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

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

#91

Post by nueded »

beyondcompute wrote: post #85
nueded wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While professionals in other industries use professional tools, programmers use commodity hardware and software (the kind a homemaker would use to google a guacamole recipe). :( 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…

So how many programmers you know use a professional keyboard, say? I don't want to provide free advertisement here so I won't mention any brands. But the ones that have hands separated and keys placed in recessions for comfortable wrist position and modifier keys under thumbs? And those that are fully programmable, the ones that cost from 300 euro and up? I don't know about you but I have (on my mechanical 100+ euro…

>In the meantime, IDEs for web development are a few and are not very customizable by my needs

i'm a full stack web dev myself, whatever that means nowadays. i consider languages, the os, dbms, version control, virtualization, browsers, webservers, automation servers etc etc, to be my tools. not merely the the IDE or text editor. personally i hardly need anything beside emacs and zsh terminal on my 7y/o thinkpad t410. that said i do understand that different people need different tools. hope you find what you need.

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

#92

Post by BjoernKW »

dang wrote: post #79
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…

I once met with a team of 'business support' people at a large company (not financial—it was in the oil and gas sector) who turned out to be a rogue technical group. Their job was to support the complex spreadsheets made by their bosses. They told me that every 2 years a new batch of software would come out of the IT division, and IT would get a company-wide decree mandating that everyone must use the new software wi…

Situations like this one are just sad yet unfortunately quite common in the enterprise segment.

There's this dilemma that the people buying the software and mandating its use aren't the ones who end up having to use it. So, often ridiculously complex workarounds happen in order to comply with company policy yet still be able to get any work done at all.

This quite likely is one of the largest productivity sinks in industrialised societies.

There are ways to amend these issues but they require a change both in company policies and in thinking: Allow departments and teams to choose their tools. Have a repository of internally developed tools (Excel spreadsheets, bespoke CRUD applications, shell scripts etc.) for others to share and build upon. Put an emphasis on software quality and user experience.

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

#94

Post by calvano915 »

ex3xu wrote: post #27

I do marketing and AdWords for a company that specializes in local contractors. Modern online marketing is a race to the bottom that only Google wins. Fundamentally, regardles of industry, marketing is a simple logistics problem -- connect clients to service providers. But the distribution of attention is incredibly imbalanced -- the top 3 search results get nearly 50% of clicks with the top ten results getting 90%.…

Isn't this the problem that Angies List/Amazon Home Services/etc is attempting to solve and monetize? For a goof I submitted a plumbing work order to Amazon and received at least three competitive bids, all from businesses I had never heard of before that are vouched for to some degree by Amazon. It seems to be either the above or Yelp/word of mouth are the only ways that contractors can be seen by prospective clients, at least until they grow large enough to have more marketing funds and return business.

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

#95

Post by user5994461 »

mafribe wrote: post #84
user5994461 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I was on about 70; when i asked for 80, some employers would wince but keep talking, and others would end the conversation quickly. 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…

I just talked to a former student of mine, who said their startup can't hire senior programmers with relevant experience in the UK, despite offering £160k per year. A colleague of mine has a new startup on the side, and he says he can't hire reliable front-end devs despite offering £70k-£80k. I also just talked to two former PhDs from my group, and both went to the US where they got offers > $200k per year, while in…

Are they british? Do the UK have an immigration agreement with the USA I am not aware of?

Last I checked, Europeans need a H1B VISA to go work there and it's so hard to get it's bound to failure. Even if you get it, it prevents you to switch job and you can't negotiate and swap jobs to the top.

P.S. No place in Europe are charging $4000 for a one bedroom ;)

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

#96

Post by user5994461 »

twic wrote: post #86
user5994461 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I was on about 70; when i asked for 80, some employers would wince but keep talking, and others would end the conversation quickly. 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…

> 70k is borderline insane. What package do you have on top? I had some stock options that would obviously never have been worth anything. Can i ask what kind of companies were paying you 70k in London when you were less than 25? And to do what? And how much experience you had at that point? If you were doing generalist development on the back of a degree and four years of work experience, i'm going to cry. > I don't…

Whatever brings the money. If am not doing generalist development. If I write down all the specialisations I do or used to do, a tree is gonna die.

Don't compare yourself to the top and cry. There is always someone earning more. I had my time when I was always the least paid guy in the room. Arguably that's still what I feel every time I look around.

I've got a bad image of retail banks. I am fine with investment banks and other banks and non-banks (hedge funds, others) that treat their people well and can build a business out and around what I do. Retail and consumer banks are no places for programmers.

>>> It's not technically difficult, but as a senior, you spend your whole time banging your head against the brick wall of client stupidity.

Not much different from a permie. I find it a lot more tolerable when you can see daily stupidity along a daily rate. Who cares what happens. You'll be on a new contract in 3 months anyway. (That being said, I really hate contracting).

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

#98

Post by humanrebar »

SlySherZ wrote: post #52
humanrebar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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…

I completly agree with the need to communicate and program with other people. From my experience, computer science degrees severely lack this communication trainning. You do ~2 small group projects per semester. The group splits the project into parts and everyone goes and does it's own part alone. There is no teamwork, source control, tests nor anything like that. I seriously hope other universities do it differentl…

I had team projects, somewhat resembling what you describe. No, I had no source control or testing training at all. I chalk that up to more academic programs being oriented towards computer science and mathematics than craftsmanship, engineering, and project management concerns.

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

#99

Post by SFJulie »

randomdata wrote: post #38
Lordarminius wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I believe he is referring to postsecondary education specifically. In North America, K-12 exists to make one a functioning member of society. For what flaws it may have, it has overall shown to be beneficial. With that measured success, we got the idea that once you were a functioning member of society, you could become a functioning member of the workforce simply by continuing in even more years of schooling. But it…

I was indeed referring to post secondary education.

If I was no troll, I would admit a soft tooth for Finland focus on early education and the amazing results they have doing so.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/20/grammar-sc...

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

#100

Post by SFJulie »

IgorPartola wrote: post #56
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…

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.

Having a father who was a surgeon (and quite good), I have enough real life feedback to say that apprenticeship/internship in medecine may matter more than the years of theoretical studies that actually are used mostly for selecting the «right persons».

Not to say theoretical education worth naught, I say there is a cursor that is way tilted in favour of theory that costs less and make universities earn more.

Let's call it a corporatism behaviour.

You don't want a surgeon that was good at school, you want a surgeon that when his hospital is poor will use his earning to buy medical reviews to stay up to date, say fuck to the hospital and take unpaid vacations to go in conferences to stay up to date.

You want a surgeon that don't care about his diploma, or the titles but stay focused on his craft and will go on learning without caring for what society legally requires him to do in order to practice.

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