In online learning for higher education: if you don't make mobile learning your first priority you will struggle to stay relevant in the market.
Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
41–50 of 104 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#42In tech most managers and recruiters think there is a skills shortage. This is untrue. The truth is that companies do not want to pay market rates for people with the right skills
What are those people (with the right skills) currently doing instead of working in tech?
The definition of "right skills" and "tech" is open to debate and basically they're working somewhere else for someone else perhaps at a better job title for a better standard of living. Possibly they're doing the same kind of job for a "non-tech" company internally.
If they insist on tech in SV or nothing, its like people who fail the culture fit criteria because they're a woman or minority. Uber and sales and non-tech employers, unlike tech, won't discriminate as much against women or people of color. If a white male can't get a job because of a different issue like skill vs pay, he can Uber and sales and non-tech employers just as well as a black or woman already has to do.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#43Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spre…
A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along. More complex systems often die when the person who knew them leaves. Plus all that stuff about crappy IT departments who don't act as if they exist to serve the actual purpose of the business.
I have seen enough legacy applications, applications so old no one understand how they work or dares to touch them, or for which we need to pull developers from retirement, software running only on old mainframes, to take the key man risk with business-developed software too seriously.
Same thing with reliability. So many of these IT supported applications that are supposed to survive a nuclear strike are down a day a week, while the basic access database pretty much hasn't seen a downtime during business hours since inception.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#44Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment. Funnily, the only persons asserting the value of diploma ... are PhD in ivy league business schools... selling expensive diplomas... Education is probably a large scale scam in its actual form: too long, too expensive, counter-productive and overrated. Cf Henri Mintzberg essay on why MBA for ins…
It depends a lot on which parts of education you're talking about. The first 9-12 years are required so that kids have something to do while their parents are at work. Learning stuff and interacting with other people is a nice way to spend their time. From that point, it depends on the subject you decide to study. It seems to me that medicine students get a lot of real life practice during their training, which makes…
> ...you're better of staying at home and watching online lectures and making your own pet projects to learn
While I agree that you can get pretty far with self-study on small projects, the most important parts of software engineering revolve around communication, especially with other developers and with expert tools. It's hard to get better at communication without, well, communicating.
Of course, one can get a lot of experience by contributing to open source projects or finding other ways to work on group projects.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#45Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spre…
Not just financial institutions either: I've worked for two global manufacturing businesses – in very different industries – where fundamental parts of their day-to-day operations were dependent on Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. I would absolutely echo all your points, especially the rationale behind "real software": it would have been far more expensive, have taken far longer to be delivered, and that's if…
My experience as well!
Once I was contacted by a friend who works on the QA department of a factory (belonging to a multinational company) to implement a system to keep track of the building process (what was soldered, who did it, what tolerances it must have, things like that). The factory's process was entirely modeled in Excel spreadsheets, with the caveat that they took almost 6 months to gather and deliver the data to the client after installing the product on the client site.
As it was a freelancing job, I gave them a very high hourly rate, such that it they could forget about it, as it was too much work for one person alone. But in hindsight, I also refused because most certainly it would imply that a lot of the workers in that departament would be made redundant (there were 30 workers there, I would say that at least half would be unnecessary after the system was up and running). If only management understood the huge savings that would be possible.. But in this case, I'm glad they don't!
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#46The mining industry relies on a single guess as to what an orebodies looks like when they plan their multi million/billion dollar mines. These guess orebodies are usually made by inferring local information based on their neighbours within a specified range, weighted proportionally to their distances. The method is still widely used even though it was made to deal with the fact that back in the day these calculations were done by hand. We have more correct methods but they're require computers and people don't like computers.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#47The mining industry relies on a single guess as to what an orebodies looks like when they plan their multi million/billion dollar mines. These guess orebodies are usually made by inferring local information based on their neighbours within a specified range, weighted proportionally to their distances. The method is still widely used even though it was made to deal with the fact that back in the day these calculations were done by hand. We have more correct methods but they're require computers and people don't like computers.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#48I live in China and run startups in e-commerce and food. China subsidizes up to 70% of postage fee, so Aliexpress sellers can sell cheap stuff for $2 with "free shipping" worldwide. There is no such thing as "free shipping" in e-commerce, it's just included in the price. An astonishing amount of people actually thinks it's free for the seller. When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root acces…
> When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root access to the Ministry of Information.
Wow, I'd like to know more, this seems especially interesting in regard to Chinese Bitcoin exchanges. They can keep most of their bitcoins in cold storage, but still having root access to the web server means user passwords, TLs, and so on. Is it just a web server directly connected to the internet that they need to have root access to? Or do you e.g. also need to provide access to the db server used?
edit: Also what's with the license? It's possible for me to buy hosting in China without any licenses.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#49Commercially available desktop automation systems are pretty terrible in terms of modern software design. Specifically lifecycle management, code versioning, third party tooling integration, and readability.
Unfortunately, they're aided by a compatibility moat built up of custom control support. Basically everything that doesn't support Microsoft UI Automation requires memory hijinks. And you'd be surprised by how much legacy software used weird third party libraries.
If you want more impressions or to chat, feel free to flip a mail at ethbro.co a g mail. Happy to talk, as god knows automation software could be improved.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#50The majority of commercial software writers are banging out poorly designed, fragile, inadequately tested and often borderline-unmaintainable code. I feel that people have a kind of double-think about this; they suspect this is the case, but they still expect software to work properly.
Amen.
I work at one of the most well-reputed software product companies in the world. We pride ourselves in hiring the very best, and try to do so through an interviewing program that simulates real life coding instead of an academic whiteboard situation.
Even amongst smart people, the bar for software quality is shockingly low. You will find ostensibly senior people again and again who given half a chance with espouse all day long the importance of high quality code, well-designed abstraction, separation of concerns, and good testing.
You can then let these people operate for a few hours by themselves and examine the result. In all but a few situations, it'll be a pile of mud that's designed counter to every one of the values they talk about. Often they're not aware of this, but it's also very common that they know it's sloppy, and don't really care. People don't do what's right, they do what's easy.
In a corporate environment, there is never a structure to identify the developers who are most likely to write good and maintainable code (it's too subjective) so that they can be put into a review capacity, and even if there were, there just isn't the bandwidth to review new additions to the depth that's required. In an ideal situation, many patches would be returned to author essentially asking for a complete rewrite, but that's difficult to justify given that building strong relationships inside the team needs to be considered.
The result is that all software developed in industry trends towards bad over time, and it appears to be as absolute of a universal constant as entropy. You can find localized exceptions, but they're often only temporarily good as eventually more people contribute more features.