391–400 of 407 posts
A few thoughts: - Just because a value is high and may very well go down, doesn't mean it's a bubble. FAANG are making real money from those workers, not just inflating an asset and selling it to other investors. - Just because it doesn't involve long hours, doesn't mean it's not hard. A lot of my college colleagues really struggled, and many more didn't even get in. Don't discount natural ability - in the land of th…
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Does anyone do that, at least on the software side? Obviously there are consistency issues with e.g. non-instantaneous bank teller actions, but those are human inconsistencies, not software inconsistencies..
What I mean is that some of the powerful components we can leverage today solve problems that did not exist in 1985, so having these available then would not really help. I mean: what would you use Node.js for - in 1985 - even assuming you had access to a system to develop and test stuff made with it?
In 1985, your hypothetical bank would be running VMS, which had asynchronous IO system calls as the default. There was no need to "invent" something like Node.js.
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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. But that is no definition of bubble. Bubble, at a very basic level, means there is a lot of capital flowing within, it has little to do with whether how difficult your job is.
This is... debatable. I was around in 1985 and if I had proposed using "an eventually consistent schemaless DB" to tackle a bank or a manufacturing project I would have been laughed out of the room. And not because it sounded too good to be true, mind you...
Medical record systems were running on MUMPS (schemaless) and being eventually consistent (records were keyed in from paper forms) long before 1985.
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> we are looking at the top 1% of software engineers Working for a big company that pays well does not mean you're at the top 1% of software engineers. It means you're willing to do what it takes to secure that job and maintain it, including moving somewhere many don't want to live.
"willing to do what it takes to secure that job and maintain it" Some (most?) of that is innate ability and intelligence. Sure, there are well-paying jobs that are unpleasant. But for many others the company literally gets to choose 1 out of 100 candidates.
Getting a job at these companies largely requires studying up on CS101 trivia and CS basics to pass stupid tests. It's practicing how to pass their interview process. It's not "innate ability and intelligence."
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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.
What is the pydata library set? numpy, pandas, matplotlib, sklearn and the like? My google fu is failing me...
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Lawyers have been around for a while, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of them, and the average salary is still relatively high. However the distribution of starting salaries has trended towards being bimodal ( https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib ). I could imagine the same thing happening for programmers over time, if it hasn't already.
I think barrier to entry for lawyers is way higher than for programming.
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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.
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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.
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> Nothing frustrates me more than having my job responsibilities include training someone with no initiative. Years ago, I worked someplace where a colleague was tasked with working with another developer on project X. After about 15 minutes it was clear the other developer ... wasn't? A web project, and this person had been employed as a "web developer" for at least several months. Questions like "how does this info…
Sadly reputation comes from result. He was given 2 tasks and he only delivers one result. I know this sounds... not ideal... but it is what it is. His manager probably has to operate at the same level of expectation: given 3 tasks by his manager (or director), either you finish all 3 or you're less dependable.