301–310 of 406 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In all fairness, where I work (large european financial institution), all the dev jobs have been moved to India.
But is it working out? Or is everything now an infinite shitstorm?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's ageism. Sorry for being so blunt, but I know to many people who were just uninteresting to human resourses after hitting 45-50. I know more than a few homeless people in my life, and over half were once Programmers. It makes me sick. I do know this, if you are in tech, save up that money. (I have never understood this industry's way of hiring. Long drawn out interviews, and candidates whom are just average that…
As someone who's been in charge of recruitment, I've made an effort in hiring people who are less likely to get a chance at other places (minorities, older candidates) One thing that stood out to me though is that a lot of the older candidates I interviewed that had been struggling had deep knowledge of a technology that's no longer used and had had very little interest during their career in learning new things outs…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Music is one of those degrees I think naturally translates to programming. My first programming boss many years ago, was a classically trained professional musician. He ended up starting a software company with another person (who was crazy so we all moved on) to create some kind of management software. Eventually he retired as the CTO of a large privately held company.
Giving how technologically grounded most music degrees are now I don't think it's that unusual that positions often move into programming for work
These folks could definitely use software, but why? They largely don't need it, they are performers or educators, not composers. Even composers, some prefer to work at the piano or in their heads, writing down snippets in tech or on paper doesn't matter to them in my experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An EE degree IS awesome. It gives a generalizable mathematical foundation which applies in just about any other field of work. It gives a huge competitive edge. For example: * Circuits are physical implementations of differential equations, and EE gives a unique way to intuitively think about dynamics, which applies to finance, epidemiology, and just a really diverse range of domains. * With a rigorous EE background,…
EE is one of those "engineering is really applied physics" disciplines. There's a slant towards standardised EE-specific solutions for PDEs, but it's still much more abstract and mathematical than any field of CS, apart from maybe cryptography and data science. But career-wise, it's a mediocre choice in most Western countries. (Possible exception is Germany, where engineers have a similar status to doctors and lawyer…
Here's the thing, though: PDEs are NP-hard. There isn't a generalizable way to model dynamics. On the other hand, dynamics come up everywhere:
- How is the pandemic going to evolve?
- How will incentive structures skew cultures?
- How do I build a suspension for my car?
- How does heat leak from my house?
- How does my understanding evolve with learning?
... and so on.
What EE does -- and I think uniquely -- is given intuitive, graphical tools to think about differential equations, in tools like Laplace, Body, Nyquist, root-locus, and so on.
They also give a lot of applied experience in applying those, including in contexts with nonlinearities. An op amp will clip on both sides, which you model as a linear differential equation (which is easy enough to reason about) and a memoryless, time-invariant nonlinearity. You squint. You kinda ask yourself how it would work if it /were/ linear, and the nonlinearity just cut gain. And at some point, after doing it enough, you have intuition for what it will do.
With the EE-specific stuff, I can intuitively reason about these things think through to design.
EE is all about modeling -- building simpler equations which approximate more complex ones in ways which give intuition -- so this is also usually correct or almost correct. Indeed, if you go onto grad level courses in control theory, you'll see formalizations of this intuition, where for example, a time-variant system or a nonlinear system is modeled as a linear time-invariant system, together with a bounded error.
A lot of the mathy stuff -- which I've learned a fair bit of as well -- is in abstract more general, but in practice, gives much less intuition.
My experience with the real world is that there are rarely actual differential equations handed to me. I kinda get that we've set up some pricing structure, or some incentive design, or whatnot, but I can't model it formally. I know which way things push, and whether those integrate or not. I can draw a block diagram and reason about how it will behave, in a way the math side doesn't let me do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing You are completely right about that and that slipped my mind. Either way it was kind of nice how easy it was to get a job back then. Getting my foot in the door was a little difficult actually, but once I had some thing on my résumé I got an interview for basically every job I applied to. My résumé is much more impressive these days, and it may be in pa…
It's ageism. Sorry for being so blunt, but I know to many people who were just uninteresting to human resourses after hitting 45-50. I know more than a few homeless people in my life, and over half were once Programmers. It makes me sick. I do know this, if you are in tech, save up that money. (I have never understood this industry's way of hiring. Long drawn out interviews, and candidates whom are just average that…
By doing so, that cuts out anybody who currently has a job. Looking for a new job is much less stressful when your fallback option is "keep working at the current job and continue the search". It also gives you a much stronger negotiating position, since you don't have the deadline of bankruptcy hanging over your head.
If I heard that a company wanted me to work for two weeks on a probationary manner before deciding, that would be a very hard pass. That's long enough that it couldn't really be done without leaving a current job first. Best-case scenario, the transition becomes immensely more stressful for no good reason. More likely scenario, the hiring company decides to play hardball after the two weeks, and I'm over a barrel because I already left the safety net.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
History (BA/MA/PhD)
I have a music degree, and when people ask me why I do web development, the answer is a combination of "I enjoy it" and "I have children and therefore need to be able to afford things".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An EE degree IS awesome. It gives a generalizable mathematical foundation which applies in just about any other field of work. It gives a huge competitive edge. For example: * Circuits are physical implementations of differential equations, and EE gives a unique way to intuitively think about dynamics, which applies to finance, epidemiology, and just a really diverse range of domains. * With a rigorous EE background,…
I think you over promote the utility of the formal methods taught in the degree. Not once did I use Laplace in EE. It was all cheat sheets or applying data sheets and doing some adhoc calculations in excel or taking a wild guess and iterating. After twenty years of doing IT related stuff I’ve forgotten how to even differentiate stuff.
1. I did learn them well, and so I did use Laplace quite often in EE.
2. I jumped careers not into IT, but into tracks which leveraged both programming and a mathematical skill set.
I'll mention: I'd be bored out of my wits doing just IT. The intersection of IT and math includes computer graphics, visualizations, robotics, machine learning, fintech, image processing, and a ton of other stuff I find much more fun and fulfilling.
That's not an implicit commentary on your path, by the way, just an explanation of mine. We all have different goals, desires, values, constraints, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there’s anything I’ve learned it is that you should always make your own mistakes. Your parent’s mistakes don’t even make sense any more 30-40 years down the line. My father pushed me into EE. I burned 5 years in industry being paid crap and then discovered it was actually a fairly low paying profession in the UK. Ended up supporting a bunch of Sun machines for other EEs which was more fun. So i learned Perl one w…
Considering how hard it can be, EE is seriously underpaid compared to software.
In America, we value frivolous crap over serious scientific and artistic endeavors, mainly because the masses are terribly dumb. Idiocracy was quite close to the truth, as good satire must be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there’s anything I’ve learned it is that you should always make your own mistakes. Your parent’s mistakes don’t even make sense any more 30-40 years down the line. My father pushed me into EE. I burned 5 years in industry being paid crap and then discovered it was actually a fairly low paying profession in the UK. Ended up supporting a bunch of Sun machines for other EEs which was more fun. So i learned Perl one w…
Why is EE so bad? On the surface it looks like a degree with a strong grounding in mathematics, exposure to programming, the discipline of engineering, and a diverse range of applications across industry. It kind of seems like the ideal degree if you want to hire someone. I'm always baffled when I hear stories like this.