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Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

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Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#251

Post by Mezzie »

bluGill wrote: post #248
Mezzie wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I'd go beyond that and say invest in yourself first and foremost, but I've been VERY SCREWED after trying to make decent financial choices. 1.) I was into computers and programming in the 90s but I was too young for the dot-com boom, so by the time I could work we were in the bust. So computers weren't a 'safe' ROI. 2.) So I went into languages and wanted to be a diplomat: I studied rare languages to be more valu…

Plans are worthless, but planning is a useful exercise. I can't find any agreement on who first said that, but it appears that several great generals have said something like that.

This is a good point. I should say I've given up on OCCUPATIONAL planning. I'm very big into community and skill building plans.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#252

Post by jjav »

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…

> 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.

Just to add, during the dot.com boom there was a brief spike of people coming into software purely due to the hype of riches without much interest in software development. Thankfully the dot.com boom was relatively brief and it crashed hard, so from what I saw then most of those people got disenchanted right away (by the time they graduated the crash was happening) and changed careers.

This time the boom has been going on for basically a decade, so it is becoming more common and lasting.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#253

Post by Mimmy »

zerocount wrote: post #171
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 would gladly give up software development for a medical or law degree. I would gladly study for a bar exam or do a medical internship instead of grinding Leetcode and throwing salt over my shoulder or some other good luck inducing act, in the hope of passing the often subjective, 'are you a fit', can you design and code Z in the next 38 minutes type interview. The barrier of entry is way too low these days and ther…

Residency isn't the barrier to entry to being a doctor (at least not practically), the real barrier is getting accepted into medical school. The process can also feel like a crapshoot.

Likewise passing the bar isn't the barrier to entry to a good law career (at least not practically), it's getting through the interviews at a top law firm.

Many attractive industries have problems when it comes to deciding who's eligible to reap their rewards.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#254

Post by dmurray »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #159
nickjj wrote: post #42

This one from the article is a bit weird: > Sophisticated DSLs with special syntax are probably a dead-end. Ruby and Scala both leaned hard into this and neither got it to catch on. Rails is one of the most popular web frameworks around and a combo of Rails and Ruby power some really high traffic / high importance platforms like GitHub, Shopify and Stripe's API.

Also nothing in Ruby that's called a "DSL" is actually a "special syntax". It's necessarily all just method calls on objects, ruby has no actual mechanism to introduce new syntax. So I'm not entirely sure what the OP is meaning to mean. I don't know about Scala.

You kind of know what he means. Ruby uses methods for things that look like syntax in other languages (eg the plus sign for addition) and lets you define them however you want. AND Ruby has the method_missing magic method, which means anywhere the language was expecting a method call you can put pretty much any tokens of your choice, and use metaprogramming to interpret it at runtime.

Those are things that people leaned into a lot ten years ago, and relatively little now. It might still make sense to, say, define the addition operator for colour spaces in your graphics library, but not to change the look of the language to the extent that rspec does.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#255

Post by angarg12 »

> Any technical interview is going to be gameable and exclusionary to some underrepresented group/background.

Bold claim! I agree, and think this isn't talked about enough.

People love to hate leetcode-style tech interviews, but the truth is that it made it more accessible for some people (like myself) to enter the rungs of top tech companies.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#256

Post by Oregon893 »

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…

I think you forgot what has been the single largest driver of salaries for most Europeans, unions and legistlation.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#257

Post by gonehome »

Mezzie wrote: post #251
bluGill wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plans are worthless, but planning is a useful exercise. I can't find any agreement on who first said that, but it appears that several great generals have said something like that.

This is a good point. I should say I've given up on OCCUPATIONAL planning. I'm very big into community and skill building plans.

I think to some extent there are always unknowns and there's a risk you'll choose wrong, but it's worth trying to choose correctly. In hindsight from your example it was a mistake not to do computers, your ROI calculation turned out to be short-sighted because of proximity to 99. Same thing might have happened to me had I been there at the time, it's hard to make the right choice in that kind of environment.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#258

Post by dvaun »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #206
vlovich123 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The issue is the same in reverse. I've heard horrible anecdotes by male friends in female dominated industries such as teaching, nursing, etc. Why is the same societal push not happening in those industries? I never said we shouldn't strive to be welcoming and to cultivate a friendly environment for all, just that the intentional push for more of any specific demographic seems strange to me. Shitty people are going t…

While there may not be similar pushes in other industries, there is no reason to dismiss the efforts to encourage participation in software based on a lack of effort in other fields.

Implicit and explicit biases exist everywhere. My wife is in teaching, and would love to move into administration some day. The problem with that? Despite women being the dominant sex in the actual teaching position, men continue to fill administrative (i.e. principals, deans, etc.) roles at far higher rates than women. Why are men filling leadership positions more than women, when they have less experience and participation in the field overall?

I guess my rant/point is, each field will have their own unique battles with inequality and/or lack of participation from various demographics. We can't compare apples to oranges.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#259

Post by scollet »

lexicality wrote: post #137
dagw wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mobbing" means "bullying" in Swedish, which initially confused me greatly.

It's not really a positive term in English either, I think the name's supposed to be a joke

I didn't know it had a negative connotation.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#260

Post by endisneigh »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #236
endisneigh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree - the difference isn’t leverage it’s monetize-ability. If teachers were paid a lifetime percentage of their students earnings teachers would make far more than software engineers. Barring some cultural revolution that’s not going to happen. Software engineers simply make more money because the companies they work for have high margins.

This assumes there’s actually a significant benefit from school on lifetime earnings, which is at best debatable if not actually at odds with all available research.

I’d love to see the research you’re citing. Are you suggesting kids would be better off if schools didn’t exist with respect to lifetime earnings?

Seems easy to prove wrong by trivially looking at high school dropout vs graduate incomes.

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