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We will never have enough software developers (2020)

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Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#471

Post by trashtester »

mmarq wrote: post #445
trashtester wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People always believed in crazy anti-Jewish propaganda since, at least, the first crusade. Absolutely they did. However, even at that time, it seems (if wikipedia is to be trusted) that the Jew's roles as bankers was part of the reason for the massacres: "Many crusaders had to go into debt in order to purchase weaponry and equipment for the expedition; as Western Catholicism strictly forbade usury, many crusaders i…

I am going to say that you sound a bit confused. > But as we consider the inflation we are seeing today, try to imagine how it would be if the inflation is not 5-10% but 29500% Hitler took power 10 years after the hyperinflation. People didn’t vote for the NSDAP because of hyperinflation, nor they started hating the Jews more than before because of it. > You are absolutely right that antisemmitism didn't suddenly pop…

> deeper roots that the hyperinflation or some temporary unemployment.

Oh, and about this part, I think you underestimate the hyperinflation in 22-23 in Germany. Over a period of about 2-3 years, people who had been comfortably part of the upper middle class would lose EVERYTHING, and in many cases end up starving to death. That's not "temporary unemployment".

Read this quote:

- One particularly arresting story is that of Maximilian Bern, a man of literary education exemplary of Germany’s formerly middle-class Bildungsbürgertum. In 1923, writes Taylor

- "[he] withdrew all his savings—100,000 marks, formerly sufficient to support a modestly comfortable retirement—and purchased all it would buy by that time: a subway ticket. The old gentleman took a last ride around the city, then went back to his apartment and locked himself in."

- If you are like me, you probably assumed the next sentence would conclude with suicide. No. “There he died of hunger.” I had to linger over that sentence to fully grasp the reality: starvation in a society that had recently been among the most technologically and commercially advanced of any on earth.

https://fee.org/articles/how-hyperinflation-shattered-german...

For the Germans, this left an impression that resembled the Shoah for the jews.

Imagine seeing former affluent tech workers starving to death in San Francisco in 2029, looking like the corpses of Bergen-Belson prisoners. What would that do to the survivors?

They say that, of all causes of death, hunger is the most horrible.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#472

Post by treis »

chadash wrote: post #469
treis wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Variations on hash maps are used all the time Yes, you use them. You don't build them. To torture your analogy it's like asking the surgeon to explain how their bone saw works. Why should they know? All they care is that it cuts bone.

Knowing how to build a bone saw is a completely different skill set than surgery. Building a hash table is a job for a software engineer even if not every engineer does it frequently. Still my analogy wasn’t great. Analogies aside, hashmaps (in one implementation or another), arrays, vectors/lists, strings and arguably sets are very very common data structures in most modern languages. I don’t expect someone to be ab…

>I don’t expect someone to be able to build a hashmap from scratch but I do expect an experienced engineer to have some basic idea of the pieces that go into building it as well as it’s properties (not necessarily ordered, O(1)ish sets/gets, collisions, etc). Knowing this kind of thing helps you understand when to use an object in JavaScript vs a map. Or how dictionaries differ between python 2 and 3. If you understand the underlying data structure, then you know what questions to ask.

Yeah, I'd say this is all in knowing how to use a hash. How to build one would go into the underlying data structure.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#473

Post by ipaddr »

shagie wrote: post #426
usrn wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH CS degrees don't really produce people who can code in general either. As far as I can tell they take people who already understand the basics and teach them to formally communicate.

They typically also require 1000-2000 hours (over the course of the entire degree) of instruction time in things relating to software development. Part of that is homework and the practice of the craft of software development. One of the key things that self taught developers miss is the instruction and review of the code. You write code differently if you're going to be graded or if its a throw away script. In theor…

If you go to school or learn by yourself you are always self taught.

The quality of reviewable code from a cs student is not surprisingly not great but languages like python force some standards.

Neither prepare a student like a community college. Usually the most successful group in the job market.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#474

Post by xwolfi »

z3t4 wrote: post #349
xwolfi wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but I interview for a role where we dont have set languages: we're a small optimisation team working across system when they reach capacity bottleneck and we do JS, C#, Java, C++, PL/SQL fixes completely transparently, we've slowly learned that languages really dont matter all that much for performance tuning as much as programmers mishandling which are identical in all of them (hash map loops, abusive recursion,…

If you are doing optimizations I would say you need at least a few years experience in the language. You often see people say they switched from language A to language B due to performance, then some guy optimizes the same lib/functions in language A and it gets 10x faster then the optimized version in language B... and people say: Yeh, but that guy has several years of experience. Once you know the layout of the min…

Depends of the level of maturity of the system. I d agree you need to be a C genius to accelerate the linux kernel a bit, maybe.

But most software aren't the linux kernel, they're small systems solving a class of specific problems as fast as possible with rotating teams, so it sometimes is just a matter of profiling this stupid hashcode function or asking why the mouse is freezing during high trading volume on the C# GUI :D

You wouldnt believe how common optimization problems are and are not related to GC, a belief I have to disprove very often (look 300ms of GC a day, but hey, you're checking an unindexed table each calculation for a trivial non essential decision, what if we fix it)

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#475

Post by JumpCrisscross »

908B64B197 wrote: post #416
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse, industry is routinely bashing on CS degrees because they don't turn people into framework X-ready candidates. It's getting a little tiring just how little credit is given to the idea of "maybe these tools can be learned in a reasonable amount of time by people with a degree showing they can pick things up rather quickly".

> industry is routinely bashing on CS degrees because they don't turn people into framework X-ready candidates. To me that's noise and not much else. Something I don't think a lot of folks realize is that there's two parallel industries (and pipelines to jobs in the industry). They almost never overlap. One in which recruiting is largely done by non-technical folks who match keywords of frameworks, and where rote and…

> can guess in which one Google and FAANG or whatever the acronym is now

Small aside. It describes Google and Facebook and the others several years ago. Speaking anecdotally, the impressive people at those firms are fewer and farther in between.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#476

Post by jart »

goldenshale wrote: post #240

I think this article hits on some truths and gets a handful of things wrong. First, they are correct that we are in a dynamic profession that requires constant learning and expanding. No doubt the people who choose to stay in software are likely to be people who are curious, life-long learners where this is a benefit of the profession rather than a drawback. That said, one thing I noticed from teaching computer scien…

> I noticed from teaching computer science while a graduate student is that the poor (a) students think about languages and libraries as key skills, while the (b) better students think about the data structures, algorithms, and design principles.

The truth is that the programmers in group (b) think about both. Who's designing a lot of the new languages, libraries, and frameworks? Chances are it was someone from group (a). If you're in group (b) then do you want to spend your whole career being forced by your bosses to constantly relearn and follow the latest vogue vision from group (a)? Of course not. So this might not apply to students, but everyone from group (b) will eventually get burned by fads enough times that they start caring about the politics of software. Namely, not wanting to depend on bloat that doesn't actually solve computer science and systems engineering problems. Group (b) might even create alternatives themselves. Go is great example. The guys who built the Fifth Bell System watched their vision behind their techniques decline over the decades and said, enough is enough. So they made Go and it was like a ray of sunshine when it came out.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#478

Post by rapind »

irrational wrote: post #144
rapind wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software development is some of the easiest, highest paid work in history. Nope this is an outdated opinion. You can do just as well or better in trades (source: my electrician buddy). If you’re referring to the FAANG salaries (sub 1%) you’re comparing to doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs in terms of opportunity cost. Your average joe programmer isn’t killing it like you seem to think, and they’d do just as well in t…

Yeah, but in trades you have to climb in hot attics, deal with sewers, work outside, etc. And you have to put in a full days work. How many of us developers actually put in a full 8+ hours? I know that I don’t. I can usually get my assigned work done in about four hours. Can you imagine an electrician or plumber or doctor or lawyer only working 4 hours a day? It’s insane how much I get paid for what I actually do.

We’ll my buddy does electrical for new builds and most of his time is spent waiting on other shit to get done. Not even joking, they want the electricians there just in case they can stick to schedule, but of course they can’t.

Also sitting in a chair in an office all day has a lot of health issues And they’re insidious in that your body doesn’t immediately tell you how badly your damaging it.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#479

Post by rapind »

bombcar wrote: post #122
bluGill wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do just as well in the trades - if you are a master (whatever the top rank is) working 80 hours a week. Right now the trades are in high enough demand that you can get that overtime, but that will change and then you are back to hoping you can even get 40 hours. In the meantime working for a boring company is a 40 hour a week job with great pay. FAANG is much higher pay, but they are also more hours per week…

Remember that a high-paid software developer is unlikely to have poor electrician friends, so by definition any of their friends are likely to make as much or more money. The trades can be a good life, especially since you have much more freedom in where you can be located, but to pretend they average as high as FAANG is silly.

> to pretend they average as high as FAANG is silly.

Who said this anywhere in this thread?

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#480

Post by comp_throw7 »

bradlys wrote: post #255
Gigachad wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also don’t need to spend years in a very expensive education with tall entry barriers and taking on massive debt. But also, you had the info in doctor fakeries available and still chose software.

I mean - this is YMMV. Typical SV FAANG engineer is from an Ivy League or adjacent competitive school. Often with a masters. So, yes, you might not have to do the full specialty training and residency but it can still be quite competitive and expensive. You’re only earning surgeon money when you’ve made staff level at FAANG. Which usually means you’re near the same age as surgeons and there was a lot of risk and grin…

This is kind of a meme. I'm not sure what you consider to be "surgeon money", but senior engineers at FAANG nowdays net ~450k/year (annualized). As a single person you can retire at 40 with ~5m in the bank by starting at FAANG at 22 and plateauing at senior (not staff) after 5-6 years. So you're hitting that 450k/year level at, like... 27? Earlier if you're working at a company like Facebook, which promotes aggressively (many people make it to senior in 3-4 years), maybe later if you're at Google (where it's non-trivial getting to Senior in 5 years; many take up to 8, some don't break through at all). At 27 you're just starting your residency, working 100-hour weeks for less than six figures. Lol.

FAANG hires way too many people to hire exclusively (or even primarily) from Ivy League schools. Jointly they employ probably 5% of the software engineers in the country! Master's degrees are likewise totally unnecessary; I almost never see anyone who isn't here on a visa getting a Master's. (PhDs are a different story, but I know people without even undergrad degrees working at FAANG too.)

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