Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground? • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by constantine42 » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 2:43 AM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #26

gbasin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out, the hard part of software is figuring out what to build. The rest is cheap in comparison, whether done in SF or Bangalore.

(Product) managers decide what to build. Engineers decide how to build it. You make it sound as if software engineering has no value. Clearly this isn't true as small local banks will have awful sites and apps despite the problem statement being pretty clear cut. The most successful tech companies also happen to be the ones that have attracted the top engineering talent. Generally, ime, an engineer you pay $150k is w…

The company I work for has an interesting setup. Marketing drives what products we need via marketing research, Product Owners(PO) represent those products and further research the problem space, Product Managers(PM) are coupled with an engineering team and the PM negotiates with the team around estimations, priorities, and planning. But ultimately the team decides what it does, but they are held accountable for delivering business value.

As a team, we can't just go all vigilante, but we can push back and have at times gone over other people's heads to make sure the proper people understood the problem. Most of the time we got what we thought was best for the customer by going over people's heads, but there's been plenty of times that a middle ground was reached.

The main thing is to not just say "we can't". Our job is to deliver solutions, not products. If there is a problem with priorities, we find an acceptable way to make things "work". Maybe that's adjusting timelines, or features, or just asking the customer how important that timeline is to them. I can't tell you how many times I've been told about "deadlines" that the customer never actually said was a deadline.

Us: Yo cust, can we slide that project 2-4 weeks?

Them: Sure. Heck, move it back 2 months if you want, but we absolutely need to start testing on our end in 3 months.

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

#312

Post by datavirtue » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 2:56 AM UTC

thewarrior wrote: post #198

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 tw…

Yeah...but the Chinese are going to demand just as much as Americans and the costs/salaries are not likely to go down for the other points made in this thread (language/culture barrier, time zone, etc).

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

#313

Post by bsder » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 2:57 AM UTC

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #268

bsder wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Business culture in the US is also quite authoritarian. You ain't seen nothin' then. Try challenging an elder boss in Japan (or China or South Korea, but Japan is especially bad) and watch what happens, for example. I find that very few cultures allow challenging authority like the US does.

On the other hand, Japanese or Korean boss would not spit some random bullshit, because he/she would emabarass themselves and will have to leave. Never happens with an American boss.

> On the other hand, Japanese or Korean boss would not spit some random bullshit, because he/she would emabarass themselves and will have to leave.

Then you have limited experience with Japanese bosses.

Under most circumstances, they simply avoid trying to commit to ANYTHING. They will never give you a definite yes or no and will move glacially slowly.

However, when driven to against a wall in which they must make a decision, it is fairly common that they can, and will, spew some of the most jaw-droppingly stupid things, and nobody will ever contradict them--certainly not publicly.

Yes, when things go really bad, they will have to apologize and fall on their sword. However, the failure has to reach epic proportions before that will happen--normally they just shovel the blame onto subordinates exactly like US bosses.

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

#314

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 4:10 AM UTC

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.

For niche markets this does happen, and for mass consumer markets the economy of scale comes into play, as the local market is so much smaller than the global market, or the English market, or even the local market of California (I mean, the state of California is economically larger than many countries, and doubly so for the premium market targeted at wealth individuals) that the local adjustments aren't sufficient to outcompete the much larger investment available due to a larger market. But for the larger markets this definitely does happen.

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

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Post by PeterisP » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 4:22 AM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #262

contravariant wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a precise and clear enough description you could throw it at a python interpreter and run it. Though things could get fun if AI can enable more flexible declarative programming.

if you could throw it at a python interpreter and run it then that wouldn't be english.

I'd argue that "precise and clear enough description" means using a subset of English that's more complicated and much, much more verbose than python.

Have you read laws? That is the style of language that tries to make a "precise and clear enough description" in English, but it does not go far enough, it's still not sufficiently precise to be applied directly, you would have to use something like 'super-legalese' for that.

So even if you had a system that could accept English, nobody would want to use that because it's difficult to express precise and clear enough descriptions in English, and easier to do so in Python or some other programming language; and in any case, the difficult part of programming is thinking up the precise and clear enough descriptions.

This comes up in writing specifications for outsourced programmers. Writing a specification in English that's clear and actually precise enough takes more work than just writing the code directly - since you have to do all the hard part anyway, and then have to express it in a language that's poorly suited to do so. And a reasonable specification is very much not precise enough to be executed, it relies on the programmer putting in a lot of the details based on their domain understanding and common sense, leading to very different implementations as that domain understanding and common sense varies.

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

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Post by monksy » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 4:26 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #69

matz1 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This remind me of the recent Microsoft AI that can write code demo. You give the AI instruction and explanation in English, preferably as clear and as detailed as possible and you get back code. Essentially its very similar workflow when working with offshore developer, in the future you could in theory replace the offshore dev with AI, except with much less latency.

The issues we have with any code development; whether through on-site employees, offsite employees, contract shops, or integrated contractors, would also apply to AI. Those of us that have been doing it a while, know that the single biggest issue in any commercial code project is bad input to the process; otherwise known as Requirements. No one knows what they want, or, even worse, they know what they want, and what…

It's amazing how we have, and used to have, all this great knowledge about process and methodology. (McConnell and Brooks) but yet the industry would rather throw their hands up and micromanage projects into the ground. (Agile).

The books that are published feel like they're targeting entry developers and it's a lot of stuff you'd learn on the job. It feels like we're over-promoting way too quickly and demanding delivery over experience or quality.

Interviews: You have developers that refused to learn this skill and they just skim a few leetcode problems and expect the interviewee to solve it in 15 minutes.

Best practices: What happened to developing standards and demanding/expecting tests (and their appropriate categories unit, integeration, smoke, feature/functional, etc)

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

#317

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

T-hawk wrote: post #279

temuze wrote: post #68

I'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…

> giving them work is often a form of programming... they will do exactly what you tell them to do Yup. My anecdote: There was a middleware business application. Two database fields were last-changed-timestamp and last-changed-username. The spec document accidentally flipped the definitions, defining the value for last-changed-timestamp = current-username and vice versa. You can guess what got implemented. "I ran thi…

Oh, I've got a relevant story. There was a spec sent overseas for a system where one of the entity descriptions had a typo - in the title instead of 'Customers' it said 'Custoners'.

The 'Customers' table was referenced in multiple other places and tests, so the delivered system had no problems with that, the customer functionality worked properly; however, sure enough, in addition to the 'Customers' table the database schema also had a table 'Custoners' with all the fields. Because the specification required that.

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

#318

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 4:34 AM UTC

kirubakaran wrote: post #129

kls wrote: post #127

Earlier 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.

I've worked on banking software development, and we definitely expect programmers to know nuances of banking.

Perhaps not all the nuances, and many aspects are arbitrary choices and only the spec would reveal what the business unit chose, but there's a lot of domain knowledge required to be productive.

If we need to outsource stuff, that has to be to some outfit that has developers experienced with banking nuances, and often times they are more experienced than internal devs (because they have worked on this parictular tricky corner of banking for multiple different institutions), and if we hire devs from outside the industry, we expect the first 6 months to need a lot of handholding because they don't know the nuances of banking and they can't be productive at all until they learn at least most of them, because no realistic spec will be sufficient for a programmer without a domain knowledge, at least not in the financial domain.

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

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Post by hrishios » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 4:52 AM UTC

A lot of people have pointed of culture and language, and this has been two of the most important things for me when I've had to make the choice between programmers.

Most of the time, as long as the hire is above a certain skill level, the bottleneck is absolutely the communication bandwidth between you and them. If they don't completely understand things or you don't understand them, the number of round trips increases. Add to a general sheepishness when presented with American English and slang, as well as certain cultural tendencies, and you encounter a lot of hires who will say yes (especially from India and Vietnam) when they don't understand. This is a big problem.

I've also seen the efficient market at work, but on a level up from the programmers themselves. In a lot of cases, programmers from developing countries are hired out by agencies who will charge a lot closer to market while paying them less. This might cause a lot of the disparities in the data looked at by the author, and in any data where salaries are compared directly.

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

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Post by enonevets » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

speeder wrote: post #61

I am Brazilian, I tried to get jobs in other countries multiple times and many times it failed due to reasons not related to my competency: 1. Rejected from working in a gamedev in Europe because I am not EU Citizen. 2. Lots of companies on USA have to follow some crazy tax rules or general regulations that make them not allowed to hire foreigners, don't even need to be military stuff. Noticed some companies won't ev…

Based on your comment, I assume these are all under the context of full time employment? Do you find the same barriers apply when attempting contracting (including factors others have noted in this thread)?