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You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

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Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#81

Post by chasd00 »

nick222226 wrote: post #51
johnnyanmac wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I'm 47, I met my current three best friends the first day of college. Two of us have families and we have all moved about. We have an active group chat on imessage and still get together a couple times a year.

There's no relationship-as-a-service app despite the hype, relationships take work and you only get what you give.

edit: when we do get together we just sit, watch youtube or play video games and drink beer just like in college heh. Our meatspace relationships are like a time capsule more or less, in that respect it's sort of depressing haha.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#82

Post by waynesonfire »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #46
TrackerFF wrote: post #36

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…

I guess society has decided better to ghost than be cancelled. Are you surprised?

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#83

Post by Izkata »

GrinningFool wrote: post #79
Verdex wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The older I get, the more I blame the internet for most of our current societal ills. I watched a lot of star trek when I was young. At some point it became hard to go back and re-watch because of the advent of social media and the 'modern' web. Social media was so obviously going to be a massive part in everyone's lives that it felt weird that it wasn't present in our star trek future. Sure, star trek had a world…

A perspective that might help: social media failed catastrophically at some point in the distant past. Society shunned it to ensure it would never be repeated, to the point where it was baked into future technological development and not even a point of discussion. Yeah, still a stretch. But it could work...

It would fit right in with how TNG portrayed entertainment: passive enjoyment was generally frowned upon, creating something new and being in-person social was what everyone wanted in that era.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#84

Post by seanw444 »

sph wrote: post #64
johnnyanmac wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Excellent insight. Let me 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 inun…

> The older I get, the more I blame the internet for most of our current societal ills.

Really though, a lot of it can be blamed on the advent of the internet. Which sucks, because the internet is an awesome tool.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#85

Post by oooyay »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #46
TrackerFF wrote: post #36

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…

> 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

The office never was my "second place" as a junior; to me this concept is very much a myth. I spent most of my time in my cubicle or in a meeting room and very little time with people my age. Most of my work got done when I was home and undistracted. I stayed up late coding and was perpetually trying to catch up on sleep. When my dog was in the process of slowly dying I worried every day that I'd come home to her corpse and that she'd die alone. I got lucky she died on a Saturday. Now that I work from home I spend a lot more time with people my age and those problems I faced that seemed to be part of every day life that I just needed to "deal with" as consequences to corporate life have evaporated out of thin air.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#86

Post by seanw444 »

piva00 wrote: post #73
sph wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent insight. Let me 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 inun…

> 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. Similar to the conclusion I got to in the past 5 years, I'm in my mid-30s by now and been steadily removing myself from being a "digital native" back into the real world. It was immensely enlightening to grow up on the internet, see it appear and flourish, being taught by so many an…

> Maybe I'm just getting old...

Don't worry, plenty of us "zoomers" are getting sick of it too.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#87

Post by [deleted] »

seanw444 wrote: post #84
sph wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent insight. Let me 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 inun…

> The older I get, the more I blame the internet for most of our current societal ills. Really though, a lot of it can be blamed on the advent of the internet. Which sucks, because the internet is an awesome tool.

[deleted]

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#88

Post by JackMorgan »

socrates137 wrote: post #62
JackMorgan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m quite intrigued by the number of SWEs you’ve trained through an apprenticeship. I think there’s often this tension between those who have been trained at some university and now have a CS degree and those who have “learned on the job” or by some other means. I think that tension also exists elsewhere in other careers - it is not unique to software. I’d like to think the reality is more nuanced and complicated. Ev…

There definitely is that kind of tension between the two camps. Generally though it's safe to assume a CS degree is optimized to prepare a student to become a CS professor or researcher. A CS graduate typically seems to graduate about 2/5ths of the way through my program, needing 300 extra hours to be at the same level as my graduates. This is not true for all of them, just most of the ones I've interviewed. There's definitely been some though who are way ahead of my students, usually because they went to an extraordinary university and also put in a lot of extra time outside of their coursework.

It's not cheap though, I do it as a charity. I've recently started my own business, so as of this summer I'm able to actually pay them which is epic. Still the program as a whole operates at a loss. So I do it because I want to pay it forward.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#89

Post by TrackerFF »

piva00 wrote: post #73
sph wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent insight. Let me 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 inun…

> 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. Similar to the conclusion I got to in the past 5 years, I'm in my mid-30s by now and been steadily removing myself from being a "digital native" back into the real world. It was immensely enlightening to grow up on the internet, see it appear and flourish, being taught by so many an…

Prior to 2010, I met A LOT of people IRL that I had previously only interacted with on forums, IRC channels, and what not. I guess that was the exciting part, to see what kind of people they were IRL, as you only had their internet persona and nickname to go after.

We'd meet up at a bar, pizza place, etc. in groups and just shoot the shit. Hell, my roommate at the time got a visitor from the other side of the world, and they'd only been discussing stuff on some (niche) hobby chatroom.

I haven't really met too many like that in the past 10-12 years though. Many forums moved over to become Facebook groups/pages, and the excitement is kind of gone.

Re: You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

#90

Post by walleeee »

tayistay wrote: post #71
whatscooking wrote: post #8

this whole article reeks of privilege

So much is bad about it: > After two weeks, I come up with some of my own tweaks that make the algorithm work a bit better. I happily add “built a state-of-the-art library for numerical integration, with novel improvements on the best techniques in the academic literature” to my resume. Ok so he's a liar. He made something "work a bit better" and then claimed to build the whole thing. Two weeks of work. Talk about re…

> > For some reason, a lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life

> Well it's better than fucking up the world at least.

I think there's a good case to be made that over-focus on narrowly defined "hard problems" is one of the biggest drivers of existential risk we face

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