291–300 of 584 posts
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I speak primarily from experience.
As an "offshore developer", I have worked on multiple US projects with low quality code written by US developers. Should I assume that American code is usually low quality?
Yes, it is. And the example used in the article of chemical engineering reinforces the point. It ties into computer science quite nicely. To become a chemical engineer, you first have to complete the course work for a degree in chemistry. Chemistry as chemistry is an extremely modular subject matter; you can solve most problems in discrete steps in isolation. In a computer science sense, chemistry is about pure funct…
>To become a chemical engineer, you first have to complete the course work for a degree in chemistry. That is incorrect. Look at the programme of study for a chemical engineering undergraduate degree [1]. It doesn't cover anywhere near the same content as an undergraduate chemistry degree [2]. [1]: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/chemical-engineer... [2]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/chemist…
This turned it into a de facto 5-year degree even though they stripped most of the non-related coursework to a bare minimum; you still had two years of coursework for the engineering program after the chemistry. People that lost their appetite for chemical engineering after compressing all their chemistry into three years could switch to chemistry, which meant they spent their last year taking the filler non-technical courses that the engineers were allowed to avoid.
The article gives as a potential reason for high developer compensation the possibility of a shortage of talent. That seems obvious to me, but the author goes on to suggest that if there was a shortage, you'd be seeing more people go into development. Does this actually happen? My understanding is that skill supply is simply not elastic in this way. Kids generally pick what to do based on their aptitude and what they…
My thoughts exactly. Demand for programming is growing faster than the supply of programmers. Not only is demand growing because ever more devices demand an ever-growing amount of software, but also because every already existing line of code in production needs somebody to keep it from falling over. This compounding effect further escalates demand.
The reasons underlying the bi-modality are pretty clear to me. There are a couple of major factors at play: 1) Inflation. My starting salary out of college many years ago was $35K. Today's starting salaries are double that. Double in less than 20 years. A $50K salary in the early 1980s is equivalent to $120K today, not controlling for geographic location--HCOL areas are actually far worse than that. Let that sink in…
New grads at Facebook who received a return offer as an intern get a bit over 200k/yr total comp. to start.
> Any way you look at doing software development as a career you come to see that it stinks.
I don't see how being able to make several hundred thousand dollars a year with a few years of experience while working at a major company in a safe and clean environment is a bad choice.
One (semi-pedantic) quibble with the article: there absolutely are barriers to entry for programming. Programming is hard! These barriers may not be artificial, but they are real. To use a non-software example, there are barriers to entry to chip manufacturers and power companies even under anarchy. Fabs are tremendously hard to build. Power plants are extremely hard to build. Building up knowledge and skills about c…
If you want to know just how hard programming is, try teaching it to someone. Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge. Consider the basic task of choosing where you are going to store some data, well first you need to know which options exist and there's dozens of them (do you want Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..?). Then you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of each. And I hope you…
You could add another layer to what you are saying as do you want to build apps? platforms? or enterprise line of business software? if so you need to know entirely different stacks. Then you need to know what is important to being "good" at the chosen stack.
This is just a long winded way of agreeing with you, there are vast amounts of knowledge required to "make it". Most importantly you cant ever feel like you know enough and stop trying to learn. I took about 12 months off from stretching myself and now I feel 3 years behind...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an "offshore developer", I have worked on multiple US projects with low quality code written by US developers. Should I assume that American code is usually low quality?
Not at all denying the existence of low quality programmers in the US, but generally it seems like there is a focus on quality that does not exist for the majority of offshore developers, just about churning out code as fast as possible.
You can also hire the better part of offshore developers if you'll pay just a bit closer to US rates. I saw the situation "$15/h developer failed everything, help us $35/h developer!" quite a lot in Russian-speaking freelance communities.
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Mechanical engineering didn't have its Lisp. We do The steam engine was more of a productivity multiplier than Lisp could ever dream of.
Steam engine unfortunately can't make itself. So.
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Ideally not. But then your government unilaterally decided that spreading American values, culture, and products is the best thing to do. And now a lot of people want to come here and experience first hand.
I'm fine with that, as long as they can positively contribute. I'm not fine with bringing in millions of people who immediately go on benefits while US citizens can't afford health care, college, and military vets are living on the street
This is difficult in most countries and extremely so in the US. Which benefits? How do they prove entitlement to them? By what process are they entitled to them but the military vets living on the street aren't?
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I suspect it happens a lot less often than you think.
(also, you've done the old "Schroedinger's immigrant" thing: at the top of the thread we were talking about jobs, you're talking about benefits now. Who are these people who simultaneously go on benefits while also stealing your job?)
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If people don't like the concept, they don't really understand it. The way the word is often used and even the word itself, absolutely that ruffles some feathers and rightly so. They do studies, if people are given massive advantages (e.g. rolling two dice instead of one in monopoly and starting with double the cash) that are obvious and explicit, people will still believe they deserved to win, they earned their vict…
The reason people refer to these things as privileges is because they are unavailable to the majority of the population. It's a very privileged perspective to live in a world where these things are considered normal. Privilege has to do with the idea that these things are so far from being a reality for so many people that it's evident to them that the world does not consider this to be their right.
> In that sense it feels perversly exploitative and priveleged to make so much more money ...
It seems to be more useful for shaming people.
> ... that the world does not consider this to be their right.
This seems to imply that those with privilege think their privilege is a right.