I strongly disagree with your understanding of software engineering. In my experience, the best engineers adapt as layers of abstraction permit them to no longer be as concerned about the lower level considerations, such as the ones you noted. The engineers most useful to a business are generalists who have an enormous breadth of knowledge and can specialize at will, where and when it becomes necessary. Much of the knowledge you’ve acquired in the past, will and should atrophy as it becomes less useful. You need to stop having a fixed impression of what a software engineer is and realize that the definition is constantly evolving.
Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
91–97 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Go on then, go look for them. Go search on job boards and fine all those mystical jobs. They are the tiny minority.
The last job I had was doing graphics coding for a video game, and before that it was c++ CAD programming. They’re not hard to find at all. They probably seem more rare because the barrier to entry is much higher but I think that's a good thing.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.h…
I agree with the rule, but I only accused him of shaming after he drew a broad insulting caracature of a community I'm involved in and actually understand (the demoscene) by suggesting that it just involves people "browsing early 2000 forums and installing gentoo on PS3s". I think if you said that to any demo coder they'd tell you to eat sand. It's not even remotely close to what that scene is about. If there's a criticism to be made here, perhaps it's about not making assumptions about groups you know nothing about?
I made no assumptions other than what he explicitly said, which was insulting and displayed ignorance of a community he clearly does not understand. My original comment was also only "People who care about their craft?", which was simply saying that people get into demo coding because they care about doing something worthwhile (getting the most out of their machines in an artistically satisfying and interesting way).
There's a common social anti-pattern in most tech forums of hand-waving away any complex domain knowledge that the person doesn't personally use as "useless". I have no regrets about stating the contrary.
I am amused that I am the one getting a warning about this though. I'm not the one that made a drive-by ambiguous comment that could easily be read as singling out a fun community as being a waste of time. I just pointed out that that's what he just did.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.h…
I agree with the rule, but I only accused him of shaming after he drew a broad insulting caracature of a community I'm involved in and actually understand (the demoscene) by suggesting that it just involves people "browsing early 2000 forums and installing gentoo on PS3s". I think if you said that to any demo coder they'd tell you to eat sand. It's not even remotely close to what that scene is about. If there's a cri…
I see now that the problem was that you pointed it out in a way that made sense to you, but not to the rest of us who lack all that background information. If you had responded in the first place with the explanation you've posted here, it would have been much easier to understand what the issue was. Now that I read this, I get your point, and I also see how the problem started with the GP comment, not yours. But this was not at all clear to me before! and I'm sure not to many readers.
HN has been super impressed and favorable to the feats of demoscene programming for over a decade now, so hopefully there's a lot more of that than this.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go on then, go look for them. Go search on job boards and fine all those mystical jobs. They are the tiny minority.
The last job I had was doing graphics coding for a video game, and before that it was c++ CAD programming. They’re not hard to find at all. They probably seem more rare because the barrier to entry is much higher but I think that's a good thing.
Selective hearing from you.
You claim there's MORE than web dev jobs. Go to a job site, type in developer, and count the web dev jobs. Now count the non-web dev jobs.
Worse still, you're repeating this and replying to me even after ThrowawayR2 gave you a hard number to go off (a mere 13%).
Not only do you have web businesses, but also almost all enterprise apps are now web apps. I'd guess that those are the vast majority of jobs in the market, but again you probably won't believe that.
They're all web dev jobs because it's easy to deploy. 20 years ago, I used to work in places that had to roll out desktop apps to everyone. It was a nightmare, as well as a security nightmare as they had to have the db open to the whole network.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#96Yes. The quality of software has definitely gone down. Then again, so has the quality of everything else, from engineering to urban planning to infrastructure maintenance. A possible explanation for this phenomena is that the global mean IQ has also fallen quite a bit over the last 50 years and continues to fall[0]. [0]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/IQ/1950-2050/
That's quite curious, because previously I thought the average intelligence was rising, to the point where the IQ had to be renormalized regularly for the mean to stay at 100. This source [0] seems to agree with that view. What's the deal here? [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/intelligence
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Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#97Can you suggest a product update in the last 8 years that is clearly better than its previous version?