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The shittiest project I ever worked on

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Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#181

Post by shailesh »

ryan-allen wrote: post #172
shailesh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of agree with you and OP, so let me add to the discussion with the caveat that YMMV etc. Some of these points may overlap with comments by fellow HNers in these threads. In any organization as a prospective customer, there are three forces at work that matter to a consultant: users, decision makers and finance folks. Ideally, the decision makers appoint a dedicated person (or team) who mediates users and finance…

Awesome post! One thing I find is really important is to charge 'properly', which at first seems like exurberant fees. My friends think I'm rolling in cash because of my 'rate' but when you outline all of this stuff up here, you can see where it all goes. I don't do much better than when I worked full time, but I have the potential to work harder and make more money. But the extra super hard work doesn't' seem worth…

Happy to learn that the post resonated with you. I appreciate it.

Once a VP at a customer told me that a diamond is just a piece of coal that shines under pressure.

The quest to become a jewel in the market can be a powerful initial thrust to work as a consultant. Combined with the opportunity to work in a diverse set of technologies and business domains turns to be a pretty compelling force.

Re: compensation, tptacek and patio11 have shared some great thoughts in the past.

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#182

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

EnderMB wrote: post #104
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a "Senior Software Engineer" title after only about 2-3 years of real-world programming experience, at age 23 or so. I had shipped a couple games as lead by then, so it wasn't entirely unearned.

I started out at a non-technical startup that was pushing a technical tool as its main product. Out of a team of three developers, I became the Lead Developer, despite having barely a year of experience, simply because I was the better programmer and was willing to call management out when they tried to make technical decisions. I was offered a choice of "Senior Developer" and "Lead Developer" and went with the lead…

Congrats! Sounds like quite a ride. :)

Can you believe that when I started, barely anyone used source control? That's what jumped out at me about your story, oddly enough. When I started the Web hadn't been invented, and the only version control packages were CVS and commercial options. CVS sucks, in case you're wondering. So did most of the commercial options.

In my own case I'd been programming and writing games for fun since I was 14, so by the time I took my first job at 22, I'd already been coding pretty regularly for 8 years. Some of that was actually for-pay, though only a few months worth. So between the experience I did have and my oversized ego, I pretty much expected the "Senior" label.

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#183

Post by eof »

nostrademons wrote: post #101
kabouseng wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could have moved to the petrochemical industry, where you would have been paid more than any software engineer anywhere...

Is that really true? This article [1] lists a top 10% petrochemical engineer's salary as $146,000. A fairly skilled senior software engineer at, say, Google can easily pull in $250-300K in total comp, and a programmer on Wall Street or independent consultant with good domain knowledge in wealthy industries like banking can pull in $300-500K/year. That's not even counting talent acquisitions, which can go for $1M/engi…

yeah but those wallst and google jobs are not top 10%.. probably closer to top .5%

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#185

Post by tripzilch »

kbenson wrote: post #151
jerf wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In the process it has automagically determined properties of the image which allow it to perform the classification." (Emphasis mine.) But that's the point; it may be "auto", but if you understand how NNs work it's not magic . It's not even all that hard to understand (considered broadly), and once you understand how they work it is, for instance, easy to construct cases they fall flat on.... "So it has in effect de…

It's classic emergent behavior. While you may understand how the algorithm works, and even be able to step through and see how each neuron affects the whole, that doesn't mean you know why the answer is correctly achieved through all of them combined. The classic example is facial recognition. Training a neural network for facial recognition will result in lots of neurons contributing a very small part of the whole,…

But it's not emergence. Using Gaussian elimination to solve a gigantic system of equations isn't emergence either, even if the numbers are a bit too many to carry in your head at once. (as a matter of fact, solving systems of linear equations is part of the RBM training algo)

And even then, if it was emergence, doesn't automatically imply we don't understand it or that it's "magic". The famous Boids flocking simulation is a classic example of emergence. It's not very mysterious. Yes large-scale behaviour emerges from simple rules, this is amazing that it happens, but it doesn't hold up a barrier for us to understand, analyze and model this large-scale behaviour. Crystallisation is emergence, again we model it with a bunch of very hard combinatorial math.

But in this case, neural networks are not an example of emergence. They are really built in a fairly straight-forward manner from components that we understand, and the whole performs as the sum of the components, like gears in a big machine.

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#186

Post by fusiongyro »

adamconroy wrote: post #50
fusiongyro wrote: post #22

> In 1995 I quit my regular job as senior web engineer You had the job title "senior web engineer" when the web was 4 years old. That's pretty cool.

Sorry if it reduces self-esteem, but we (software developers) are not engineers. I've been brainwashed for many years by my brother, who is a Phd civil engineer, that professions that hijack the term engineer are kidding themselves. I know it sounds cool, and my current title is 'Senior Software Engineer', but it is all a scam.

It would only be a scam if anybody but engineers thought there was a real distinction here. But nobody is, and the language is defined by use. This tiresome argument is never raised by "real" engineers, just software engineers who feel like impostors. Relax. You're not scamming anybody.

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#187

Post by jetti »

grumps wrote: post #27
jetti wrote: post #4

Fascinating! As somebody who is starting to do freelance work a story like this is not only an interesting read but provides insight on what to avoid and when to speak up as I start freelancing.

hmm yes... until your pipeline slows down.

In general or because of tips I would take from the article? I'm not that concerned about a slow pipeline because at this time, I'm only going to freelance on nights and weekends.
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