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Are coders worth it?

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Re: Are coders worth it?

#231

Post by randallsquared »

Falling3 wrote: post #203
damoncali wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, like a draftsperson or an engineer who refuses to learn Solidworks, the more powerful software will be a negative for those who cannot, or choose not to, evolve their skill set above a more basic level. That line jogged loose a memory that might cause some thought in other so I'll share: I used be an aerospace engineer. Typically, what we called * designers* were technical people who were very good at workin…

But doesn't it stand to reason that if he'd been just a little more personable and just a little less resistant to change, he could have done even better?

Not necessarily. We don't know if what made him so incredibly productive sprung from those same qualities. In fact, refusing to learn new processes when the old ones still worked might have aided him in gaining expertise.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#232

Post by jholman »

gte910h wrote: post #226
abraininavat wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree that the quote suggests that gvb disagrees and thinks the analogy is wrong, or at least inferior to his analogy.

I mean, gvb's alternate analogy is also a good one. Yes, writing software is like configuring the assembly line, and yes both of those things are expensive work for highly-trained professionals. And yes the interesting difference is that 99.999% of the cost of making software is this design, whereas in car manufacture it's maybe 5% or 20% or something (and the actual stamping is the rest). This is a good analogy, sure! It's also hopefully old news for basically all of us. Isn't it?

But sologoub's analogy is a different one, and it's also a good analogy, and in my experience a less-overused one. And insofar as it's more-novel (to me), it's more instructive, and thus "correcting" it with an overused analogy suggests lack of understanding.

Sologoub's point, to attempt to restate and simplify, is this: the value and scarcity of modern engineering is comparable to the value and scarcity of pre-industrial artisans. Industrial artisans because less valuable when industrialization commoditized their work. And sologoub proposes that this could one day happen to software development (and other engineering), and if/when it does, (software) engineering will cease to be lucrative. I think it's an interesting model; I have no idea if it will be possible to industrialize software development, short of god-AI taking over all human labour.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#233

Post by 6d0debc071 »

Falling3 wrote: post #203
damoncali wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, like a draftsperson or an engineer who refuses to learn Solidworks, the more powerful software will be a negative for those who cannot, or choose not to, evolve their skill set above a more basic level. That line jogged loose a memory that might cause some thought in other so I'll share: I used be an aerospace engineer. Typically, what we called * designers* were technical people who were very good at workin…

But doesn't it stand to reason that if he'd been just a little more personable and just a little less resistant to change, he could have done even better?

Depends what he wanted out of life really. He may just have run into the point where having a little extra leverage would have been meaningless, or at least more bother than it was worth.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#234

Post by clark-kent »

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…

Great tips thanks

Re: Are coders worth it?

#235

Post by nileshtrivedi »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #222
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is insightful. Lack of information, lack of willpower (eg. laziness, addiction) and bad decision-making (for reasons such as cognitive biases, poor reasoning under uncertainty etc) can be reasons why actions may not be consistent with the real wants. I agree with your larger point.

Given this, as a business, one has a choice of focusing only on what you can get people to do (eg. cigarettes, farmville, tabloid journalism, in fact any business that exploits the above reasons) as opposed to focusing on what they truly want - even though we want people to act in a certainway. The first kind are the businesses which are generally considered "evil".

Your idea of wants differentiated from actions seems to be quite fruitful. I used to tell people "don't ask your customers, instead, observe their actions". Clearly, something more is required to make a non-evil business. Thanks for teaching me something new. :)

Re: Are coders worth it?

#236

Post by mjw »

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…

> 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

Another trap people fall into is equating what people are willing to pay for something, with the amount of value that's actually able to be captured in the market for that item.

The finance industry, say, is able to capture a lot of the value they create (some might say more than they create). Some other industries, less so.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#237

Post by henrik_w »

bennyg wrote: post #164
sologoub wrote: post #153

This article seems to be missing a parallel that was drawn previously many times. PG has written on the subject, and so have others. The closest parallel we can draw between "coders" and the distant past, is that with the artisans of the middle ages. Aside from the landowning nobles, the artisan class was probably the closest thing to a true middle class. Many advanced to upper-middle and later became the industrial…

Sure some parts of software will become manufactured and mass produced - I mean that's the case today. How many libraries do you use? However, software is still an intellectual, out of thin air, endeavor. It requires thought to create new and make work with existing circumstances. You aren't melting metal into a mold to make a tangible object. You are literally fusing thoughts and intellectual processes together to d…

Creating the library presumably took a long time - it wasn't "mass produced". Using it is not the same as creating it.

But leveraging already existing SW (OS, stacks, web tools etc) is what makes us much more productive today compared to 20, 30 or 40 years ago.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#238

Post by damoncali »

Falling3 wrote: post #203
damoncali wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, like a draftsperson or an engineer who refuses to learn Solidworks, the more powerful software will be a negative for those who cannot, or choose not to, evolve their skill set above a more basic level. That line jogged loose a memory that might cause some thought in other so I'll share: I used be an aerospace engineer. Typically, what we called * designers* were technical people who were very good at workin…

But doesn't it stand to reason that if he'd been just a little more personable and just a little less resistant to change, he could have done even better?

I know what you mean, but I would say no. This is getting a little philosophical, but bear with me. It's like saying, "what if Steve Jobs were a little more down to earth?" or "What if Nick Saban was just a little easier to get a long with?" It's tough to separate out what makes a man who he is. The same unreasonableness that made people not want to work with him is what saw his designs through to production unmolested by the compromises of what he would likely have deemed lesser minds (or "fucking idiots" as he'd have said).

Re: Are coders worth it?

#239

Post by mbrock »

bennyg wrote: post #206
nekopa wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how long will this idea of 'fusing thoughts and intellectual processes' remain the sole domain of humans? Besides from some creative leaps, a lot of this has to do with logic: knowing what works where and when. I'm working on an idea tied to literate programming where someone can tell a story of what they want a program to do, put it in a wiki, and then programmers can edit the wiki to add in the actual software…

That sounds awesome. I've dreamed of a context-aware, natural language programming language: Change value of potatoes to 10. (potatoes = 10). Make potatoes equal 10. (potatoes = 10). Give every person at the dinner table a potato. (for x = 0; x Etcetera.

Check out Inform.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#240

Post by EternalFury »

When one becomes obsessed with the tool of the trade, one loses sight of the greater end. If the ultimate goal is not worthwhile, it does not matter whether you code it Ruby or Scala. It's busy work and a waste of human energy.
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