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Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

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Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#181

Post by dagw »

edoceo wrote: post #99
ericmay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I mean nothing is perfect. While capitalism doesn’t lend well to maintaining open source software (which I find to be a surprising comment given that GitHub exists) it does lend well to things like having a house, or being able to save money for retirement, or to creating markets where you get products you want. YC for example has enabled lots of founders to create brand new companies and services we all use. So…

Wait. Are Norway and Sweden in the group of "most capitalist"? I thought they also had a bunch of socialized programs. I feel like USA and UK are the top two "most capitalist" countries.

Ranking countries by "capitalism" is hard and kind of pointless. Sweden for example has no legally mandated minimum wage, which should make it more 'capitalist' than the US. It also has stronger unions and worker protection, which some people might argue makes it less capitalist. Sweden has (I believe) a much higher percentage of privately run high schools than the US (more capitalist), but free University education (less capitalist). Also the UK is in some ways 'less capitalist' then Sweden with its fondness for large government institutions like the NHS, while in Sweden health care is to much larger extent provided by private healthcare providers.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#182

Post by lucasyvas »

bumby wrote: post #168
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…

> And yet, their jobs are ESSENTIAL and we need people to do them even though they're grueling and underpaid. I think this touches on an uncomfortable point that many people don’t acknowledge: our current system generally* pays people according to how much they contribute to the economy and not by how much they contribute to society . The scalable nature of software means developers can disproportionately add value t…

I've felt for a long time that the reason software is not fulfilling its promise is because it has been tied exclusively to capitalist goals. The incentive structure is completely broken.

I think a balance probably exists, but we are badly missing the mark.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#183

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

StevePerkins wrote: post #178
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sucks is having a supercomputer in your jeans' pocket that is significantly less responsive to your input than a Commodore 64 and is mostly used to deliver ads to you.

I realize that this will get some reflexive upvotes from the meme crowd. But neither of those statements are remotely true.

I frequently have to pause while typing and wait for my pocket-supercomputer to catch up and actually give me feedback like putting text on the damn screen. Multi-second non-interactable pauses are not uncommon at all. If that isn't "unresponsive" I'd really like to know what is.

The ad thing I admit might be a touch hyperbolic.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#184

Post by tshaddox »

teddyh wrote: post #83
roenxi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing is almost a no-loss addition though. If your function takes an integer argument and someone might pass it a string, that is a bug. It is quite hard to argue that a typing mechanism won't improve code quality, and it is very lopsided in the amount of time it takes to type a function vs. debug something that would have been caught by a type system. There are edge cases that can be argued all day, but if some lar…

What you’re describing is optional typing. What is usually derided as cumbersome is mandatory and exhaustive typing.

“Mandatory and exhaustive” typing is also good and usually not particularly difficult if you have a decent type system. With OCaml, for instance, you rarely even need to go out of your way to have 100% type coverage.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#185

Post by lkrubner »

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 wages for software developers were basically stagnant from 2001 to about 2014 or 2015. The big surge in pay is relatively recent. While this is a complex subject, I have written about a few examples, and can offer more. But take this as one example:

Right now the best devops people in New York City are making between $200 and $300 an hour. That's obviously good money, but in the 1990s I had older friends who were making $200 an hour as Oracle consultants. At the top, the nominal pay has remained the same, but adjusting for inflation, that is a 50% paycut.

Likewise, lower down, I know lots of mid-level devs who are happy to make $100 an hour right now, but I also had older friends who were slapping together classic VBA apps with VisualBasic, back around 1999, and they were also making $100 an hour, so, again, it's a 50% pay cut.

But it is absolutely true that pay has been surging since about 2014/2015, so I imagine the software developer pay is about to catch up to the highs of the 1990s.

It's also true that the picture only looks bad when compared to inflation. To your point, most other professions did even worse, so the benefits of being a computer programmer are more obvious if the comparison is to other professions.

All in all, after the peak in 2000, the USA economy had a difficult 15 years.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#186

Post by bradstewart »

bumby wrote: post #168
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…

> And yet, their jobs are ESSENTIAL and we need people to do them even though they're grueling and underpaid. I think this touches on an uncomfortable point that many people don’t acknowledge: our current system generally* pays people according to how much they contribute to the economy and not by how much they contribute to society . The scalable nature of software means developers can disproportionately add value t…

At the risk of adding to his number 12... this is capitalism.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#187

Post by lexicality »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #154
lexicality wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done it, it's significantly better in terms of software robustness and having a good time. You definitely get less code written than you would individually, but at the end of it everyone involved understands how the code works and why it conforms to the requirements which keeps your team's general knowledge high and turbocharges training for juniors. It's also just pleasant to do a genuine team activity and have…

This is some of the first I've heard of mobbing. Is it generally (or in your positive experiences) done remotely, in-person, or could be either?

I've only ever done it in person and I can't imagine it would work particularly well remotely. Maybe you could attempt to recreate the experience in VR but I don't think we have anywhere near the technology level to accurately recreate 7 people physically in the same space as each other constantly moving around, having side conversations and whiteboarding things

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#188

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #161
3pt14159 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but they also often leave. I've taught three[0] people a little younger than me software that all wanted to do it for the freedom and financial security and two of the three transferred out of software to something else in tech like product management. It really bummed me out too, because it was the two women out of the three. Their lives are still markedly better than before, but I want more women in ac…

I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from entering the field, and everyone should be equally encouraged and provided the same opportunities, but more and more I see these pushes for trying to pump the numbers of specific demographics. If someone wants to join the industry, great. If not, also great. I t…

It’s hard to know if an environment is hostile to you or not if there are no examples of safety. For example I would hesitate to join a magic the gathering group if I didn’t first check that they’re friendly to newbies. Especially because I know magic the gathering can vary in experience and that a group that isn’t friendly is not an outlier. If I think about it this way I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect, and won’t be pushed to something like management or product, if there are no examples to go off of? It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#189

Post by vlovich123 »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #161
3pt14159 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but they also often leave. I've taught three[0] people a little younger than me software that all wanted to do it for the freedom and financial security and two of the three transferred out of software to something else in tech like product management. It really bummed me out too, because it was the two women out of the three. Their lives are still markedly better than before, but I want more women in ac…

I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from entering the field, and everyone should be equally encouraged and provided the same opportunities, but more and more I see these pushes for trying to pump the numbers of specific demographics. If someone wants to join the industry, great. If not, also great. I t…

I think the general perception is that women often get turned off not by the work, but by the male-dominated environments. This can be due to subtle issues and sometimes due to non-subtle issues. You want to go out of your way to make it a friendly environment in those cases. Basically, do you want women to have the same shitty experience when they were breaking through various male-dominated fields in the past (e.g. medicine, law, business, etc) or do you want to be a welcoming host? It seems like as a profession we're still in the shitty part of the spectrum based on the horror stories I hear from my female friends in tech.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#190

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #161
3pt14159 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but they also often leave. I've taught three[0] people a little younger than me software that all wanted to do it for the freedom and financial security and two of the three transferred out of software to something else in tech like product management. It really bummed me out too, because it was the two women out of the three. Their lives are still markedly better than before, but I want more women in ac…

I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from entering the field, and everyone should be equally encouraged and provided the same opportunities, but more and more I see these pushes for trying to pump the numbers of specific demographics. If someone wants to join the industry, great. If not, also great. I t…

> I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech.

Perspective is valuable, and like it or not various demographics have inherently different perspectives due to a variety of factors. We need conscious effort to include more demographics because our industry is dominated by a very small number of them and therefore its culture is heavily biased towards them.

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