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Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

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Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#121

Post by AYBABTME »

Danihan wrote: post #82
codingdave wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One would never refer to law school or medical school as "vocational". Sure you would. They are 100% vocational schools. Their cost, acceptance rates, time commitment, and difficulty level may be higher than other vocational schools, but that doesn't change what they are -- 100% focused on giving you the knowledge and skills to do a specific job.

Well then where are all the "vocational" CS programs at universities?

Canada has ‘software engineering’ degrees which are essentially vocational CS degrees.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#122

Post by deathanatos »

md224 wrote: post #104

> Charge more. Charge more still. Go on. This might sound stupid, and maybe it's my inner hippie talking, but did this make anyone else slightly uncomfortable? I get that it's "good business", but something feels kinda gross about saying "extract as much money from other people as you possibly can." Like... shouldn't you just charge whatever you think something (a product, your time) is worth? I realize that "what so…

I interpreted that point very much together with the preceding point:

> Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

That, in my experience, is very true. Teams are staffed to "we can make it work, maybe" not "we can actually engineer something"; the second bullet, to me, says, "you need to charge more than you think you do, because you're underestimating the costs of doing it, in particular, of doing it well."

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#123

Post by compiler-guy »

allenz wrote: post #77
macintux wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...yet that's not obvious to everyone, hence the inclusion.

It's not about that fact. The author argues that programming schools should be vocational schools (while ostensibly presenting a list of objective facts).

The author doesn't seem to be making a normative argument here. Rather he is observing that something many people believe (someone with a CS degree will be a trained programmer) isn't true.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#124

Post by rhizome »

Danihan wrote: post #82
codingdave wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One would never refer to law school or medical school as "vocational". Sure you would. They are 100% vocational schools. Their cost, acceptance rates, time commitment, and difficulty level may be higher than other vocational schools, but that doesn't change what they are -- 100% focused on giving you the knowledge and skills to do a specific job.

Well then where are all the "vocational" CS programs at universities?

Medical and Law schools are postgraduate.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#125

Post by emsy »

simonbyrne wrote: post #100
vm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no no. Debt is not universally better. Debt can wipe out companies. It requires payments that equity does not. Miss one payment and you're in default. It's extremely risky for companies that are young and volatile. Debt vs. equity is always a case-by-case situation. Debt is cheaper but comes with strings attached. Equity is pricey but more flexible.

But it isn't in your creditor's interest that you go bankrupt either.

This. Being able to get debt should, in general, be a good indicator that your company might actually be valuable.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#126

Post by shostack »

dsnuh wrote: post #66
shostack wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also often a messy transition period where a team goes from a bunch of generalists to more specialists. This can be extremely rocky for all involved as often generalists have lots of historic operational knowledge and strong opinions, but the new specialists come with external knowledge of best practices and how to scale. It is important that historic knowledge is respected for the context it provides, while…

>often generalists have lots of historic operational knowledge and strong opinions *citation needed Edit: to be clear, in my experience the specialists that aren't also generalists on some level are the least productive on the team because they have trouble participating outside their knowledge domain. Maybe I have worked at the wrong places though...

To clarify, when a company is young, you have a lot of people wearing a lot of hats. They may in fact be quite good at wearing some of those hats. Likewise, having visibility and exposure to multiple domains aspects of the same company gives a perspective that is hard to have if you live in a super specialized silo.

However specialists don't need to be generalists to be productive as long as they come in with the mindset that they are specialists, and therefore may not know everything. And that is especially important, as I highlighted, for respecting historical context of the company and its operations.

There might be VERY good reasons for not doing something the way the rest of the industry does it (which is what the specialist might be inclined to do). However a good specialist should also be adept at factoring that into how they approach problems, and properly weigh the new information against their past experience to determine if in fact this is a special snowflake situation, or if their approach is still the right one. Conflict can often arise when if they push for the latter, so strong communication skills are key (and that is something that never really changes for any role at any stage of company growth).

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#127

Post by ken47 »

wnoise wrote: post #3

> CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a programmer should involve doing material actual programming. Well, that's because CS programs are designed to teach CS, not to be a vocational school for programmers.

There is a well known delineation between applied math and pure math. It seems that such a convention has yet to be established for CS.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#128

Post by allenz »

jack9 wrote: post #86
allenz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about that fact. The author argues that programming schools should be vocational schools (while ostensibly presenting a list of objective facts).

> The author argues that programming schools should be vocational schools I dont see where. The implication is that they are assumed to be contrary to reality. It's supposed to be a list of obvious facts.

The full tweet, from the link: "CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a programmer should involve doing material actual programming. There are some exceptions: Waterloo, for example. This is the point where I joke "That's an exhaustive list" but not sure that a joke."

This reads to me that Patrick wishes that the joke were not true, which is corroborated by other comments of his, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761134#7762383

The fact that you think that the article is in any way objective is why it is so dangerous. Ideology is like water. Patrick's assumptions and biases shape how he presents his "facts" and which facts are left out. It's not objective! What he is really doing is presenting a specific market-based worldview, which has certain insights and major deficiencies.

Consider for example "There is no hidden reserve of smart people". It sounds like an actionable insight, but is it true? Is it even falsifiable? What does it mean? And what actions would it lead you to take?

My answer: it reinforces the perspective that smart people are the only people worth considering, that there are few smart people, and (in context) that these people are mostly "generalists" and entrepreneurs. It values "intelligence", probably measured in terms of short-term ability to make money, and leaves out values and self-reflection. It leaves out the possibility that you can learn from anyone (c.f. the story of the $20 fan[1]). It leaves out the possibility that your hiring process could be discriminatory or unwelcoming. And so on.

This, I argue, is a good demonstration of why programmers need liberal arts; technical decisions are never just technical decisions. We must remember to ask who wins, who loses, is that desirable, is that just?

[1] http://cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEngineers.ht...

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#129

Post by BeetleB »

khedoros1 wrote: post #106
BeetleB wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well, that's because CS programs are designed to teach CS, not to be a vocational school for programmers. And which is why they should be moved out of the College of Engineering and placed into the college that has mathematics. Curiously enough, the only school he mentions where he can reliably know their grads have programming experience actually does place CS under mathematics. I think being able to program basic…

I went to a polytechnic university (i.e. one with a "learn by doing" focus). Our engineering students definitely had to have some programming classes, but they were taught separately from the CS ones. Most engineering students considered them an annoying roadblock in the way of getting back to their "real" work, and I (a CS student) spent a fair amount of time tutoring friends. I'll have to ask some of them if they u…

>A grad student who wasn't a decent programmer was either a cheater in undergrad, or didn't come from our school.

This particular student came from a different engineering background. Yet, he still got admitted into a top 5 CS program.

And whether he did CS or not in his undergrad is beside the point. I think this is a task any engineering grad should be able to do. If not, the university should not be listing programming as a core skill they teach their engineering students.

BTW, he is not unique. I don't think many (perhaps 20-30%) of my fellow grads (non-CS engineers) could code something that simple either when they were graduating.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#130

Post by blacksqr »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #59
bambax wrote: post #39

> Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. This is oft repeated, but not always true. Take the Nazis (bear with me). The Nazis had the best execution ever . They almost drowned the whole British army, which had previously conquered the world. While fighting battles all over Europe and being one of the most bombarded country in history, they continued to produce tanks, planes, submarines, oper…

Or they lost the war because of bad execution. They had feifdom fights in the upper ranks and Hitler wasn't able to have anyone tell him he had bad ideas (e.g. war on two fronts and locking tanks in Paris instead of letting them be commanded as needed during d-day (which again came down to infighting)). Germany was also being worn thin on supplies. It's not as if they were in perfect shape minus allied bombings. Also…

You clearly need to re-read John Gill.
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