41–50 of 127 posts
I respect some of what’s being said about “mappers” vs “packers” - but the article presents the idea that there are 2 kinds of programmer and you’re one or the other, largely based on growth as a “real” mapper. I think a more realistic description is that everyone is a mapper. There isn’t a single body of knowledge that is “software engineering” - so it’s ok to encounter something new, “pack” it, then map it if it’s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you are saying there are those who split people into two groups and those two do not, and the first group is inherently bad at writing articles?
This is the flaw in having an entirely hateful view of splitting, that view is itself an example of splitting. You have to instead believe that there is a time where it is appropriate and useful to split (e.g, war) and times where it isn’t (general thinking)
The article talks about packers and mappers and that either is it isn't a useful distinction. I am open to either, but I wouldn't dismiss the idea because it's "splitting" by nature.
You can be a junior developer with 15 years of experience, but it's quite hard to hear.
Tell that to my previous employer. There, software engineers turned "senior" after 2 years. Then principal after 3 more. It was a scheduled activity to "upgrade". Only X people could turn senior every year because the title changed triggered a salary raise and they could only afford that for X people. I left when I got approval to hire 3 senior software engineers to my team but the salary level was only attractive to…
This is particularly apparent in large cities, where salaries can be almost double at each end of the spectrum. From what I have seen promotion to senior or hiring inexperienced staff at senior level is the only way these companies can retain or recruit staff.
> Why do we need variables?
> How variables are really stored?
> The type of variables matter?
These aren’t questions that a junior engineer couldn’t answer. These are questions that somebody who has passed a single programming class ought to be able to answer.
Then they have questions about this vite platform, which I’ve never heard of, but it seems like they are asking “does software have dependencies?”
It makes me a little suspicious of the article. It looks they’ve set up a contrast: packers vs mappers, where packers are the bad result to end up aligned with (then, if you want to be a mapper, come join me!). But it seems like an over-shoot. The questions they have the packers failing seem to indicate some wild levels of incompetence.
Sorta like those online IQ tests that always tell you that you are a genius.
You can be a junior developer with 15 years of experience, but it's quite hard to hear.
Tell that to my previous employer. There, software engineers turned "senior" after 2 years. Then principal after 3 more. It was a scheduled activity to "upgrade". Only X people could turn senior every year because the title changed triggered a salary raise and they could only afford that for X people. I left when I got approval to hire 3 senior software engineers to my team but the salary level was only attractive to…
I sort of feel bad for them because without a large step down in title they’d never get another job. Perhaps that’s the trick - title inflation to mask bad pay?
Any article that splits people into two groups and says one group cannot inherently be good at something immediately puts me off, sorry.
So you are saying there are those who split people into two groups and those two do not, and the first group is inherently bad at writing articles?
Any article that splits people into two groups and says one group cannot inherently be good at something immediately puts me off, sorry.
But then I start to get it and finally do get it. The packers are now "experts" at their acquired knowledge and seem to have a hard time changing opinion where they should.
Back in school I had real problems getting good enough in subjects that required learning pieces of fact that don't quite go together or display some inherent system. My friends didn't. Things that have a system or are "logical" in the wider sense, easy peasy.
EDIT: I would call myself a decently accomplished programmer and engineer at this point after 25 years or so working with it.
We don't have senior salaries anymore. For the budget you have you get what you're complaining about.
I think it's pretty hard to get a sense of what is out there unless you work across a wide variety of companies. I've been blessed to mainly work in companies that had very high engineering bars (finance, faang) but I spent two years at a scale up and the difference in engineers was crazy. Senior engineers who, when faced with an outage just threw up their hands and said "we dunno". And this was still a place that wa…
Top tier companies pick up the faang rejects. Middle tier get the top tier rejects. Bottom tier get the rejects from the middle tier.
“We get what’s left. Sometimes we get lucky and get someone who’s fallen through the cracks”
Personally I’m not a massive fan of the faang recruitment techniques and I think there’s a lot of fantastic senior engineers who want to do interesting work without jumping through ridiculous hoops. The main issue is usually just being able to pay sufficiently well to attract them in the first place. It’s a tough argument with the exec team to get a salary through that can sometimes be double or triple the companies median.