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I would have hired Doug, but...

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Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#121

Post by tosseraccount »

sgt101 wrote: post #99
_yosefk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embedded programming is much more stable wrt languages and (often non-existent) frameworks. Nice for C/C++ devs.

I worked as a C and then C++ dev for a few years and then I started a Ph.D writing a C++ code base. I remember the day that I got java 0.7 running on my spark 20. I would never touch the STL again, never have to worry about malloc and #def overwrites. No more gdb. There's not much nice for c/c++ devs, pity them.

How many java programs are running your desktop now?

How many C/C++ programs?

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#122

Post by camperman »

michaelangerman wrote: post #19

I am 55 and have been programming computers since 1975 when I was 15 years old. Do the math, I have been programming now for 40 years. Recently, I had a conversation with someone else about this topic and I told them that I have never been so excited about my career, the field of computer science, and most importantly the opportunities that exist today in the field of technology. The excitement surrounding too many t…

49-er here. It's still as much fun to code as it ever was.

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#123

Post by onaclov2000 »

ErikAugust wrote: post #34
intrasight wrote: post #6

When I was a young man, a slightly older associate told me that "programming is a trap". What he meant is that if you are relatively smart, you can get a CS degree, get good at it, and go earn a fantastic income right out of school. I heard the words. I understood the words. I agreed with the words. Even now, 30 years later, I keep asking "is this a trap that I choose to remain in?" I still love programming, but it i…

You should quit now, and try working a multitude of other jobs. Come back to us and see if your definition of 'trap' has changed, or expanded. Software engineering is such an entitled world, it is ridiculous. As someone who has seen the world of menial work, I will never, ever leave it. I feel blessed. You should too. You just don't know it.

I guess what I read into that is similar to how you can consider television a "trap". It's easy to get sucked into and not think about anything else. I know that I spend a lot of time thinking about different software related stuff, I love it, but I would suspect (and i could be wrong) that the cashier working at burger king doesn't think about how they can ring things up faster, move between the pickup window and the fries more efficiently while they're playing with their kids, I suspect they go home and thing about their family, not their job, and i think it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking about work much easier when your job is a "thought" job per se.... again I could be crazy though.... good luck if I am.

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#124

Post by vectorjohn »

markbnj wrote: post #103
fennecfoxen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the modern world if you're not on a trajectory toward the 1% you're losing. And what, exactly, is it that you're losing? You can have a pretty damn fine life without getting anywhere near the 1%.

It was not a statement about my personal feelings, but rather what I think the common perception is.

My perception is that is not the common perception.

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#125

Post by nostrademons »

markbnj wrote: post #103
fennecfoxen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the modern world if you're not on a trajectory toward the 1% you're losing. And what, exactly, is it that you're losing? You can have a pretty damn fine life without getting anywhere near the 1%.

It was not a statement about my personal feelings, but rather what I think the common perception is.

One possible explanation for that is that there are two kind of people, some who believe that everybody is working towards the same goal and some who believe that everybody should decide what their own individual goals are. The former group settle on money and social status as those universal goals, because they are reasonably common and can often (though not always) be exchanged for what you really want. The latter don't believe in telling other people what their personal goals are, because if they are different for every person, what's the point?

Under this model, 100% of the public discourse would be devoted towards achieving money and status. That does not mean that everybody (or even a majority of people) pursue those goals, only that people who do talk about it a whole lot more than people who don't.

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#126

Post by nilkn »

derefr wrote: post #13
intrasight wrote: post #6

When I was a young man, a slightly older associate told me that "programming is a trap". What he meant is that if you are relatively smart, you can get a CS degree, get good at it, and go earn a fantastic income right out of school. I heard the words. I understood the words. I agreed with the words. Even now, 30 years later, I keep asking "is this a trap that I choose to remain in?" I still love programming, but it i…

A trap, compared to what? Is plumbing a trap? Is finance a trap? Is hairstyling a trap?

It's a ridiculous term which I suppose is supposed to make people feel less guilty about having extremely comfortable, high paying, and overall relatively easy jobs, when they know that millions of others are struggling in jobs they hate, are drastically underpaid, or can't even find jobs.

A common version of this is to complain about a lack of vacation time (even though you have 4 weeks, plus holidays, plus sick time, plus sometimes getting to work from home), as if struggling menial workers barely making above minimum wage are spending half the year in the Bahamas. [Note: this paragraph is written from a US perspective.]

"Golden handcuffs" is a similar term. It's not that there is no validity to these notions or that the phenomenon of golden handcuffs doesn't actually occur, because it most certainly does. It's just that, in their typical usage that I see, these terms are used to invent an abstract struggle that upper middle class people are supposedly facing in order to assuage guilt over their own fortune.

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#127

Post by lisper »

munificent wrote: post #92
lisper wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No more BASIC, but I still code in Common Lisp whenever I can. And I'm using some library code that I wrote when I was in grad school 25 years ago. Once you grok Lisp, everything else is easy. You come to realize that the vast majority of what passes for "new technologies" is really just a re-discovery of something that exists (or is easily implemented) in CL. That makes it a lot easier (if a tad frustrating at times…

> no other language has co-opted yet. Check out Dylan, Julia, and my old hobby language Magpie[1]. [1]: http://magpie-lang.org/multimethods.html

I guess I should have said: no other mainstream language.

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#128

Post by housel »

_yosefk wrote: post #37
bentcorner wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm coming to grasps with this too. I'm over 30 and have spent most of my life building large desktop applications in C/C++. I want to eventually work remote, and looking at what's out there, there are very few opportunities with someone with my skillset. It's all modern frameworks and languages. So, I'm spending some of my own time learning some of this stuff.

Embedded programming is much more stable wrt languages and (often non-existent) frameworks. Nice for C/C++ devs.

Embedded programming is also harder to do remotely due to needing hands-on access to development hardware, frequent access to hardware engineers, expensive test equipment, and so forth.

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#129

Post by madez »

mgkimsal wrote: post #68
SCHiM wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine all the technologies and skills you guys have acquired. If I may derail the conversation a little bit, may I ask if/how you use the things you've learned today? I mean, is it things like paradigms that have stuck with you like OOP/functional/w\e, or do you always structure your exception handling in a certain way, no matter the language? Are there skills/technologies you've been using since you've sta…

I'm not quite in the same age range, but north of 40, and have been doing this for > 20 years. The tech changes - I don't use BASIC or Z80 machine code day to day. The skills that I can speak to, and the skills I see from others with this level of experience, are problem solving and communication, and secondarily the confidence that comes from having made mistakes. Few projects fail miserably solely due to technical…

We younger folks are incredibly curious about what you've learned. Can you elaborate on the topics you mentioned or recommend other sources? Can you give tips on best practices?

Re: I would have hired Doug, but...

#130

Post by silverlake »

ams6110 wrote: post #9
jgrahamc wrote: post #2

"Unlike Engelbart, I have re-tooled. I now work in JavaScript in the browser and on the server. I had to walk away from the codebase that I loved. I understood that the price of relevance is to give up fighting at some point and settle for a partial victory. I think I was right in the development environment I created. But right doesn't mean the world uses what you created." Yep. That's the key to staying relevant: c…

For me, the thing that gets a bit discouraging at times is the feeling of riding a slow-motion merry-go-round. Every 10 years or so you see the same ideas start to come around again, only with some new paint and landscaping. I have found myself more than once thinking that learning about some new trendy buzzword is just ultimately a waste of time, since I will barely have mastered it before it's been replaced by the…

Most companies aren't using the trendy new languages and tools. The bulk of jobs today are for C++ ('83), Java ('95), Javascript ('95), Python ('91), and maybe C# (2000).
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