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Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

blog.cerebralab.com

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Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#191

Post by foobiekr »

crote wrote: post #13

It seems to be missing a very big factor: culture. If your goal is to implement some code for, say, healthcare, it is a lot easier to explain the business process to someone who is already familiar with how stuff is done on a higher level. Whenever you hire someone from a different culture / country, you need to start from the basics by explaining the very core of your society. An American programmer might not be too…

IMHO, it's much much more likely that the issue is the geography of skills, and we're entering a very interesting period where we may do an experiment to see if geography is the answer.

There are a number of technology-specific hubs around the world and even just in the united states. Silicon Valley is one of the most obvious ones, but Raleigh is another one, as are Nashua, Boston and Salt Lake City (there are others).

What all of these have in common is that each of them had, at some time in the past there was a massive company with out-sized returns. In the Valley were were _several_ - Intel, HP, ... and many more. NCR (and others) in Raleigh, Westford, Petaluma (optics), Boston as a geography absolutely dominated storage until Netapp, and so on.

When you have companies like this, they produce a lasting geographic concentration of talent, especially early in a given sector's life. Think Michigan and especially Detroit for automakers or California for aerospace.

The experiment we're doing with the work-from-home thing will be interesting if it goes forward, because as a few locations in Canada demonstrated, a very active de-centralization of a given kind of expertise (in that case, the network element management software) can render a given tech hub a memory at best. If history is anything to go by, disassembling Silicon Valley, if possible, will not result in more uniform distribution, it will just move from one concentrated area to another.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#192

Post by firethief »

chii wrote: post #62
jesstaa wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely it. The best markets for selling software are the wealthy countries with their cultures. You need people in those countries that are part of those cultures to develop that software. So your employment market is limited by people within that culture that have that skill, which is why there is still a software development skills shortage. For purely technical things like kernel, database, network or…

But by this hypothesis, countries that have a different culture, but have similarly good programmers, would be able to produce a product suited to their own culture and thus out-compete the imported english version. But this rarely happens, if at all. So there's something that's still amiss.

It is much more lucrative to make the version for Americans. The other country ends up with whatever's cheapest to make, which is more likely to be a localization than a parallel effort (the better cultural fit for an independent product would not be worth the cost).

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#193

Post by CobrastanJorji »

babesh wrote: post #176

This article is badly informed and badly reasoned. Adam Smith - An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ” It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving, or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest.” In those places, you are willing to pay the most since it will make you the most. Brooke’s Law Wikipedia “ Communication overhea…

The desire to cluster makes sense, but why cluster where the salaries are most expensive? If you want to start a software company, why start it in the Valley and not some town that has lots of programming talent but way lower pay? We see so many startups that are paying top dollar for San Francisco office space and a dozen six digit programmers, but the same company in suburban Georgia would cost only a tiny fraction of that, and putting it in the country George would cost only a small fraction of that yet again.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#194

Post by TeMPOraL »

benjohnson wrote: post #188
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent my entire career being told that pointing out problems doesn't help the situation, having these problems blow up and having the same people say they wish they had listened... and being told that pointing out problems doesn't help the situation. I had a real heart-to-heart with the CTO where I worked since he only gets along with one of the managers and doesn't like his directors. He said the only reason he…

>>pointing out problems That's the first step. Proposing a complete solution that takes in the needs of the various stakeholders and doesn't just move the problem and does so in a way that makes the whole situation easier is the hard part. If you've done that and nobody is listening, it's time to change the culture or leave.

> Proposing a complete solution that takes in the needs of the various stakeholders and doesn't just move the problem and does so in a way that makes the whole situation easier

There's a fine line between being thorough, and doing the job of several other people for them. The latter isn't what you're being paid for, and in some companies isn't appreciated if it risks some of them losing face.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#195

Post by Barrin92 »

chii wrote: post #62
jesstaa wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely it. The best markets for selling software are the wealthy countries with their cultures. You need people in those countries that are part of those cultures to develop that software. So your employment market is limited by people within that culture that have that skill, which is why there is still a software development skills shortage. For purely technical things like kernel, database, network or…

But by this hypothesis, countries that have a different culture, but have similarly good programmers, would be able to produce a product suited to their own culture and thus out-compete the imported english version. But this rarely happens, if at all. So there's something that's still amiss.

This does indeed happen and the biggest example is probably China. Wechat with its super-app concept has done something that didn't really have a Western analog. Didi replaced Uber in China, Alipay and TikTok and a lot of other apps constitute an entirely different, domestic ecosystem.

It's also starting to happen with banking / finance apps. Nubank is growing very fast in Latin America, Africa is starting to have a domestic ecommerce sector, and so on. The internet is new and many countries, particular developing ones that have a sufficiently distinct culture to not just adopt Anglophone products are only now starting to have the talent and infrastructure in place.

It's also happening in messaging. Telegram is overwhelmingly more popular in Europe/Russia than it is in the US. LINE is the most popular app in Japan and Thailand, Facebook Messenger and SMS still dominate in the US.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#196

Post by treeman79 »

Frost1x wrote: post #108
silvestrov wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the communication is. Silicon Valley and Scandinavian cultures are very flat, so it is possible for "the man on the floor" to tell management that it doesn't work to put diesel into a gasoline car. In authoritarian cultures this would be a mistake as it's seen as embarrassing the management by saying they made a mistake. If you want to continue being employed then it is much b…

Business culture in the US is also quite authoritarian. There have been decades of strategic peeling away of labor rights to put labor in a more leveraged situation, leading to restricted freedoms. Sure, you can tell your manager/director/CIO/CTO their choice is idiotic but the fact is, you'll be fired instantly and depending on circumstances, you may be in a bad situation financially and future career wise. The very…

I’ve worked for both kinds. Seen good ones go bad.

One kind of employer only retains crappy employees.

The other gets all the good ones.

Health care industry coding seems to along the lines. Solve the immediate issue. A few years later the complexity is off the chart.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#197

Post by throwaway4220 »

joelbluminator wrote: post #144
throwaway4220 wrote: post #7

“ Doctors in the US and UK are very expensive, that's not because nobody has noticed there are equally skilled doctors in other countries that charge 1/5th the price (or even algorithms that can do most of it for pennies). It's because practicing medicine in those countries requires to go through a regulatory gauntlet that would make Kafka feel like an unimaginative fraud.” Ouch. Yeah some US/UK doctors are overpaid…

> I don’t know any even in radiology/pathology that can rival a physician You're saying this based on..?

I'm a radiologist involved in machine learning research! I lurk on HN to feel like I know how to code :)

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#198

Post by thewarrior »

dxbydt wrote: post #172

imho american programmers are in for a world of hurt. Day of reckoning is coming. Its just not today. So if you say its today, you naturally get the derision and downvotes. But that doesn’t mean there is no such day. Just 2-3 days ago we sent 2 chaps into space. 50 years ago with far more primitive software we sent them to the moon. And you are bitching about how your software profession is so fragile it’ll be messed…

The day is closer than most here on HN think.

TikTok is doing extremely well and rapidly gaining users. They demonstrate a good knowledge of everything that SV typically does and are based entirely out of China. These arguments about culture are laughable. TikTok is basically the engine of culture now among teens and is playing a big part in the current protests.

Zoom has its engineering based in China. This means two of the fastest growing consumer products today are built by Chinese software engineers.

The Chinese are also at the bleeding edge of Machine Learning and are taking baby steps in building cloud services. With the elimination of Huawei from Western tech ecosystem they will be forced to build an entire stack from Silicon => Pixels and its well within their reach in the next decade.

IntelliJ which everyone here swears by is built entirely out of Russia.

All FANGs are rapidly scaling up their presence outside the US in locations like Europe/Canada to hedge US visa issues which will intensify over time. The only way to employ non US software engineers along with western ones might be to have offices in non US western countries.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#199

Post by joelbluminator »

rubber_duck wrote: post #171
joelbluminator wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany isn't developed?

I'm talking about the more extreme cases like India and US, but if you want to take it there I'd say compared to the US the opportunities for you and your children will be better when you're in the top income bracket.

Yeah, looks like a great place lately you're totally right

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#200

Post by joelbluminator »

throwaway4220 wrote: post #197
joelbluminator wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know any even in radiology/pathology that can rival a physician You're saying this based on..?

I'm a radiologist involved in machine learning research! I lurk on HN to feel like I know how to code :)

That's surprising, I was sure radiology would be the first medical field to get automated away. What are the main challenges you think?
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