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What Makes a Great Software Engineer (Dissertation) (2016) [pdf]

(faculty.washington.edu)
94 points azhenley | 3 comments | 19 Feb 25 23:40 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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aen1 ◴[20 Feb 25 01:11 UTC] No.43109931[source]▶
Here are some slides summarizing the shorter paper this is based on:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170809055122id_/https://learni...

tl;dr They did a qualitative survey of what other people think makes a great software engineer at Microsoft.

Their take aways:

- The ability to learn is more important than any individual technical skill

- Making good decisions is rarely discussed in the software engineering literature, but it is critical to being a great software engineer

- Software engineering is a sociotechnical undertaking

- Delivering the code is often insufficient; complex contextual technical considerations abound.

replies(1): >>43111423 #
1. rukuu001 ◴[20 Feb 25 05:28 UTC] No.43111423[source]▶
Thats a very handy link, thanks.

The whole 'sociotechnical' part is gaping black hole for most new devs I meet, because it's not taught, and I don't know that schools know how to teach it.

Anyone have any internal processes (or resources) for helping newbs understand that side of the job?

replies(1): >>43113532 #
2. svilen_dobrev ◴[20 Feb 25 11:38 UTC] No.43113532[source]▶
check "recommended readings" on the right:

https://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/

starting from Organisational patterns, down. Skip anything there about design/ architecture/ math.

But: have in mind Conway's law - software-produced <=> organisation's-culture. So you can't dismiss entirely either of the two extremes of the socio-techical (human-machine) systems.

IMO, Winnie the Pooh has much more sociotechnical hints than CS university course.

replies(1): >>43123384 #
3. rukuu001 ◴[21 Feb 25 02:39 UTC] No.43123384[source]▶
Thank you very much, I'll check that out