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Ask Slashdot: Transitioning From 'Hacker' To 'Engineer'?
antifoidulus writes "I'm about to get my masters in Computer Science and start out (again) in the 'real world.' I already have a job lined up, but there is one thing that is really nagging me. Since my academic work has focused almost solely on computer science and not software engineering per se, I'm really still a 'hacker,' meaning I take a problem, sketch together a rough solution using the appropriate CS algorithms, and then code something up (using a lot of prints to debug). I do some basic testing and then go with it. Obviously, something like that works quite well in the academic environment, but not in the 'real world.' Even at my previous job, which was sort of a jack-of-all-trades (sysadmin, security, support, and programming), the testing procedures were not particularly rigorous, and as a result I don't think I'm really mature as an 'engineer.' So my question to the community is: how do you make the transition from hacker (in the positive sense) to a real engineer. Obviously the 'Mythical Man Month' is on the reading list, but would you recommend anything else? How do you get out of the 'hacker' mindset?"
Add Code Complete to the reading list as well as The Pragmatic Programmer
Don't worry. You don't seriously think you'll get to do any "software engineering" when you start, do you. You'll start -like everyone- programming fontends/GUIs, and let the more interesting parts to the more senior people.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I'm not sure you should try to get out of the 'hacker' mindset. Iterative innovation and continuous integration is much more rewarding than any waterfall approach. Good luck and follow your heart.
If you can actually design a solution, throw together a suite of unit tests (that ideally show the basic API,) and deploy it to production, you are already ahead of 95% of the "software engineers."
An "engineer" is somebody who takes the time to understand a problem, and creates something to solve that.
Having done software from scales ranging from "quick shopping cart application" to enterprise scale organizational relationship management software, the only real difference between the two is that with the latter, you create a large number of smaller projects roughly the size of the aforementioned shopping cart application, except that the "users" are often other pieces of the same system. In larger systems, you'll be talking with other developers who have built or manage the pieces your parts will communicate with. You'll read more documentation, and it will be generally of higher quality than the shopping cart scripts.
Don't *ever* lose the "hacker" mentality - exactly what you described is what software engineering is. The toughest part IMHO is getting to an understanding of what the end user actually needs. That's far and away harder than all the other stuff, which boils down to implementation details once you understand the algorithms.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I never considered the two to be mutually exclusive.
But really, that's for project management.
1) Go read up on the industry standard IDEs & debuggers for the programming environment you will be working in.
2) If your job is really consistent and stable (ie: Java programs day in day out), then go master your IDEs & debuggers. Learn their customization capabilities.
3) Learn to organize your personal code library and build up your core tool set in a way that is functionally reusable and searchable.
4) Learn to program your work in a way that adds to and complements #3.
5) Learn to document your code and processes.
6) Read a book on communicating to management (sry someone else will need to provide a good example), this will set you apart from your companions.
I meant to give you my 2 cents, but dropped a nickle... keep it. Good luck.
Being a software engineer instead of a hacker is all about predictability:
There's more to each of these items, of course, but it's all about making it simple (KISS) and predictable. This sets a software engineer apart from a mere hacker.
For experience, there is no substitute for working 8 hours a day, week after week, trying to write programs and make them better. Always be thinking about how you can improve the program you are working on (even if you don't actually have the time to do it), and you will quickly improve.
Even if you are just stuck debugging someone else's code (90% of what I've done over the last year), the process of doing that 1,600 hours a year will really improve your skills.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'd recommend reading the classic software design book Design Patterns by the "Gang of Four" (Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides). I know that "design patterns" has become something of an overused buzzword, but that book is without a doubt one of the best books about software architecture I have ever read. It helps you learn how to think about designing object-oriented software in ways that result in re-usable, understandable code. I don't think I really saw the power of good object-oriented design until I read Design Patterns.
I think the main difference between "hacker" and "engineer" is the level of detail and concerns on corner cases that you want your code to be able to handle and/or tolerate. Having worked as an engineer for some years, basically I boil down the job to three things -- 1) good clear communication of what the problem to solve actually is, 2) solving the problem such that the solution "meets spec", 3) trying to make sure that the solution continues to work within tolerance in any typical adverse conditions the solution needs to handle. Occasionally you may need to do some kind of formal verification that the solution will be wtihin tolerance in typical adverse conditions. With programming this verification might involve a test suite, code review, fuzzy input testing, memory leak testing, security audit, etc.
But in your particular situation it sounds like you're going to learn what you need on your own on the job one way or the other, so for now I'd say just relax and figure out what you need when you get there. i.e. I think you might be over-thinking this right now. ;-)
Find someone in your new office to show you the ropes. Every major piece of software tends to have its own issues. For server software you might be looking at analyzing piles of log output. For gaming it might be real time perf metrics. Chances are, the biggest thing to get comfortable with is your debugging->fixing->building->testing->checkin cycle. Make sure you figure out how to get the road blocks out of your way. If you're working on something painful where there's a ton of time wasted rebuilding to try out your ideas, maybe there's a better way to build/patch in a more granular way. Your peers will also be interested in any process improvements. If you can optimize and speed up a process that makes you more effective, share it with the team. People really respect and appreciate anyone who can make their life easier.
And *really* spend some serious time trying to learn your software's object model, lifecycles, and data structures. When you start there will be an overwhelming amount of information. You need to accept that. But once you've got a bit of a foothold, CONTINUE learning. You want to be an expert. It takes discipline to get a broad and deep enough understanding to truly be efficient and effective. Be interested in the work of your closest peers. Chances are, what they have learned over the years can be incredibly helpful to enhancing your efficiency. At the end of the day, you'll be primarily judged on reliability and throughput. Whatever you can do to meet your goals, the better! And never be afraid to get help. It doesn't matter if someone helps you finish something. All your manager cares about is that the task is done. If they assign it to you, you are responsible for driving that task to completion. If you don't have an a clear idea of how to do something, that's your cue to immediately find someone to brainstorm with.
And career-wise, it's easier to advance in the earlier years. So when optimizing towards success and a happy retirement, a lot of it comes down to how quickly you can advance in your early years. Down the road, it's as much time as ability. To start with, it's all work ethic. Put in that extra 10% to be the hardest worker and you'll be getting promotions year after year. Work through those lower levels as fast as you can so you can enjoy the rest.
Good luck :)
Engineering a house:
1. Gather requirements
2. Write a spec
3. Design house to spec
4. Build house to design
Hacking a house:
1. Nail boards together
2. Step back
3. Is it a house yet?
4. No, go to 1
Both methods work, but I'd prefer the former to the latter...
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
Ignore the assholes. Debates about the meaning of 'Engineer' aside, what you really need to learn is maintainability, testing, and patience. Writ code that you wouldn't mind maintaining if you weren't the original author. Don't repeat yourself. Follow coding standards. And most of all, learn to work with others and leave your ego at the door. That's what separates a 'hacker' from a professional.
Welcome to the farse of "Software Engineering", the sooner you realise that the way things happen in the real world is just (as you say) hacking stuff together and debugging it the better. The only added fun that you will have no idea what 70% of your codebase does and neither does anyone else.
While Software Engineering never provided any credible way of _building_ the systems, what it used to do is provide ways where you could find out exactly what you need before you start building it. These days we have Agile instead, so we don't do that, we just pick an idea at random and hope to god it's either right or we can change it.
My advice: Learn to read code. Learn to find out what the system actually does, not what the comments says it does. Learn to read it then work out how to slowly change it into what you need. It's the difference between the respected senior guy who fixes the problems and the detested junior guy who creates them. I work with a commercial 3D game engine and the fact I know every line of it is worth far more to anyone than how many lines I can myself write in a day.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Your contrast is not really hacker vs. engineer, but agile vs. waterfall.
If you think building software is like building a building (spec it out in detail before you start, write tons of documentation, resist any change orders)--that's "waterfall" methodology, what you are referring to as "engineering."
If you want to start with a software sketch, show the sketch to your customer, and then incrementally improve it until the shape develops into something really useful and valuable--that's "agile" methodology, what you are referring to as "hacking."
Both are totally legitimate forms of software engineering. But waterfall-style "engineering" is cumbersome, slow, extremely expensive, and tedious. If you love programming, pick a small company with an agile mentality. I've done both styles, and I don't ever want to work in a large software shop again!
Meh.
Which came first, the engineer or the engineering degree?
Kid-proof tablet..
Sounds like you already did.
The biggest problem most techs face is their own arrogance. Your desire to mature as an engineer sets you apart from many of your peers.
Perhaps on a more practical note, I'd suggest that you plan to spend six months to a year working in a beauracracy nightmare shop (eg a bank).
If and when you come out of the end of that experience, you will be much better positioned to apply the theoretical knowledge, and you will also be sufficiently jaded with process overkill.
However, my strongest suggestion would be to keep doing what you're doing. Allow a little time each week to continue developing your expertise. That habit distinguishes the masters from the journeymen.
>nobody in the 'real world' is any different
And the public wonders why most software is bug-ridden, badly designed shite.
So you don't get confused with a real, actual engineer.
I have a hotshot hacker working for me right now who thinks he knows everything, but he is just a stupid little hacker who thinks his dick grows every time he uses vi. Don't be like that.
You are already on the right path: You recognized in yourself that you need to grow professionally and that you need to get away from the little dark screen and see how it fits into the world.
Three points:
* See the first for the trees
* Have the balls to say "I don't know"
* Education, education, education
Here is the most important thing to remember: A hacker sees his own little thing that he hacks on. An engineer see how that thing fits into the world and people who uses it. See the forest that your little tree grows in.
All companies and industries have standards, habits and a culture that it uses and the people are almost always NOT used to or interested in the little details that fascinate a hacker.The people out there will not change their entire culture to fit your hacking needs. The job of any technology and the engineers that build it is to facilitate the and simplify the lives of other people.
Professionality means that you take responsibility for your work. That includes taking responsibility for the interface to the users.
Read this:
The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/9780132542913)
Number two: You cannot know everything. Accept it.
There is nothing wrong with expanding your horizons and going past your field, but when you are in a terrain where you are uncomfortable make sure your peers know it and make sure you have a mentor and listen to him. Or delegate to an expert. People will have a much higher esteem for you professionally if you have the balls to say "I don't know" instead of lying. It can be hard sometimes, but it beats being known as an arrogant little know-it-all.
Point number three: Education, education, education. Always assume you know nothing. Read up about your industry outside of the computer part. Computers are just a tool to make the gears turn. You will be a much better engineer if you know what the gears look like.
Good luck. You already took the first step and you will make it.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
First off, a rant. Either your Computer Science program/dept does not truly deserve the name or you did not fully attempt to master the curriculum as it is intended. I know it sounds harsh, I am mostly annoyed by the constant misconceptions about CS that pop up here on /. from time to time.
A masters degree in Computer Science builds upon the basics of theoretical CS (theory of computation, languages, grammar, logics, discrete math...), technical CS (microcontroller, assembly) and applied CS (functional, OO and logic programming) from a undergraduate CS degree and extends it with topics about Networks (Sockets, Protocols, OSI Layers, Routing), AI (both classical AI with logic, planning and formal systems as well as machine learning), Operating Systems (for instance reimplementing parts of and studying Tannebaums Minix, Filesystems), Databases (Tuple relational calculus, OO databases, inductive databases, knowledge discovery) and also, and this is what I think you definitely missed out on, Software Engineering. This would involve developement models (V-model, Waterfall, extreme programming), UML, testing, maybe software verification, refactoring and so on.
Note that there is not much hacking (in a positive or negative sense) involved here. Great hackers do not necessarily need to be computer scientists, and competent computer scientists definitely do not need to be or leave the university as any from of hackers (be it some low level C pointer wizards or some OS file system experts).
I think what you meant to say is that the university did not teach you how to code in an industrial/enterprise setting. And rightfully so, thats the job of a vocational/trade instituion, but not of an university.
However, let me give you some pointers that helped me to grasp a bit more beyond purely academic programming.
1. Patterns. As some others have pointed out, this pretty much a must to grok in any OO project. The Gamma book is good, if you are looking for some really good intermediate more applied Java book about this, Effective Java by Joshua Bloch (he developed, among other things, the Java Collections).
2. Revision control management. One word: git. Anything beyond toy problems should not be touched without revision control. Watch the video with Linus Torvalds (the creator) to get motivated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
A pretty good git tutorial that I like can be found here: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/ch01.html
3. Read competent peoples code of the language of your choice! github and gitorious are a real treasure. The more you do it, the more you will discover more efficient approaches of how to implement certain concepts. And you will also see a lot of bad code and learn how to spot it.
4. Testing. JUnit is pretty basic to grasp. Some people swear by TDD (test driven development, write the test case first and then the implementation of what to test), I find this a bit extreme, however unit testing is a must to know.
5. Program yourself! Pair programming can be very helpful if your mentor is knowledgable and able to teach, otherwise do it yourself. Do not hack for the hell of it (although it can be fun), but focus instead on clean and clear concepts that you want to implement and improve upon. And document your code (doxygen or javadoc are your friends).
"with proprietary closed source software [...] compared to the FOSS model"
I think you are mistaking possibilities with realities. Yes, open source has the *potential* to more eyeballs but then, all so much FOSS projects have are the two eyeballs from its only developer. Yes, FOSS has the potential to get rid of absurd timelines but then you see so many projects that deliver on a deadline, ready or not ready, or answer you about a bug report with a variant of "I don't have time to deal with old bugs, I prefer to expend my time on more bug-ridden features". Yes FOSS is not necesarily driven by maximizing profit, but they aren't necesarily driven by its quality (i.e.: they can be driven by it fun factor).
"because there is no profit"
Who told you that? That's obviouosly false. They can and certainly are for profit in a lot of situations, it's only that their revenue stream is not on selling use licenses but in the development fact itself (features on demand; I worked for a company like that -the problem is when this becomes a freemium model where known to be necessary features are not developed unless something pay for them) or in installation and support (and then it can be possible that never good install procedures or documentation will ever be produce).
"I wouldn't call it "hacking" though. I think its actually called "extreme programming" or "agile software development". "
But then antifoidulus is right: hacking something together and pushing it into production is, well, hacking and certainly has nothing to do per se with extreme or agile programming. Your approach can lead to a good solution (if the problem realm is not so difficult and you are good at it) as well as to a fast pile of shit that only worses as time and feature crap goes by. As such is the opposite to engineering, which is about insure the results.
You know, things have changed in East Europe during last decades. Electricity 0.14 EUR/kWh here vs. 0.15$/kWh in USA. Gas 1.4 EUR/l vs 1$/l in USA (caused mostly by taxes but that doesn't matter). Chicken meat 2 EUR/kg vs 2$/kg in USA. House property 1300EUR/m2 in Slovakia vs 200$/m2 in USA.
Perhaps I've picked wrong sources or wrong goods. I challenge you to provide your numbers and I'll tell you the prices here (where the average income is less than 800EUR/month). I'm damn sure, that cost of living here is NOT a fraction of cost of living in US.
Go with it, just like the guys that call themselves Architects, Gurus, Batman or whatever, just don't try to pretend like some of the others above that it makes you equivalent to a professional engineer.
I'm not an engineer. I used to be an engineer. I've worked in power stations, oil refineries, offices etc and helped educate engineering students at a university and been a member of IEAust and ASTM. However, due to a lack of jobs a bit over a decade ago and a career change now that I run the computer systems for a company and write a bit of code every now and again I'm not an engineer anymore. You can call yourself whatever you like and are perfectly justifed to use the title given to you but don't expect everyone to take it seriously, especially since professional engineers have a code of ethics that you do not have to stick to.
He means running it and seeing what happens by adding lots of System.out.println();s or whatever the language of choice equivalent is instead of using a debugger. Well, I assume that's what he means.
I'm a software developer by trade, and I'm also old enough to be of the generation where one has pride in one's work but, in my experience, many places where I've worked don't seem to share that same pride in a job well done. Most care far more about getting something, no matter how "bug-ridden" or "badly designed" out of the door so they can bill the customer.
I always remember this quotation from the great Niklaus Wirth:
In a well known interview with Dr. Carlo Pescio, published in Software Development, June 1997, Pescio asks Wirth:
You probably know about the 'good enough software' concept popularized by Yourdon. In many senses, it's just a rationalization of what's happening in the software world: the first company hitting the market with a feature-rich product is more likely to win the battle than the careful, quality-seeking company. Do you think there is anything developers and software organizations can do about that? I guess many developers would be happy to be given more time to develop better software, but at the same time they are rushed in the name of corporate survival. 'Educating the users' seems more a wild dream than a possibility.
to which Wirth replies:
'Good enough software' is rarely good enough. It is a sad manifestation of the spirit of modern times, in which an individual's pride in his/her work has become rare. The idea that one might derive satisfaction from his or her successful work, because that work is ingenious, beautiful, or just pleasing, has become ridiculed. Nothing but economic success and monetary reward is acceptable. Hence our occupations have become mere jobs. But quality of work can be expected only through personal satisfaction, dedication and enjoyment. In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensable luxury, but a simple necessity.
Yep, with most of the big engineering firms I've worked for, it's maybe 5% hacking and 95% documentation and packaging. If you can enjoy doing mostly the latter (finishing the last 10% of a project that ends up taking 90% of the time), then you should be able to get along fine. If you spend all of your time doing the former, then you will quickly become reviled by your co-workers :-P
Here's the junk that seemed important to engineering companies:
So, in summary, if you can find your way around some sort of toolchain that involves doxygen, mercurial, make/ant, cobbler, jenkins, and redmine, to the point that you can hand a junior engineering a piece of paper (oops, I meant email a link to a desktop instruction) such that the junior engineer can build their own working copy of the product by themselves with nothing but cold iron and a revision tag, then you're doing well.
But really, the real trick is to figure out how to get everyone on the project team to use the same toolchain :-P
Engineering is all about process. To transition from hacker/cs-grad to software engineer, you need rigorous developmental processes that guide how you specify (requirements), design (modeling), write (coding practices), build (turning code into runable programs), test (unit and system), document (in-line, reference, and user), and preserve (version control and release management) your work. Until you have internalized and utilize such processes, you will remain a "hacker", not an engineer.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.