Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#141

Post by mojuba » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

willcipriano wrote: post #125

mojuba wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the most irrelevant counterpoint that can be made here. "Communist" states were also totalitarian, i.e. undemocratic and that was the main reason for their ultimate failure. With democracy they'd be able to self-correct and likely switch to free[er] markets for example. Consumer software and Internet are probably the least regulated areas of engineering today, that's the problem. Compare that to aerospace, con…

> Regulation though is not part of the free market capitalism paradigm Who told you that? People like to simplify views and say that people are "anti-regulation", but really people are anti-poorly-thought-out-regulation. What famous capitalist do you know that argued theft for example should be unregulated?

Show me a corporation that would whole heartedly support regulation of the market they're in.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#142

Post by gonehome » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #122

WhompingWindows wrote: post #74

My Own Addition: 14. Those who code for a living make good money. I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are mak…

There has never been a 1:1 relationship between how essential a job is, nor how difficult it is, and the pay. It's mostly about a) the barriers to entry, which can be academic (law, medicine), regulatory (law, medicine, probably finance?), institutional (finance, tier 1 law), or just how grueling it is to get through (definitely medicine outside of some specialties like family med or peds, probably tier 1 finance/IB…

Imo this is related to value provided. It’s why an excellent tutor can make serious money and be hired by wealthy families to teach kids. Good teaching is a scarce resource.

Many (most?) teachers are bad and the existing incentives don’t require them to be good. It’s hard to fire them and public schools have issues which limit selection and competition.

Perhaps harsh, but some of the dimmest people I knew in highschool became teachers and some of the meanest adults I’ve ever interacted with were teachers too. Obviously great outliers exist, but I’m skeptical they’re the norm.

Most jobs that have high demand, real evaluation of skill, and limited supply of people that can do it well (for whatever reason) pay well in capitalist markets.

The exception I can think of would be something like social work, where demand is high, costs are high and it’s mostly government funded.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#143

Post by ryandvm » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 2:45 PM UTC

dpeck wrote: post #87

WhompingWindows wrote: post #74

My Own Addition: 14. Those who code for a living make good money. I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are mak…

You’re not wrong, but I’ll say the part about not going into it for the money is becoming less and less true all the time. For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Their parents, advisors, etc saw how much mo…

What I always tell people thinking about a software engineering career is that, yes, it's great money but I strongly advise only doing it if you actually like working with computers. Otherwise it's going to be a nightmare. Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#144

Post by silicon2401 » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 2:45 PM UTC

WhompingWindows wrote: post #74

My Own Addition: 14. Those who code for a living make good money. I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are mak…

> I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are making great money by utilizing the greatest tool of all time: the computer.

This is one of the main reasons I'm a software engineer and shudder to think about doing anything else for a living, despite not even liking software that much.

> It's uncomfortable because many of us didn't understand this going in.

This is probably not as common as you think. Most of the SWEs I know switched over from other fields because it's an obviously easier gig. Epidemiology, architecture, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, archaeology, public policy. People are painfully aware of how easy we have it and that's precisely why they're (we're) SWEs, not because of any interest in coding itself.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#145

Post by peruvian » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 2:45 PM UTC

sudhirj wrote: post #92

WhompingWindows wrote: post #74

My Own Addition: 14. Those who code for a living make good money. I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are mak…

The difference here is usually leverage. A teacher spending an hour to teach one child teaches one child, but a programmer who spends an hour writing code to generate a dollar’s worth of value can have that run thousands of times a second or 24/7 even when they’re sleeping. Of course teachers who understand this also make money, see Miss Excel ( https://www.instagram.com/miss.excel/?hl=en ), who was/is making $100k a…

Classic tech guy response. Teachers teach multiple kids, hundreds a week of not a day, and can inspire many to go on to do great things (money-wise or not).

Why are we tech people so arrogant about our career? We already make good money, no need to think we're better than others.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#146

Post by abernard1 » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 2:45 PM UTC

musingsole wrote: post #119

varjag wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adoption curve takes a while. Typescript definitely wasn't common back in 2012, I can tell you that.

It's not common now! The software world is huge; a niche of a niche is not some bellwether of the industry.

> It's not common now!

It is [1].

Over 60% of Javascript developers use it somewhere, and over 1/3rd of all developers use it for something. Almost all widely used npm modules have @types annotations as well. Outside of node, it's arguably the most ubiquitous voluntary extension of the JS ecosystem ever.

[1] https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2019/05/07/typescriptexploding...

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#147

Post by musingsole » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 2:45 PM UTC

akavel wrote: post #10

Re. 3 & 5: my theory is that a language with gradual typing, gradual error handling enforcement, and "gradual proving" that is seamlessly embedded in it (see e.g. the https://nim-lang.org/docs/drnim.html experiment) could hopefully actually work here. And as to dynamic typing, I found it useful when prototyping, to quickly PoC/MVP the "happy path" of an idea/design, and see if it is worth investing any bigger effort,…

> Question is, can anyone design & implement a language that would have all of that, and still be readable and understandable to a common programmer

No, because exception handling and the answer to "what type are these data?" are product questions. Hard questions that no one really wants to work out because what if our customer base wants something completely different in 6 months?

This is largely reflected in cloud providers being unwilling/unable to provide account spend caps: what is a sane response once the budget goes over? AWS can't tell you; only you can define it. (This isn't to say "there's nothing AWS can do for you here" -- they could but won't for other reasons).

Python is the largest, common language that can support gradual checking systems being added in over time, and mypy has outlined a great framework for doing just that. But it's not a silver bullet and can't be because the problems are cultural, not mathematic. Either spend the time working out what you want your software to do, or don't. But don't argue "strictness" is "correctness".

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#148

Post by willcipriano » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

mojuba wrote: post #141

willcipriano wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regulation though is not part of the free market capitalism paradigm Who told you that? People like to simplify views and say that people are "anti-regulation", but really people are anti-poorly-thought-out-regulation. What famous capitalist do you know that argued theft for example should be unregulated?

Show me a corporation that would whole heartedly support regulation of the market they're in.

Facebook[0]. Regulation could make it more difficult for competitors to get off the ground so they are in support of regulation to that effect.

[0]https://about.facebook.com/regulations/

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#149

Post by silicon2401 » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 2:47 PM UTC

ryandvm wrote: post #143

dpeck wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not wrong, but I’ll say the part about not going into it for the money is becoming less and less true all the time. For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Their parents, advisors, etc saw how much mo…

What I always tell people thinking about a software engineering career is that, yes, it's great money but I strongly advise only doing it if you actually like working with computers. Otherwise it's going to be a nightmare. Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life.

> Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life.

I disagree. I coded for fun once, as a kid, and have never felt the need to do it again. If I never coded again, I wouldn't even notice because I my passions lie elsewhere. But working as a software developer is still tolerable because I'm just sitting at a desk, typing on a computer. As long as I don't have meetings...

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#150

Post by Workaccount2 » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 2:48 PM UTC

Well if we're just gonna bash software guys here....

The arrogance stands out for me. I have worked in many different fields and with a range of engineers (EE,ME,CE), none come close to the general aura of big ego and arrogance around software guys. It's similar to the levels seen in finance guys. Its like there has to be some relationship between compensation and true value, where ego makes up the difference.

Of course there are the humble bunch in there, but god I have no idea how they get along with their colleagues.