The Surprising Qualities Of Great Devs
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- Опубліковано 4 вер 2023
- The Three Virtues Of Good Developers is one of those things that I think about a lot. I hope this plants some useful seeds in your brain as well
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S/O Ph4seOne for the awesome edit 🙏 - Наука та технологія
Larry Wall isn't only a Perl educator but the creator of the Perl programming language.
lmao as you can tell I'm a very deep Perl guy
Instantly came to make this comment.
His story is really interesting though as a linguist that wrote a computer programming language. Sadly I think it is responsible for many of the problems with the language.
I hate Perl
I don't know why, but when Theo started talking about hubris and Prime's face poped up with that gaze which reaches the very depths of your soul combined with that little smirk - I laughed pretty hard.
All jokes
Laziness - agree (to some extent like you've mentioned)
Impatience - totally agree (unless someone is impatient about writing 5 more letters, then maybe not)
Hubris - totally agree
But please, take that "Arrogant" out from thumbnail. It's totally opposite and a lot of people will get the wrong message from the thumbnail alone
Also kindness in engineering is highly underrated. I much more prefer to work with a less-skilled kind engineer than to work with high-skilled arrogant engineer, that will disdain the work of others
I was going to say this exactly. Glad I'm not the only one
I'd say that that's people's problem if they just label any confident behavior as "arrogant" nowadays. I can learn and build most stuff faster and better than 95% of people out there and I can prove it any day of the week. Some people just choose the wrong job for them, and some people know a lot better ways to learn/do stuff. Yet, somehow, if I am not "humble" people immediately label me as "arrogant".
It goes the other way too. I am confident(to the point at which people would consider me "arrogant", again) that I can learn any new technology or language and build stuff in it no problem. It changes your way of thinking when you don't assume everything new is "hard" or "complicated" by default. Everything is a simple enough thing that you can tackle no problem. And I do live like that. That was exactly the reason I became as good as I am. If I was "humble" like most people out there, I wouldn't delve into different complicated topics and so much new stuff as easily and wouldn't learn as much, so I would never become this good.
So what I wanted to say - arrogance is always good when it is paired with pride in yourself. If you have pride - you will continue proving yourself and your claims. Which can't do you anything bad at all.
@@twothreeoneoneseventwoonefour5 All of that may be true for one or two person dev teams. However, I've observed a rather strong correlation between fast arrogant developers and the amount of burden they inadvertently push onto the rest of the team. It's very frustrating to see a fast arrogant developer claim all the credit in standups while the rest of the team is fixing their bugs and re-enabling tests they stealthily disabled.
As long as you keep this motivation towards yourself, no problem, and a good mindset to have! If you start saying that to other people tho (especially the better than 95% people out there, can prove it, some just choose the wrong job) you do come off as an arrogant prick. :-)@@twothreeoneoneseventwoonefour5
"kindness in engineering is highly underrated." we should all held hands and sing love and tolerance
My favorite feedback: "You make a lot more mistakes than anyone, but you fix them much faster"
Are the other developers also burdened with fixing your bugs? Managers are often oblivious to the negative impact of bugs and other technical debt.
My favorite feedback: "anything he doesn't know yet he spends countless hours learning about"
Humility and empathy for others will get you so far.
100%
Be willing to change should be 4th. A few years back, I didn't have wifi in my dorm and had a task to build a netflix clone (interface only). I ended up making an npm package that easily created new elements and added them to the DOM, and soon enough i could build html templates based on JSON objects. Two weeks later, I was introduced to React.
If I had only hubris or laziness, I would refuse to use React because I had a "better" tool (one I already knew). I *had* to be willing to change despite my ego.
Premature optimization is also a smell that derives from these 3 virtues, and so is inheritance. It's important to reflect on your work and be willing to change.
Really important one here imo! Thanks for bringing it up
Fantastic video. Your videos and contributions have been very influential in my growth as a developer. I'm sure this will inspire many in the future as well.
I'm really digging the change in content you've had since your "burned out" video. This feels more genuine in some way.
Agreed on all the stuff. Proud of the work i do because I do it with utmost passion and try to achieve the best possible outcome in those timelines
Thanks for this, man... You made me smile a lot after mentioning each value, since I have all the mentioned values. Before watching this I thought I was becoming an a-hole but I'm quite relieved now. I just wish upper management can understand me lol...
Thank you. This one hits. I have a couple of projects, tools I made, that I think are pretty cool, but I've been reluctant to really share or promote them. Realizing now I don't have enough pride in my work?
OK, love this one, thanks
Great video, will take the lessons from this!
Would prefer Efficiency, Drive and Professionalism to Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. They better define the actual virtues without forcefully convoluting vices.
4th virtue = Milk
Your channel has helped me in so many ways to growth as a developer, right now been loving using T3 stack (without trpc for the moment). Thank u theo :)
theo can u please do a video about astro 3.0? something like chirp, I learned a lot from that video, it really helped me improve, I have my own portfolio page and I think astro is the best approach. besides that, keep doing amazing videos u’re killing it!!
This video timing is great. Just started a refactor of a core component of our app due to my laziness, impatience, and hubris.😉
Nice teo, gave new prospective.
“Strong opinions weakly held” part sounds great, until you realise you’ve been holding onto them for 20 years and you’ve just became stubborn.
SHOTS FIRED!!!
I can't believe that the thumbnail actually represents the video! You got my like.
You've never met me or heard of me, but thanks for the shout out!
I've been telling juniors for a while now to have "the right kind of lazyness".
Don't be too lazy to turn on your brain and automate something.
Be too lazy to do the exact same thing 3 times in a row.
Had pre conceptions of you before, ThePrime said follow you, actually your not bad, actually have good thoughts. Thanks
I can personally relate so much to this. Laziness is such a huge motivator to do things in the most efficient way possible. And being cocky and proud also keeps you on your toes because you have to constantly be good to validate the arrogance.😂
Strong opinions weakly held describes me perfectly. Never heard that phrasing before.
I always went my own way, against what other people think would be”right” and now I see myself 100% in these things and I’m just super proud of myself
Once you said the first two "virtues" are laziness and impatience, I thought the third would be stubbornness. Kinda think it's better than hubris, because then one's excellence isn't drawn from opposition to others' ideas, just commitment to one's own.
I like that quote. I’ll steal it. It fits quite well with how I operate.
Taking pride in your work and having hubris (defined as "excessive pride or self-confidence") are, in my view, two very different things. Looking at something you wrote and saying, "man, that's badass" is oftentimes a good thing. It's often just an expression of a desire to create the right thing - something elegant, maintainable, form-fitting - and being happy with the result thereof. It's reflective and identifies beauty.
But as a character trait, I think it makes you a very poor teammate and employee. Its fruit is inflexibility, disunity, and friction. On a team, I think it results in a worse product and team culture, since those who would prefer to avoid conflict or maintain good working relationships may avoid more hard conversations with this type of person. I have both types of people on my team, and it's not even a question for me. The humble leader gets SO MUCH more done in a team setting, code-wise and culture-wise.
I realize you caveated it by saying this person needs to be able to recognize when they are wrong, but I think that is another way of saying that this isn't an arrogant person, but rather a humble person who has the experience and education to recognize great solutions, even in their own code. And when better ideas come along, they are ready to adopt them.
Just my $0.02, and perhaps I'm splitting semantic hairs here. Great thought-provoking concepts, though - thanks!
The pride/hubris thing shouldnt be overlooked. I found that my work has to be interspersed with things things that I can be proud of. This sometimes means working on the visual part of a feature before everything on the backend is implemented. Or doing something yourself instead of delegating it (so your work is not only management if that's your position). Or challenging yourself with an implementation, perhaps sacrificing simplicity. Or holding off on fixing that bug.
The consequence of not doing this can be lack of motivation and gratitude about the sport of coding.
As for the new video design, my 2ct: make the text way smaller. make sure there is plenty of white space left of the "Theo window". add more whitespace in general. remove the black border on the headline text an use font that's different from the body
I dislike working on ui before the backend is implemented. In real world projects, it is too much trouble to actually write lots of code to make the fake data behave. Like when the client asks you "I want to see the ui", but you don't have the backend - you have to make some fake data. And then you have to write all the interactions with that fake data. And then it is kind of frustrating to fix and rewrite most of that so that it uses real data. Especially if you don't even know how the backend response would look like.
If you work on simple projects it isn't that big of a deal, but in a highly dynamic ui (real world application) it is a lotta trouble.
agreed. I have the luxury of being able to implement backend as well and design the entire implementation from the start@@twothreeoneoneseventwoonefour5
This perfectly encapsulates how I got good at bodybuilding, I knew that bodybuilding and programming are the same thing in a sense that it is a skill you get good at lol
I love how on their own it might not be so, but by the powers combined it leads to a strong programmer. Captain Planeting that shit.
I am not sure if I understood it correctly. I have a few concerns with pride and their affect on others.
Therefor I like to keep my pride on my behalf. I feel like it has no place in other developers path. It doesn't bring other devs any value. I have come far in my little career - and yet I have MANY places to go, but I do not think it's my core value to be sharing my success and pride. I - like many others - did mistakes and failed at times. The pride thing makes it seems like I am coating the fails with a desperate layer of something which feels like bragging (for me). I don't put my pride onto others, neither do I need to showcase anything.
But if I see pride as being kind and thoughtful for others and helping them getting their software issues being solved, getting a win-win situation of everyone involved - then I am happy - and yes, that I would consider as pride.
The examples you gave are very well chosen. For those examples I agree, just the phrase "being cocky" is not my way of being a dev.
Anyways, incredible video - love it. Thanks for sharing Theo!
Instead of hubris: "a big ego with strong confidence" 🤣
This is so counter intuitive. For me, I simply don't have the confidence to be cocky. Even so, I do understand the importance of this virtue. Instead of fiddling around, it gives you velocity towards your end goal. I think of this in slightly different manner. I'm trying to be confident I can build/repair things(eventually), leaving the greatness aside. In regards to the other two virtues, I think I have too much of those :)) All in all I find this very interesting. There are a lot of tech gurus that preach this kindness overflowing utopia. That's simply not realistic for me. I think challengers (slightly cocky devs) are engines of growth for entire teams. Great video as always! ☮
Maybe they're engines of growth, but also unbearable to work with. If you don't agree with their way of doing things, then it will be harder and harder for you
So maybe I will stay with this unrealistic "kindness overflowing utopia"
@@DEVDerr I was probably too superficial in my description. I agree with you, I also dislike working with asshole geniuses. But I think that challenging mindset is useful in contrast with everyone just agreeing blindly.
I don't think you should view it as being cocky or feeling superior. I think Larry just meant that it's hubris to believe that you will even be able to make something good and solve a difficult problem, so you need it to get going.
They all describe a very stereotypical programmer if you think about it. Someone who can't stand repetitive tasks, cares about writing fast programs and thinks "I could do that" when faced with problems they have no idea how to solve.
"Instead of fiddling around, it gives you velocity towards your end goal"... Many ways to interpret that sentence probably, but it made me think of either decision paralysis, or wanting to make things perfect. My two favorite responses to this situation "perfect is the enemy of good", and "make something work, then make it good". I often waste so much time trying to perfectly design something too early, and locked in decision paralysis about "the right way". If I knock out something fast without caring too much, then I get so much more clarity and velocity. (basically low stress prototype first, then do the real thing)
Who is the third one in 3:25 ? Is it Fireship?
Yea Jeff’s on this I picked people I liked
Technically impatience could be fast.
Instead of being impatient in a patient way, I just adore pure efficiency in a perfectionest way. I want my shortcuts to be awesome hacks, but I still want solid or exquisite performance. Kinda like OCD or being a virtue stickler. I would be embarassed by bad code or worried about flawed code bringing down other parts. I'd be concerned even more if I knew a 1% improvement would save a bajillion dollars
1. Laziness | Yeah, I agree - Strange how I see some random programmers call other programmers lazy because they use an IDE or VS Code. But then I'm just thinking to myself "Isn't the point of software development making the computer automate tasks". (For me Laziness is a I'm sick of this problem, I'll make a better solution)
2. Impatience | WOW, strangely agree because that's like how I got into any hobby. Got into graphic design at 12 because I got tired of waiting for someone else to send me graphics. Got into 3D modeling at 14 because some arma 3 mod was taking too long. Got into coding at 16 because :/ still no software for this yet.
3. Hubris - I actually don't know that word. I've never seen it before. Sounds like Humor and would assume it means funny person.
"Strange how I see some random programmers call other programmers lazy because they use an IDE or VS Code"
No one says that. No actual programmer says that. Maybe your friends(who got into coding 6 months ago) or some 60 year old C programmers. But no actual people.
But, a huge but, that's probably what they meant - you should use VIM motions. You can use VIM motions even in VSCode or IntelliJ ides or anywhere. If you don't use them - then you are lazy. Because there is no downside to them. You learn them, you become more productive. You don't, you are lazy.
I thought hubris is some water plant like debris
It doesn’t matter as much what age you started it’s more about IQ, eventually the person with higher IQ will surpass someone more experienced
@@perc-ai it matters on the job market. Sad to say, but no matter how smart you are, interviews and company higher ups only look at your "years of experience" and your actual knowledge is no more than 20% contribution.
Source: me. I don't like IQ tests (because you can easily fake any of them) but it was 145+ for me on most of the tests I did...
I did get a middle level job as my first job though lol, through hundreds of applications.
@@twothreeoneoneseventwoonefour5 at some point the engineer with the higher iq will outshine the engineer with experience ... you know that right? Why do you think FANG companies dont give a fk about your experience but whether or not you can solve the problems. They are looking for top of the line thinkers aka someone with high iq they dont even have ot have much experience if they are in school still.
At some point companies have so much money they dont really care that you have 10+ years of experience unless its experience with other companies in the same caliber. They just want the absolute best talent there is on the market and they are willing to pay premium on it. IQ is not everything but its more than most ppl think
These 3 points are very controversial to themselves :), but combined, they result in a high-quality engineers!
🤩
And here I was thinking all those things about me were a bad thing.
Can we talk about how great devs can totally boff technical interviews
recruiters should start looking for these skills xD
Right add it to the job description
Someone has been in the sun 🌞
Strong opinions loosely held: mentions his hate for Flutter 3 times on his website.
Who are people at 3:21?
@MelkeyDev @ThePrimeagen @Fireship @trash_dev @ryansolid
Ego is a tightrope - you need enough to do what you need to do and want to be seen as good, but not so much that you're unbearable to work with.
Well after viewing this video - I now consider myself a great dev! 😅
There's some great stuff in this video, but it would have been helpful to focus less on the *productivity of the individual* developer and more on the *impact a developer has on other developers' productivity.* At the end of the day, overall team productivity is more important than one individual's productivity.
okay, now i'm justified
We might want to revisit this take from Larry Wall and consider if it’s just a coincidence that all the examples in the video of devs matching these virtues are men. Might be a product of the status quo that you have to be this way in order to thrive.
Keep this haircut in your catalog ❤️🤲🏾
this bombed lol
You just founded a new religion.
Virtue of a developer, not be to opinionated and use the right tool for the job and not JavaScript
Also: software is a team sport - don't be a jerk.
strong opinions work well when there are many others with strong opinions and egos. ego is what creates a toxic environment
you forgot toxicity and stupidity
lol
I'm Lazy, Impatient, and I'm proud of what I make...
it feels like I was made to be a developer.
Wait, is that a sunburn? Did you go outside????
Maybe skateboarding 😮
Sunscreen brother. Use it.
I think ADHD make great devs for these reasons
I was made for this shit.
I have all those chircled qualities ingrained in me , that means I was destined to be a great dev one day , well Thank u Theo 😊😊 for the forecast 🤘
A more political version of this would be 1) Be efficient. 2) Have urgency. 3) Have confidence.
Looks like ADHD is a programmers super power😛
So this isn't sarcasm? I am so confused.
I told my boss I’m the laziest dev and I didn’t get a promotion
What do I do now?
To sum up my mindset, wasting 5hours trying to automate something where 2minutes of copy pasting would have done the job 😂
Seems to me that a missing fourth ingredient is "drive". Sorry, that's too positive. How about "obsessiveness"?
Impatience and Hubris aren't great values in a developer.
Do you really think an impatient developer will have the patience to debug that issue that isn't reproducible, triggers once every 8 hours and is buried in a 1mb js file thats been uglified and we don't have the original? A developer who is only capable when everything is done right is no developer at all.
Do you really want to be the manager explaining to the client that the bug you said was fixed isn't really fixed, because your hubris dev decided that they could find the bug, fix it and then commit that without ever running or testing any of it? A developer who is only capable when they are lucky is no developer at all.
"that issue that isn't reproducible, triggers once every 8 hours and is buried in a 1mb js file thats been uglified"
That doesn't happen in real world ever though. If a developer is smart he will notice - 8 hours signifies something. Why isn't it reproducible, why 8 hours? Timezones? The problem with some time function? If it isn't reproducible - the problem is not in the data, but in the current time. Uglified JS file? Here, I have a beautify plugin. Let me see, oh let's add a couple of console logs(or breakpoints). Oh I see where the problem lies. I fixed the bug. Didn't break a bone.
Patience is when the person would try to disect every single thing about the script, try to dissect every line of code by steps, look at every single operation. But that's very ineffective, compared to the "impatient" approach of just THINKING. It would take a patient dev 2 hours to fix the bug while looking at every single line, and 10 minutes for impatient dev who just identified the root of the problem.
"Do you really want to be the manager explaining to the client that the bug you said was fixed isn't really fixed, because your hubris dev decided that they could find the bug, fix it and then commit that without ever running or testing any of it?"
That's just your strawman argument. A hubris dev would fix it AND test it AND make sure it doesn't appear anymore. A hubris dev has PRIDE in themself and their abilities. If they didn't fix it - they would lose their pride. And by definition - they are not a hubris dev anymore, but became just a sloppy bad dev now.
@@twothreeoneoneseventwoonefour5 You can format the js but you can't bring back the function and variable names. You can't debug something that happens to clients in production and adding logging will take the 8 hours to reply nothing of value. Timezones? Please no its all unix timestamps so theres no messy timezone conversions. The js on the front end does an ajax call that some times has a race condition with a cron job thats completely unrelated.
The above happend in my new job a few months ago, intermittent unreproducible bugs happen all the time often due to race conditions. You can think of yourself as more clever than the average bear but you just spent all day debugging timezones because you didn't want to do tedious work. GG
@@Fluxiton stop with the strawman argument. I haven't seen your codebase lmao. I just said the possibility. If it isn't the timezones - I would see it in the first 5-10 minutes, ESPECIALLY if they are UNIX timestamps, and go to my next hypothesis and next and next. That's how it works. You would need hours to "debug" something. I need less than an hour to fix anything, because I actually THINK about where is the problem, where it might be, and why is there a problem(it's cause), not mindlessly stepping over every single line in the function stack in searches for unknown error lmao. "Patient(adjective)" more like "patient(noun)". Impatient people are usually better developers because they approach things better and in smarter ways. That's what I am talking about.
@@Fluxiton also 97 times out of 100 if you have a problem in some third party uglified js - it's entirely YOUR fault. Even if the stack trace says that the error "happened there", it only means that you did something unexpected in YOUR code. Bad input, or bad unsupported use case. So in real life, you would never need to debug an uglified js file. Even in the RARE case it's the library's problem - that's still the job of that library provider - you submit a bug report. Then you always need to look into YOUR code and fix it for the time being by going around the problem. But in 97 times out of 100 it is entirely your problem, in your code.
Can't be more detailed because that's the hypothetical scenario anyway. I haven't seen your codebase. If you say "it was an ajax request that had a race condition with unrelated job", then it adds even more to my point. No matter how many lines of code you read, you wouldn't notice that and waste your time. You would need to think out of the box, or just "outside" with your whole project structure in mind. That's exactly what an impatient person would do. They will think about the cause and all the possibilities from the very start, NOT just mindlessly search every single line for hours and only then, when they patiently checked everything, check outside causes like those race conditions you mentioned. You get my point by now?
@@twothreeoneoneseventwoonefour5 You can't just quote me and then baselessly claim it proves your point, thats not an argument its nothing more than "no you"
I wish I was more opinionated
Strong opinions weakly held is a definition of an idiot. Just be curious instead, and in time, you'll acquire opinions based on experience.
Hehe
Did you even read the definition of hubris you included in the video. It is a good thing to be confidently proud of your code while still accepting it is not perfect and welcoming any possible ways to improve it. But that is NOT hubris. Hubris is an anti-social, destructive personality flaw, EXCESSIVE pride. For example: someone suggests there is a bug in your code and instead of investigating you personally attack them for even suggesting your code has flaws. Please educate yourself on the meaning of words before using them.
The arrogance and ego
Use SPF, skin cancer is not a joke.
Your Karen haircut has gone to your head, TypeScript is not a religion, it's a superset of JavaScript. Calm down.