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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

#131

Post by pm »

csours wrote: post #111
rhaps0dy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you framed your anecdotal evidence as supporting the OP's statement, but also that you misunderstood such statement; and you actually present evidence against it. If companies find it hard to reliably staff generalist positions, _and_ you're a generalist as you claim, then you would find it _easy_ to get a job.

There is a massive gulf between hiring and work. There's another massive gulf between what a manager asks for and what HR or recruiters ask for. > "If companies find it hard to reliably staff generalist positions" The process of hiring for this is hard. Finding people like this is also hard.

There's also gulf a between what companies think they need, and what they actually need. Almost everyone hires on technologies and not the abstract skillsets required to learn said technologies.

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

#132

Post by saryant »

wmeredith wrote: post #114
saryant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's arguing that the average wage in our industry is low simply because the workforce leans so young, so a disproportionate number of software engineers are still junior—and making junior wages—compared to other industries where the age curve is more spread out.

> the average wage in our industry is low Is this a joke?

There are a lot of literalists in this thread.

The average wage is dragged down because the age distribution leans so far to the left. That is, the average wage disguises the wages made by staff/principal engineers, which can be 3-5x the comp numbers commonly tossed around for SV engineers.

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

#133

Post by rogerbinns »

valuearb wrote: post #105
toasterlovin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher education is used as a proxy for intelligence by companies who are hiring because they are not allowed to use IQ tests. So I think it kind of makes sense that our society is confused about the purpose of higher education.

It's not just an IQ test, it's a test of ability, which is different. Your college record shows that you a) Whether you were able to get the work done. b) Whether you were smart enough to do the work well. It's the combination that's important, not either single one. Employers want people who show up on time, actually care enough to try, and are smart enough to figure it out. The college degree has a better than zero…

It also shows that you could do that for several years, following the rules set by someone else, and passing.

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

#134

Post by valuearb »

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.

It is if they lose faith in your ability to make a profit. Better to force you into bankruptcy and auction the IP and tangible assets than let you ride it down to zero.

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

#135

Post by ynniv »

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.

Sometimes* the best way to learn things is to do them, a lot.

- Graduate of the North Avenue Trade School

(* Most times)

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

#136

Post by aeorgnoieang »

dvdhnt wrote: post #50
drewrv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been spending a lot of time lately wondering if people who treat colleges and universities as though their job is worker training are confused, or if I'm naive in believing colleges and universities exist to expand human knowledge through research and education. I suspect the answer is that our culture is confused, we want people who are smart and well rounded to also be useful. And the ugly side of it is, we wa…

> And the ugly side of it is, we want clear class divisions. What? I suspect that it's typically, if not exclusively, those in the upper classes that want this. The ugly side of it is human nature is selfish.

Actually, I suspect that it's the middle class (or middle classes for cultures with more than three classes) that are most anxious about being mistaken as lower class. Actual upper class members don't usually care – they're not relying on university attendance to protect their positions.

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

#137

Post by gthtjtkt »

> The tech industry is fundamentally unserious about how it recruits, hires, and retains candidates. About which I have a lot more to say than could fit in a tweet, but, a good thing to know.

Would love to read more about that. I'd be willing to bet most SMBs are terrible at hiring / retaining developers.

My last company did literally nothing to help devs learn and grow (or to reward those who did so on their own), which created a department full of miserable, unmotivated people. The only reason most of them are still there is because they haven't found a new job but can't afford to leave.

They're trapped, essentially.

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

#138

Post by runako »

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…

Taken with the rest of his comment, the meaning here is to ensure that you build a viable, sustainable business.

The norm for techies is to underprice their offerings (based on underestimating the difficulty and expense of creating, selling, and supporting software). This leads to even "successful" companies closing because they weren't built to be financially sustainable.

One way of making a company sustainable is to charge a sustainable price (which is typically "more" than initially apparent).

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

#139

Post by valuearb »

jamesrcole wrote: post #107
swamp40 wrote: post #58

> Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. Then why did Amazon patent the concept of a drone that will fly to your car and recharge it?

I'm also somewhat sceptical of the blanket "ideas are never valuable" statement. Surely there are situations where not many people are going to think of the idea and being first to move on it is very important ...such that both the idea and the execution are important. You can't execute well on something that you weren't able to come up with.

Sure you can. Henry Ford didn't come up with the idea of the car, nor did he invent manufacturing by building many copies of the same identical thing in a factory.

But he sure did execute doing both together well.

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

#140

Post by aeorgnoieang »

ninkendo wrote: post #120
tikhonj wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they do a pretty bad job teaching CS too. Your average undergrad program is almost entirely learning about CS, not learning CS. A non-trivial of students get through a CS degree never doing anything novel in CS —a real shame because, unlike math, research-level CS problems are eminently accessible to undergrads. It doesn't even have to be "real" research: I just expect more than classes which have you reg…

> classes which have you regurgitate what you learned to pass I think that's what school is, no? I'm not trying to be glib, I think this is just a reality of how education works in pretty much all subjects (typical US academia, YMMV etc.) Can you name a major that doesn't work this way?

I had to write real proofs (tho I didn't fail completely if it wasn't free of errors) for my U.S. math undergrad degree.
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