Not to mention; web developers are constantly having to context switch between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Old school days they also had a backend language like PHP or Perl. Many still do. Then there was/is SQL. By my count, that's at least five different languages to know all at once.
“Look at how many plates I can juggle at once!” “Aren’t you just trying to walk to the store?” “Look! I added a fifth! Everyone do this now!”
Isn’t using Java, PyTorch, Elasticsearch, and neural networks for a TODO iOS app the same?
As someone running a technical recruitment agency, I can assure you that it is true that someone having built stuff in Clojure is more likely to be considered as a good engineer than someone who did JQuery all the time. Recruiters use an intuitive approach to conditional probability. Given only the info alone (if someone did JQuery or Clojure) exposes you to two bell curves, with the X-axis being "programming ability…
That is definitely a good strategy for a recruiter. However the context of the author's experience seems to be how the author's coworkers treats them. If I'm working with someone and I get to see their code, or I can take a look if I'm curious, IMO it becomes a vice to use Bayesian probability when you can look at the person's actual code and judge their skill. A different way to put it is Bayesian probability is good in a situation of uncertainty, but if you are not in a situation of uncertainty it just becomes lazy/ prejudicial.
Not to mention; web developers are constantly having to context switch between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Old school days they also had a backend language like PHP or Perl. Many still do. Then there was/is SQL. By my count, that's at least five different languages to know all at once.
“Look at how many plates I can juggle at once!” “Aren’t you just trying to walk to the store?” “Look! I added a fifth! Everyone do this now!”
Non-trivial websites are more complicated than walking to the store.
Maybe it's my age, and a youth of grunge, metal, hardcore and punk, but whatever happened to doing what you love and not giving a shit what naysayers think?
“Look at how many plates I can juggle at once!” “Aren’t you just trying to walk to the store?” “Look! I added a fifth! Everyone do this now!”
I don't understand your analogy. What is walking to the store without juggling any plates in web development? I'm not aware of any stack that allows you to write styles, markup, business logic, and database queries in a single language.
I don't understand the analogy either but I do know that when I'm doing iOS development it's almost always all in Swift. Sometimes some C or Objective-C or even C++ smattered in but that actually kinda proves my point because when I have to deal with one of those languages in a Swift project I slow down.
> when I told other software people I’m a web developer, I got treated like shit. I was a lower class of coder because I wasn’t “solving cool problems” because making web sites is easy. Of all the stupid arrogant awfulness in tech that has crossed my path this one is definitely high on the list of the most baffling. Web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work I've ever done, by a country mile. (Whether that…
The attitude has changed as people have realized the web isn't going away and isn't qualitatively changing. Fifteen years ago you could ask, "Why on earth would a programmer put up with that incoherent mishmash of shitty technologies? For God's sake, if you have any taste at all, work in a different domain." Now the why is clear, and anyone who had a snobbish attitude (I won't hold my breath while the rest of us out themselves) probably feels a little dumb. I peeked inside the web UI domain a long time ago and said "noooooo thank you, I will come back when this shit gets sorted out." I figured in five or ten years there would be something entirely different (something that made sense) and I would start from scratch on an even playing field, and HTML/CSS and Javascript would end up like Cobol. Now instead of feeling smart for skipping it, I just feel behind, and the people who slogged through that era have earned (really, really earned) a deeper understanding of the technology behind our generation's most influential way of reaching people with information and ideas.
As someone running a technical recruitment agency, I can assure you that it is true that someone having built stuff in Clojure is more likely to be considered as a good engineer than someone who did JQuery all the time. Recruiters use an intuitive approach to conditional probability. Given only the info alone (if someone did JQuery or Clojure) exposes you to two bell curves, with the X-axis being "programming ability…
Presumably people are paying you to find good engineers, not just people who match particular profiles. If "rational prejudice" doesn't always find the good engineers, why justify it like this? Wouldn't it be better to take this as evidence that your approach could use improvement?
Yep. Funny that HackerNews seem to be unable to wrap their head around the fact that prejudice is just applied Bayesian statistics.
I'm gonna say prejudice is actually not applied Bayesian statistics
and you would be right. Say I have a broken phone which is an Android. A prejudice would be that androids are likely to break. Mathematically we could represent as
The commenter said "statistically speaking" to justify part of their point. I am directly challenging their assertion and requesting evidence that they have 1) actually quantified something in more than a hand wavey manner, and 2) found the (falsifiable) conclusion they stated, based on that analysis. I'm deeply skeptical. People like to throw around percentages and references to statistics to justify their biases, b…
Next time you have a blocked toilet, and the plumber says it's a problem with 'ABC' why don't you just tell him that's not quantifiable! and then tell him you think it's 'XYZ' that's the problem.
If someone who interviews thousands of people and finds a correlation between those who have some clojure experience and quality, I believe him.
For the simple reason that most programmers don't try very hard and anyone taking the time to even learn a rarely used language is demonstrating a positive quality that most don't.