A lot of answers here. But no clear question. The advice in the comments from the physicist is spot on.
Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
301–310 of 350 posts
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#302The analysis in this post is all over the place with no guardrails. The advice from the physicist in the comments is spot on.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people cite liability as the main reason but I also haven't seen any algorithm that reads chest radiographs better than radiologists. To be fair, rads look at images, correlate with the patient chart and symptoms, and that info is not provided to the algorithms. But also, humans need only one or two examples of a weird diagnosis to find it again and that still can't be tackled by one-shot/few shot learning algor…
I don't know enough about A.I or radiology but if A.I can drive cars or make investment decisions better than humans I can't see why something as technical as reading photos and recognising patterns can't be done by A.I. Good luck with your research!
The largest system in the human brain is the one responsible for vision. There's a scary amount of computational power involved in a human completing simple-seeming visual tasks, and that's not always easy to reproduce with computer models.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point. In Eastern Europe a decent programmer earns 35-45K after tax. I know it because I work with developers from Eastern Europe. 12-16K is more a fresh grad level, really junior.
Just for clarity, US salaries are usually discussed before tax. If you're taking home 35-45k, you're basically at US salary levels. Remember than even here, Silicon Valley salaries are way above salaries elsewhere in the US. Increased competition for the best / closest programmers increases wages.
The Silicon Valley premium is not that large. Every programmer I know in North Carolina earns six figures. I earned 95 as a programmer with moderate experience in South Carolina a decade ago before I changed career paths.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That should be obvious. That's exactly what different cultures look like: it's absolutely not obvious in Eastern Europe where I live. We call each other out on our BS freely and directly, and almost nobody ever gets offended. It is quite the cultural shock for many of us when we suddenly have to sugar-coat and positive-tone-first every work criticism we express. It can feel like a huge waste of time and energy whil…
Man I wish it was more like that in the west, it's great to not glorify people being assholes, but when coworker X pushes a security fix on all production servers at the same time on a Friday afternoon, crashes the entire thing and somehow my manager talks about "the importance to avoid fingerpointing" in the post-mortem.
> my manager talks about "the importance to avoid fingerpointing" in the post-mortem.
I sometime am, and will continue to be that guy.
At least partly because it's the right way to handle post mortems, but partly because coworker X is only a symptom of the problem - and the underlying problem here is a manager who hasn't got a process in place to ensure Friday afternoon rush fixes on production don't happen. That's a process problem which is neither your nor coworker X's fault. That's my fault. Sorry...
(And maybe coworker X is a serial offender for this type of fuckup. Also my fault.)
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#306It 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…
> An American programmer might not be too concerned if a body temperature measurement returns 45 degrees Celcius. Similarly, a patient height of 95in probably wouldn't immediately raise alarm bells for a European developer. I would be questioning professional qualities of these programmers at this point. That’s just a common sense and base knowledge about the world you live in and people you write code for.
and yet, stuff like this happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work for an American semi-conductor company that no longer exists in its original form in (at that time) MCUs. MCUs are essentially CPUs with an internal bus, and some modules (PWM, A/D converter, math co-processor, what not) and that bus connects to the outside (often at a different speed) where it connects to various RAM and serial and/or parallel devices and analog innies or outies. The systems engineer…
Another possible takeaway: - Being excellent becomes a baseline expectation if you do it long enough so it's best you never put out your best possible work in the office? Pretty interesting story, thank you for it! Seriously though, my main takeaway is that you can be a genius and not an ass -- at the same time. But in your particular example the guy was completely in his right to mock them. And sadly yes, pride over…
Your point #1 is akin to my #3 - but you said it better! :-)
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
I try to explain this to people all the time. People discount tribal knowledge. I always use the analogy what if we where hired to build an app for Islamic banking, and ask them do you know anything about Islamic banking usually the answer is no. I know one thing about Islamic banking, they are not allowed to charge usury and I think they charge an upfront fee. I don't know how it is paid or if it is rolled into a lo…
A programmer from the US won't know the nuances of US banking either. I agree that someone has to know and write the specs. Does it have to be the programmers? I agree that domain knowledge is invaluable. But in the examples given, the difference in domain knowledge between local talent vs remote may not justify the 5x salary.
The problem with any outsourced companies is they live and die by acceptance criteria. Many times it takes longer to write out all of the criteria to the level of detail that I need than to just do it myself because natural language is horrible for such technical details and trying to explain to someone "What" and "why" is too time consuming.
It really bothers me because I generally get put on projects with little acceptance criteria and not something I've done before, yet I deliver on time and the end user is very happy because I take the time to ask good questions up-front. Why can't someone deliver something that makes me that happy.
On the topic of communications. I've consulted on projects where I've said that something I noticed should be done a specific way, even though it was not part of AC, technically worked correctly, and making the change would be feature creep. My advice was ignored. Weeks later the end users kept complaining that the software was difficult to use and could not communicate what they didn't like. Since they refused to use the software and they refused to accept it as it was, I was brought back in. I sat down, found out what work the end user was doing, and did some of that work. I literally did someone else's job. I used the software. I made a huge list of areas for improvement. The PM agreed to everything. All of the changes were made, the end users were now saying it was awesome to use.
To summarize, learn to read between the lines of the acceptance criteria. Would you want to use the software you're making? For me, small issues annoy the heck out of me. I notice these things. End users tend to just say nebulous things like "it doesn't work well".
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#309It 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…
> An American programmer might not be too concerned if a body temperature measurement returns 45 degrees Celcius. I'm baffled by this statement... I worked in the medical device industry for years at a company of 10k people and you would be hard pressed to find a sw engineer that didn't default to Celsius. Almost all sw engineers there either had EE, CpE or Biomedical Engineering degrees; Celsius is not remotely fore…
[deleted]
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#310I've worked with outsourced programmers before. Most of them are talented and a joy to work with. However, giving them work is often a form of programming... they will do exactly what you tell them to do, no more and no less. For example, unless you describe the tests you want them to write, they may not write tests. If they see a possible refactor or optimization, they won't volunteer to do it. One of the frequent s…
Tbf, often contractor developers have tried to do the right thing (e.g. write tests) and been bitten ("I didn't pay for a test suite!"). Individual initiative in the contracting world usually goes unrewarded and is often punished, so you quickly learn to do what you are told, no more, no less. And you have gone the extra mile for deadbeat clients that have left you hanging with unpaid invoices, so why bother wasting…
It also pays significantly more for less work and soul sucking drama than the FTEs deal with. Another point I can make, I'm considering joining a contracting firm that actually does real consulting because all of the engineers are senior and are known for contributing excellent big-picture work. They operate on word of mouth and have been maintaining their spots in companies while the pandemic has caused FTE layoffs in those same companies. Employee owned and the benefits are above average.