231–240 of 407 posts
I don't think Mechanical Engineers back then were managed by Project and Product Managers though. They had much higher status.
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> More young students than ever are learning to code More young students than ever are being taught the utmost basics. But is it true that more people than ever are pursuing it in the sense of seeking professional mastery over the craft? A proxy for this might be population-relative CS program enrollment and graduation rates. It would also be interesting to know how this is scaling compared to the overall volume of p…
Anecdotal, but the CS program overtook the business school at the University of Washington a few years back, my alma matter. I remember when I was there, the CS classes were for NERDS and now here we are, everyone wants in.
I remember when I was there, the CS classes were for
NERDS and now here we are, everyone wants in.
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I doubt the difference would be that dramatic (see Hollywood actors and athletes). Also, what's the point of 500K if you're prohibited from working on personal projects, open source and have non-competes, no vacation out leave time and NDAs to deal with? Maybe if you're willing to deal with it for a few years so you can retire early and loaded?
There are no non-competes in California, and most of the best paying tech companies have decent vacation policies (though maybe not as good as the norm in Sweden). Lots of people have hobbies other than coding, so they wouldn't mind not coding on personal projects after work. Is it really that hard to imagine that people might be willing to make fairly minor sacrifices in exchange for several hundred thousand dollars…
There are intellectual property assignment agreements though. These basically say "we're a giant tech company and work in a lot of areas, so if you work on a side project in any of those areas, we can assert rights over it cause it competes with us and you probably stole that knowledge from us, or thought about it on work time, or something".
>and most of the best paying tech companies have decent vacation policies
You get 15 days at Google for the first 5 years (even if you come in with experience). I'm not really impressed by this. I will probably never see 20 days of vacation from Google. Cisco had 20 for everyone. Other companies may vary.
>Lots of people have hobbies other than coding
This is not the case for me. I play some video games and I write code. I like programming more because it feels productive, games are fun though.
>Is it really that hard to imagine that people might be willing to make fairly minor sacrifices in exchange for several hundred thousand dollars a year?
It's not hard to imagine that (it's how I ended up where I am), but now that I'm in the situation I don't really like it.
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> I think programmers tend to underestimate the difficulties involved with becoming a good programmer because once you're good, you only see the even steeper learning curve ahead of you. Good programmers I know also overestimate the skill needed to earn high salary in this job. You don't have to go up the learning curve much; these days, you just learn yourself JS a little bit and go for a webdev job, making shit cod…
I don't see that mass-produced cohort arriving any time soon. My city has 1 developer for every 3 jobs and it's getting worse.
I’ve met people in marketing calling themselves programmers because they once wrote a PHP script.
I’ve overheard high school-aged kids at the Starbucks talking about the differences between a developer and a designer.
I’ve interviewed self-described “programmers” who struggle to write a for loop and “DBA”s who don’t know what the normal forms are.
My family, none of whom are the least bit technical, casually throw around words like “algorithm” and “server”.
The guy who works at the deli outside my apartment has asked me what my opinion on Python is.
We are definitely in a programming/CS/IT (whatever you want to call it) bubble - the level of general interest and enthusiasm for this stuff is unlike anything I’ve seen with other fields.
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your standards for acceptable software were frozen in time in 1985 Haha in 1985 Amiga had a multitasking GUI desktop in 512k and 7Mhz. Now we have millions of times more computational power and struggle to deliver an experience as crisp and satisfying. I wish people still made software like it was 1985, that actually used the full power of the hardware for something useful...
Yeah but Exec/Kickstart/Workbench was missing some basic niceties that are table stakes today: - No process or kernel security (processes could rewrite kernel code) - Processes could effectively disable the scheduler - Supported only a single, fixed address space: both a massive limitation and a performance hack that made the system bearable to use - Single-user - No security model There are embedded applications the…
That’s chicken-and-egg. Why do modern apps with actually quite simple functionality need all this vast power, the GHz and Gb? Because it’s there. Why does software crash? Because the OS let’s it with nothing more than inconvenience to the user.
Amigas were actually quite usable, they were stable enough for complex software to be developed and real work done. Same for ST’s.
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I have not noticed these technical shifts per se. What I have noticed is that mature engineers move on and do other things and new ones reinvent the wheel with some new fancy language or term which then becomes the new way of doing things, and the cycle repeats. Sometimes there is a great deal of value when a new level of abstraction happens but I wouldnt call this a shift, it's just progression. Many of the underlyi…
In maturing parts of the software industry you'll often see a desire to stay with the times in order to maintain a competitive edge, re-inventing the wheel often looks like full/partial re-writes of a system for minor marginal gains. A great example of this is the evolution of FB/Google/Amazon. Portions of their core tech have been completely re-written over the years for marginal gain, but there is a large premium t…
These companies have actually devised a pretty decent scheme to select candidates, you gotta be someone either smart enough off the bat or dedicated enough to study to pass their interviews -- either way it's a VERY strong signal that you're going to be a solid hire.
Tech companies are going to continue being some of the most valuable companies in the world, if they aren't we have a lot of other pressing issues (like the decline of civilization) to worry about. Even amongst a downturn and/or recession I'm very confident that programmers at the FAANG type companies will continue to be paid very well relative to the rest of the population.
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your whole point is extremely backwards! software in 1985 was more "complete" than today. Even CD roms shipped with magazines had to support more windows variations than "good software" today supports of browsers! not to mention that every corporation with a software team also had usability and QA teams. Software quality and resiliency was much better than today. Then in the 90s it took a dive because online made "fi…
Agreed, and the games industry may be the clearest example of this. In 1985 the developers had to actually ship a finished game, there wasn't the opportunity to release a half-finished product and update it later. Compare to Fallout 76, which was very clearly unfinished at launch. Edit:typo