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

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

#51

Post by overgard »

dliff wrote: post #17

No, I don't think the quality has gone down. I think this outlook is a way of gatekeeping engineers who don't have a formal CS background. I happen to be one of them. Most people who go to a bootcamp (I did not, but have hired a developer who did) do not end up working in a role that requires understanding of the 5 topics above you mentioned, with the exception of cache and maybe algorithms. It's just not what most b…

I think you can get that knowledge from anywhere, and university education is only one path. That being said, that knowledge is REALLY important. I don't care if you come from a boot camp or not, but I wouldn't want to hire a developer that doesn't understand those 5 things (plus a lot more).

I mean, you're using "gate keeping" as a pejorative, but, gate keeping is super important in any profession. Doctors and lawyers have a lot of "gate keeping" too, but would you really want to go to a doctor without a medical degree or a lawyer that's been disbarred? You might say what engineers do isn't as important, but then, if you're running a software business that employees 50 people, that business shutting down because their engineers can't cut it is a fairly impactful thing to a lot of people.

There's nothing wrong with having novices at work. We need novices and apprentices, they're the lifeblood of our industry. The problem is that our novices don't know they're novices, and now we have novices teaching novices and telling them that a lot of important stuff doesn't matter. Or you have novices hiring novices, and now you have bloated engineering organizations that take a ton of time and manpower to do things that should be simple, and the entire industry gets a black eye for it.

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

#52

Post by papermachete »

overgard wrote: post #50
papermachete wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>demoscene Honestly, who has time these days?

People that care about their craft?

Yeah buddy I get home tired from work and the commute, crack open a cold one, and surf late 2000s forum posts on installing gentoo on a PS3.

There are many healthy activities to take up rather than play with deprecated/obscure tech. Not to be judgemental of course, I draw my line at home repairs.

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

#53

Post by sandofsky »

dliff wrote: post #17

No, I don't think the quality has gone down. I think this outlook is a way of gatekeeping engineers who don't have a formal CS background. I happen to be one of them. Most people who go to a bootcamp (I did not, but have hired a developer who did) do not end up working in a role that requires understanding of the 5 topics above you mentioned, with the exception of cache and maybe algorithms. It's just not what most b…

> I think this outlook is a way of gatekeeping engineers who don't have a formal CS background.

If a driving school doesn't teach parallel parking, pointing out that deficiency is not gatekeeping.

> It's just not what most bootcamps are targeted for.

If you're making $35,000 a year in the service industry, making $70,000 translating Photoshop files into HTML is life changing. If making that transition is your only goal, great.

But I think many people enter bootcamps with more ambitious goals. They'd like to move up the career ladder, take on more responsibilities, tackle more difficult problems, and receive commensurate compensation.

People I've talked to who come from non-CS backgrounds said they hit a wall years into their careers, having to play catch-up on the job. In my experience, CS didn't help me as a junior engineer; by the time I was senior, those concepts were invaluable.

When people with CS-gaps hit a wall in their career, we have a two options: we can give them more responsibilities anyway, which sets them up to fail, or we can identify gaps early and help them. That's the opposite of gatekeeping.

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

#54

Post by overgard »

papermachete wrote: post #52
overgard wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that care about their craft?

Yeah buddy I get home tired from work and the commute, crack open a cold one, and surf late 2000s forum posts on installing gentoo on a PS3. There are many healthy activities to take up rather than play with deprecated/obscure tech. Not to be judgemental of course, I draw my line at home repairs.

I'm not saying you should. Enjoy your free time. I just think it's weird to shame people that care more by implying they have too much time on their hands. Everyone has a level of caring that's appropriate for them.

There's a lot of things you can learn from writing demos that is still incredibly valuable. I wouldn't expect 99.9% of developers to know those things, but if I saw it on a resume? That'd totally jump off the charts to me and I'd definitely want to interview that person.

Don't shame expertise just because you choose to spend your time differently.

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

#55

Post by ubertoop »

Yes, I do and I think a lot of it has been driven by hard and fast (reckless) development of really odd frameworks like react native:

class AnimatedCollapsible extends React.Component { state = {expanded: false}; render() { return ( { LayoutAnimation.configureNext(LayoutAnimation.Presets.spring); this.setState({expanded: !this.state.expanded}); }}> Press me to {this.state.expanded ? 'collapse' : 'expand'}! {this.state.expanded && I disappear sometimes!} ); } }

Look at this code. How is this okay? When were framework developers taught that mixing business logic and UI is a good idea? Seriously?

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

#56

Post by mrbonner »

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…

Yes I do think about this occasionally at work for math heavy (LA and in house built convex optimization) problems. I cringe when I see tight loop with stream/functional java API. It’s not zero cost abstraction you know!

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

#57

Post by papermachete »

overgard wrote: post #54
papermachete wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah buddy I get home tired from work and the commute, crack open a cold one, and surf late 2000s forum posts on installing gentoo on a PS3. There are many healthy activities to take up rather than play with deprecated/obscure tech. Not to be judgemental of course, I draw my line at home repairs.

I'm not saying you should. Enjoy your free time. I just think it's weird to shame people that care more by implying they have too much time on their hands. Everyone has a level of caring that's appropriate for them. There's a lot of things you can learn from writing demos that is still incredibly valuable. I wouldn't expect 99.9% of developers to know those things, but if I saw it on a resume? That'd totally jump off…

I'm sorry it came off as shaming.

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

#58

Post by overgard »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #30

> 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 pa…

There are so many things to do with computers that have nothing to do with the web, where native code is incredibly important. There's probably even more of those jobs than there are web dev jobs, it's just that hacker news is a bit of an echo chamber.

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

#59

Post by dang »

overgard wrote: post #54
papermachete wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah buddy I get home tired from work and the commute, crack open a cold one, and surf late 2000s forum posts on installing gentoo on a PS3. There are many healthy activities to take up rather than play with deprecated/obscure tech. Not to be judgemental of course, I draw my line at home repairs.

I'm not saying you should. Enjoy your free time. I just think it's weird to shame people that care more by implying they have too much time on their hands. Everyone has a level of caring that's appropriate for them. There's a lot of things you can learn from writing demos that is still incredibly valuable. I wouldn't expect 99.9% of developers to know those things, but if I saw it on a resume? That'd totally jump off…

I appreciate what you're writing about demoscene programming, but the GP comment does not seem to me to be shaming. It most likely was just about the commenter not having time themselves. HN has a guideline for cases like this:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#60

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

overgard wrote: post #58
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #30

> 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 pa…

There are so many things to do with computers that have nothing to do with the web, where native code is incredibly important. There's probably even more of those jobs than there are web dev jobs, it's just that hacker news is a bit of an echo chamber.

Kind of a half-assed estimate but summing up web/mobile vs everything else (excluding QA) from the counts from this article https://learning.linkedin.com/blog/tech-tips/the-american-ci... gives us about 13% of software jobs being non-web. I lump in mobile with web since a lot of mobile apps are cross platform hybrid apps using web stuff.

Personally, I think even that estimate is too high; I'd be surprised if the true number wasn't somewhere closer to 5%.

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