61–70 of 115 posts
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Is it true that their friends ghost after graduation? I thought they would have more contact through Snapchat etc. Do you have personal acquaintances who had that happen. Im older, 30s but I felt that friend contact really fell off after moving away from SF former room mates and startup friends.
Everyone I knew at uni stopped talking after a while.
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I also sometimes think most people could train to be an entry-level dev over a summer. Yet that seems demonstrably wrong. I wonder if it’s similar to how a musician can’t comprehend how I can barely hear a beat.
I train software engineers with the apprentice model, and it takes about 500 hours to train a person to be able to get hired as an entry level full stack engineer. Maybe not in today's market where even talented engineers are struggling. But over the last sixteen years I've trained sixteen engineers who all still work in the industry. I use TDD, a list of projects that gradually increase in difficulty, multiple langu…
When you're young (think HS and college aged), difficulty seems indeed to be the "ultimate" prestige. If you're a musician, that means playing that most technically advanced piece flawlessly. If you're an athlete, that means raw ability like speed, strength, etc. If you're a mathematician, that means having a go at some unsolved/open problem. If you're in the military, that means joining the special forces or becomin…
When you're young (think HS and college aged), difficulty seems indeed to be the "ultimate" prestige. If you're a musician, that means playing that most technically advanced piece flawlessly. If you're an athlete, that means raw ability like speed, strength, etc. If you're a mathematician, that means having a go at some unsolved/open problem. If you're in the military, that means joining the special forces or becomin…
>One thing I've noticed with young and ambitious employees, is that many need constant feedback. If they don't get any direct feedback immediately, they feel left out in the cold, and don't know how to react. It's an increasingly cold world and some young people may legit get zero feedback outside of work. Ghosted on dating scene, ghosted by the remaining friends post graduation, and now feeling ignored at work. Add…
> Ghosted on dating scene, ghosted by the remaining friends post graduation, and now feeling ignored at work.
> Add on no third place to go to and how work is increasingly ceasing to be a second place with wfh and you just have a loneliness sandwich.
And all around them, a social media full of hucksters and fake personas that should how successful they are. Build something, and get inundated by infinite liars that have shipped your idea in 30 days and earned a billion dollar MMR, blessed with capacity to work 80 hours a week and come back for more.
Meanwhile these new people just want to feel they have a mark, any mark at all, in the world. Ever self doubting. Before the next layoff.
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The older I get, the more I blame the internet for most of our current societal ills. I am a Millennial, but a digital native no more.
I've always thought that people underestimate the mental acuity needed to find simple truths within complex systems and to use them to achieve useful results. Especially in academia, many professors, who are wedded to particular models, go so far as to dismiss simplicity without sufficient consideration. It was not always this way. Among the older philosophers, you can observe a strong affinity for simplicity. Figure…
Simplicity does surely survives better. But you clearly do have a biased picture on your head. That claim that current people value it less than ancient people is not only baseless, but quickly dismissable just by reading those genius you quote.
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Top modern researchers/practitioners do seem to value simplicity heavily, but can't say the same for most. The propensity for misuse of abstraction/models/data/theories is pretty high from what I've seen. That's my view. You are free to disagree! PS: It is always better to rely on older sources for illustrations, because they have lived their life fully and you have documentation of their lives + effects of their eff…
Largely, it seems top modern researchers are able to free themselves from many of the perverse incentives of the academic game. You might be surprised how many who have not reached such a level also value simplicity, but simply must play the game. It's very common to see a clear and simple (in the good sense) paper grow increasingly complex in response to reviewers demands, going through a sequence of one or more rej…
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> If X is an easy problem, solving it "as quickly as possible" would be easy too. Hard disagree with this one. Summing all numbers from 1 to 100 is easy, summing 1 to a million is also easy, just time consuming. 1+2+3+4.... Coming up with (n*(1+n))/2 is not.
"easy, just time consuming" ... Also known as hard
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>One thing I've noticed with young and ambitious employees, is that many need constant feedback. If they don't get any direct feedback immediately, they feel left out in the cold, and don't know how to react. It's an increasingly cold world and some young people may legit get zero feedback outside of work. Ghosted on dating scene, ghosted by the remaining friends post graduation, and now feeling ignored at work. Add…
Is it true that their friends ghost after graduation? I thought they would have more contact through Snapchat etc. Do you have personal acquaintances who had that happen. Im older, 30s but I felt that friend contact really fell off after moving away from SF former room mates and startup friends.
When those things change, friendships may cease to exist. People move away, and grow away from each others - it is a sad fact of life, but it is what it is.
I had friendships in college which I felt were going to last my entire life - you really felt close to those people. Struggling together in the reading halls and labs, going out to pubs in the evening, and just chilling with movies on the weekends.
But then life happened, people move away, and you lose contact. Maybe one part tries to keep in touch, but you with work, family, and what not - it is not always a two-way street.
Then you bump into each others, 5-10-15-20 years later, and the magic is gone. Or maybe not, I've bumped into people I haven't seen in ages and we picked up were we left things.
Same goes for work - or dare I say - especially for work.