Hacker News

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document.

Document why. I can read code. I want to know _why_ this nebulous function called "invert_parameters" that is 200 lines long even exists. Which problem did you have that this function solved? Why was this problem there in the first place? Write some opinions on maybe its intended lifetime of the codebase. Hell, I write comments that apologize, just so that a future reader knows that the code I wrote wasn't meant to be great but that I was in a time crunch or a manager was breathing down my neck, or that some insane downstream/upstream thing did something... well, insane.

Paint some picture of your mindset when writing something, especially if it's non-obvious, as that'll give all the additional context not captured in code, when reading the code.

Obviously this isn't the only good documentation rule, but I wish people - juniors and seniors alike - would do this more often, especially at the workplace.

“a new job in two weeks.” heh, yeah everyone was opining expertise back then when employees had control of the market.

> Don’t meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He’s a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he’s making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Ha yup - I've felt this one before :D

Quite a few major issues with the post:

  - Drinking wine solo is odd. Whiskey, vodka, or beer (and if you Russian) is the standard. Spelling mistakes like 'ever thing' support the idea of alcohol induced unordered thoughts, that's good.
  - Webdevs would one of the last to consider to be experts.
  - While I don't use darkmode, browser extensions solve the unsupported web pages. Dark mode used to be the only possible option on a black/green screen, glad that changed.
  - Pharmacist require a degree and quite a few years of studies and exams with tons of organic chemistry. 
  - HN comments being worthless is an awkward one. Lots of posts (e.g. Apple CEO change) had tons of useless stuff but it's very often the comments would bve better than the post itself.

> Max out our 401ks

If there's any 20-somethings here that make 6 figures, listen carefully:

  1. Max out your 401k, and invest all of it in a target date retirement fund. (Some companies are douches and will assign you mostly their own stock, which when it tanks, there goes your retirement... so check your allocation)

  2. Get an HSA and max that out. Invest it all in a target date retirement fund. Do not use any of it, pay for medical expenses with cash and save your receipts. Get reimbursed for the receipts when you retire.

  3. Contribute to an IRA and max it out (or backdoor roth when you make enough that that's necessary). Invest it all in a target date retirement fund.

  4. Keep 6-12 months of living expenses in a high yield savings account.

Wow, this is 2021? Feels like 2014. SQL, getting a new job in 2 weeks, etc.

> Algorithms and data strictures are important — to a point. I don’t see pharmacist interviews test trivia about organic chemistry. There’s something fucked with our industry’s interview process.

Pharmacists have to get a special degree before they can even get an interview, and I've heard that the education is heavy on organic chemistry. Then you get a job as a cashier selling pills.

> Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless.

You got me.

> Once, someone asked me who I looked up to and I said Conan O’Brien [...]

He wrote for SNL and studied literature at Harvard, so there's probably plenty going on up there.

I did TDD properly the first time in my Masters Degree (ongoing). It was an eye-opener. Write your program in two different ways to make sure you know the requirements by making their outputs match. That's not me being snarky. It actually works well. Just make sure you can type quickly.

I feel strange about someone deciding an interesting use of their time is getting drunk alone to write a blog post.

"If you’re not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It’s a shitty programming language that’s good at almost everything."

- I agree, 100%.

And here's a take that a lot of the folks will disagree, and categorically state that these both belong to two entirely different domains: "Rust, is the evolution of Java. Not Kotlin, not Scala, not clojure, but, Rust".

Related:

Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27333260 - May 2021 (494 comments)

My biggest lessons I've learned as non-senior non-engineer:

1. You'll never be as smart as the smart guys. It's okay to give up.

2. Most likely you'll work with incompetent fools, get used to that.

3. Workplace is the best place to make friends. If someone tells you otherwise it's a psyop to turn you into a robot.

4. Minimize your output while trying to maximize your salary because mythical "job satisfaction" doesn't exist and it makes much more sense to redirect your energy elsewhere.

5. Luck is the most important factor.

There is nothing I've done at work I'm truly proud of. Everything I'm proud of is completely unrelated to work.

Lost me at dynamic languages. Don't build anything of any significance in dynamic languages! ;)

Some good points. Laughed at TDD is a cult. I mean a lot of software orgs/cultures are cultish (Agile, Scrum, whatnot). At work I often feel I'm part of a cult.

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there’s any recommendations, I’d seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Good docs are docs that make it easy to implement the next feature.

From an AI perspective, it's my observation that LLMs often write code with lower quantity / quality docs. At the same time, they are reasonably good at synthesizing / inferring meaning from code that lacks good docs. They often do so internally by forming a chain of thought / reasoning around how the code works. The docs that should be written as part of the code are probably the same things that an LLM would reasonably come to by spending tokens when modifying that code. I believe that this should be trained into model so that future LLM work starts with not having to build up context.

In the absence of that being built in, something I've been experimenting a little with is tuning what I want to see in docs that actually help source control / development. Currently that's at https://github.com/joshka/skills/tree/main/doc-steward - still needs a bunch of work, but it's generally better than nothing. YMMV

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there’s any recommendations, I’d seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Just wait till he hears about Claude Code

This genuinely looks like that I wrote it...until I saw that LISP line, definitely not me. But do agree with a lot of items in the list, and I happen to be a DE, too.

> A lot of progressive companies, especially startups, talk about bringing your “authentic self”. Well what if your authentic self is all about watching porn? Yeah, it’s healthy to keep a barrier between your work and personal life.

this is probably the best truth. after a while it's easy to recognize people that are consistently being their "authentic self" and they're usually the worst.

FFS, be professional at work.

"HR" does not set your professional obligations. If you need to be drunk to talk this honestly, you are not a "senior" nor a mentor, but an incipient alcoholic and a coward.

Then again, this person is obviously also lying to claim the engineer title - sit down, "data science!" You're only even here because Product prefers being lied to - so that really sets an ironically honest baseline on how seriously anyone should be taking any of this farrago.