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Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

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Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 and the fact that amiga was clean room design. IBM Pc was already old and even x86-64 won over itanium. Backwards compatibility has a cost but also gains. Amiga wasn't even compatible with c64.

Itaninum only lost because Intel did the mistake to allow AMD to design x86 chips.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#362
post #320

>> Rank and file programmers at the top tier tech companies now make $300 to $400 thousand per year. That is absurdly false. To be generous, let's pretend he's only talking about FAANG programmers, rather than startups. According to Glassdoor, average compensation for "Software Engineer" positions: Facebook: 121K Base + 15K Addl = 136K Apple: 122K Base + 10K Addl = 132K Amazon: 103K Base + 20K Addl = 123K Netflix: 12…

Personal experience from GOOG 3 years ago: Staff SWE, 220K base, ~200K stock grant per year (if you ship something really impressive, numbers go way up from there). This is with "exceeds" perf reviews which is a baseline to stay in good graces. That is, in short, why startups have trouble hiring Staff SWEs from Google. From what I heard from my FB peers, comp is better there by about 15-20%, but work is more boring, and there's more politics. Why did I leave, you might ask? From a realization that you can't make all the money in the world, and intense desire to get off the treadmill. And make no mistake, Google puts you on a serious treadmill when you join.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a data scientists who considers himself moderately good with the pydata library set, I realized the other day if you took those 5 libraries away from me, I'm not sure I have that much to offer in terms of my programming abilities. I don't necessarily feel bad about that, although it did give me pause.

the libraries have grown nicely over the years, though I am surprised they still lack some basic stuff. why in 2019 is there no good way to visualize a decision tree? having to install, configure, and get working graphviz feels very hoaky. I prefer python, but R still does some things really well that the python libraries are just not up to par 1) anything geospatial, including drawing maps. here is a list of project…

> why in 2019 is there no good way to visualize a decision tree?

You should try https://github.com/parrt/dtreeviz. From Terrence Parr and Vince Grover, released in Sept 2018.

There is a good background article on the problem space and their design iterations here: https://explained.ai/decision-tree-viz/index.html

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the libraries have grown nicely over the years, though I am surprised they still lack some basic stuff. why in 2019 is there no good way to visualize a decision tree? having to install, configure, and get working graphviz feels very hoaky. I prefer python, but R still does some things really well that the python libraries are just not up to par 1) anything geospatial, including drawing maps. here is a list of project…

> why in 2019 is there no good way to visualize a decision tree? You should try https://github.com/parrt/dtreeviz . From Terrence Parr and Vince Grover, released in Sept 2018. There is a good background article on the problem space and their design iterations here: https://explained.ai/decision-tree-viz/index.html

thanks for the info, but as I said above anything that relies on the installation of graphiz is extremely hoaky, and as you can see on many posts on SO, doesnt work many times.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#365
I get the feeling that a lot of programmers (especially the older senior ones) are overestimating their significance. It's like people don't want to accept the inevitable future of AI and automation and be like "oh, code is never going to write itself! nope, it's never going to happen! herp derp my job is safe!".

Give it 10-15 years and the bubble is going to burst whether we like it or not. If you're not into machine learning or deep learning at that point you're screwed.

Change my mind.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#366
post #26

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. Some of the smartest people I know work in other domains: biology, chemistry, and even physics. They are sometimes baffled by tasks that seem trivial to me, and I'm under no impression that I'm more intelligent than them. I simply spec…

Absolutely right and something we see in Data science too. Coding is a domain where we work cross-architecture. I can't be just a useful Python programmer - I can only be a useful Python programmer in Marketing automation or some Business associated with it. The fat package makes programmers not realize this.

Data scientist is a term similar to Web Master, I don’t think it will be a thing in 10 years.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no non-competes in California, 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…

Correction: 0-3 years: 15 days 3-5: 20 days 5+: 25 days

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 and the fact that amiga was clean room design. IBM Pc was already old and even x86-64 won over itanium. Backwards compatibility has a cost but also gains. Amiga wasn't even compatible with c64.

That and the fact that amiga was clean room design. IBM Pc was already

Well the PC wasn’t backward compatible with CP/M so that’s an odd critique to level at the Amiga.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#369

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. Some of the smartest people I know work in other domains: biology, chemistry, and even physics. They are sometimes baffled by tasks that seem trivial to me, and I'm under no impression that I'm more intelligent than them. I simply spec…

> they program to accomplish other tasks in their domain of expertise My kids have mentioned that they might be interested in a degree in computer science because and I've encouraged them to combine that with a second area of specialization. Programmers are everywhere, but a programmer that also knows chemistry or biology or economics or art history or just about anything stands out.

>Programmers are everywhere, but a programmer that also knows chemistry or biology or economics or art history or just about anything stands out.

Really? I have a physics degree with some experience in rocket science, but my most valuable skillset (measured by how much pay I can fetch for it) is plain old software engineering. I don't think I'd be able to leverage my area of specialization to exceed or even match what I can get from FB/LI/G as a generic software engineer.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, knowing that I can get a good salary with relatively shit skills makes me want to up my game. Because it seems like a situation that is inherently unstable. Eventually it has to change (imo), either through companies becoming more scrupulous in their hiring, or through a massive flood of new devs.

I think it will be a massive flood of new devs (maybe we're in it now?) -> overvalued tech stocks -> crash -> stricter hiring. It's not that tech, even done by shitty devs, isn't valuable. It's a question of whether the market can control itself, which I'm pretty sure is no.

> stricter hiring

Stricter hiring on the low-end perhaps, because in FAANG and the companies that copy them, hiring could hardly get any stricter...

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