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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)

#131

Post by [deleted] »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #111
js2 wrote: post #54

Where are these horrible places that people work and hang out? I’ve worked at places as small as a tiny ISP where I was basically the only tech employee, startups with a dozen employees to companies as large as HP and everything in between. I’ve worked on the east coast and west coast. I’ve worked for private companies and public ones. Ive been on small teams and large. Ive had dozens of managers. I’ve been an SA and…

You've either been lucky or oblivious. My experience with office people has been that any minuscule thing that can be used to alpha-dog somebody, will be used to alpha-dog somebody. I suspect it's because the mothership goes out of its way to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and confusion--open offices, stack ranking, endless meetings, etc... It is easier to assert your dominance over them when they are at ea…

[deleted]

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

#132

Post by bsder »

wellpast wrote: post #91
21 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now apply this logic to men in tech and woman in tech bell curves and see how that works out. Is it still rational?

Your question assumes that the programming talent bell curve for men and women are different, which I wouldn’t expect to be the case.

Almost nothing in nature matches that statement.

The "Bell Curve" for females of a species generally has a significantly narrower standard deviation for practically any genetically driven characteristic.

The problem is that none of this applies to an individual.

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

#134

Post by bsder »

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…

> Web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work I've ever done, by a country mile.

I think Web Dev and App Dev get such a bad rap because the half-life of the knowledge there is so short that length of experience isn't the signal that it is in other areas (and sometimes it can be an anti-signal).

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

#135

Post by GijsjanB »

gameswithgo wrote: post #119
GijsjanB wrote: post #118

I think everybody who writes HTML, CSS and JS for a living experiences this. For me it's the never ending jokes about "JS was written in 9 days" and remarks on how easy it is to fix a problem, because "it's just CSS". I compare it too subtle discrimination. I am a white male and I won't pretend to know how it feels to be discriminated, but I do know how it feels too fight the uphill battle of condescending remarks. A…

Javascript being sub optimal makes what you do harder, which implies you are smarter. You aren't being made fun of, the language is. And CSS is harder than programming!

I think the assumption is: he's willing to code in a suboptimal language, so he must be a suboptimal engineer.

PS. I use TypeScript, love it and don't believe it to be suboptimal.

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

#136

Post by casion »

cuddlybacon wrote: post #133
casion wrote: post #102

What does "signalling" mean in this context? I tried to look it up and failed to find a definition that made sense.

This is signalling in the economics sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

Thank you

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

#137

Post by GijsjanB »

dokem wrote: post #94

It's really not that complicated. Technical people recognize technical ability. Throwing together a CRUD site in some framework is really not that complicated and can be achieved without really understanding what's going on. When you started learning Clojure you got a little more respect because you were broadening you're horizons. It's not some conspiracy systems programmers have against web-only devs: The web dev l…

Why are you assuming s/he is putting up a "CRUD website in some framework"? I work with HTML, CSS and JS, but it does not tell you anything about what I'm building or how I'm building, so you should not "recognize my technical ability" based on your false assumption.

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

#138

Post by userbinator »

js2 wrote: post #82
freetime2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author was exaggerating a bit, or perhaps is more sensitive to other peoples' opinions than most (e.g. the bit about crying in the bathroom). In the past I have definitely worked at companies where "web developer" was a completely different job title than "software engineer" (back-end developer), and paid less money. Definitely second-class citizens. The industry seems to have turned a corner with the adv…

Weird (to me). I don’t care what a coworker makes or what their title is. I don’t even care what my own title is. When a former employer let me choose the title for my business card I went with “problem solver.” All I really care about is having competent coworkers with integrity who are respectful to each other. It’s not my job to judge the value of a coworker’s work.

It’s not my job to judge the value of a coworker’s work.

It most certainly is, when you have to work with and clean up the mess.

Much like there is the notion of "10x" programmers, there are also "-10x" ones. Unfortunately they can stay around for a surprisingly long time.

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

#139

Post by userbinator »

alangpierce wrote: post #110
algeom wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what you mean when you compare Gmail and Facebook to the moon landing? On its face that comment looks way out of whack to someone who is outside the tech industry.

Obviously software was totally different back then, and Apollo 11 was much more than a software project, but FWIW the Apollo guidance computer software was 130416 lines of assembly[1][2], while Facebook is probably at least 100 million lines of code at this point[3]. Also note that Facebook uses languages that are much more expressive than assembly, so "1000x as much code" probably indicates much more than 1000x as m…

while Facebook is probably at least 100 million lines of code at this point

...which, if I were to guess, consists of a significant amount of "do nothing" or otherwise useless abstractions that either were put there dogmatically or once served a purpose but no longer does. This is reasonably prevalent in Enterprise software but I imagine the much higher churn in Facebook code also increases the amount of cruft that gets thrown in or otherwise left behind.

Search HN or the Internet in general for mentions of Facebook's app being bloated and you'll find that even non-technical users are at least somewhat surprised by this gross inefficiency.

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

#140

Post by tptacek »

smhost wrote: post #125
wellpast wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I have no instincts in this because my experience has always been so fewer women than men on the engineering team. So this is totally anecdotal. But the few women I’ve worked with have always been in the upper part of the talent scale, while there has been much variance among the men. I.e., I’ve encountered many low talent (and high talent) men but not one low talent woman. Maybe there are enough hurdles for wom…

From what we understand about the difference in white-collared intelligence in males vs females, there's a higher variance in intelligence among males than in females. So either women really are in general better at coding than men, or the mid-to-low skilled women aren't making it professionally as much as they should, and only the highest-skilled women are being selected. If your anecdote generalizes, that is. (FWIW…

This logic comes up all the time on HN. I always wonder whether the people repeating it really believe that commercial software development is so intellectually challenging that it is only practiced by people at the very top end of the cognitive spectrum.
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