Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

#21

Post by CM30 » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 6:51 PM UTC

Nah, I don't think so. Software engineering has always been a field where the barrier to entry is quite low, and where a lot of people didn't need a CS background to get started there. And for many of them, they still don't. Web development for instance requires more knowledge of how browsers work rather than the computers they run on.

Even so, the number of mediocre/terrible software engineers and web developers doesn't seem to have changed much overall. We all know of old school desktop software that was incredibly poorly written. We all know examples of games which were incredibly poorly written. There have been badly coded, badly designed websites from people with little experience in the field since the web first became a thing.

Plus people joined because it paid decently back then too. The dotcom boom brought in a lot of people who only cared about the wage slip at the end of each month. The early days of gaming had tons of people jumping on the hype train for money, whether it was the home computer scene in the 80s in the UK or the early console gaming one when Atari was still a big player. Or perhaps for every generation since.

As for whether they'll stick around if it crashes? It depends. It may very well not crash at all. And while a certain percentage will leave if it does, others will stick around and learn more instead.

So no, I don't think the quality has gone down. There have always been people from informal backgrounds, a knowledge of CS hasn't ever been necessary or mainstream overall, and mediocre to terrible programmers and developers have been a thing since the field began.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

#22

Post by vanniv » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 6:53 PM UTC

Most engineers have always been terrible. Been true for decades.

But perhaps with the demand for engineers really high, and the economy at full employment, and the big tech companies growing and also explicitly optimizing hiring practices for things other than "best SWE skills", more of the not very competent folks are getting into the places you don't expect to find them

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

#23

Post by leoh » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 6:53 PM UTC

hvass wrote: post #10

I am not a developer, so take this with a huge grain of salt, but this comment sounds a bit like old school photographers saying iPhone and Instagram are not for “real photographers.”

I think that's right. Tangentially related: have been thinking a lot lately how tone often (but not always) implies some kind of distortion in thinking. To a degree where you can _anticipate_, but not necessarily intelligently articulate why some position is incorrect.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

#24

Post by rinchik » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

hvass wrote: post #10

I am not a developer, so take this with a huge grain of salt, but this comment sounds a bit like old school photographers saying iPhone and Instagram are not for “real photographers.”

Yep. Exactly.

“How one can be a car mechanic without knowing how to blacksmith and forge car parts manually, from metal ore”.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

#25

Post by manmal » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

hvass wrote: post #10

I am not a developer, so take this with a huge grain of salt, but this comment sounds a bit like old school photographers saying iPhone and Instagram are not for “real photographers.”

As a software engineer with CS background, I first wanted to disagree, but have to say that the analogy checks out.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

#26

Post by grogenaut » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

DavidWoof wrote: post #16

I honestly can't remember a time in my career when I've looked at a codebase and thought to myself "what this dev really needs is a more thorough understanding of CPU pipelines and virtual memory". Ed Yourdon once wrote something like "No project was ever cancelled because the developer couldn't address the serial bus". I'm much more concerned with bootcamp graduates not understanding good class design or appropriate…

I don't know of any project that was ever cancelled because of poor class design or lack of unit tests either. Sure they were hack jobs but if they met the needs of the customer then they were successful. Likely successful enough to be worth hiring you to fix those shortcuts. And allow you the free time to complain about craftsmanship on a public forum.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

#27

Post by nickysielicki » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

My feeling is that the quality of software engineering has gone up dramatically in the past decade.

> It feels like a lot engineers now days don't seem to have a good cs background. They don't see to understand things like cache, paging, virtual memory, cpu pipelines, algorithms or other things pretty fundamental to CS.

Pipelines and caches and paging and virtual memory are stupidly complicated in modern processors. If you claim to understand these things and you don't either work at the company or have an NDA with the company so that you can implement drivers, you're probably full of shit.

What I can't stand are the "highly-ranked" schools that introduce students to a very basic and abstract (and outdated) notion of these topics, and students enter the workforce overconfident that they have understood the topic. You haven't understood the topic, and having some rough notion of the topic can often times be worse than if you didn't know anything at all.

tl;dr: Modern processors are proprietary IP and you should be skeptical of anyone who claims to deeply understand it but doesn't work for the company making it. You do not need to understand how one works to be a great software engineer.

https://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

#28

Post by sys_64738 » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

SW development isn't real engineering as computer scientists are not real engineers. That being said, we do have a generation of coders who are proficient at googling for terms then doing copying/pasting. They hit brick walls when it comes to debugging and testing code.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

#29

Post by manmal » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

Recently I had the pleasure of working with people in a project who I (CS background) hired myself, and I now couldn’t care less about how much they know about memory paging. The most important traits to me are:

1. Intrinsic motivation to be productive and solve problems

2. Ability to communicate well, especially via specifications and Slack.

Anything else can be learned in a few months max.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

#30

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

> It feels like a lot engineers now days don't seem to have a good cs background. They don't see to understand things like cache, paging, virtual memory,cpu pipelines, algorithms or other things pretty fundamental to CS.

Yes but nearly every software developer job is web stuff these days and in the web world, they don't need it. (Cue all the HN posters saying "college is a waste of money" and "it's just a piece of paper".) All they need to be able to do is glue together libraries and frameworks created by people who do happen to have good CS backgrounds. You really have to go out of your way to find jobs that actually require knowing "cache, paging, virtual memory, cpu pipelines, algorithms", etc.

> When we have the next industry crash (.com crash) will these people stick around?

It won't crash, because everybody needs a web site these days, but it will become commoditized because the bar to entry keeps getting lower and lower. I've seen some comments already on HN saying that software pay is gradually becoming bimodal.