Other example of slow performance in MS is file system access and process creation.
It takes a PhD to develop that
91–100 of 429 posts
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like Windows Notepad. I suspect it was never designed for anything more than trivial cases, and then it never got requirements overhaul later in subsequent versions of Windows.
I was under the impression that Windows Terminal is a recent greenfield project.
Yea. Microsoft has two terminals. Command Prompt (cmd.exe) which is the default that comes with Windows, has been around forever and basically never seen a significant update. And the new Windows Terminal which is the recent greenfield project that only works on recent versions on Windows 10 and doesn't ship with Windows by default (yet).
Unfortunately people often get the two confused when talking about "the windows terminal".
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course we have all met people who were pompous, arrogant and ignorant. But there are some good and outstanding leaders out there. If you never had the chance to meet one (or did not recognize them when they were in front of you), I am sorry for you.
> But there are some good and outstanding leaders out there. There are, though they are just almost never the people who's job it is to be a leader. > If you never had the chance to meet one (or did not recognize them when they were in front of you), I am sorry for you. The worst of the worst are the "outstanding" leaders that just "did not get recognized" as such. Not even the worst part of the worst hell would be g…
All that being said, I agree with you: leadership is hard. In 20 years in industry, how many (really) good leaders have I met? Three maybe.
My original point is that the _role_ is a lot more interesting than what the article seems to suggest.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#94Counter argument: If the experienced programmers stay where they are, software development will forever remain craftsmanship. A single developer can only tutor so many juniors. In fact, I think that teaching and encouraging to learn is the most important thing in SE. And that has to begin with leadership figures that don't believe their own knowledge gets obsolete after one year just because the latest framework got…
Just a side note, your idea of art is a bit naive. Take for example the work done by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, citing wikipedia:
> Their work was typically large, visually impressive, and controversial, often taking years and sometimes decades of careful preparation – including technical solutions, political negotiation, permitting and environmental approval, hearings and public persuasion.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#95It saddens me to see, time and again, the role of leadership painted in such a dire and incorrect way. Leadership is a lot more than about "shuffling paper" in an "ivory tower". As a lead (in any decent company), you get to participate in critical design reviews; you get to read and review code; you get to shape the trajectory of others; you get to participate in discussions with the product teams. If you work smart,…
> It saddens me to see, time and again, the role of leadership painted in such a dire and incorrect way.
I think you misread the post.
I don't see where this is criticizing the role of leadership. Good leaders exists (though, they are rare). I have been led by some of those inspiring people. But I've never met a leader (as good as it was) who continued to be a great software engineer.
The point is that they all were stuck in the "Sort of knows what they are doing" zone. And that's ok for being a great leader. But then, nobody in the company is kept long enough at a position to become what the author describe as "Experienced".h
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#96PhDs often make the worst possible developers. People with PhDs (especially in Mathematics) are often lacking the most critical characteristic of a good developer; they don't know why they do things. Being good at math requires being able to solve problems whose solutions often do not have any practical uses or whose practical uses may not be clear. This is very different from how software problems should be approach…
A bit if a generalisation. For a different view: currently almost all the core devs for NumPy and SciPy (those are the ones I know personally) have doctorates.
I think that we can agree that if you want to become a generalist programmer, able to hop from random web startup to random web startup, then a PhD is probably not that useful. If however you want to become more of specialist, say being able to develop novel solutions to complex fluid dynamics problems then a PhD is very useful place to start.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#97cmuratori is great software engineer, for sure, but, god, this bug report poisons the well right from the start (see below). Also the report is actually quite bad, because 40x performance drop, that is stated, could be actually nothing. If something takes 1 millisecond instead of 25 microseconds (numbers from the head, to illustrate the point), it might be an issue, but also might mean nothing. This is the thing that…
I personally disagree. I don't see any poisoning in the original bug report; furthermore, I think it conveys the issue (and some of its subtleties, such as referencing "modern CPUs") much more clearly than the version you propose.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#98PhDs often make the worst possible developers. People with PhDs (especially in Mathematics) are often lacking the most critical characteristic of a good developer; they don't know why they do things. Being good at math requires being able to solve problems whose solutions often do not have any practical uses or whose practical uses may not be clear. This is very different from how software problems should be approach…
> PhDs often make the worst possible developers. I personally don't agree. > Software development is more about finding the right problems than it is about solving problems; to find the right problems, you need to understand the 'why' in as much detail as possible. This is what a software or CS PhD makes you understand. You know the why's to the lowest level possible. > The PhD diploma itself doesn't have much practi…
I say, it doesnt matter, PhD or no PhD. Alot of the smartest people in the world have no PhD.
What i will say is that, i suspect PhD people to be people that create more theories around how to solve certain problems. And this. is very very very bad. It leads to design patters and generic solutions aka. lazy solutions that are just bloated and slow.
And this is a problem i see often with people who learned to code via school/university or some code academy like BS.
Design patterns are evil, and solutions should always be custom made towards the problem and be made as simple as possible. Only then you wont end up like microsoft or 95% of all developers.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
A bit out of topic but has anybody followed performance issues of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020? For more than half a year it was struggling with performance because it was CPU heavy, only loading one core and etc. Barely ran on my i5 6500. Fast forward half a year, they want to release it on XBox. MS/Asobo moves a lot of computation on GPU, game starts running smoothly on the very same i5 with maximized quality se…
Because a rule of thumb is to not focus too much on performance in the beginning of a project. Better a completed project with some performance issues, than a half product with hyper speed. The key thing with development is to find somekind of balance within all these attributes (stability, performance, loo, reusability etc) In case of FS simulator. Not sure what the motives were. Sure that they had some serious time…
Agreed. As someone who spends most of their time on performance related issues, it's important to keep in mind that sometimes performance issues are strongly tied to the architecture of the program. If the data structures aren't set up to take advantage of the hardware, you'll never get the results you're hoping for. And setting up data structures is often something that needs to be thought about at the beginning of the project.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#100Yup, this. Something I've been ranting about[0] for a while: there is no technical progression ladder. The Senior->Principal-> ... path seems to be a faux-management track, with all the managerial responsibilities and little of the authority. Software is shitty in big part because it's mostly written by juniors, as almost anyone who has any clue moves over (or gets pushed over) to managerial or faux-managerial roles.…
I really appreciate this perspective. Better tooling to enable individuals to penetrate more layers of abstraction sound great. To some extend e.g. with cloud providers this is already happening. We have more powerful building blocks than ever.
However, I feel the idea of experienced vs. junior programmer is not helping this discussion much. Experience can also hurt to some extend, because you need to unlearn things.