Hacker News Reader

Comment by hanoz | Hacker News Reader

Good job the violinist works in the music industry not the software industry, or he might find after all his sessions of focused deliberate practice that now no-one wants to hear the violin anymore, and he must in future focus his efforts on the upcoming disciplines of both xylophone and clarinet.

View on HN

And then he finds that the xylophone works in hall A and not hall B, and for the latter he has to get a slightly newer xylophone with more keys. Oh, and he has to learn a new scale invented by the xylophone's makers.

All the while taking instruction from someone who would struggle to knock out a few notes on a ukulele.

Of course, better-known orchestras will first assess an applicant's musical prowess by whiteboard interviews.

If you can't write down Freygish scale, including the dominant fifth, you needn't even dare thinking about playing there.

If he has appropriate training in music theory it should be easy to get moving more quickly though ... that said in this specific example muscle memory is a factor so maybe all the keyboards in the office getting switched to dvorak is a better metaphor!

I appreciate the humor but I also think working in tech is much easier. Like you can be 25th percentile programmer and have comfortable salary/job security vs 99th percentile violinist.

Well yes, one provides an actually valuable service while the other is a form of entertainment

(1) All of the notes written on the sheets will periodically be replaced with complicated names that mean the same thing but sound more modern.

(2) The musicians will start to charge fractions of a cent per note, with some sections playing certain notes while other sections play the rest of them. Incentivizing short bursts of music, and "interoperability"

Would you really want to work in a static industry? The constant change and opportunities for lifelong learning is something that makes me love being a software developer and not get bored (I've been doing it for almost 40 years).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com