What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers • Hacker News Board

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#51

Post by Muromec » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:15 AM UTC

omscs99 wrote: post #34

Imo all of this talk about being “well treated” in SE is an utter load of shit Regular office jobs don’t have oncall. They don’t get randomly pinged outside of business hours. They aren’t as rat racey. There’s less ageism. They don’t force you to live in areas where a shitbox sfh costs more than 2mil Seriously, I wish I could go back to undergrad and tell myself to go into a regular engineering field. And my experien…

Don’t work at big tech. If possible, don’t work with people buying into Protestant work culture.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#52

Post by FirmwareBurner » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:17 AM UTC

pydry wrote: post #40

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. Why is it bad that more people learn to code? I see this as a net benefit to humanity. Why do you want to gate-keep it?

I was just explaining why the tech oligarchy is so obsessed with it. It's a long term pragmatic and selfish effort to drive down our wages that is couched in progressive terms about inclusion, equality, education, etc. They also want to appear to be the hero while they try to push down dev wages. It was a positive statement. You're free to make whatever normative judgements about that that you please. I'm not here to…

'Tech oligarchy', whatever that means, can't forcefully turn everyone expert SW devs even if they wanted to.

We studies fairly advanced CS at school, without the 'tech oligarchy' making us (in Europe where this is non-existent anyway) and yet very few of us turned it into a career later in life because not everyone likes to do programing for a living and there's other lucrative jobs out there. Same at university, less than half of those who entered, managed to graduate in CS because it was tougher than people initially thought.

Cook, Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos can't turn you into an productive CS if you don't have what it takes, they can't download CS theory into your brain like in 'The Matrix'. In fact, many of them are responsible for dumbing down the population when it comes to computers, so I guess we can actually "thank" them.

Only the last ~6-10 years saw an insanely large number of people get into the industry without CS background because of the super high demand driven by the mobile revolution, negative interest rates, crypto hype cycles and stuck-at-home pandemic, and not by the 'tech oligarchy'.

But that was potentially an once in a lifetime event which might never come back. The mobile market is now saturated, crypto is done, people are not stuck at home anymore and the negative rates are also over, plus a trade war and an actual war, meaning an industry slow down, but again, not dictated by the 'tech oligarchs' and more people choosing CS careers, but by market, geopolitics and financial circumstances.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#53

Post by liampulles » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:24 AM UTC

It sounds to me like successful software companies are Agile in nature. Most significantly, that autonomy and people in the business are the priority, and that the processes support them - not the other way round.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#54

Post by eddtests » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:35 AM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #27

fragmede wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bartending at the right bar is a six figure, semi-untaxed salary which is competitive with a jr swe salary.

Not competitive because you still have to account for quality of life, working on site with no remote option, working evenings, nights, and weekends, general riskiness of being around drunk/high people, etc. Of course you may not have had to study as hard, so your quality of life as a young person might have been better, but bartending is not secure income for life either. Either way, the easiest way to look at it is…

> Either way, the easiest way to look at it is, do parents tell their kids to aspire to become bartenders?

That sounds incredibly elitist and cringey. If I had a child earning six figures as a bartender I’d be very impressed, and even if they weren’t earning six figures but were enjoying life I’d be happy… And taking it from another perspective, I know people who’s parents would be disappointed their children are ‘lowly software engineers’ too. With that sort of attitude you can rarely win.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#55

Post by gedy » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:43 AM UTC

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #15

You can always rely on Gergely to cut to the heart of the matter with his articles. What he's written largely chimes with the (many) diverse engineering environments I've collected a paycheck from. Some, usually the worst ones, have that "just stick to shipping PRs code monkey" mentality based off zero wiggle room in terms of defining the problem scope. At these kinds of companies and teams, the seeping lethargy and…

> The best places, in fact my current role in an SV-adjacent tech company

Would love to find a company like this again, past two roles were JIRA micromanagement shops and actively discouraged talking about anything.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#56

Post by lotsofpulp » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:59 AM UTC

eddtests wrote: post #54

lotsofpulp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not competitive because you still have to account for quality of life, working on site with no remote option, working evenings, nights, and weekends, general riskiness of being around drunk/high people, etc. Of course you may not have had to study as hard, so your quality of life as a young person might have been better, but bartending is not secure income for life either. Either way, the easiest way to look at it is…

> Either way, the easiest way to look at it is, do parents tell their kids to aspire to become bartenders? That sounds incredibly elitist and cringey. If I had a child earning six figures as a bartender I’d be very impressed, and even if they weren’t earning six figures but were enjoying life I’d be happy… And taking it from another perspective, I know people who’s parents would be disappointed their children are ‘lo…

Using a broad range of parents’ recommendations for what their kids could aim for does not having anything to do with parents being proud or disappointed.

It is a rough rubric to gauge an average quality of life for a person who does a certain thing for a living, not that parents or even entire generations of parents are always right about the continued resilience of a given occupations’ quality of life.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#57

Post by pavlov » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 11:12 AM UTC

DrDroop wrote: post #48

threeseed wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They will expect you to do all the real hard work while they sit in meetings all day making UI mockups and architecture diagrams You could also look at this the other way. They are the ones doing the real hard work i.e. making tough decisions, dealing with stakeholders, incomplete and poorly conceived requirements whilst you just get to build what's written down on a page. Everyone plays their role in companies and…

I think the point of the article was that to be valuable as an engineer you have to do things like "making tough decisions, dealing with stakeholders, incomplete and poorly conceived requirements". My problem is that a lot of people have your attitude and pretend that they are doing me a favour by having this being written down all the while limiting the actual design space for a problem, and in the same breath patro…

If you want to do that work, have you looked for ways you could get involved?

Or if it’s the case that you’re actually doing that work behind the scenes because the output from the PMs isn’t very useful, have you looked for ways to make your contribution more visible?

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#58

Post by pydry » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 11:21 AM UTC

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #33

Fluorescence wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is so disingenuous to snip out the reason they gave and then pose a sanctimonious question as if it wasn't clear. They said it's to increase supply and lower labour costs. You can argue with that or not but don't pretend you do not understand the capitalist ideal of an excess supply of labour so that salaries and benefits can be driven to legal minimums with desperate people still waiting to be hired no matter the…

>It is so disingenuous to snip out the reason they gave and then pose a sanctimonious question as if it wasn't clear. They said it's to increase supply and lower labour costs. Oh please, don't act so 'righteous-than-thou'. With this logic, aren't we all here who got into SW development responsible for increasing the labor supply and decreasing wages? What's disingenuous, is people in traffic complaining there's traff…

>Oh please, don't act so 'righteous-than-thou'.

Theres an interesting pattern here of us making positive statements and you inferring normative judgements which then make you upset.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#59

Post by uoaei » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 1:02 PM UTC

I think autonomy is ultimately a red herring -- what people want, crave, to feel dignified is agency. This comes in various forms but sometimes it can be as a part of a collaborative team that values their input, not just as a free-floating agent that can sweat hard and steamroll things into production.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#60

Post by mattbuilds » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 2:58 PM UTC

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #20

quickthrower2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a miracle. Things fuck up extremely quickly when you the systems are not maintained and it takes competence. A lot of businesses value (most perhaps?) goes to zero in a flash sans - IT. There is a developer behind all of that. That combination of needing talent which is in short supply and being essential.

Even comparing traditional sysadmin work — where operations are even more crucial — to software engineering, it’s easy to see that engineers tend to get paid more, get treated better and have more freedom. Obviously there are reasons for this, but it seems to boil down to broad generalizations in how the C-Suite sees your role, and very little in the particularities of the org or employee.

The reason is growth. A sysadmin will make sure the lights stay on and the place doesn’t burn down, but they aren’t creating a new revenue stream. And when all these companies need to grow forever, they need to be creating new things, which developers do and sysadmins don’t.