I encourage juniors in my team to interview staff level engineers all the time.
A significant part of a staff level and higher engineer is mentoring. I am looking to you to help train the juniors.
If you appear intimidating, the juniors are not going to be comfortable reaching out to you for help. If you appear condescending, same effect.
I explicitly ask the juniors to not evaluate the candidate from a technical skills point of view. Obviously that's a waste of time and an insult to the senior person. Instead, I ask them to evaluate the candidate from a human perspective. Does the candidate use every opportunity to showcase his/ her seniority? Does the candidate put you at ease?
> Have you ever seen a config file where everything is commented out, but shows every option and the default value? I love those configs.
> Funny, I hate those. I want to have a minimal file that I feel like I crafted just for my purposes
There is no harm in providing the full config and allowing the user to minimize it.
At least that way I can do a `grep -v ^#` or something to avoid showing the comments and still get a minimal file when I want to see the minimal version
yep, currently it forces our engineers to use VS Code or a terminal-based setup (or GitHub Codespaces). Hopefully Goland / IntelliJ catches up in this year...
Internal resistance led to (allegedly) discontinuing that Chinese search surveillance engine (dragonfly was it?). Google employees care a lot more than typical ones it seems and we should give them more credit than “I hope your kidding”
> When you are getting money the amounts Google pays their employees, you couldn't care less if everyone in the world says "we hate you, you suck"
That kind of exquisitely proves my point. Back 15-20 years ago, the pitch was "if you're really smart and want to make gobs of money, but don't mind selling your soul, go to Wall Street. If you want to change the world (for the better) go to Silicon Valley."
Yes, of course that was always somewhat marketing speak, but it was also fairly representative of how people thought. This idea that people are just in it for the money, or just in it to "build your resume", are the kind of behaviors Googlers from an earlier era would have looked at with utter distain.
I thought people shouldn't post anything about bash on HN? The minute you post something about bash immediately you will draw out a whole bunch of folks from the wood works talking about how bash sucks and should never be used for anything more than 3 or 4 lines and how they replaced bash with python or some thing else, immediately in turn drawing out a bunch of other folks talking about how bash should be replaced with power shell and how you can parse objects better ... .
I had a really fun project earlier in the year prototyping a load testing tool for a blockchain in Bash while 4 other developers wrote a ‘better’ one in Haskell. Bash can get results quickly, although it’s not maintainable! Still, a decent kloc or two of bash with performance results within the sprint.
I had become annoyed by the Python bigots who will tell us about how easy to read their language is because its notation is clean, how all its functionality is "intuitive", how any combination of Python-based Rube-Goldberg Machine systems is the best.
Oh please stop white knighting. The resources spent doing something unnecessary can be better spent elsewhere. No need to break scripts that have a hard coded master keyword in the.
Nobody is offended it's being changed. Nobody is offended it says master either , it's just plain unnecessary and in general doing stupid and unnecessary things is a bad idea because it prevents the person doing so from doing something useful and good
Here's the real question - So you are convinced you don't need Vim, right? Why are you on this thread?
No one's saying vim is superior. However, you need to have an open mind to understand the alternatives.
It's not like Vim is a paid product and by you not using it, Vim is going to die out soon or anything.
If you dont' like it, great? You are happy with the alternative, great. You seem like you just want to deliberately start an argument and then prove you are right, but why?
I am in this thread because this is not a thread about how Vim is great, it's a thread about how Vim became popular, which I honestly don't understand in a day and age where modes are completely unnecessary. I see lots of happy Vim users telling the rest of us how they are so happy with Vim and they can't understand how anyone can do anything without it... so I thought I should point out I feel extremely productive on any non-mode text editor (all my shortcuts work even in this HN editor, on a browser, in Word, basically anywhere except old editors like Vim). Been programming for nearly 2 decades now and even when I started, I thought Vim was a tool from a time when we didn't have Ctrl and Arrow keys and we already had better alternatives.
At this point, I feel like "I use Vim" is like "BTW I use Arch", said usually with an air of superiority as if choosing "the hard way" was somehow smart.
which I honestly don't understand in a day and age where modes are completely unnecessary.
Modes are everywhere. My microwave has a defrost mode. Cars have reverse mode. Pill bottles have modes where the bottle has to be held differently to open it.
Modelessness isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I’ve used many editors on the Mac—BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, Chocolate, TextMate, TextWrangler and a few more obscure ones.
I switched to Vim and haven't looked back nearly 10 years ago because the "modeless" editors had limitations and issues I didn't like.
I used Emacs when I worked at MIT because that's what everyone used, but it never took for me when I had to use Unix.
What the author didn't mention is that when Ruby on Rails was the new hotness, so many of the leaders in that movement were Mac users, on TextMate. But when TextMate went into limbo, and then eventually died, that tribe needed a new editor and they essentially all moved to Vim.
Many of the early Rails videos were done on Vim; they were quite influential.
I wanted an editor I wouldn't outgrow in a few months and Vim fit the bill nicely.
And to this day, I feel like I'm pretty proficient with Vim but I also know I'm using like 10-15% of what Vim can do and it's nice to know all that capability is there for when I need it.
So if I understand you correctly you're angry that people choose to work in a way that you think is unnecessary and that they're just doing it to show off.
I can't speak for other vim users but I think it's pretty obvious to us how other users work without vim and we know you can be productive without it.
Personally I make a point of not telling people to learn vim but equally I think, for example, not having a shortcut to repeat a complex visual selection is a pain.
I never feel the need to enter a thread about IDEs and point out this missing feature (especially if it's a program I don't actually know well and that might not be the case).
However I often see people that don't know vim well make statements like "vim can't do x" without actually checking if that's true.
Then we look "superior" when we point out how to do it in vim.
It's hard to win because your argument sounds like an emotional one.
To win what? This is not a contest or even a debate where one point of view may prevail... we're just expressing our opinions about Vim and its alternatives here. Obviously, if you like Vim, great! But it seems to me you're the emotional one if you find it necessary to question anyone pointing out they believe Vim is not a good tool at all (it promotes modals, which should have died as soon as they became unnecessary due to hardware improvements as they are objectively harder to use) and wondering why it's still somewhat popular.
I use vim as a boring config editor in terminals. I don't think it's the best editor by a long shot and even something as basic as Atom is more productive for code editing for me.
The idea of customizing your vim setup for maximum productivity doesn't appeal to me. It always ended up in a mess and over ssh it's pointless.
I'm glad we are not co workers then. I would hate it if you decided that my time is not important and that whenever you walk over to my desk I should drop everything I'm doing to serve you.
It's an office, not an isolation chamber. You have to work together.
That may be a frustrating concept for some -- from your comment it appears you only care about your work, you don't care if others' work is completed or the larger corporate objectives are met -- but that's why teamwork is so important.
Yes, it would be great if everyone could just singlestream on their own tasks but that's not how companies work. I'm sorry you find helping your coworkers to be such a frustration and distraction from your own personal achievements.
A significant part of a staff level and higher engineer is mentoring. I am looking to you to help train the juniors.
If you appear intimidating, the juniors are not going to be comfortable reaching out to you for help. If you appear condescending, same effect.
I explicitly ask the juniors to not evaluate the candidate from a technical skills point of view. Obviously that's a waste of time and an insult to the senior person. Instead, I ask them to evaluate the candidate from a human perspective. Does the candidate use every opportunity to showcase his/ her seniority? Does the candidate put you at ease?