71–80 of 104 posts
That we are actually quite close to the development of a panoply of working rejuvenation therapies capable of significantly extending human life spans, were the right lines of research and development just more aggressively funded than is the case at present.
● The two most successful and widely used to solve everyday problems paradigms/environments: spreadsheets and shell scripting (with pipes, etc.) are the ones that have the least attention from “industrial” and academic programmers. Lessons and strong points from those systems are being ignored. ● There are “clusters of bugs”, i.e., finding a bug in a certain module increases a chance to find a subsequent bug in the s…
i have to disagree with you here. most of the tools we use as programmers are so precise, adaptable and refined for the job that would make your average industry professional cry.
having those tools run on a guacamole-recipe machine is only a testimony to their power.
it's not just the software either; through services like AWS we have access to some of the most sophisticated and optimized computation and storage hardware on the planet.
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…
Sometimes, something gets publicized. Usually, it will get shrugged off and nothing much will happen about it. This makes one wonder when the whole house of cards will finally collapse...
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…
s/education/higher education in liberal arts and business/g. Next time you need surgery, you probably don't want your doctor to have been self taught.
The challenge the real world presents is that the resources needed to reach that level, such as access to specialized equipment, is not in reach of the average person. It's not like a software development career where a widely available personal computer that can be purchased for hundreds – even tens – of dollars pretty much sums up everything you need to become among the best in the world.
What the schools have been able to provide is a place where people can pool their resources to gain shared access to infrastructure. Education comes as a natural consequence of effectively utilizing that infrastructure, of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>(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…
Java AND DevOps AND leadership AND 10 years experience?
Seriously. That hurts to hear about companies who expect to get that sort of profile for less than 6 figures. 70k is borderline insane. What package do you have on top?
I already got that when I was less than 25... Please don't tell me I am the 0.1%
The basic standard day rate for DevOps is 500-600 from what I've seen. I don't get how the average could be 450, that's less than the absolute minimum, especially if you also have good development skills on top. Java might be slightly cheaper but not much.
Met a guy between two contracts recently who does that kind of stuff (and some others). He left his current gig to join government consulting for £1000 a day :D
> i would be looking at a 70 - 80 k£/yr salary, or a 600 £/day rate.
I think that's on point. Anyone who looks old enough, can say hello and talk about some past real world experiences will land a 500-600 consulting gig or a 70-80k job at a random company.
The big brands and the shops that pay more are more selective (including most finance). Permie = annoying interviews + skill. Consulting = network + delivering.
> The salary could be a lot higher somewhere like a hedge fund or Google
Then join them. Cheap companies are not worth applying.
I actually think that consulting is very easy to do by anyone and it's more gentle on > 30 years old devs (than SMB/startups). That's why there are so many people doing it, it's not about the money (though it helps).
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?
My anecdotal case : I currently work for a very well known French startup. I am paid a bit under 50k€/y (and no equity).
The company really struggle to attract skilled engineers and to be honest there are not that many skilled engineers in a given field in the country.
I could get 70-80k€/y in some other less known French startups that do their best to attract top talent.
I got an offer for an US based startup a little bit under 200k$/y with some advantages and a good amount of equity.
If I can get an US work visa, I am going to take that offer, otherwise I will follow other opportunities but I am not staying with that first company in the long run.
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…
But in the case of china/Ali-express, it receives maybe 1 for every 100 mails it sends out, which means receiving countries use proportionally much larger manpower to distribute the mail, and this is via tax-payer funds.
So interestingly, that you yourself end up paying for china's free shipping, via your home-country taxes.
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…
But the business people had a strategy to defeat this every time. They would simply make sure that "copy/paste" was on the requirements list every 2-year cycle. When the new software came down, they would satisfy the company-wide decree as follows: (1) open the new software; (2) copy the data; (3) paste it into Excel. And then they would continue as before. The only thing that changed every two years was which buggy, slow, and limited in-house application they would be copying data out of and pasting it back into.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I almost had a heart attack thinking about it while watching one of my bosses try to consolidate 13 different versions of a spreadsheet, none of which made sense. And then I realized he's one of the above par ones.