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Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

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Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#61

Post by darawk »

panic wrote: post #47
iwangulenko wrote: post #20

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?

No. You have limited resources to sift through people. Heuristics like this are an efficient way to reduce your search space. That is sort of the whole point of statistics.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#62

Post by prolikewh0a »

themagician wrote: post #35
SCdF wrote: post #3

> 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 inflated sense of ego associated with “saving the world” and “solving tough problems” has almost completely turned me off from tech, in the Bay Area in particular. My problem isn’t with the sentiment—it’s that 99 out of 100 times it’s pure bullshit. There are a few people out their doing really amazing things, but the vast majority of people who have big egos aren’t the people working on that stuff. Tech is the n…

>The inflated sense of ego associated with “saving the world” and “solving tough problems” has almost completely turned me off from tech, in the Bay Area in particular. My problem isn’t with the sentiment—it’s that 99 out of 100 times it’s pure bullshit. There are a few people out their doing really amazing things, but the vast majority of people who have big egos aren’t the people working on that stuff.

I see this mindset in Seattle very often. A lot of my friends have recently been quitting their jobs to do something other than tech because of the overly inflated egos and the need for software engineers to constantly "do something new" instead of just maintaining & fix what they already have.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#63

Post by [deleted] »

amalcon wrote: post #58
Zelphyr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a little weird to count a markup language, a presentation language, and a query language on the same axis as Turing-complete programming languages. If we go by that metric, the average sysadmin knows dozens of languages all at once. Yet sysadmin work is also often looked down on for some reason. I don't have a good explanation for either of those phenomena, but I think language-counting isn't a good way to comba…

[deleted]

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#64

Post by dizzystar »

As a Clojure dev, I find this attitude absolutely baffling as well. I can assure you that nothing at all about Clojure makes you a good dev. Nothing about any language makes you a good dev.

Want to fast-track a new project into a convoluted legacy codebase few humans can grok? Hire a bad dev and have them write in any language, it doesn't matter. I've seen Clojure code bases passed through a dozen hands that no one could figure out.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#65

Post by oneplane »

amalcon wrote: post #58
Zelphyr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a little weird to count a markup language, a presentation language, and a query language on the same axis as Turing-complete programming languages. If we go by that metric, the average sysadmin knows dozens of languages all at once. Yet sysadmin work is also often looked down on for some reason. I don't have a good explanation for either of those phenomena, but I think language-counting isn't a good way to comba…

I think those markup and styling languages and even SQL have all been used in turing-completeness examples. Everything is bad, nothing is easy, and we might as well stop using the internet. We're all going really fast, but nobody knows where ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#66

Post by seanmcdirmid »

SCdF wrote: post #3

> 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…

Hard and intimidating doesn’t necessarily mean interesting, I think a lot of the bias against web dev is hovering in the latter and not the former. Note, I’m not saying that web dev isn’t interesting, just that the common perception against it is rooted in interest rather challenge (like it was for database in the decades before).

More to the point, why would people want to work in a hard and intimidating area anyways? If it was fun and interesting, it might be challenging but not intimidating. Again, I’m not making judgements in web dev, just on how biased perceptions go.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#67

Post by Zelphyr »

amalcon wrote: post #58
Zelphyr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a little weird to count a markup language, a presentation language, and a query language on the same axis as Turing-complete programming languages. If we go by that metric, the average sysadmin knows dozens of languages all at once. Yet sysadmin work is also often looked down on for some reason. I don't have a good explanation for either of those phenomena, but I think language-counting isn't a good way to comba…

I've done sysadmin work as well and the context switching didn't feel as prohibitive. Generally I was using something like Perl, Python, Bash, etc... but rarely switching between more than one in any given day.

With web development, I have to know HTML, CSS, and JS at least. I probably really need to know SQL. And I switch between those four (at least) every day, many times a day.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#68

Post by idontpost »

Zelphyr wrote: post #59
dkarl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone who has slogged through it for 20 years, I wouldn't say I've earned much other than to realize that its all an even bigger mess than what it used to be. The solutions people come up with to combat it (frameworks, JSX, CSS-in-JS) only exacerbate the complexity in my opinion. I truly feel like we're headed in the wrong direction when it comes to web development. I haven't figured out what the right direction…

> I haven't figured out what the right direction is yet, short of going back to the drawing board with HTML.

That's almost certainly what's needed. The fundamental structure of the HTML-CSS-JS triad is the problem that all this complexity tries to abstract around.

Separation of concerns is only good if you're separating the right concerns. Back when web pages were really PAGES (ie documents), the Content-Styling-Interactivity division made sense. But now that web pages are applications that division makes very little sense.

All the different solutions represent different approaches to redefining the separation of concerns, but what they all agree on is that Content-Styling-Interactivity is the wrong separation.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#69

Post by [deleted] »

darawk wrote: post #61
panic wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. You have limited resources to sift through people. Heuristics like this are an efficient way to reduce your search space. That is sort of the whole point of statistics.

[deleted]

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#70

Post by ender7 »

iwangulenko wrote: post #20

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…

It's true that, based on my interviewing experience, candidates with only a jQuery background are unlikely to have the skills to cut it developing large-scale software at a large-scale company, which is what I am hiring for. At the moment I interview mostly front-end candidates, and it takes a lot of sifting to find qualified hires.

However, the implicit companion assumption that a resume with lots of clojure experience will have those skills is not something I've seen any evidence for. Many Clojure-focused candidates are unproductively dogmatic and are at risk of wasting everyone's time by trying to rearchitect our codebase because it doesn't meet their particular taste. In general, if a candidate is an adherent to a niche programming language they need to be able to explain to me when its use would be appropriate and inappropriate. If their answer is "this language and/or dogma is always better" then you're adorable but you need some more experience before I'm going to hire you.

It's also important to point out that, while my core requirements are the same for both jQuery and Clojurey candidates (ability to function in a large, complex codebase & ability to manage your own code's complexity), the specific skillsets are very different. Most clojure enthusiasts are actively bad front-end engineers. Which is fine! But many positions require engineers to at least be able to dabble in UI work, and if I get the sense that you would find it beneath you to do so, its probably going to mean better luck somewhere else unless I have a very specific position to fill.

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