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You must read at least one book to ride

ludic.mataroa.blog

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81–90 of 155 posts

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#81

Post by jjmarr »

DavidPiper wrote: post #68

> I can't help but feel that something has gone dreadfully wrong in society in that we've decided to start incentivizing people with no talent or interest to participate in the technology space. Many of them are extremely wide awake in other areas, be it sports, art, mathematics, whatever. Unfortunately for complex reasons related to some sectors having more money than they know what to do with, large organizations b…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_signal

Salaries going up in tech are an indication that there are not enough programmers. Most growth in the US economy is now based on programming/technology.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#82

Post by michaelcampbell »

deergomoo wrote: post #39

> Then there are engineers [...] who never try for the entirety of their careers This matches my experience 100%. I am not a brilliant developer by any measure. I'm competent enough, I can put together good solutions to the admittedly low-scale problems I'm assigned, and I like to think I have a pretty good sense for the right and wrong ways of going about doing so. But I'm not even sure I could land an interview wit…

I don't know if you're correct or not, but I will say your experience mirrors mine.

I have seen more than I'd like of people who throw some code at an issue without much interest or care or curiosity about it and think that's ok. A former manager of mine was always looking for people with, what he called, "the fire". I guess I had it at the time since he hired me.

There are places for devs without that, and I've been in places that suffered for trying to get ONLY those people too. But there are plenty of bootcamp graduates in it for the money or (what they thought would be) job security, and nothing else.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#83

Post by thaumasiotes »

>> I got the sack, very traditionally in Britain, I got the sack on Christmas Eve.

I remember how NCC Group told me not to worry about my health insurance, because it would stay good through the end of the month, as they fired me, with no stated cause, no notice, and no severance, on Halloween.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#84

Post by righthand »

HKH2 wrote: post #77
righthand wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School is not cool and that’s a problem.

Well, when students are not kept back for failing, they are given an incentive to fail.

Students probably fail because of external factors (depression, anxiety from poor home life) not because they’re a dumb-dumb. When the course work requires you to understand subjects that have no real world use or your curriculum doesn’t teach you how to apply the education, you’re incentivized to fail as well.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#85

Post by gwd »

loeber wrote: post #65

> I've only ever written tests for personal projects because no employer I've ever seen actually had any working tests or interest in getting them, and I wrote the entirety of my Master's thesis code without version control because one of the best universities in the country doesn't teach it. I'm sorry, but after reading this sentence there is no way that this man is a great engineer. And I don't care how much he stu…

He did't use version control for his master's thesis because he never even knew about version control until after he left university. And he's saying that when he's in control of his own time (i.e., for his own projects) he writes tests; but that when he's being told what to do by someone else, they don't want him to spend his time writing tests.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#86

Post by 63 »

The point is a bit exaggerated and reality is more nuanced, but as a general principle, I agree that simply giving a damn about what you're doing can often get you miles ahead of people who just show up for the paycheck.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#87

Post by gwd »

Does reading HN count as self-improvement? I can't say how many "leads" in technology or ideas I've got by spending time on this site; and I'm sure I never would have quit my job to be a solo founder if not for the stories on this site. (Too soon to say whether the latter was a good idea or not!)

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#88

Post by Unlisted6446 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #70

> This led me to Betty Edward's Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, a book whose title profoundly upsets me as someone that left psychology due to the field's horrendous epistemology. I was hoping that the author revisited this at the end of the piece. We see this line of thinking on HN all the time. Perhaps judging an entire field solely on epistemic grounds is a form of all or nothing thinking?

Well, there's a couple of things going on, right? One is whether we it's a bad idea to judge an entire mass of literature because of its epistemology and the second is whether the OP's claim that psychology has horrendous epistemology is valid.

I'd say that judging an entire mass of literature because of its epistemology makes logical sense. However, in practice, it's not possible to make a judgment as to 'what the epistemology of an entire field is'. What would that even mean? Does OP think that every psychologist has an analogous enough epistemology that anyone can claim what the field's epistemology is? I think not.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#89

Post by fragmede »

duggan wrote: post #76
fragmede wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

smaller companies are more exposed to customer demands. whether that makes for better or worse code depends on the team and company culture. the demand to ship something right this second and is existential for the company tends to prioritize shipping over well engineered code. At the opposite end of the spectrum, being totally insulated from such demands can lead to some really nice design docs, and code that might…

> the demand to ship something right this second and is existential for the company tends to prioritize shipping over well engineered code. This is a challenge, though very early in my career I learned that one solution to this is to just get better and faster. Failing to deliver to your own standards becomes a motivator (with lots of caveats in regard to working environment, domain applicability, etc).

also learning to say no is an important skill to develop. my current director asks the impossible just to get us to say no, and then we have a good back and forth on what's a realistic balance, like what features we can trade off for which time.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#90

Post by talencorimas »

>Then there are engineers (and people in every profession) who never try for the entirety of their careers, and this is the majority of every profession.

I find this pretty ridiculous. It's just that the standards are pretty low in IT. And being a good programmer just isn't a job requirement in the industry. I don't know a single case where a someone got fired for writing bad code.

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