Industry and Market

A grumble about buckets

Sometimes developers limit the choices that are offered to their users as a way to simplify. This can be a good thing; I’m a big fan of simplicity.

However, this strategy comes with an important caveat:

If you’re going to force all choices into a few predefined buckets, you better provide buckets that match the needs of your users.

Broken buckets will not earn you brownie points. Or revenue.

image credit: Eva the Weaver (Flickr)

Today I was adjusting my 401k contribution. Here’s the broken buckets I saw when I logged in to the financial services website:

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“Rockstar Developers” are a dangerous myth

Recently I’ve run across several uses of the phrase “rockstar developer” or “rockstar programmer” (“code ninja” is another hip variant). The term shows up on slashdot, for example. I’ve also seen it in job postings and in blogs.[1],[2],[3] A rockstar hacker archetype is standard fare in TV shows, where his or her computing feats are practically a superpower (Agents of Shield, Person of Interest, Leverage, Scorpion, …) Of course Hollywood loves the notion, too; I thought The Imitation Game was fascinating, but besides taking liberties with history, it portrays Alan Turing in a distorted way that feeds such mystique. (Turing was absolutely brilliant, and certainly one of the most important pioneers in computing. But he didn’t invent his codebreaking machine alone.)

Alan Turing and team members at Bletchley Park, with a forerunner of the modern computer-- technology invented by brilliant people to break the Nazi Enigma encryption. Screenshot from official trailer, under fair use.

from The Imitation Game: Alan Turing and team members at Bletchley Park, with a forerunner of the modern computer — technology invented by brilliant people to break the Nazi Enigma encryption. Screenshot from official trailer, under fair use.

It’s even in my inbox. After I began writing this post, I got an email from a recruiter on LinkedIn, looking for “superstars”:

superstar

The buzz about these mythical supercoders has begun to raise my hackles.

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A More Important Manifesto

A couple years ago, I wrote about signing the Agile Manifesto and the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship.

Today I want to write about something a lot more important.

Let me use résumés to provide some context.

I used to think that the “Objective” section of a résumé was fluff–a place to dump vague platitudes, maybe. You know the stuff I’m talking about:

Objective: Craft high-quality, enterprise software in an environment where I can make significant contributions to the bottom line of a growing company.

Blah, blah, blah.

Theoretically, this stuff helps you get jobs, but as someone who writes a lot, my drivel-o-meter pegs at such verbiage. Usually, it means about as much as the Business Buzzwords Generator recently posted by the Wall Street Journal.

image credit: David Blackwell (Flickr)

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Your objectives ought to matter.

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Grumpy Old Men, Opacity, and Optimizers

Today I’m channeling my inner grumpy old man. And these guys are helping. (I am not old enough to pull off such a face by myself, although life is rapidly helping me get there. ;-)

Grumpy old men.

The reason I’m feeling grumpy is that I’ve had another in a long, long line of conversations about how to write faster code.

It’s not that optimization experts are dumb. Far from it. They are invariably smart, and in general, they are better informed than I am about how pipeline burst cache and GPUs and RAM prefetch algorithms work. I generally learn a lot when I talk to guys like this.

I applaud their passion, even if I think they sometimes get carried away.

No. What’s making me grumpy is that after decades of hard work, we still have compilers that encourage a culture of black magic and superstition around this topic. I thought I signed up for computer science, not voodoo.

To show you what I mean, let’s talk about the humble inline keyword in C and C++. The amount of FUD and nonsense around it is really unfortunate. How many of the following have you heard?
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Why you should use an IDE instead of vim or emacs

With a title like the one above, you may be expecting a rant from an IDE bigot. I know there are plenty of flame wars on this topic, on both sides, and if I raised your hackles (or whet your appetite), I’m sorry.

This is not that kind of post. For one thing, I don’t take myself so seriously:

There’s a keystroke for that! Image credit: xkcd.com

What I’m hoping to do here is point out some subtleties to this debate that don’t get a lot of airtime, and explain to my supercharged-text-editor friends why I work the way I do. However, I also plan to write a companion to this post, explaining why you need to learn a tool in the vim/emacs category, and I’ll have plenty to say on that topic as well. Hopefully that buys me a few minutes of an open mind. :-)

From a distance

If you step back from the debate over IDEs vs. supercharged text editors, and squint to suppress the details, you’ll see that most exchanges on this topic look like this: Continue reading →