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How to Become a Demonstrably Better Engineer

 

A friend who was looking for a new job texted me "how does one become a demonstrably better engineer?"

Given what I knew of their context, I assumed they were looking for something actionable that would ratchet them up a notch in interviews (perceived more senior). The question stumped me. I just didn't have a good answer. Given the longstanding situation where companies interview in a manner optimized for the software engineering challenges of last century, there are only two ways I really know of that typically manner: be recruited directly by ex-colleagues who know your skills well, or excel at those wrongly optimized tech interview shenanigans. Sometimes the timing is off for the former to work.The problem with the latter is  that the longer you spend actually doing typical 21st century engineering work, the less you remember how to pass those useless puzzles that rarely come up in real work (and when they do, are more quickly and reliably solved by doing a litle research rather than trying to implement something from 30 minutes at a white board).

It stumped me so much, I didn't reply for a few days while I mulled it over. Then I went on vacation for a couple of weeks, feeling guiltier every time I remembered I still didn't have an answer.

Procrastination is like a credit card: it's a lot of fun until you get the bill. - Christopher Parker

— The Quote (@thequote) June 2, 2021

I've spent a couple of decades hiring engineers off and on. Most of that time I've conducted the exact same pair programming interview, but that would be a whole other post and not likely to be relative to my friend's interviews. I considered how I would start to believe someone was a senior level engineer in the absence of my usual rubric.

I still don't have a great answer but I do have a couple of thoughts.

1) I believe that the best software engineers are like blacksmiths.

Photo credit: Yi Chen

Both blacksmiths and software engineers make their own tools. The tools they use on the job are made of the same stuff they produce, so a master of the craft should be comfortable doing this. Making your own tools demonstrates not only that you understand how to do basic tasks for your job, but you probably also understand which tasks are the most important to the overall goals, and have creative thoughts about how the approach to those tasks could be improved. So one way to demonstrate your skills are to be able to talk about the tools you have made and how they helped you and/or your colleagues reach team goals better.

• Maybe you automated a tedious task that used to waste time and/or allow human error to creep in.
• Maybe you extracted data on your processes and built a report to show where bottlenecks lie.
• Maybe you built a tool to visualize your app logs in a richer way, allowing issues to be found quicker.
• Maybe you extracted code to a sharable package so that it could be shared by system components.
• Maybe you developed an IDE plugin that improved support for a custom part of your system.

I believe conversation about tools you've built reveal a lot about how an engineer thinks and can highlight the skills with which you feel comfortable. It can also be interesting to discuss the tools you didn't build and why.

2) Have a portfolio

One of the major problems with demonstrating your skill at interviews, is that probably all that great code you've written for past employers is closed source and unavailable to show. One solution to this is to have contributed to open source projects. Not everyone has time to start and maintain their own meaningful Open Source Software project, or even to make significant contributions to one, but just like the professional artists' need to maintain a public portfolio, there is a benefit to having something on Github you can point to and talk about.

I don't plan on ever being a hiring manager again, but if I were I would consider the following as an addition to my usual pair programming exercise: ask the interviewee to be prepared to talk about a few contributions they made to OSS projects. It could be simply finding open Issues in an existing project and submitting a PR for it. Some things that might be interesting to discuss:

• Why did they choose the project?
• How did they communicate with existing contributors? (if the communication was public on Github, walk me through it)
• Why do they think the Issue had not already been resolved?
• What approaches did they consider in implementation? Why did they decide on the one that they did?
• What tests did they add to ensure their implementation was correct?
• How did they handle PR feedback?

There are similar opportunities to have something in the OSS ecosystem without even contributing shipping code:

• They could pick a project with a lot of open PRs and in a technology they know well and simply code review them. In fact, given modern prevalence of code reviews, I think this would be a great thing to demonstrate to an interviewer.
• They could contribute tests to low code coverage projects. It's an even better story if these tests exposed previously unknown bugs!
• They could contribute failing tests that highlight an open Issue.

Obviously the interviewee could cherry pick their best OSS contribution narratives to demonstrate, but as an interviewer I would value recency so even if you have a great story to tell and show from years back, I would still put a little time into having one or two recent examples as well.

30 years of ideas

Since the early 90s I've been keeping a list of various ideas I've had for software products. It's not an exhaustive list, just the ones that I took seriously for some period of time. There are many others that never made it past the "wouldn't it be cool" concept phase and thus never made the list. Many of these listed below didn't make it much further than a couple of weeks of design and/or proof of concept coding, but some were actually pretty fully realized. Some were collaborations but the bulk were solo efforts. A lot of these read as kind of "so what" now, but at the time I was working on them, they were novel ideas that didn't really exist yet! For instance the genealogy one was a couple of years before Ancestry.com and the like appeared. I recall my beta version of that mapped out the Simpsons family tree since that was one most people knew well at the time.

I would use this list for the common "Prior Invention Disclosure" you provide when taking a new job. I'm starting a new job this morning, and it could well be the job I end up retiring from. I figured I'd retire this list as well, but posting it here for posterity. I might come back later make longer posts for some of these.

• VR app for decorating and sharing 360 media
• VR team sport game that mimics rules of rugby and can include players not in VR.
• VR training app for rugby wisdom
• AR app that allows creating puzzle mazes overlaid in the real world that can be navigated by players.
• AR app that visualizes a heliocentric stable grid of nodes through Earth’s orbit.
• Tool to create & interact with quizzes based on importing a spreadsheet.
• Periodic True/False/Confidence quiz and social system.
• Warehouse Management Tool for creating/processing picklists, and purchasing/printing shipping labels.
• Professional rugby 7s production with specialized pitch allowing multi camera option for viewers.
• Rugby club app for tracking game stats in real time
• Rugby 7s fan site for tracking players/staff across social media, collecting and visualizing data and tournament info
• BideAndSeek tool that takes text input (usually from paste buffer) and uses known patterns to match it to a particular URL. 
• FamilyBank, an Alexa skill that allows a family to manage child allowance balances in Spending/Savings/Charity accounts.
• Tadima/Okaeri mobile app and server system utilizing BT beacons to do tasks when the device nears the beacon.
• Mobile phone based dating app with reverse social graph and in-app economy features. (with Romain David)
  
• ExqCor system for audience-collaborative real time script writing and on stage site-reading.
• Handheld locative devices and support system.                   
• Group notification system with web and voice drive components.
• Online retail management system with general shopping cart and browsing features.
• Online invitation management system.
• Online retailer aggregation system for gift registries.
• Ephemr: way to send ephemeral photos not subject to screenshot capture using biological vision technique.
• EyesOn: system for geolocation photos of a stationary object and aggregating into a fly-through visualization experience.
• Skedu: easy to use conference schedule creation and sharing tool with mobile app.
• iBurn: app for burning man attendees
• Real estate locative software for tracking home sales via user defined neighborhoods.
• Collaborative system for creating, distributing and reviewing instructional audio content.
• Genealogical collaborative online software.
• Personal contact organizational system for “social hubs” (with Joi Ito).
• Collaboration studies interdisciplinary mapping system (in conjunction with The Institute for the Future).
• Travel planning site that aggregates travel fares and lodging rates from a given destination.
• Adult social network with Flash-based interactive creative facilities.
• Sailors social network with educational, trip planning and historical reference facilities.
• Video blogging tools with special integration with programming interpreters.
• System for displaying synchronized videos on mobile devices for multidimensional storytelling or informational purposes.
• iNag reminder system with custom text and voice delivery (in conjunction with Todd Siegel)
• Taste Profile Builder multiplayer game (in conjunction with Todd Siegel)
• Internet loan system that facilitates offering and managing of loans.
• Blank White Server technology that allows user-driven server process customization.
• Systems that assist in strategy and real-time game history analysis for online poker players.
• 3-D anaglyphic (red/cyan) rendering and visualization software.
• Peer to peer social darknet that allows encrypted peer to peer communications via a user relative authentication and authorization system.
• Captcha software.
• Distributed (telecommuting) software engineering, consulting and management processes with a focus on “follow the sun” development.
• Virtual world/real world interface via RPC and audio/visual transmission.
• Online chess game analysis system.
• Photographic virtual tour software assembled from still photos..
• Social network and group messaging system mediated via mobile device and the internet.
• Flash mob coordination system via web network and mobile devices.
• Collaborative educational software that allows creation, sharing and engaging in “pop quizzes” tied into browser and OS activities.
• OpenCinema software that facilitates collaborative script writing, storyboarding, casting, shoot production management, marketing and distribution of cinematic works. Animation/graphical design and display software for decorative LED displays.
• Electronic Lab Notebook for chemists with fast molecular substructure search capabilities.
• Point of Sale retail management system for DOS systems.           

           

An Ode to Roblox as a Gathering Place

I haven't spent a lot of time in Roblox, even though both of my kids have spent significant amounts of their time and my money there, but this essay about how it compares to those places where teenagers hang out and create their own space away from the rest of the world really resonates. It makes me want to give it a try again.

Some choice excerpts:

On his first experience in Roblox:

In one of the very first games we played together (a work-in-progress safari game, the link to which I have since lost), V became a zebra, and I was a lioness. We ran around a broad plain populated by other animals, trees in the distance, low clouds overhead, and the buzzing of insects on a 2-minute loop. The chat was full of messages from prey to prey, predator to predator. V was almost immediately killed by a cheetah who then got in the chat to say, “Overyone come to pr,” “theres meat.” Summoned, I did so, and as I ate the still-living digital body of my friend in the company of a stranger in the shape of a wild dog, I thought, “Oh. This is special.”

On the game creation tools:

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Roblox Studio is the Toolbox. Other game engines have assets stores, but none of them feel like this: a rollicking, copyright-fucked, messy, virus-filled, unsortable pile of labor and of love.

On the long tail of forgotten worlds (games) waiting to be stumbled upon:

But the things I am making in Roblox are not what are unique or compelling about Roblox, and the same could be said for most of the big games that populate the platform’s front page. Instead, what is so special here are the millions of bizarre little worlds, all networked together and waiting (mostly empty, sometimes for over a decade) to be dropped into and explored with friends.

On the "brutal" monetization situation:

As a developer, you can monetize your own games in a variety of ways, from the above-board (tip jars! cosmetics!) to the scammy. Developers earn 70% of Robux spent in their games, which is a pretty standard cut for an app store/developer split. However, getting USD back out of Robux is a different story. The payout exchange rate drops to $0.0035 USD per 1 Robux, meaning the takeaway in real world currency is roughly 24.5% of any in-game commerce—a brutally extractive exchange rate.

Third Best Product of the Past Decade: HeatTech

My favorite new product of the past decade, after the iPad and the iPhone, is HeatTech from Japan. It's a new fabric that is comfortable, anti-static and most importantly unusually warm despite being very thin. I love it. Mie's mom introduced her to it back in December and she brought some back for me. Her mom sent another care package of HeatTech recently. I can't get enough. They make undershirts, underwear and socks. Exciting! Seriously, I love this stuff.