111–120 of 184 posts
I think this is a great take. Culture is not a monolith in space or time. Write for the rebels far away or the ones yet to come.
What resonates the most with me in the article is this quote > I was so naïve that I thought progress could only go one direction, because that’s all I’d ever known. As kids growing up in Eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s the world felt like its getting better every year. More peace, fewer borders, more opportunities, better technology. Everything was getting better every year and we took it for granted that this is…
I think many of us take it for granted. I wonder what the view on the ground was in the late 1930's and early 1940's. Or a more recent time. I think how mechanical engineers felt in silicon valley over the last 40 years as basically 'making and shipping" was all exported to china. I have some mechanical engineer friends whose life got smaller and smaller.
Being a grown up man with a family and a kid, I gradually care less and less about my economical "social identity". It is not exciting at all. I bring bread to the table for the family. I am among the backbone of the society i.e. people who pays the largest amount of tax proportional to their income, while receiving very little benefit from the government. Why do I even want this identity? I have to wear this hat sim…
> "There are programmers, and there are system programmers, and ultimately there are kernel programmers" ... and "ultimore" there are assembly programmers, machine code programmers, ASIC microcode programmers, ... :-)
BTW definitely would love to do more professional assembly or microcode, if possible! I'm planning to migrate a very old kernel to different architectures and there is tons of assembly code, or, to be more precisely, more cursed GCC inline assembly code in the kernel. E.g. everything in string.h is in asm.
What is he talking about? AI?
I can't relate. Maybe it's because his identity vaguely repulses me. Although in some ways I'm part of it, I never liked the programmer subculture that he's mourning.
I find AI exciting because I don't know where it's headed. If it can do my job better than me, that's even more exciting. Maybe I'll have to find a new job or just learn to use new, diffeent tools but either way, change is interesting.
> Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of programming. I guess when you get to a certain age (I'm 45) I stop caring whether something like this has social value. I enjoy it anyways. Wanting to know how things work always brings me back. I don't c…
I lost my job as a programmer and I think it's over for me. No, you will not hack the device drivers in the basement but you're gonna be flipping burgers and out of cash or energy for anything else. Worst thing: you never gonna even be good at flipping burgers without experience or young age... Once you are out of the field, and your money is gone: suddenly you are useless, old trash. No one even wants to employ ex p…
i promise you this is not true
understand the chemistry of fats an denaturing of proteins, understand myoglobin; it is not much different than understanding anything.
nothing stops you from trying to make the best burgers in the world
be curious, ignorant and kind
Curious: Now that AI programming is getting good, is anyone using AI to chop away at boilerplate and/or simplify it? For example, is anyone skipping the ORM and just having AI write SQL and build objects from a datareader?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you believe that, it could be true. On the other hand there are lots of companies hiring still, so you could also keep working as a software engineer, if that's what you're good at. The job has changed a lot though, it's not about writing code by hand anymore.
Provided one can go through the silliness of fitting golf balls into planes, or going through the algorithms and data structures books from 30 years ago.
Do you know many plumbers or doctors who are so connected to their work that they do plumbing or doctoring as a hobby?
I personally try to avoid such Programmers when possible, they usually overengineer everything they touch just for the sake of engineering. Without even realizing there is a problem.