmer will need more than one year to understand it. It never took me more than one month to understand a system, even when I was junior and when the system was > 1M LOC.
Please do an AMA?
How long did it take to learn those skills? Do you use a tool to understand the code? What is your advice for coming up to speed on a domain you are unfamiliar with?
1 reply →
> don't expect them to make suggestions for a year
That's not the problem.
The problem is that some newbies want all of the code to be their design pattern of choice; or just want to refactor things until they understand it. Some will just refuse to follow established design patterns and do things like bypass our dependency injector.
For me, it's a red flag whenever someone comes on a team and immediately wants to refactor to use their favorite design patterns, frameworks or style. It's not that their preferred design patterns are better or worse than what we're using; it's that you just don't refactor code on a say-so.
I feel like the article is not about this at all though. If you behaved according to the algorithm as a newbie, you would only refactor and change the design pattern if people told you that that should be done. Which your newbies weren't told according to what you're saying.
No, but I'm responding to the comment.
Depends on the size and life of the project and average term of service. If your project is a decade old and massive, where many on the team have been on the project for 5+ years - Yes, a 'newbie' needs a (non-trivial, 1 year could be too long or too short) amount of time to ramp up on why things are like they are before they can make a nuanced suggestion for improvement.
A smaller project that's in a constant state of flux? Of course suggest giant overarching changes when they appear to make sense. What's proper depends heavily on the context of the group and project.
I work on a system that has 15 year old code in it, lots of it in a bad state (it's being removed, but slowly).
I've seen a lot of people come in (category A) who can spout best practices that we're not following, but can't ever wrap their heads around the way the system works, the amount of effort that implementing an idea will take, and the amount of payoff it will offer. They just cargo cult best practices. With those people, I want to say "please just crank out tickets until you understand more".
However, there have also been a small handful of people (category B) who come in, and quickly find ways to make beneficial changes that are achievable and worthwhile. Those people are incredibly valuable.
Concrete advice: if you take a year for any new hire to understand things enough to make changes, you need to work on the understandability of your system, your onboarding, or stop hiring exclusively from category A.
How is “quickly find ways to make beneficial changes that are achievable and worthwhile” distinct from resolving tickets?
That seems like a perfect description of doing a good job at resolving tickets to me. Because if the change was beneficial, it was presumably not just navel gazing architecture astronauting, it was solving an existing problem, right?
6 replies →
I don't know about a year, but usually understanding how things work take time. Understanding why they work this way and not another also takes time. If somebody doesn't take time to learn the background of decisions taken, they are liable to repeat the same mistakes and stumble at the same bumps as have been already passed before and encoded in organization's common lore.
There is something called Chesterton fence principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence - before proposing to change something, give it an earnest try to figure out why it was like this before, and what changed. Sometimes there's no good reason, or the reason once existing is long gone, and a fresh eye is useful to shake out those cases. In other cases, there are complex and unobvious reasons that cost a significant effort to figure out, and may be not apparent to the fresh eye. So it's better to keep an open and humble mind and at least at first, approach new system with the attitude "please help me learn why it's like this" instead of "this looks wrong, let's throw it away and re-do it from scratch". I'm not sure about a year, but at least a month or two would probably be appropriate. And my experience showed dealing with bugs can actually be very instructive about how things work and why they work this way and not the other.
Why the bias against solving problems that are ticketed? Problems that haven't been discovered yet are seldom more important than the ones that have already been discovered. Unless we're optimizing for your ego, or the existing team truly are idiots whose entire list of known problems deserves to be blown off. (Or more gently, they've made some glaring oversight of a worthwhile value-adding solution.)
Anyway, the article is more about humbly learning how the team works, not about rewriting their codebase just yet, i.e. the opposite of your point about "ticket monkeys."