Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We will never have enough software developers (2020)

whoisnnamdi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 553 posts

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

#481

Post by commandlinefan »

62951413 wrote: post #288
commandlinefan wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need to do this forever The thesis of the linked article is that you do. For the most part, it matches my experience. I'm 30 years in and already wondering how useful the Hadoop/Spark/Scala stuff I spent the last few years mastering is going to be in the next 5 years.

I agree with your sentiment but question some of your examples: * Scala introduced us old Java hands to a whole different world of modern languages. If you know it you get Kotlin or the latest Java changes for free (probably TypeScript-like other ecosystems too). * Spark introduced a generation of backend developers to distributed query engine technology (my generation is unlikely to delve into postgress codebase in…

Well, I hope you’re right…

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

#482

Post by lmm »

trashtester wrote: post #117
TexanFeller wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HR managers are rarely ever intelligent. The work they do doesn’t require it and intelligent people don’t want to do a job where they’ll be surrounded by lower intelligence people.

Maybe some HR managers believe that empathy and "EQ" are more important than IQ? Maybe they even think that intelligence is a social construct invented by the Patriarchy for the purpose of oppressing people who are not "cis white males"? Who knows, maybe for some, these ideas may even have been part of their education....

> Maybe some HR managers believe that empathy and "EQ" are more important than IQ?

> Maybe they even think that intelligence is a social construct invented by the Patriarchy for the purpose of oppressing people who are not "cis white males"?

Are you agreeing or disagreeing with the person you replied to?

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

#483

Post by lmm »

whimsicalism wrote: post #194
iso1631 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternate is not owning the house and instead paying rent, which means your rent would have to be far lower than the appreciating asset (house) and the cost of servicing the debt (interest part of the mortgage) That's certainly not the case in the UK. I'd be surprised if it were in the US

The primary reason buying a house is better is because the government has put it's thumb on the we scale to allow you to leverage the fuck out of your assets. If you could get a loan of the same amount and yolo it into the stock market, I am not sure buying a home would come out better.

There's another piece of government interference that's a lot more relevant: it's a lot easier to get legal permission to start a company than to build a house anywhere remotely desirable.

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

#484

Post by selcuka »

xwolfi wrote: post #474
z3t4 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#…

Agreed. I once "optimised" an in-house software that took minutes to process a single report, down to seconds, just by adding an index to the database (Microsoft Access, mind you) table. Not all developers know what they are doing [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

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

#485

Post by bradlys »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #480
bradlys wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aggressiv…

$450k/yr at FAANG for senior is definitely the very top of the band and to get there after 5 years is extremely optimistic. Again - if you're comparing Stanford graduates then maybe it's more common but for your average FAANG eng isn't making that in 5 years out of college especially with just 40-hr work weeks. Very few engineers are making that money even after transferring to another company. Maybe if you have some stock appreciation or stacked refreshers working in your favor you're at $450k/yr. Levels backs this up...

Surgeon money is generally $500-700k/yr (this might be my sampling bias - looking at stats online, it varies a lot - this is like tech incomes, there's a wide distribution). The nice thing about surgeon money is that you can make that in a lot of places - not just in SV. The same cannot be said of FAANG. You're gonna have a hard time getting remotely hired in BFE making $400k+/yr. Yet, the local hospital always needs a surgeon and most surgeons don't want to live in BFE... So, you're gonna be fine.

Even then if you assume you're making $450k/yr at 27 - you're not gonna have $5m by 40 unless you somehow are beating the market or save every penny and live like scrooge. (Which - again - why bother saving $5m if you're gonna live like a peasant?)

If you assume you're gonna live like you would on a safe withdrawal rate (let's say the more optimistic 4% - $200k/yr at $5m) then you're gonna only have $250k/yr gross income to save - which turns out to be ~$150k/yr net. (You can play with the numbers however you see fit but the point will come around) If you decide to save $12.5k every month for 13 years at 6% return rate (just a simple return - we assume same value dollars) then after those 13 years you have $2.9m. It would take 19 years until you crossed $5m. So, you'd be 45-46 assuming you saved every penny, never went above a $200k/yr income lifestyle (LOL at that in the bay area - you're a renter for life!), and you somehow made $450k/yr starting at 27. Which - is again - uncommon. It has happened due to wild stock appreciation but it isn't the norm offer people receive for senior level - levels backs this up.

It sounds nice until you do the math and realize $200k/yr is shit to live on here. God forbid you marry someone who isn't in tech/law/finance/$400k+ income.

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

#486

Post by Frost1x »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #440
Frost1x wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if the same major thing breaks but you were asked to do it? Your necks on the line and you did something wrong that you were asked to do correctly. The problem is that part of current micromanagement environments isn't just about micromanagement but also passing down risk and responsibility to developers. You can do the change work in a feature branch and propose the idea after the fact. If there's interest…

Because if you're asked to do something, someone has presumably thought it through and accepted the risk to the business/client. I'm not sure I'd keep someone on the team who did a branch AWOL and proposed the idea after the fact. Doesn't show much respect for the team, that time could've been spent working towards goals agreed by the whole team. If you don't have a lead or management environment with ears open to ex…

If you consider such behavior 'AWOL' then you've bought into modern development micromanagement and may be part of the issue. That perspective doesn't believe any degree of autonomy and desires drone teams who just crank out on orders. I would never work in such a role or environment, but to each their own I suppose.

There's also an assumption buried in there that any time spent working is somehow owned by you, your leadership, or the organization and not your team or teammates time. I've personally spent plenty of hours "off the clock" investing in directions I think are correct in an IC environment and it's paid off many times (I've also wasted my time on occasion but it's my own time and my choice). If you have slack in your schedule or want to push something out by taking initiative, then the type of management philosophy describe loathes initiative, creativity, and innovation in engineering. It's a great way to drive those abilities out of your teams and organizations.

It's good to foster teamwork and target goals but you also have to give your teams some degree of autonomy, otherwise just as the article describes, they will leave from the drudgery. The allure of technology is the tangibility of innovation. If you rip that off development, for many, the work becomes unenjoyable, tedious, repetitive, etc.

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

#487

Post by willjp »

trashtester wrote: post #77
willjp wrote: post #15

Re: skill churn I got the impression that there is much less of this in lower level languages. It seems like there is a fairly stable foundation of C, Cpp that everything else is built on top of. I wonder if embedded programmers have this problem.

> I got the impression that there is much less of this in lower level languages. Not only the lower level languages, but fundamental skills in general, I think. Undertanding the computer from the hardware level, OS level as well network protocols, filesystems etc tend to continue to provide benefits even if one fashionable technology is replaced by another. Similarly, fully undertanding algorithms, data structures, d…

This is what I’m hoping for. At least, I’ve noticed on the admin side that lower level tools and system calls seem to be more stable and better documented than the abstractions built overtop of them.

I think market pressures make this a difficult fit in the workplace. High turnover (~2yrs) and larger systems encourage shorter term results with a shallower understanding.

This isn’t a criticism (I have so so much to learn still, I’m in no position to judge, nor do I want to be), but more of an observation. Balancing learning churn(frameworks/languages) vs fundamentals(theory, concepts) is a struggle I think I will have for the rest of my life.

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

#488

Post by willjp »

matt321 wrote: post #48
leoedin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience it's the opposite problem. Advocating for modern development practices or languages (even unit testing, let alone Rust) for embedded projects is hard work. Most new embedded projects, even today, are written in C or C++.

I have the same experience. I cant event get people onto github. We spend thousands a month trying to keep our international teams connected to our local servers and they still have to zip up the project and send it to me over teams.

Wow, I had no idea. I wonder why all of the resistance - if not github then even the git protocol over ssh or a samba share.

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

#489

Post by willjp »

II2II wrote: post #88
willjp wrote: post #15

Re: skill churn I got the impression that there is much less of this in lower level languages. It seems like there is a fairly stable foundation of C, Cpp that everything else is built on top of. I wonder if embedded programmers have this problem.

From an outside perspective, as someone who does embedded development as a hobby rather than a profession, the answer is both yes and no. The stability of C and C++ helps, but you still have some churn in libraries and you almost certainly have to deal with vendor specific libraries (which makes moving between vendors difficult). Trying to bypass libraries doesn't really help on that front, since you are simply tradi…

That’s very frustrating. I suppose it would be very expensive to standardize apis at this level where everything is performance critical.

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

#490

Post by charlie0 »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #12

>High-ability workers are faster learners, in all jobs. However, the relative return to ability is higher in careers that change less, because learning gains accumulate. This is not the only reason for the quick learner -> high dropout thing. By the article's definition, I'd be a "fast learner". Most of the industry expects me to come in already knowing what they want me to know, while most ways to obtain said knowle…

This. Slap the golden handcuffs if possible for the most boring work and give employees extra vacation time to recover from that slog and they might not leave. Most people are willing to deal with some BS as long as they feel compensated and the comp keeps up with changes in the marketplace.
Post reply on HN