Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#101

Post by waps » Thu, May 02, 2013, 6:04 AM UTC

ExpiredLink wrote: post #48

> Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers? Because a career in computer programming (still) sucks: http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/03/why_a_career_in.html > Programming is easier to learn than a foreign language Maybe 'coding' but not programming and definitely not software engineering.

The advantage older coders bring to the table is full-stack understanding, at least at the moment. Sure, maybe not as useful to bring your site off the ground, but MUCH more useful for any kind of optimization.

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#102

Post by espeed » Thu, May 02, 2013, 7:22 AM UTC

willholloway wrote: post #21

The author of this would have his answer if he understood the IQ floor necessary to be a good engineer, access to computers at a young age and willingness to troubleshoot obscure problems is relatively rare in the population. There are far less high IQ individuals in the world than the world needs right now. We can teach coding to young people, but as of now we can't reliably increase IQ. We have studies that prove a…

> The author of this would have his answer if he understood the IQ floor necessary to be a good engineer, access to computers at a young age and willingness to troubleshoot obscure problems is relatively rare in the population.

The author is Phil Greenspun (http://philip.greenspun.com/) -- I'm pretty sure he gets what's required.

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#103

Post by raverbashing » Thu, May 02, 2013, 8:12 AM UTC

redblacktree wrote: post #41

raverbashing wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a waiter at a tourist restaurant is pretty much an 'on/off' occupation. You need a small amount of specific knowledge to start working (at a specific place), and leaving the job takes almost no knowledge away. Software development is a very slow start, depending on the project. Just try and see how long until a developer has the development environment. Yes, it should be a 'turn key' solution but that's often n…

Check out vagrant[1]. I can have a new developer set up in about 30-60 minutes. [1] http://www.vagrantup.com/

Well, you're assuming that

1 - All projects can be run in a VM 2 - Setting the development environment is all a new developer needs

Let me try to instil some expanded vision into things:

- I can't have a VM for our specific embedded hardware with its specific devices

- I haven't seen a VM for AIX on Power (maybe except running on Power HW)

But most importantly, Vagrant can't put on the developer's head everything specific (s)he needs to know to do the job. Like how to use the proprietary utils that we need to integrate in a project. Or what the project is all about.

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#104

Post by tjr » Thu, May 02, 2013, 2:11 PM UTC

jshen wrote: post #99

tjr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $125/hour and $5000 for servers, $10-20k could be spent up in a couple weeks or so. That seems pretty reasonable, and certainly not as absurd as $327 million, which would amount to about 1200 years of FTE effort.

If you were the government or a big company with a reputation would you call up 1 guy and say "you've got a few weeks and 120/hr, make a site and well run it in our data enter"? Think of all the things that can go wrong! Security, PII, etc.

Ah, I thought your remark was suggesting that it should be even cheaper than $10-20k.

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#105

Post by redblacktree » Fri, May 03, 2013, 5:33 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #103

redblacktree wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out vagrant[1]. I can have a new developer set up in about 30-60 minutes. [1] http://www.vagrantup.com/

Well, you're assuming that 1 - All projects can be run in a VM 2 - Setting the development environment is all a new developer needs Let me try to instil some expanded vision into things: - I can't have a VM for our specific embedded hardware with its specific devices - I haven't seen a VM for AIX on Power (maybe except running on Power HW) But most importantly, Vagrant can't put on the developer's head everything spe…

I didn't mean to imply that Vagrant is appropriate for all situations. However, it has certainly been a boon to my web project.

I hope you'll forgive me for misunderstanding "Just try and see how long until a developer has the development environment." -- The language is ambiguous, but "until a developer has the development environment" means software to me. That is, that the developer has the tools he needs to make changes to a code base. You're right that I may have taken too narrow of a view, but my interpretation also seems reasonable.