Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You can't git clone a team

virtualize.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 115 posts

Re: You can't git clone a team

#91

Post by johnnyanmac »

manquer wrote: post #65
IshKebab wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No he's saying if you are a generalist you shouldn't try to market yourself as that. Usually employers are looking for specialists that are perfectly moulded to the one exact task they need at that very moment. It's misguided of course, but that's what they think they want and if you say "I've done all sorts of things and I'm good at all of them" they'll hear "I don't have much experience with anything" and discount…

On the flip side few reasons why I don’t favor generalist profiles (while being one myself). - resumes which claim generalist tend to be SEO’ed than real, or AI generated and they will say experience dozens of technologies most of which would be untrue, throw everything and see what sticks . In most cases it just tells me what they have heard of rather than what they know especially if they are not very senior . - It…

>Being a generalist with depth of understanding means you are the type of person who needs to understand things properly before doing them . .You are lot of time learning things which are not required for get the task completed.

It's just how my career swung me. I would have loved to have developed as a subject matter expert, but everytime I get into the swing of things, layoffs came around or the studio shut down. Now I'm freelancing and that by nature requires a generalist approach.

no one's really investing in specialists, so I have no idea how the millentials/Gen Z of the world will ever get to properly specialize. Specialization requires time to master something, and that time implies stability to do that thing.

>To be productive to learning curve is steep and the prior knowledge is limited in usefulness.

business wise, sure. It's a shame all business sees as "productive" is based on how many widgets you churn in that time. It's no surprise such companies want to force AI into it without quality considerations.

Re: You can't git clone a team

#92

Post by johnnyanmac »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #26
polishdude20 wrote: post #2

I think the issue started way before AI when it comes to not having enough fresh blood for this industry. Companies have decided they don't want to train juniors. They want seniors who already have the skills.

I think it is important to acknowledge that it takes much longer to train juniors in systems software today than a couple decades ago because the nature of the problems have changed. It now takes several years to get someone to an acceptable level for a lot of systems software work. In many cases that’s longer than the entire development cycle — a junior would never really be productive on the project. And yes, this…

>And yes, this is creating a vicious feedback loop where we are no longer producing many new people with these skills despite a lot of demand.

if the company would rather burn out and age out all their talent than invest in the future, I don't know what to say. For niche domains, you can't treat talent a a pure business expense. That's how you lose out all that talent to China and suddenly you can't compete at all. If anything, training should be treated like insurance.

>It is no longer feasible in many cases to have companies effectively subsidize the development of highly skilled systems software people.

"subsidize" implies that somehow engineers are saving money by choosing to take these more niche paths. It doesn't make sense. You have a product and you need talent to develop and maintain it to compete. There's no "subsidies" in a business relationship like this.

your choices are few and simple: train in-house, lobby schools to train for you, or publicize your tech and hope people train themselves for you again. It seems like these days companies aren't looking out long term though and just want to jump the ship that has plenty of time to steer past the iceberg everyone sees ahead.

Re: You can't git clone a team

#93

Post by johnnyanmac »

artyom wrote: post #20
polishdude20 wrote: post #2

I think the issue started way before AI when it comes to not having enough fresh blood for this industry. Companies have decided they don't want to train juniors. They want seniors who already have the skills.

I agree but it was always like that. Also there isn't any incentive anymore in growing juniors if they're going to immediately take the next better offer that comes around when they know enough, and you have such thing being offered on a daily basis (at least until a couple years ago). I would love to work on low-level, systems stuff (anything as close to the hardware as possible), that's even my education and area o…

>there isn't any incentive anymore in growing juniors if they're going to immediately take the next better offer that comes around when they know enough

okay. Promote them with proper pay then. This HR debacle of putting more budget into hiring over retaining is entierly self-inflicted.

>People follows the money.

Well that love sounds more like a low priority whimsy in that case. I don't think tech workers of all people are ones who ever complain about low compensation. Unless you work in games, I suppose.

Re: You can't git clone a team

#94

Post by johnnyanmac »

gbuk2013 wrote: post #46
betterThanTexas wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is much wiser to hire one senior instead of 2 juniors for the same money. Maybe in terms of pure productivity, but if you can match hiring to roadmaps you can give them more approachable/further from revenue work for which seniors would be an overkill. Etc. I'm just saying anyone with a simple explanation is only telling you part of the story. Besides, hiring is expensive . If you say live near a university, you…

> give them more approachable/further from revenue work for which seniors would be an overkill My experience suggests there is no such thing. There is work that seniors might not want to do, but if you hired well then they will be professional enough to do it, if it really needs to be done. And it takes some experience to determine which “non-revenue generating” work (e.g. tech debt) actually needs to be done, to adv…

>which “non-revenue generating” work (e.g. tech debt) actually needs to be done

This mentality is part of the problem. You can't fundamentally treat juniors as a profit center. Especially in more niche fields. They need to be trained and schools don't cover your specific pipeline.

maybe it doesn't "need" to be done, but some refactoring work will pay off to turn your juniors today into seniors tomorrow. If you can only think in productivity charts, then you don't hire juniors.

Re: You can't git clone a team

#95

Post by johnnyanmac »

plam503711 wrote: post #12
htrp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That said, in my previous job in a startup we hired very junior engineers and gave them plenty of opportunity and support for growth and several people did stunningly well. Pity the company didn’t do very well (IMHO due to focusing more or this sort of thing rather than making money). Mentoring is a key part of technical leadership, way easier to help the talent grow into your requirements (even if they are under-qu…

I agree but there's also the extra difficulty to do mentoring remotely (we are a remote first company). I *really* like being remote first and provide the choice if you want to work on site or wherever you want. But it does come with some challenges.

This may be a hot take, but I don't think most juniors should be remote. You need some time face to face to understand the processes and you miss lot of passive knowledge when you're not navigating a workplace of people discussing matters.

once you get a few years under the belt, sure. You're probably fine doing everything online. I can't think of many remote only studios hiring juniors anyways.

Re: You can't git clone a team

#96

Post by johnnyanmac »

fragmede wrote: post #62
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, some C code, some html, a table here, a colspan there, and you can have a website made by a single person... if we want a website to look like it was made on an 1980s computer by a single person.

If you're not that person, it's fine. Some people still just use notepad and write html like it's 1999. Other have both kernel experience, and have picked up react at some point in the past ten years. Plus LLMs write css these days, so no colspan needed.

Is an LLM gonna write your kernel too?

Re: You can't git clone a team

#97

Post by johnnyanmac »

ipaddr wrote: post #52
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's difficult to find kernel developers then wouldn't it help to not require them to also know web UX? That means hiring two people, and in $current_year, companies expect one person to know everything. Sysadmin, backend programmer, frontend programmer, designer and a DBA used to be different people not that long ago, now they expect one person to do all that... + it seems they want kernel development experienc…

Good, that's the way it was until the splitting of roles for commodification. A programmer is more like the Renaissance man who makes it a goal to do everything from different disciplines than a drone who has been trained to do one thing and can only be trusted to do one thing.

It's not commodification, it's acknoledging that tech got exponentially more complex over the decades.

just think of your favorite video game character in 2000 and then one in the 2020's and consider how much tech is needed to render, animate, light, and conceptualize it. in 2000 this was all done by maybe one artist and one gamedev, probably making a character with some hundreds of polys at best. now that artist has a pipeline of riggers, material artists, animators, and concept artists, while that single dev became a graphics programmer, gameplay programmer, tech artist, and build engineer.

Re: You can't git clone a team

#98

Post by johnnyanmac »

lesser-shadow wrote: post #59

>Partnering with Universities and Research Labs Like where? In the US? Western Europe? You're cleary not searching hard enough because I've never heard about your company once throughout my time at university.

They shoutout a city in France, so I assume western EU.

Re: You can't git clone a team

#99

Post by johnnyanmac »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #68

The value of knowledge is plummeting. It can, will, and should be subsumed by LLMs. Consider London’s black cabs. Drivers pass a gruelling exam to prove they know “everything” about one part of London. But, Google Maps puts that knowledge and more on every rideshare driver’s dashboard, for free, no advance study needed. Map knowledge doesn’t make you able to drive. Driving happens in real time - steering, obeying roa…

>It can, will, and should be subsumed by LLMs.

okay. So what to do in the meantie while an LLM can no in fact help you much with kernel programming? People love talking about the future but people also have current business needs.

> a motivated individual can use AI to make themselves employable as a full stack engineer faster now than at any point in history.

I'd love to hear one case of that happening. I'll even take someone ramping up from zero to freelance work as long as they have a good portfolio.

Re: You can't git clone a team

#100

Post by fragmede »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #96
fragmede wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not that person, it's fine. Some people still just use notepad and write html like it's 1999. Other have both kernel experience, and have picked up react at some point in the past ten years. Plus LLMs write css these days, so no colspan needed.

Is an LLM gonna write your kernel too?

At the rate LLMs are improving, that certainly seems like a possibility, but until they do, why would you need one for that? Kernel C makes sense. CSS is the problem here.
Post reply on HN