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I hereby pardon all junior engineers

taylor.town

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Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers

#41

Post by wewtyflakes »

financltravsty wrote: post #39
wewtyflakes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everything within the U.S. spiritual ecosystem is geared towards a superficial approach to all things" This is hyperbole, I don't think there will be any way to convince you.

I agree that there isn’t much of a chance I can be convinced otherwise, having travelled and having not been born in the U.S. I disagree that it is hyperbole. The main motive of this country seems to be exerting power over others. Whether that be through military, monetary, or quasi-cultural means: onto other nations and onto its own citizens. It’s very Prussian in its pursuit; and nothing that requires sensitivity c…

Your assertion of "Everything within the U.S. spiritual ecosystem is geared towards a superficial approach to all things" is hyperbole since you qualify it with "Everything" and "all things".

Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers

#43

Post by stillwithit »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #40
oceanplexian wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US for sure knows how to build things. SpaceX alone delivered over 80% of mass to orbit while China’s entire space program can’t keep pace with a single American company. We are also killing it at EVs, again, all the great might of the Chinese economy is playing catch up to Tesla. The thing is, we know how to build things. Those things aren’t crappy block apartments or faster trains. They are: space ships, artifi…

Most of what you mentioned is research & development, not building. I don't know why you say we're killing it at EVs, when there's many competitors, and Tesla churned out dreck for years until it finally produced a decent car without defects, and had to be floated constantly on US government subsidies. SpaceX is the only thing that seems to work reliably, probably due to sheer will from passionate engineers and a ton…

Pst; all of tech is floated by government. It wants to keep a pipeline of engineers around.

IBM refused to risk its old tube business on transistors so Uncle Sam paid for it, gifted tech to IBM.

Internet was a government defense project.

Capitalism is just people. The euphemism is getting too deep. We need waders.

Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers

#44

Post by PlatinumBench »

I liked this post, especially this quote:

> The norm is to battle software rot and add features ad infinitum.

Software engineering is so expansive, it is ideas built on ideas built on ideas. I learned Node.js in my free time because of the derision that is rampant for FE engineers. Node.js is built on C++, which compiles down to machine code which runs on a CPU that has it's own firmware. My Node.js application sits in a docker container on a Linux server written in C that somehow knows how to accept network requests and respond with data to a user's browser, using protocols and methods that were conceived of before I was born. The application got on the server because of my gitlab pipeline that first built my application and bundled it with Webpack, then ran unit tests with Jest, then ran e2e tests with selenium, then runs a bash script to git clone my code to build a docker image. This all to change a response header from a 200 to a 203 to align with best practices.

At any given day I am working on 30 levels of abstraction, trying to deal with elitists who were around when the internet was in its' "glory days" telling me now that the stuff I am working on means nothing when compared to the pristine web we had in 1987 when a gif of a dancing baby blew people's minds. Now the internet is layers upon layers of protocols and languages and code and tracking that if I take time to look back on and learn, the industry will have moved past me to Next or Nuxt or Nyxt or Naxt or whatever bullshit flavor of the month library I am required to master and have 3 years of experience in (it came out a month ago).

There is no extra space for regular people like me, we can't build things any more; at least not things of note, things that get used. And while building something that never gets used is great for your portfolio, it feels like making a painting and immediately sticking it in a safe. What is the value if no one even sees it?

> When fewer than 5,000 programmers existed, they built Lisp (1960) and APL (1966) and sketchpad (1963). With over 5 million programmers today, the best we can do is Rust and React.

Being a standout of 5000 people is extremely hard, being a standout in 5 million is a statistical anomaly even with specialization. And people do it in the same sense that people win the lottery: someone has to but your chance may as well be zero[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_paradox

Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers

#45

Post by rramadass »

rramadass wrote: post #37
jhp123 wrote: post #23

I connected with this, I've had many of the same thoughts lately. It's a thoughtful essay and I have no idea why it's been flagged? > When fewer than 5,000 programmers existed, they built Lisp (1960) and APL (1966) and sketchpad (1963). With over 5 million programmers today, the best we can do is Rust and React. It feels like this has worsened even just in the last 15 years. When I started in the industry (2008ish) i…

> It feels like this has worsened even just in the last 15 years. It is a question of Statistics/Probability and similar to statements like "The End of Science"(see John Morgan's book) i.e. all the main/major aspects of knowledge are already known. IMO the following are the reasons; 1) In the early days the field was populated with experts and the quality of the output was high. There was also a lot of unknowns to be…

Errata/Addendum to above:

It is John Horgan (and not Morgan) and the book is "The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age".

Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers

#46

Post by rramadass »

williamcotton wrote: post #33

I don’t blame the junior engineers either. I blame their seniors and managers. Leadership is especially awful these days and across most industries. Leaders tend to be too far removed from object level reality and just sit around blowing smoke up buttholes all day long. If you got laid off in the last year or two it’s because your leaders failed you with their shitty cargo cult approach to running a business. “Der, G…

> I don’t blame the junior engineers either. I blame their seniors and managers. Leadership is especially awful these days and across most industries. Leaders tend to be too far removed from object level reality and just sit around blowing smoke up buttholes all day long.

100% agree with this. "Modern Management" as practiced today is a major factor in the decline of quality creativity/research/engineering.

Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers

#47

Post by a-french-anon »

wewtyflakes wrote: post #3
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #2

> It seems like nobody knows how to build things anymore. The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Germans, etc might disagree. There's a lot of people out there who seem to be able to build very high quality things fairly quickly. It seems like it's the Americans that are struggling. We have for a long time, actually. I would argue we just have a shitty building culture. We chase trends, cheap out on materials and salaries,…

It has been my experience that there are good and bad engineers from all origins; Americans do not have a monopoly on it in either direction, nor does anyone else.

pg's essay on the subject is a must-read: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html

Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers

#48

Post by black_13 »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #2

> It seems like nobody knows how to build things anymore. The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Germans, etc might disagree. There's a lot of people out there who seem to be able to build very high quality things fairly quickly. It seems like it's the Americans that are struggling. We have for a long time, actually. I would argue we just have a shitty building culture. We chase trends, cheap out on materials and salaries,…

[dead]

Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers

#49

Post by black_13 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #32
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #2

> It seems like nobody knows how to build things anymore. The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Germans, etc might disagree. There's a lot of people out there who seem to be able to build very high quality things fairly quickly. It seems like it's the Americans that are struggling. We have for a long time, actually. I would argue we just have a shitty building culture. We chase trends, cheap out on materials and salaries,…

The US for sure knows how to build things. SpaceX alone delivered over 80% of mass to orbit while China’s entire space program can’t keep pace with a single American company. We are also killing it at EVs, again, all the great might of the Chinese economy is playing catch up to Tesla. The thing is, we know how to build things. Those things aren’t crappy block apartments or faster trains. They are: space ships, artifi…

[dead]

Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers

#50

Post by surprisetalk »

zubairq wrote: post #42

Instead of complaining about others why don’t you build something great yourself?

Author here!

Totally agree. I'm secretly off in the wilderness trying to build something I think will be great:

[1] https://scrapscript.org

In the meantime, I thought some concrete complaints could inspire people to work together :)

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