That hasn't really been my experience, for every 50 people I meet maybe 1 is here for the craft, the rest want to do 9-5, have a visibility at work, work on impactful projects but actually talk about their problems, their opinions in a deeper way - almost never.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

  - 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.

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'm running a link shortener on shared hosting. No SSH, FTP-only deploys, no background workers, no Redis. Every time I wanted to add something "proper" — a job queue, a WebSocket, a cache layer — the hosting said no. So I didn't.

The result: click notifications go out via a cron job that hits a PHP endpoint once an hour. No queue, no retry logic, no worker process. It either sends or it doesn't, and I log the outcome. Six months in, it works fine.

If I'd had a VPS from day one I'd have built something I'd still be maintaining. The shared hosting said "you get a cron and a database" and that turned out to be enough.

- 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".

I've been rate limited by the HN mods and knowing I can only reply a few times a day now I don't bother reading the comments anymore because I can't participate.

It also feels icky to continue when you're no longer welcome somewhere, but they're trying to be nice by slowing you down rather then an outright ban.

I was worried that means I'll miss out but maybe that "pull" I feel to check the comments might not be such a bad habit to break as I might not have been getting the value I thought from it (at least I hope so)

That did not age well.

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.

Literally the only thing I miss

Mood. Like yeah, everyone at the moment is criminally underpaid with relation to productivity gains and cost of living, but generalists in general are woefully underpaid compared to narrow specialists.

I come from the IT space, where I've got to fight tooth and nail to keep my job versus the race-to-the-bottom mentality of MSPs and outsourced sweatshops overseas. I'm a generalist who builds globe-spanning networks while memorizing VLAN schemas across dozens of sites, while also owning IAM across Entra and Okta for the Enterprise and the associated JAMF/InTune MDM profiles for mobile and desktop endpoints, and the SME for Windows server environments and VMware VCF datacenters and the AWS/GCP/Azure tenant, all while forecasting and budgeting for future CapEx and OpEx projects within the IT space for long-term planning relative to corporate needs and strategy. I own storage, identity, server, endpoint, networks, physical security, infrastructure, cyber security, hardware, software, licensing, architecture, support, and on-call, in orgs ranging from 20 to 80k people in size. I've saved companies 20x the TC they paid me through cost-effective infrastructure.

You know what employers feel that skill set is worth right now, with 15 years experience? $130k, exactly what I made in 2019 before COL doubled. Not even enough to make median rent in my metro (~$3500) on a standard 50/30/20 post-tax budget scheme.

It's disgusting out there. Nobody wants to pay the people who do the actual work.

This is interesting. At my employer we see job hopping as a bad thing.

I think there's a unique perspective you get by seeing your 5+ year old code in production. I can kinda tell when someone only does short stints based on the way they talk about other people's code.

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.

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

Just wait till he hears about Claude Code

LOL can't disagree with that opinion.

See what the current thought leaders in tech believe and say out loud and this makes a lot more sense.

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.