Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#61

Post by ellius » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 2:17 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #43

brongondwana wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think to this point, the organizations that will really succeed in the future are the ones who aggressively hire people with a strong cross of building simple, usable and understandable technical tools who also understand business logic and can communicate. I think soon people will be able get further with some basic R/Python and the ability to write a good email than many of the more technically skilled workers without those abilities.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#62

Post by user5994461 » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 2:21 PM UTC

mortehu wrote: post #3

zubairq wrote: post #2

In 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?

What makes you think they are not in tech?

Some are still in tech, at places that pay them, places that you may not know or have never heard of.

Little experiment: Add 50% to your top compensation, then you may soon start interviewing people who earn around that number and sometimes another 50% on bonus/stock (that your company doesn't have).

They are here and they are the people you wanted, they're not difficult to get, you just didn't know about them.

Now that you found out, you'll continue to ignore them and keep looking for a unicorn at half the price :D

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#63

Post by user5994461 » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 2:27 PM UTC

lucraft wrote: post #11

mortehu wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are those people (with the right skills) currently doing instead of working in tech?

Well, for one, they're contracting. Though that isn't quite the same thing as being unavailable, it contributes to a perceived shortage of permanent developers. In London this is because rates for senior developer contractors are something like 50% higher than salaried, and that's only changing very slowly. (Is the situation similar in the US?)

>(Is the situation similar in the US?)

What's the rates in question in London? For permies and for contracting.

Not much familiar with the USA but permie got better advantages. For one, massive stocks/RSU at big internet companies (that the same companies don't give in London), and healthcare/benefits that are expensive as a contractor. I assume it's better to get a standard $300k package as a senior developer than a $1500 a day as a contractor.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#64

Post by contingencies » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 2:30 PM UTC

mstaoru wrote: post #28

I 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…

Shipping: It's generally pricey as hell to send anything out of the US. It's cheap to send things from developing countries. This is merely economic reality (shipping costs include cost of packaging, labor salary/health/pension, rent at all trans-shipment points, distance-to-port, economies of scale, tax on private company earnings, legal and insurance overheads, etc.) Since half the world's products come from China, its government-run mail system has no taxes and it has huge ports and rail networks, it's very cheap. I doubt there is a gov.cn conspiracy to undermine foreign e-tailers (ready to be proven wrong!), it's just a highly efficient and centralized socialist bureaucratic mail system. (Note that it's currently being supplanted both domestically and internationally for many purposes by more trackable courier companies, of which there are many dozens already, the best of which is http://sf-express.com/ )

Root: If you do business in mainland China the government reserves the right to strongly suggest you comply with everything they want, which is usually "if anti-government stuff appears on your site, you are done, and otherwise if we give you a phone call, jump high now". This is in some ways no different to other countries in model, but perhaps stronger in presumed responsibility and penalty than some. As for root-by-VPS, yeah maybe, but citation-needed, and there's arguably not a huge difference versus seizure as performed by other countries.

(Source: ~16 years ... not claiming total accuracy, the above is just my experience/impression)

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#65

Post by ethbro » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 2:38 PM UTC

ellius wrote: post #58

pards wrote: post #6

Spreadsheets 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…

The thing I find most amazing about this (I work for a bank) is seeing people make decisions based on version 812 of a workbook passed between 3 different departments with multiple pages where the count of line items doesn't even add up. They're so obviously incorrect and of questionable value, but I've seen managers drop them like they're God's own Truth in meetings. It's that kind of thing that convinces me organiz…

Abstraction increases as you move up org charts. Unfortunately, actual process knowledge does not.

I blame the "MBAs can do anything" philosophy, but it's probably also a consequence of worker mobility.

To state it most simply: if your management (at any level) cannot call bullshit on the data their direct reports provide them (whatever level of abstraction that is), then your business is at existential risk.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#66

Post by user5994461 » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 2:39 PM UTC

SlySherZ wrote: post #30

SFJulie wrote: post #13

Education 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…

>>> The first 9-12 years are required so that kids have something to do while their parents are at work.

They also learn to read, write and count. It's a rather useful skillset to have :D

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#67

Post by ethbro » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 2:44 PM UTC

ellius wrote: post #61

cm2187 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think to this point, the organizations that will really succeed in the future are the ones who aggressively hire people with a strong cross of building simple, usable and understandable technical tools who also understand business logic and can communicate. I think soon people will be able get further with some basic R/Python and the ability to write a good email than many of the more technically skilled workers wi…

To tease out a little more from yours and parent's comments, I think a few things are drastically undervalued by traditional programmers.

Tactical initiative: not just for Marines. The closer software is being built to a person who actually posseses the domain knowledge, the less risk of misunderstood requirements / behavior there is.

Readability: a language that requires six months to learn to read but expresses programs in half the length is often times not the right choice. If a good enough language can be read by someone with a week of training, and 90% of the domain knowledge is possessed by people who don't know the better knowledge, then use the good-enough language.

Reasons like these are why Excel / VBA is used. And moreover, why it (paradoxically to us) works.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#68

Post by ethbro » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 2:49 PM UTC

powmonk wrote: post #14

pards wrote: post #6

Spreadsheets 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…

The insurance industry has a lot of this too. Not as much by the sounds of it but our internal reporting relies on it a great deal.

In my experience, a huge amount of insurance is (various front end systems run by various external sources) -> semi-standardized mainframe intake -> mainframe heavy duty processing -> kick out report of manual work items -> Excel sheet -> manual resolution.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#69

Post by Shorel » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 2:54 PM UTC

Lordarminius wrote: post #20

SFJulie wrote: post #13

Education 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…

> Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment. As a person from a region of the world with a high level of illiteracy an having witnessed firsthand the ROI of an uneducated citizenry, I would question this assertion

He is talking about College/University education, and companies sometimes requiring advanced degrees for basic jobs.

High school is and will always be needed. Also, for some careers university education is obviously necessary. Just not always.

However, this probably only applies to the USA, or other places (South America as well) where students get into high debt to get degrees.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

#70

Post by twic » Sun, Mar 19, 2017, 3:08 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #63

lucraft wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for one, they're contracting. Though that isn't quite the same thing as being unavailable, it contributes to a perceived shortage of permanent developers. In London this is because rates for senior developer contractors are something like 50% higher than salaried, and that's only changing very slowly. (Is the situation similar in the US?)

>(Is the situation similar in the US?) What's the rates in question in London? For permies and for contracting. Not much familiar with the USA but permie got better advantages. For one, massive stocks/RSU at big internet companies (that the same companies don't give in London), and healthcare/benefits that are expensive as a contractor. I assume it's better to get a standard $300k package as a senior developer than a…

> What's the rates in question in London? For permies and for contracting.

Part of the trouble is that nobody knows!

However, i think that as a pretty good mostly-Java agile devopsy tech-leadish developer with about ten years' experience, i would be looking at a 70 - 80 k£/yr salary, or a 600 £/day rate.

The salary could be a lot higher somewhere like a hedge fund or Google, but when i was looking recently, those are the numbers that were in play. I was on about 70; when i asked for 80, some employers would wince but keep talking, and others would end the conversation quickly.

The day rate might be way off; it's anchored in a couple of highly anecdotal personal data points. It doesn't match the published industry average of ~450, but i assume that's weighed down by legions of grunts and juniors.