Comment by magicalhippo
1 year ago
> if you can’t read the code you Shldnt be working on it
I don't know this AW guy, but to me that's a huge red flag and a sign that a programmer hasn't worked on anything substantial. Ie non-trivial stuff that's maintained by a team over time.
Being able to read the code is irrelevant, as the comments should tell you why the code is doing what it's doing.
For example, yeah I trivially can see the code is doing a retry loop trying to create a file with the same name.
That looks like a bug, if you can't create the file with that name, you change the name in the retry loop.
But the comment will tell me this is due to certain virus scanners doing dumb stuff, so we might have to try the same name a few times.
Sure, good code will have few comments as most of it should be self-documenting through good structure and names of classes and variables. But in non-trivial code there will always be places where it is not obvious why the code does what it does.
Defining substantial as written by a team over a long period of time seems to be putting the value in the wrong place. Is the important thing what the software does, or that it took a lot of people a long time to write it?
I didn't say long time to write it. I said maintained by a team over time.
Sure there might be some substantial software that was written as a one-off (ie not modified after release), but that's the minority by far.
> a sign that a programmer hasn't worked on anything substantial
Maybe you want to check who he is?
I meant I don't know as in I haven't actually worked with him.
Based on what I've seen before as well as the supplied code, I would be very skeptical to have him on my team.
This is a bit of a tangent but it’s a thought experiment that I recently heard:
Data pipeline A is written and maintained by a team in a type safe language with extensive unit tests.
Data pipeline B be was written long ago by a scientist who has since left, in sql in a day.
Both compute the same dataset, but B gets the answer correct.
Which is the better pipeline, and why?
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He would be your entire team
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I think what he meant is he hasn't had to work with other people's code. Other people have to work with his code.
This reminds me of Rorschach prison remarks.
> hasn't worked on anything substantial
This isn't the case. It's more likely a lack of business socialization combined with individual hyper-achievement. Reminds me of Ian Pratt in some ways.
An annoyance in tech, both startups and corporate, is technically-capable people but with outsized egos.
for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_(computer_scien...