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Are coders worth it?

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Re: Are coders worth it?

#221

Post by abraininavat »

gte910h wrote: post #185
abraininavat wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stamping out software is what your Windows/OSX/linux installation CD/DVD is. Microsoft is making a lot of money stamping out (figuratively nowadays) copies of Windows. I think you misunderstood. The product a software engineer makes is not a CD that lands in a person's hand. It's the arrangement of bits that eventually ends up on that CD. The OP is saying there is no way for a machine to arrange those bits.

He understands you. He just disagrees and thinks your metaphor is wrong.

He understands you. He just disagrees and thinks your metaphor is wrong.

First of all, let him speak for himself. Or do you claim to read his thoughts?

Secondly, no he doesn't seem to understand. The statement he disagreed with was: We cannot put software on the kind of assembly line/stamping process which is obviously a point about the fact that we have no assembly line process for writing new software.

He replied with: Stamping out software is what your Windows/OSX/linux installation CD/DVD is which is obviously missing the entire point. We are talking about writing the software, not putting the software on the disk. It's a distinction you've clearly also missed.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#222

Post by jrochkind1 »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #196
jrochkind1 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think you are right that there is a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want -- I would suggest that there is also a difference between what people actually want , and what people demonstrate with their behavior, what they actually do . What people do is not neccesarily what they want either! For all sorts of reasons. Poor self-control, costs/risks (financial/social/psychologic…

Very interesting. However, I think by differentiating what people "actually want" from what they do, you have made it completely inaccessible. How can we possibly find out what people actually want if it's different from both (1) what they say and (2) what they do? In other words, is there any way you can validate your thesis? I suspect you can't. You will have to fall back to what they say they want .

That's a good point too, I'll have to think about that.

The sorts of examples I was thinking of though, would be:

* Someone who wants/says they want everyone to be paid a living wage and are willing to pay somewhat more for products made by people earning such -- but still consistently buy the cheapest products, made in sweatshops.

(That one might be, in part, about a lack of trustworthy information?).

* Someone who wants/says they'd rather there be fewer McDonalds around and more healthy restaurants, but still spends lot of money at mccdonalds, and maybe not at an available healthy restaurant.

(lack of willpower?)

I think you are right about the, er, epistemilogical problems, but I think there are still some examples that make it pretty obvious that what people actually want is not always represented by their actions.

Or at least not always by their _purchase actions_. Maybe the larger point is that, contrary to certain religions, the market is not in fact a perfect aggregator of people's true desires. What is successful in the market is NOT always representative of people's true desires, for all sorts of reasons (including the obvious one that some people have more market power than others, so are better represented in 'the market' -- but that's just the very beginning of reasons).

Re: Are coders worth it?

#223

Post by nawitus »

nekopa wrote: post #201
nawitus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The creative content (writing, photography, art, travel guides etc) is all in demand, but no-one wants to pay for it, perhaps because it's so easy to produce something yourself, and so hard to distinguish the fine differences in quality which separate a remarkable piece of writing or photography from the mediocre. The real reason is not really that people don't want to pay for it, but rather it's available for free,…

In response to you and grey-area about news: yes I get news for free, and it is normally good enough. But... Some of the recent reporting from the NYT has really made me reconsider paying for a news subscription, just to be able to fund great investigative reporting. If I wasn't in a low income country making low income wages it would be a no-brainer. But I really do think that there is a market for high quality repo…

I agree completely, but it seems that the mainstream is moving towards to free newspapers (which may be online or not).

Re: Are coders worth it?

#224

Post by mc-lovin »

NickPollard wrote: post #79
grey-area wrote: post #50

Wonderful writing, I loved the way it circled several times around the central issue - the value of work, and I particularly liked this conclusion - much validation and reward in our society is driven by how much people are willing to pay you for your chosen work, and it's very hard to separate your self-worth and confidence from that. It's hard to reconcile when your values don't meet those of the people around you,…

>> If you ask people in the street whether we need another Facebook, most would say no Don't take this as a disagreement with your whole comment (it isn't), but one trap that people fall into is equating what people say they want with what they actually want - at least as expressed by what they are willing to pay for , which is what shareholders and VCs care about. There was an article on HN a day or two ago about ho…

>The main issue as I see it is that as we use money as a proxy for value, we disproportionately weight the desires of the rich over those of the poor. A service for rich people (e.g. an online photo sharing website) doesn't need to produce much utility to be worth a lot of money, whereas a service for poor people (e.g. clean water for poor villages) can produce a lot of utility and still be worth little money.

That is the essence of free markets. If you look up the "welfare theorem's" you will see that the free market promises to do precisely what you describe: maximize the weighted sum of individual utilities, where the wealthier individuals generally have higher weights.

Ultimately, it is in human nature to care more about oneself and one's family (and possibly other people who you consider to be part of your in-group) than others. The free market just happens to make this fact very stark. Each time I buy a coffee for myself instead of donating to a poor village, I cannot avoid the conclusion that I care more about my momentary happiness than whether someone in that village gets some avoidable disease.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#225

Post by sologoub »

abraininavat wrote: post #221
gte910h wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He understands you. He just disagrees and thinks your metaphor is wrong.

He understands you. He just disagrees and thinks your metaphor is wrong. First of all, let him speak for himself. Or do you claim to read his thoughts? Secondly, no he doesn't seem to understand. The statement he disagreed with was: We cannot put software on the kind of assembly line/stamping process which is obviously a point about the fact that we have no assembly line process for writing new software. He replied w…

Agree with @abraininavat. There is a big difference between mass distribution and mass design.

Another way to look at it is coach builders. 100 years ago, there were many more coach builders and custom car manufacturers than there are today. Car was also a luxury item. That started to be disrupted by mass produced and mass distributed cars, like Ford.

Today, most companies that hire "web developers", are either building things using packaged libraries or modifying things to fit. They are not taking off the shelf components and connecting them without modification. Even tools like Salesforce.com default to people writing code to solve complex configuration issues. The UI is catching up, but it's not there yet.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#226

Post by gte910h »

abraininavat wrote: post #221
gte910h wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He understands you. He just disagrees and thinks your metaphor is wrong.

He understands you. He just disagrees and thinks your metaphor is wrong. First of all, let him speak for himself. Or do you claim to read his thoughts? Secondly, no he doesn't seem to understand. The statement he disagreed with was: We cannot put software on the kind of assembly line/stamping process which is obviously a point about the fact that we have no assembly line process for writing new software. He replied w…

>Stamping out software is what your Windows/OSX/linux installation CD/DVD is. Microsoft is making a lot of money stamping out (figuratively nowadays) copies of Windows. Software engineering is the equivalent of the mechanical engineer combined with mold maker for plastic or stamped parts.

The whole quote shows he disagrees and thinks the analogue is wrong

You only excerpted part of the quote which was contradicting the other interpretation of what the product was, not the explanation of what he thought it was.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#227

Post by deathcakes »

jacques_chester wrote: post #40
stdbrouw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't feel like the author was trying to prove anything, or was trying to get people to pursue more "virtuous" pursuits. It is simply a personal reflection on the state of the startup ecosystem and what it means to be a computer programmer.

I'm trying to save him some angst. Trying to reconcile the virtues of what he does with his economic value is pointless. They're just not connected. Demand for Ruby on Rails plumbing is ultimately connected with the current wishes and desires of most of the planet's population and has nothing whatsoever to do with how he, or anyone else, feels about it. In literary terms: he's tilting at windmills.

Ah you guys. This is precisely the attitude that the article is talking about. The fact that you conflate most of the world with the tiny proportion of the world that has both money and internet and also the even tinier proportion that cares about whatever cool thing you've made in rails screams of the kind of self involved perspective that the author of the post is complaining about. I don't mean this to sound like a personal attack, apologies if it comes off that way.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#228

Post by daned »

bennyg wrote: post #152
daned wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a reasonably competent unemployed technologist I would be interested in hearing more about how you go about marketing.

Here's how I got people contacting me for jobs in the Valley and NYC. And not recruiters either, potential bosses. 1.) have a Github account, and release open-source software that helps coders be better at what they do. Basically release tools of sorts. 2.) Make the documentation for those tools absolutely stellar. Look at the .raw for the readmes of the various Github repositories you like and love. Emulate some of…

Thanks for the reply!

Re: Are coders worth it?

#229

Post by deathcakes »

jacques_chester wrote: post #56
stdbrouw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sure, but there's a difference between understanding this on an intellectual level (which he already does) and coming to terms with it on an emotional level.

Granted. But if the existentialists taught us anything, it's that if you stop and look, I mean really look at your life, you'll find how thoroughly inconsequential it is. Which is no comfort at all. Quite the reverse. Ignorance really is bliss. I find the intellectual argument comforting because I can focus on the things I can control, the things that are within my sphere of power. I used to be very interested in pol…

If nothing is worth anything then by definition everything is worth whatever you want it to be worth. My life is inconsequential from the perspective of the universe but from my point of view its pretty important.

Also, you certainly do have the ability to actively engage with your world and you have an extremely limited ability to change how certain aspects of that world works. Of course this has to be based on the idea that doing so is inherently worth it which you seem to have abandoned.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#230

Post by hackula1 »

While it is important to keep our egos in check, I think this article leans a bit on the side of discounting modern web computing. Not all of us twiddle around with CRUD apps all day. Running a site with millions of concurrent users is challenging, and useful. Sites like twitter or reddit enable social change and transparency. Running a site with one hundred users doing real work is challenging too. Allowing one or two people to do a job that would have taken 10 people just a few years ago (ie: sales force, accounting systems, gis systems, big data analytics, etc.).

Also, he talks about how web devs are like plumbers with toilet fixing robots. This would be true if the plumbers happened to build the robots themselves. Who does he think built Rails, Http, Express, Sinatra, Cake, Mongo, MySQL, and every other open source web technology out there? People like you and me. The web is an amazing thing, quite possibly humanity's greatest achievement so far, and we are still working on making it better.

One last thing. The author seems to think web devs just think about colors all day. Is he not hacking, exploring, and building things? Someone who talks about colors all day is a web designer imo. Nothing wrong with that, but entirely different focus.

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