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Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

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Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#191

Post by pc86 »

gonehome wrote: post #142
pc86 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has never been a 1:1 relationship between how essential a job is, nor how difficult it is, and the pay. It's mostly about a) the barriers to entry, which can be academic (law, medicine), regulatory (law, medicine, probably finance?), institutional (finance, tier 1 law), or just how grueling it is to get through (definitely medicine outside of some specialties like family med or peds, probably tier 1 finance/IB…

Imo this is related to value provided. It’s why an excellent tutor can make serious money and be hired by wealthy families to teach kids. Good teaching is a scarce resource. Many (most?) teachers are bad and the existing incentives don’t require them to be good. It’s hard to fire them and public schools have issues which limit selection and competition. Perhaps harsh, but some of the dimmest people I knew in highscho…

I don't think that's an exception, as government funding and capitalist market are more-or-less mutually exclusive, even in capitalist countries. Nobody in a state government makes more than the governor, nobody in the federal government makes more than the President, etc. And for social work specifically, "real evaluation of skill" is going to raise more than a few eyebrows.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#193

Post by selestify »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #161
3pt14159 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but they also often leave. I've taught three[0] people a little younger than me software that all wanted to do it for the freedom and financial security and two of the three transferred out of software to something else in tech like product management. It really bummed me out too, because it was the two women out of the three. Their lives are still markedly better than before, but I want more women in ac…

I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from entering the field, and everyone should be equally encouraged and provided the same opportunities, but more and more I see these pushes for trying to pump the numbers of specific demographics. If someone wants to join the industry, great. If not, also great. I t…

I think it's based on the assumption that if all cultural factors were removed, an equal number of men and women would be in software engineering. And so, by modus tollens, the current gender ratio of the industry is a damning indicator of how much cultural bias still needs to be fought against.

Personally I think that's a flawed assumption. While there are certainly cultural biases at play still, there are also aggregate differences between the genders that most likely means the "natural" gender ratio will still be skewed towards men.

This is unfortunately a taboo topic to make note of, and is absolutely not up for discussion in most workplaces (see the Damore scandal), and so the fetishism you note persists.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#194

Post by austincheney »

1. Not everything can be declarative. Navigating tree models (file systems, DOM, decentralize relationships) is an inherently imperative task. This doesn't stop developers from forcing declarative abstractions over imperative concerns. It just means a foot gun at maintenance time or passing the buck to somebody else.

2. Legacy paradigms will continue to live, no matter how obsolete or harmful, so long as developers reliant upon those paradigms continue to find employment. Such developers will continue to find employment so long as such paradigms remain in formal education criteria.

3. Software hiring is extremely biased. Such bias will continue until software is perceived as generally harmful by people outside of software hiring. Until such time any attempts to limit bias will be met with maximum hostility, as such only benefits experienced and generally confident incumbents.

4. It is common in software to hate on credentials of any kind except a computer science bachelor's degree, which then becomes a credential. This line of thinking is prolific and extreme enough to view credentials as a form of incompetence regardless of what such credentials are or what they mean, thereby increasing bias.

5. Software will continue to swell and slow so long as the goals of the developers are out of alignment with the end product. Claiming product first goals by developers is not a solution if not reflected by the tool chain and processes.

6. The older the web gets the more costly it becomes to add text content to a commercial webpage.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#195

Post by lexapro »

ericmay wrote: post #120
edoceo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. Are Norway and Sweden in the group of "most capitalist"? I thought they also had a bunch of socialized programs. I feel like USA and UK are the top two "most capitalist" countries.

Having social programs doesn't preclude you from being a capitalist country. If it did, the U.S. has medicare, medicaid, welfare, social security, food stamps, affordable housing programs, and many others yet we consider it to be highly capitalist. People often confuse political and economic systems (which is fair) because they get tangled together. Both Norway and Sweden are capitalist countries. They have stock mar…

>I always say yea I'm on board we should cut medicare and social security

You're evil ;)

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#196

Post by jancsika »

> Also also also, most muggles don’t want to program their own computers, much in the same way that most muggles don’t want to do their own taxes or wire their own houses.

I smell a red-herring that reeks of domain incompetence here.

Find me even a FSF/Gnu zealot who argues that paradise includes end users fishing around in ALSA or display settings to "program their own computers."

As Keenan's character on SNL's Black Jeopardy said-- "Everybody's got a guy."

Anyone who has ever installed something as simple as Ublock Origin for a muggle gets this.

Anyone who has ever tried to turn off telemetry for good on a muggle's proprietary OS gets this.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#197

Post by kevinmchugh »

nickjj wrote: post #42

This one from the article is a bit weird: > Sophisticated DSLs with special syntax are probably a dead-end. Ruby and Scala both leaned hard into this and neither got it to catch on. Rails is one of the most popular web frameworks around and a combo of Rails and Ruby power some really high traffic / high importance platforms like GitHub, Shopify and Stripe's API.

Ehh, when I would introduce people to a rails project, I always got to a point where I said basically what the author says. Usually either while explaining rspec (and `let` especially) or the routes.rb file. Rspec and the routes file are still around, but you used to see that sort of thing a lot more.

My impression is that Ruby libraries have leaned away from DSLs over time. Rails hasnt added a new DSL in a long time, none that I can think of anyway.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#198

Post by liveoneggs »

commandlinefan wrote: post #173
ryandvm wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I always tell people thinking about a software engineering career is that, yes, it's great money but I strongly advise only doing it if you actually like working with computers. Otherwise it's going to be a nightmare. Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life.

> doing math homework every day Sigh... if only there were a way I could get paid for actually doing math homework every day...

become a math teacher and never look in the back of those cheater "teacher's edition" books!

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#199

Post by nonameiguess »

mojuba wrote: post #3

No. 13 is gold: > We’re never going to get the broader SE culture to care about things like performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, or privacy, at least not without legal regulations that are enforced. And regulations are written in blood, so we’ll only get enforced legal regulations after a lack of accessibility kills people. Sorry, can't help but blame capitalism for saying "fuck performance, compatibi…

Every response seems to have missed the joke by not reading the actual article. No. 12 makes fun of "blame capitalism" and this comment is riffing on that.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#200

Post by StevePerkins »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #183
StevePerkins wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize that this will get some reflexive upvotes from the meme crowd. But neither of those statements are remotely true.

I frequently have to pause while typing and wait for my pocket-supercomputer to catch up and actually give me feedback like putting text on the damn screen. Multi-second non-interactable pauses are not uncommon at all. If that isn't "unresponsive" I'd really like to know what is . The ad thing I admit might be a touch hyperbolic.

I have never experienced input lag on a iPhone, other than perhaps a context where the input is traversing across an Internet connection.

And I assure you that a C64 with a 300 baud modem had that issue, too.

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