351–360 of 589 posts
These comments reveal a stark reality: most HN commenters have never worked on a really hard problem. They think hard problems are leetcode hards that have a prescribed list of known techniques to apply. They think communication, alignment, gathering requirements, and other political bullshit is the hard part because they have never actually solved or had to grapple with a truly hard problem. That’s fine, but it show…
Most useful software engineering work is doing fairly simple things and the numbers of people doing this work reflects that. > those of us who have had to solve open problems with no solution written somewhere because there is none. Probably because solving said 'truly hard problem' is niche with little or limited value as few people have tried to solve it (otherwise a solutions will likely have been written).
To be less tongue-in-cheek, your logic is flawed. We simply have too many hard problems than we do smart people, unfortunately.
And the ones we do have seem to like optimizing comfort over risk, such as taking cush consultancy positions.
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IDK, a sufficiently complex consumer or enterprise app winds up having big performance problems if people don't know what they're doing w.r.t. the code they write and how they connect systems together with that code. Those performance problems start out not mattering much, first it impacts one seldom-used part of the site, then another, but that chips away at users and can eventually tank the product. That doesn't ev…
> a sufficiently complex consumer or enterprise app winds up having big performance problems if people don't know what they're doing w.r.t. the code they write and how they connect systems together with that code. On those complex systems in particular the problems start long before any code is written. A software engineer can create and understand the specs, requirements, design the system, architectural decisions,…
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They simply asked you to support your claims, as an ethical person would. Without that, your words are just noise. And I see that this isn't the only comment you made where someone asked to provide supporting evidence and you dodged.
You're welcome to try it out yourself.
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Why does it have to be Shakespeare? There are millions of good writers that got there by working hard. Seems pointless to go into either extreme, when just being good at anything is generally hard.
It doesn't have to be Shakespeare, but hopefully everybody agrees that writing at Shakespeare's level is indeed hard. I agree that writing good (but not great) or even just ok literature is still hard, but that invites a bunch of no-true-scotsman arguments that I just can't be bothered dealing with (like "writing Fifty Shades of Grey isn't actually hard" or something similar).
I believe there are some programming jobs in which the code is absolutely the easier part. Not all of us work in signal processing, integrated systems or have to push upstream to Linux kernel because the company we work for really needs a memory allocation optimization for its data centers. Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incred…
IDK, a sufficiently complex consumer or enterprise app winds up having big performance problems if people don't know what they're doing w.r.t. the code they write and how they connect systems together with that code. Those performance problems start out not mattering much, first it impacts one seldom-used part of the site, then another, but that chips away at users and can eventually tank the product. That doesn't ev…
I believe there are some programming jobs in which the code is absolutely the easier part. Not all of us work in signal processing, integrated systems or have to push upstream to Linux kernel because the company we work for really needs a memory allocation optimization for its data centers. Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incred…
IDK, a sufficiently complex consumer or enterprise app winds up having big performance problems if people don't know what they're doing w.r.t. the code they write and how they connect systems together with that code. Those performance problems start out not mattering much, first it impacts one seldom-used part of the site, then another, but that chips away at users and can eventually tank the product. That doesn't ev…
I don't think you're really disagreeing with the original sentiment? However, I think you're taking a much broader view of "code" than is intended by the original statement.
In your framing, you're kind of confounding code with architecture. Code is really just the act of making a computer do a thing you want it to do, for some definition of "thing you want it to do". Architecture is more about understanding which things you want the computer to do, and in which ways.
There are a million ways to code a task. That's the "code" the original statement is talking about. Understanding which of those ways is an appropriate way is a separate skill, whether you call it architecture, or something else.
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Writing code doesn't have a notably higher (if at all higher, vs lower!) IQ requirement compared to some of the basic components of EE or MechE work. Programmer salaries have been driven up by the ability to write-once-sell-globally and the dramatic profit margin difference between that and, say, producing chips where there's a much higher fixed cost due to the need for more real material, tooling, etc. Many of those…
>Writing code doesn't have a notably higher (if at all higher, vs lower!) IQ requirement compared to some of the basic components of EE Average IQ of Electrical Engineers: 121 https://www.iqcareerlab.com/tools/iq-for-profession/electric... ...which is the top 10% of the population. https://www.desperateminds.com/blog/iq-120.html
This feels like post-LLM coding romanticization. Before LLMs, people would regularly say stuff like "I could build this in a weekend" under a "Show HN" post. How many times have people said "I could build Twitter in a weekend". I've even found in a post-LLM world, that kind of language has only increased. When you are looking at something that already exists, where all the requirements are defined, when all the edge…