I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#281

Post by ksm1717 » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

techopoly wrote: post #245

andreilys wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked” Also known as survivorship bias.

Just because there's possibly some survivorship bias in their viewpoint doesn't mean their statement is automatically false.

I like to call that the survivorship bias bias. Similar to the sunk cost fallacy fallacy

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#282

Post by catacombs » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #162

Is that..it? Where's the story? The paragraph about September 2001 is followed by April 2020, with nothing about what happened during the nearly 20 years in between? I don't even know what kind of work the author does currently. Maybe he's well known in tech circles, I don't know. This is a blog post from a job board site; at least put in something resembling a narrative. Yesterday we had a similarly promotional post…

The article screams "privilege."

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#283

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #280

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overestimating the demand for junior engineers with no formal college education. It's tough for them to get in, especially in LCOL areas where the job market isn't competitive.

That depends on how you define junior. Some people define that as less than certain years of experience on a resume. Some people define it in technical terms, in scope of particular competencies, or terms of interview performance. Since there is no uniform definition of competence my personal definition is anybody who does this job but either advocates fear of writing original code or who cannot write any code withou…

In this particular example, I'm referring to exclusively with individuals with no industry experience and no degree from an accredited program (e.g., ABET). Some people with minimal (but some) industry experience are still called junior.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#284

Post by catacombs » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #105

chvid wrote: post #79

Why do you guys assume that this crisis will hit software development? As far as I can see software development will be one of the fields least hit, possibly even benifiting, by the fallout of the Corona-virus.

Fields that will be hit: anything that relies on ad revenue, international or trans-national tourism and travel (badly), b&m retail (badly), online retail [1], entertainment [also 1], web support services, corporate web dev, real estate, fintech. Fields that may grow: medical services and support, small-scale short-distance tourism (after 6-12 months), small scale web dev, military spending, government support and co…

> fintech

Not at all. Wall Street will be just fine, as it has been in previous economic crashes.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#285

Post by thatcat » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

Ididntdothis wrote: post #263

DmitryOlshansky wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or rather the old adege of: “The luck favors the prepared”

People just remember that there are no guarantees. Dedication and hard work help a lot but you may still fail.

It's so hard to know when to give up on something you're dedicated to when it has high pay off but a moderately low chance of success.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#286

Post by yourapostasy » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

dgb23 wrote: post #179

einpoklum wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to encourage success Scammers, arbitrage stock-traders, and opioid drug marketers can also achieve success... On the other hand, some endeavors "succeed" by not-failing and being out of sight and out of mind, e.g. a plumbing installation. You don't think of your "daily plumbing success". So, I'd say not success which should be encouraged, it is well-directed and well-applied effort. PS - The plumbing example can we…

> You don't think of your "daily plumbing success". Initially I had to laugh at this one, but why not? Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens. I think one of the IT fields that is struggling with this is security, because the problem is most apparent there.

> Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens.

This is endemic to business and is especially widespread in contemporary American-style business, and the general case seems to be a failure in pricing all kinds of tail risk. I suspect a key challenge in this space is the unsolved principal agent problem.

I think the principal agent problem is rampant because pricing information is extremely lossy information compression; only the grossest outcomes are recorded in the market. Those who exploit the principal agent problem rely upon externalities to succeed, and those externalities are not timely or fine-grained reflected in the compressed/price information.

Reputation systems lossily add the missing information back into the market as a side-channel. But what externalities to record is a whole other can of worms.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#287

Post by Retric » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #240

Retric wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both social distancing and herd immunity reduce the R factor. Thus nearly everyone may end up with the disease in NYC, but in less dense areas it can stamped out with vastly lower infection rates. That alone could make the difference between 70% vs 30% of the US population getting even with minimal precautions.

There's enough social distancing going on in NYC right now to prevent the majority of people from ever getting it. It doesn't seem likely that the social distancing will be let up enough (and subsequently not clamped back down) to the point of allowing most people to get it.

On the surface that seems to be true. NYC has ~8.4 million people minus those who left the city. ~1% of the population has already tested positive (81,803), and compared to yesterday (81,803 - 76,876) = 4,727 people are testing positive per day which would take years before everyone gets it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_N...

More pessimistically, NYC’s CFR is almost 5% while in a growth phase when South Korea’s CFR is 2% after cases peaked when it was 0.6% in the growth phase. This suggests NYC is massively undercounting cases and the actual rate of infection could be something like 5-10x as high, with the virus reaching 50+% of the population in months at it’s current rate of spread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...

PS: A more nuanced look taking into account differences in the overall and infected populations could narrow that estimate down. But, it should not be assumed South Korea discovered every case or that each country is counting deaths in the same way.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#288

Post by jjice » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

jrimbault wrote: post #271

scottLobster wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. A prerequisite for winning any game is showing up. Those who show up most often are therefore more likely to win. Someone who practices a skill for 20 hours a week for a year will have had 1040 hours of practice vs 258 hours of practice for someone who practices 5 hours a week, and that linear increase in time will likely produce an exponential increase in skill as knowledge builds on itself. Assumin…

Assuming we have defined "success" and the person A will multiply their chance of success by 2 after each try. That leaves almost zero chances of success. Success, however we choose to define it, is in large part a result of luck. Skill, to a much lesser degree.

I think of it like `success = (luck * skill)`. Meaning that if you have all the skill in the world, but the absolute worst luck, you can still fail, and vice versa, but with that said, the majority of possibilities for luck can be countered by higher skill.

Is Ken Thompson lucky? Probably was very lucky to have influences to point him towards electrical engineering and computer science, but with his level of skill, it's hard to imagine him not having a huge impact somewhere. Ending up at Bell Labs (let's say that's luck since he could've worked in a variety of environments) is definitely lucky, but he wouldn't have created UNIX if he didn't also have the skill. I think this goes for the majority of figures in computer science (I don't know enough about other fields to say that about them).

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#289

Post by mywittyname » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

meowzero wrote: post #204

I too graduated with a CS degree from a highly ranked technical University. It was probably the worst time for recent graduate with a CS degree. You hear news of all jobs going to India. Nobody in the US was hiring developers. In fact, they were getting all laid off. I had to scrape by taking odd jobs here and there. I worked as a short-order cook, made jewelry in a factory, worked at a UPS warehouse, etc. It felt ho…

This is part of the reason we are / were paid so much recently. Hardly any young people went into technology from dot-com until around 12 or so (unless they were passionate about it), precisely because everyone was telling kids that programming was so easily outsourced that you'll never make money at it.

There's a distinct dips in the number of 30-40 year olds in technology. There are plenty of older people, and there are now tons of younger people, but few in between. From age 20 to about 30, I was always the youngest person on my team. Now this is no longer the case, but those who are younger are 10+ years younger.

People today are amazed when I tell them I only made $10/hr in my first programming gig. People who graduated in the 90s were making $40-50k out of school and today it's not uncommon to get 70k+ in the mid-west. The early 00s were a different time.

Re: I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

#290

Post by yayana » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #203

yayana wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and you will too" is a big part of why this is the accurate TLDR. I looked at the job market a few months ago and Carona aside, the market is in a terrible state. Companies are looking for unicorns that agree with them on style, chose all the right techs four years ago, are young or otherwise willing to accept abuse, and write like someone with 10 years experience teaching TDD style programming. On top of that they…

One advantage of an economy like this is that in another year or two, companies will have been humbled a bit and will not be looking so far up the corporate equivalent of Maslow's hierarchy, and will either be more focused on things that actually matter, or will be dead. Unfortunately, we have to get through this bit first....

I hope you are right. OTOH, with an actual over abundance of labor instead of always on hiring barely finding enough employees, they can either go even farther in the direction of pointless hoops or even shorter on wages relative to output.

My advice to everyone who is thinking about tech is to find a domain that needs tech assistance and consider that domain your career future. Street smart engineers I know have mostly dropped out by 40, so tech is not a career.