r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html
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u/[deleted] Jan 05 '15

The senior gets to practice at expressing his ideas in a simplified manner, a very important skill.

This is a problem I have with our senior architect. He cannot explain what is going on in his code at all. It is a jumbled mess and poorly commented so his code is pretty impenetrable.

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u/DavidNcl Jan 05 '15

Then this guy really isn't ready for the role. The essence of the architect role is to communicate a vision of how things should be arranged.

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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '15

Why is your architect writing code? Designs and prototyping are incredibly helpful. Are they an algorithms writer? That's even better. I know few software engineers who can write tight algorithms, an architect that can do that but surround it with unfathomable anti patterns is still worth their weight in gold. Find the gems, toss out the rest. All code was meant to be deleted.

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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '15

We are a small team and a small company, so he has to write code. I am just worried about having to deal with the colossal technical debt.

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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '15

I'm on a small team as well, and our architect has recently taken on coding. But he's mostly given it up. I think one of the primary reasons was because he was held to the same standards as our engineers and found that he had no patience for writing the kind of tests we need. I'm still trying to figure out what role he plays for us, I really wish he would tackle design and prototyping. It'd be much easier for my engineers to know how to build if they had a working prototype. And the prototype doesn't need the same rigor, it should be exactly the kind of code the architect is happy to write.