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Many programmers have a bias in thinking that what they're doing is easy or simple, because they truly enjoy it and, many times, have learnt it as a hobby. Their career choice have never been a masterplan on winning big, but it just happened to be so, so they feel like they're fraud.

Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) usually put great investment into their career by doing side projects on their free time. We're talking weekends and night of trying out stuff, hacking stuff, reading, learning, etc. It's often an invisible investment, because it's a hobby and it doesn't feel like work.

In the end, programmers don't really need to dig that far to reach a point where they're good at building stuff using enough layers of knowledge to make what they do absolutely obscure to others.

Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property; but programmers most likely know by heart a sizable bunch of Bash commands and their options, HTTP status codes, API interfaces, etc. It seems like highly advanced knowledge to be able to solve a health problem from a set of symptoms, but from the point of view of the layman, solving a computer problem from an error message is about as magic as it gets.

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> Many programmers have a bias in thinking that what they're doing is easy or simple

In my experience it's exactly the opposite. People who do nothing but write glue code between major services think they're hot stuff.

One of my personal career goals is to stay as far away from simple glue code as I can. Unfortunately it makes up most of our field right now. But it seems like an especially precarious place to be.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Dunning-Kruger.

Folks in the middle of the curve are blissfully unaware how much there is to know and how many difficult problems must be solved to put together those backend services they are gluing.

I think, therefore, we should try to use different labels for different kinds of developers as much as we can.

E.g. "software engineer", and "programmer" should be labels for different roles/capabilities, as should be "computer scientist". Using the terminology incorrectly should be frowned upon, similarly to how this goes in other disciplines.

I'm not sure the field is mature enough yet for us to be splitting things up like that. I've worked in performance critical code, research science code, website optimization, ads infrastructure, browser testing, experimentation frameworks, dumbphone mobile payments, and other things, in C, C++, Python, JS, Bash, and Java. Most of my coworkers have a similarly wide range of experience.

These have a lot of core skills in common, both hard and soft, but it's such a mishmash of things that trying to impose precision via labels doesn't seem helpful to me.

Perhaps this is due to the location where you work.

I'm in Boston, and more than half of the above were while working for a single company (Google)

Similarly in the UK I have done bits of everything from IC design, IC design software, ARM assembly, webserver (Zeus), network engineering, sysadmin, web apps, Windows CE, and even some actual soldering. Small companies are great for this.

Most people with engineering titles are primarily busy creating whatever represents "glue code" for their particular field. Most white collar work is like the saying about dissertations in the humanities: The transfer of bones from one graveyard to another.

As jefftk's comment says, the field is too .. protean and ill-defined to do that. We can barely agree on "frontend" and "backend". There used to be separate "analyst" and "programmer" jobs, enshrining that would have prevented a whole load of efficiencies.

It's also why there's so much difficulty in bringing wages down by just training more programmers: it's much harder than it looks. Teaching people to program is far more unreliable than other disciplines; the degree of self-starter on-demand continuous improvement required is very high. Other professions (e.g. actuary) may have a big hill to climb, but the requirements are written down and there is a clearly marked path up the hill. In software you may wake up to find that someone has moved the entire hill during the night and you have to make your own path, again.

This! I think Rob Pike said it best in his initial talk about Go: there are two kinds of developers...programmers, and engineers. programmers want to build things, engineers are constantly monitoring and maintaining existing structures. the terms "builder" and "gardener" are also used in this context, but I always felt that the classic usage of "engineer" was someone who would maintain, monitor, and keep systems alive...whereas a programmer is tasked with building that system in the first place. Not saying that programmers shouldn't be responsible for the correctness of their own work or anything, nor should engineers never build anything from scratch, it's more a matter of your preference and what you personally like to do in your job.

But what is a "computer scientist", really? Is it just some theorist who sits in an ivory tower and tells us all what to do? In my opinion, a "computer scientist" can actually be either a programmer or an engineer (or maybe have both in their blood? who knows). It's someone who is less concerned about building things for today, and more concerned about how computers are going to work tomorrow. It's a wholly separate role from us "construction workers" who have our boots on the ground and are actually building things...the scientists are concerned with how we're going to build things tomorrow. I don't know if Rob Pike, Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, or Russ Cox still work on actual systems code anymore or whether they just figure out how to improve the Go language, but assuming that they only work on Go full-time, that to me is the role of a "computer scientist", though for example Ken Thompson is also a "programmer" because he likes to build things.

...except that people tend to use there words with reversed meanings too :| If a programmer wants to sound fancies he/she uses the term "software engineer".

Also, separating "building" from "maintaining" (when "maintaining" means more than running / scaling / securing, and also includes adding features) is a a recipe for disasters! The builders/creators start creating unmaintainable messes because it's not their job to maintain them.

I don't think these kinds of distinctions help in software... we need different ways to look at the problem...

Also this lack of separation is kinda what makes software dev a cool field to work in... I love the hacker mentality and if it ever fully dries out I'm gonna quit working in this field and move to a fresher/younger one.

"simple glue code" tends to be the part that has the most value added. We can keep building new frameworks and technologies over and over again but the real value is in using them to solve business problems.

Right. The problem is that it isn't terribly hard to do. It certainly doesn't require a CS degree. Any reasonably smart person can do it after a three-month boot camp. This is why there's a correction on the way.

Glueing together code gets complicated fast as you start adding more pieces to the system.

There is a reason why so many projects end up being a giant mess.

Most people aren't smart enough to make it through a bootcamp and those who do still need years of experience to be fully productive.

This is largely true. However, I've been cleaning up and scaling those systems glued together by dilettantes for years. My salary has been increasing, on average, 10-12% yearly for quite a while. I'm in management now and my primary job is to find and manage 1) people who glue together APIs to solve business problems AND 2) people who can fix the problems created by group #1. There is very little overlap between the two.

I welcome more boot camp grads. The amount of work for both groups is growing. I don't see salaries for devs falling. They may flatten out for some business problems/areas, but new and/or underserved will always appear.

People have been saying there's a correction (or bubble burst) on the way for the last several years.

It's very much a "correctly predicted nine out of the last five recessions" kind of situation.

There's a definite bubble at the junior level. I feel it will be self limiting as and when the bootcamps start failing to place people and people stop seeing it as a way to easy wealth.

Having worked with people coming out of a three-month bootcamp, I strongly disagree. The havoc these people wreak on your codebase for the first 6 months to a year after their boot camp makes them completely counter productive to have around.

Incredibly thorough code reviews helps reduce this, but at that point it slows down the skilled members of the team too much for it to be worth it.

Completely agree. As a boot-camper myself, I would have been an absolute disaster for the first 6 months (really, longer) of my career. It was exactly working with experienced people who had the time to provide rigorous code reviews, and my own desire to learn from these people, that prevented me from totally messing up our codebase and eventually brought me up to speed. But even today, I acknowledge that my knowledge is very shallow compared to anyone with a four year degree. And I think the job security provided by that degree — which comes from the ability to do good work on things besides just web applications — is increasingly valuable as the number of developers increases (even though developers can work to overcome this knowledge gap).

Sometimes it is very hard to do. I am now responsible of a platform that has over a thousand, unique configuration, servers and hundreds of database servers. Putting this together is so easy, it was done by a few guys with no CS degree (not that the degree matters) with a few months of on the job training. It is a mess, it will take about one year to clean up the mess and get it right (for example, just paying the licenses we need on the servers we need will save ~ 60% of the licensing costs). Try leaving a terabyte database on the capable hands of a 3-month boot camp graduate and see how long it will work and how.

Most doctors are doing simple glue stuff and think they're hot shit. You think I couldn't diagnose that cold, or a machine?

Most lawyers are doing simple glue stuff and think they're hot shit. You think I couldn't refer that case to another law firm, or a machine?

Most businessmen are doing simple glue stuff and think they're hot shit. You think I couldn't randomly guess at the market, but not outperform it, nor a machine?

>You think I couldn't diagnose that cold

I think you'd get the 90% case due simply to the preponderance of people who have a cold instead of some other, more rare condition with similar symptoms. Problem is you'd cause harm to everyone who doesn't have a simple cold because you have no idea what you're doing.

Comparing the knowledge needed to be a good doctor to what is required to throw up some bloated SPA? C'mon, get over yourself.

Doctors make a lot of mistakes too, just like programmers. But with doctors, it's easy to blame it on the vagaries of the human body. So even when the "cure" doesn't, people expect that because of the differences between individual bodies. This gives them a pass of sorts when they screw up, the medicine doesn't work, the side-effects kill you, you get a fatal infection in the hospital, etc.

With programming, if you are designing the control system for an aircraft and it fails, people will be able to find out exactly what failed and why, and who to blame.

It's hard to compare doctors and programmers, because there are many levels of medical professionals, just like there are many levels of programming.

That's a funny comparison considering doctors must pay outrageous amounts of money for malpractice insurance, but engineers are never held personally responsible for a bug (legally, at least.)

Doctors have physician assistants and registered nurses along with EHR medical databases the hospitals subscribe to for aiding in their patient diagnosis and medical workup via always up-to-date medical coding insurance industry practices (for billing patient health insurance $$$). Any exotic infections/diseases or surgery are farmed out to specialist doctors who are also following medical billing guidelines and a narrow workup to diagnose patients within their specialty.

Lawyers have paralegals that dig through the case studies and case law for them along with law databases like LexisNexis.

I think you're grossing oversimplifying what goes into making each of these everyday decisions -- though they look simple. Misdiagnosing a cold when its ready a (deadly) brain/amoeba infection is easy to do particularly when the patient presents with vague descriptions of how they feel and 'where it hurts'.

The ability of an experienced professional to quickly decide these things comes after many years of hard-won skill building...

And you really believe your stressed, sick-of-you-already, doctor is going to even consider a brain amoeba when you present flu-like symptoms?

They either have a checklist, or they wing it. You give obscenely too much credit.

Medical mistakes are incredibly common. There are thousands of people who DIE from prescription accidents each year.

> One of my personal career goals is to stay as far away from simple glue code as I can. Unfortunately it makes up most of our field right now. But it seems like an especially precarious place to be.

Integration platforms are getting good. The API integrations that make up a lot of my work might be better done with them in not too long. It's already reached the point where some clients speak with me only after an integration platform hasn't met their use case.

There aren't a lot of areas left in CS where "clever" solutions are warranted. If you're writing clever code, then chances are you're doing a disservice to anyone who has to maintain the mess you're creating. Code is mostly just plumbing. Boring code is better 99% of the time.

The flip side of this is that because digital plumbing is "boring", the industry is constantly seeking ways to avoid it. Writing assembly language was (usually) really boring, so we developed good compilers to do that for us.

I look forward to the day where I can send data from one place to another and not have to bother with file formats, text encodings, port numbers, network protocols, and so on. IP (and especially TCP/IP) is so prevalent today that we use "IP connection" and "network connection" interchangeably. Someday I hope we have that consistency at some other layers of the stack. I shouldn't have to say "send me that file -- what app did you use to make it?"

I've been thinking through this for a while now and I've come to the conclusion that the details keep getting more complicated faster than other things can automate them. For example, I remember a time when software served ascii and when the Canadian government asked to buy a version of some software we were writing for the Americans the reason the head of the company said no was because we'd have to support French and that meant non-ascii characters.

Now, UTF-8 is a given and there is a mess of potential issues. No longer are byte-by-byte comparisons reliable, especially in some languages like Vietnamese.

Your example of IP connection and network connection is true, but overall connections are more complicated. Some clients can't use HTTP2, some clients are behind firewalls, some clients need CORS support, etc.

And plus there is this accelerating wave of advancements everyone is trying to keep up with, but that come with real investment. Upgrading OSes, programming languages, frameworks, libraries. Figuring out how to keep data secure.

I really don't see things getting less complicated as time goes on. At least not until we have some real form of AI, but even there I have my doubts because there will always be tradeoffs.

That's why we have libraries and frameworks to do complicated, human-facing bits. If you're rolling your own dateTime, it's a bad idea, but fortunately other people have solutions for this. If you want to get into the nitty gritty you can but you do so at your own peril, similar to how the vast majority of people are not reinventing TCP/IP.

It'll take a bit of evolution to get there depending on how new the problem is, but it also took a bit of evolution to get where we are today, and nothing is ever perfect.

My argument is that, as a function of time, there are more things to consider, not less. Abstraction works to a point, but it doesn't keep up with the growing complexity.

Except by the time those libraries and frameworks become stable and well documented enough for serious use, we decide to reinvent the wheel and move on to something new.

In fact, that's already been solved for the most boring of digital plumbing. The data is JSON (which requires UTF-8), and the port number either 80 or 443 - the library automatically handles that depending on if the URL starts with http or https. `requests.get(URL).json()` will grab that data for you (Python). That only covers a very specific but very prevalent use case, just like TCP/IP covers the most prevalent use case for networking.

What are you doing where that can't covered by that use case? Actually, I can think of tons. What are you doing that can't be covered by that use case, but is still boring?

I think you are coming from a common perspective for people on HN and elsewhere in IT, where you can just install anything and provision any equipment to install it on and direct others to do the same.

A lot of people aren't in a position to do this. I think actual plumbers also have to deal with similar constraints.

It's nice to not be constrained, but it's also more impressive to do a good job under severe constraints, IMO.

Something I find myself doing repeatedly is implementing arcane protocols that were created long before JSON. Bit-packed mainframe protocols. After the second or third time of working with another binary format, there's no new knowledge to gain, and it's not interesting work. But it requires meticulous attention to detail and can't be automated. Most industries don't require you to solve this specific problem but it's all variations of this. Shuffle data from one format to another format. Even if it's JSON, you're still moving it from one business domain to another, or one tech stack to another. Backend to frontend. Etc.

There aren't a lot of areas left in CS where highly generic clever solutions are warranted. There are plenty of cases where a specific business has specific needs and the solution to those needs is more interesting than glue code.

Agree 100%. Programmers that love 'clever' code should think twice about using it. Writing code that can be maintained over a long time is many times more important than saving a few bits here and there by using clever coding.

Mostly it's not the clever code that is the problem, but the way people tend to use it. Instead of covering that clever piece code in a structure with an easy-to-understand interface and a lot of documentation explaining what things allow this to work properly, it's left without any clues what it is and how it works. Essentially a puzzle in the middle of code base to solve for everyone reading.

I don't think they're talking about clever code, more about challenging solutions. Plenty of problems that have challenging solutions, though they are not often easy to recognize.

The flip side of this is that our industry has a huge affection for laziness, incompetence and anti-intellectualism. The moment they get their first job, a lot of people seem to forget that this field is a profession, where learning things is actually a part of the job. Instead, they freeze their development at junior level and whine at anything that's beyond what they know. Often times when I see actual complaints about clever code, the code isn't really all that clever - it's the complainer who can't be bothered to take two hours off and read up on a feature of the language or library they're using 40 hours a week.

When seeing something one doesn't understand, the default reaction of an intelligent person should be to ask oneself what one should learn to comprehend it. It shouldn't be dismissing it as "clever".

I'm in the opposite opinion, CS is filled with clever things we taken for granted. A lot of stuff in this field are innovations or clever stuff already figured out. The remainder is a puzzle like approach to fit it all together alongside moments of novel innovation and puzzle solving.

In my opinion if you can write glue code between major services, you're hot stuff.

I disagree, the fact that you can go to a bootcamp to learn this shows that you're not.

Isn't an alternative explanation that bootcamp actually makes a person hot stuff, despite not teaching much?

For example maybe if you went to bootcamp, you (crimsonalucard) would be hot stuff when you came out (even if you've been programming for 20 years), due to exposure to all the external services you'll be able to glue together.

The fact that your glue code will have runtime O(1) (a single call) instead of O(n^n), but only for up to 4, as the poor kids do something like have four different if statements for 1 to 4, and each one is a nested for loop, and over 4 it silently does nothing, is less relevant than the exposure to the API's at all.

In other words, maybe terrible programmers can be hot stuff writing the latest glue code - even if it's brittle and barely works.

With all the services huge companies are exposing, this wouldn't surprise me.

You're just redefining what being "hot stuff" is.

Under that definition, anyone on the face of the earth can be "hot stuff." You don't even need to go to bootcamp. Just read some online tutorials, make a website. Done. You're just calling the average person "hot stuff."

In my opinion, you're only hot when you know how to do something that is rare, very hard to learn and in demand.

I see a difference between a web site and a web site that exposes a service that on the backend connects API's of two different companies that do the heavy lifting.

There is a difference. But the difference is trivial. Making a backend or a frontend that connects to N amount of API's isn't impressive at all. Any fool can learn this concept.

In fact that's all a modern website is. The old way involved servers rendering pages. Now The frontend interfaces with an API. Efficiency at the cost of complexity.

You want to know what's impressive? Writing a compiler. Writing an OS. Nothing is simpler than interfacing with an API.

If writing glue code is your job and you're getting paid a lot of money to do this stuff then count your lucky stars because truly anyone can do that job.

One of the easiest assignments I ever had was to write code between two services. It was easy as hell but it looked impressive because both services did impressive and complicated things.

In fact, I think it helped me get my current job.

Or maybe it is impressive.

If I'm working on a blind, handicapped user's interface and someone figures out how to connect OK Google's speech recognition in a few lines of code, and it's legit and allowed by their terms, it's still impressive. Who cares if you don't know the first thing about speech recognition?

It's not impressive. The problem is, no one yet realizes that any person who can learn algebra can achieve this level of skill in less time then it took to pick up algebra. That's what I mean by "you can learn it at a bootcamp." You can hire a random homeless person off the street and in a couple months have him be a competent junior programmer. I'd be willing to pay minimum wage for that level of skill and like you said, that's probably all I need for "glue code."

What's going on right now is a bubble. People perceive these skills to be "hot stuff" when in fact it is just "average" or even "below average"

When the bubble bursts all programmer wages will go down after everyone realizes that programming is a skill akin to driving or algebra. Anyone can do this trivial work.

First of all, please don't use "random homeless person off the street" this way. It's insulting and also many homeless people are highly intelligent.

Try "random walmart shopper" (a box store that everyone visits.) or just random person.

As for your claim that a random person can learn to write glue code, well, we're going to disagree.

>First of all, please don't use "random homeless person off the street" this way. It's insulting and also many homeless people are highly intelligent.

>Try "random walmart shopper" (a box store that everyone visits.) or just random person.

Random Walmart shoppers are people too and they can be intelligent as well. I use the word homeless not to imply lack of intelligence or to insult, but to imply that even a person with no ability/capability/desire of getting a job can with minimal training gain those skills.

>As for your claim that a random person can learn to write glue code, well, we're going to disagree.

Can any person learn algebra? Can any person learn arithmetic? Can any person learn to read an english book? All of these things, seem trivial to learn, but they are not trivial at all. It is only because of the context in which we learn these things do we find it easy later in life, but fail to remember that at the time of learning, these concepts are just as hard as programming.

Programming is not easy to learn just like how reading english is not easy to learn at all. But make no mistake, just like how basically anyone can learn to read english, anyone can learn how to program. Some people have talent for learning languages others don't, but with time, everyone can learn it. That's how cheap this skill is.

The very existence of bootcamps hinges on this concept that anyone can learn. People walk out of a bootcamps thinking they have talent or were taught incredible skills. The reality is, everything they learned is available online for free. They paid money to learn because they lack the self control to do it themselves.

So do you think the average person off the street (the random walmart shopper) can go through a coding bootcamp successfully? I don't think so.

I think the people who can go through a coding boot camp successfully have great arithmetic skills, great reading skills, and can easily solve 2x-7=11 for x in their head in a moment 100% of the time. (Basic algebra 1.) And can read any generic software manual easily, if the manual doesn't assume too much prior knowledge and is written at a basic level.

I don't think the average walmart shopper can do it.

Do you disagree? What do you think the baseline skills are for people who go through a coding bootcamp successfully? Maybe you have more experience with those people than I do. I think of them as intelligent, educated people with above-average SAT scores but without specialized programming training, who decide to go through a boot camp. They're curious, motivated, smart. But they're not programmers.

>I think the people who can go through a coding boot camp successfully have great arithmetic skills, great reading skills, and can easily solve 2x-7=11 for x in their head in a moment 100% of the time. (Basic algebra 1.) And can read any generic software manual easily, if the manual doesn't assume too much prior knowledge and is written at a basic level.

Anybody can do what you just described with practice and training. The typical high school education along with programming is achievable by the typical person.

>I don't think the average walmart shopper can do it.

Stop insulting walmart shoppers.

>Do you disagree? What do you think the baseline skills are for people who go through a coding bootcamp successfully? Maybe you have more experience with those people than I do. I think of them as intelligent, educated people with above-average SAT scores but without specialized programming training, who decide to go through a boot camp. They're curious, motivated, smart. But they're not programmers.

I don't even think you need to go through a bootcamp to get the baseline skills needed for your typical "glue code" job.

Anybody can learn programming. People who go through a bootcamp typically have enough skills to do the job but they likely may not have enough skills to pass a coding interview. Coding interviews are, unfortunately, harder and unrelated to the job.

You said "stop insulting walmart shoppers", but we're talking about intellectual labor. It's not an insult: I don't think given pen and paper but no google, the average person can solve 2x-7=11 for x. (Algebra 1.) I do think the average person knows their multiplication table and can add and subtract small numbers.

Anyway we clearly view people's baselines differently. Maybe you're the one who's right.

It's a biased term. Why would a walmart shopper be stupid? There's no causative connection.

>I don't think given pen and paper but no google, the average person can solve 2x-7=11 for x.

I'm pretty sure everyone on can do this.

>Anyway we clearly view people's baselines differently. Maybe you're the one who's right.

I think you're way off. Check your baseline. There is not one person in my high school who couldn't solve that expression in their head.

That sounds good, but ultimately seems pithy. Going back to the recent "my business card runs Linux" post, board bring up and PCB design is far from "simple glue code" and far more niche than web dev. Except that pay rates for that segment of the industry are lower than a bootcamp graduate can make in SF,

The issue of precarious is also a bit "the grass is greener" sort of view. In 5 or 10 years when the industry again looks different, bootcamp level web dev work may be as precarious as you project. But right now, what's more precarious, specializing for one company in a corner of the industry where there are only a small handful of companies, or working for a company that you the employee, could easily replace?

>Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property

You're making a lot of assumptions on the hobbies people have based upon your environment.

About the only thing the two fields you listed differ from programming is actual legal barriers of entry.

s/nobody/insignificant minority/

"programmers most likely know by heart a sizable bunch of Bash commands and their options"

ha. case in point.

I happen to have a hobby of reading law cases on intellectual property that was sparked by my business being affected by IP issues.

I used to read all kinds of cases as a hobby even before that, for fun. I remember reading through much of Ross Ulbricht's trial documents and comparing it to what his advocates were claiming, which was enlightening.

Yep. The SCO UNIX trial and the ongoing oracle v google cases are exceptionally fun reads. Other notable public narrative vs reality cases included OJ Simpson, the Zimmerman guy, and what’s happening right now with Trump (the treason word gets thrown around so often yet no one actually know what that means legally)

Treason against the United States shall consist in levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies, providing aid and comfort. It's in the Constitution.

undefined in that sentence: almost every word. "Levying"? "War" ? "Enemies"? This is why we have both a Constitution and a body of law. The Constitution uses words, the law defines what they mean.

Those words are not difficult to define or understand. Only a nihilist claims nothing is inherently knowable.

It's possible to understand what treason is, just as it's possible for something to skirt the edge of it and require more nuance and thought.

The words Paul Davis used are defined in the constitution, it’s a legal document. Everything has a legal definition. Legal texts are interpreted by the judicial branch which sets the limits of nuance and thought. As Paul Davis showed, however, not everyone reads legal texts as a hobby.. so one should really delegate that work to someone who does (just like I won’t ask my plumber to create some ML models for me)

that's a load of phooey.

Trump got elected by the people, he can be judged by the people.

This argument you're making is the same mindset that causes people to argue that since freedom of speech is only applicable to the government, we shouldn't strive for the ideal in every aspect of our society.

It's looking at the problem exactly backwards.

Excuse me? I didn’t say he couldn’t be judged, I’m saying people are saying he has committed treason when he literally has not. Which is the difference between public opinion vs reality. I don’t consider my plumber an expert in AI, so I won’t expect him to have the best insight into my job. Likewise, folks who don’t wish to take the time to read legal texts should probably defer to someone a bit more knowledge than them. So call trump crooked, ugly, whatever.. but if you say he’s the nicest and happiest president ever would be just as false as saying he committed treason.

Just like OJ being not guilty based on facts (reality) but everyone already judged him as guilty. Same with Zimmerman. Same with Ulbricht.

Please don’t mistake my post for support of any particular view.

So you believe OJ and Ulbricht were innocent, and the respective civil and criminal court cases finding the opposite were mistaken?

Let me reiterate my disclaimer

>Please don’t mistake my post for support of any particular view.

A lot of America did. A lot of America was going off what the general public was thinking rather than following the actual case[0]. This thread was spawned from the love and desire to read legal texts which includes outcomes of cases which could set case/common law. I read all of the case data against Ulbricht, OJ Simpson, Zimmerman etc. As more and more information came to light it was becoming quite obvious what a reasonable jury would respond with. The prosecution showed a clear connection between Ulbricht, his bitcoin wallet, and they caught him red-handed. The LAPD completely huffed up on their police duties with OJ. The star witness the prosecution brought against Zimmerman flopped on the stand. There is believing one is innocent and then there is the actual court judgement of not guilty based on the case presented. The latter is what matters to me as a legal hobbyist.

[0] PS this is why juries are instructed to avoid discussing the case outside of court, reading news on the case, and sometimes are sequestered if it's a high profile case where such communications can't be avoided

You are implying the amount of difficulty / effort put in by programmers is as great as for other highly paid professions. I just don’t think this is true for most cases. I’ve worked at 2 of the FANG companies where compensations is on par or higher than doctors / lawyers / consultants etc. Sure we all pulled some nights and weekends and did some reading and experimentation on the side, but for the most part it was off to the pub / go home at 6. My evenings and weekends were mostly spent doing “normal” things like playing games, hanging out with friends etc. outside of startups I don’t know any programmers pulling 80 hour weeks regularly, including side projects and self learning.

I don't know any lawyers or doctors pulling 80 hour weeks regularly without billing extra for it.

You don't know any doctors who have ever done a residency?

I wouldn’t say that “Regularly” means “only during the first 3 years of your career”

and 4 years of medical school. A programmer can earn enough to retire before a doctor finishes their training.

I know quite a few lawyers at the larger firms doing 70 - 80 hour weeks on a regular basis. The goal of course is making partner, but few will get there. Consultants and bankers ditto.

I guess you need to get a job like game programming to see hours like that on a regular (career) basis.

You are implying that effort should be correlated to pay. It isn't. The hardest job I ever had was being a bartender/barback at a very busy bar - it sure didn't pay much.

It's possible that one programmer can bring generate and capture more economic value by doing one "not very complicated thing" that gets pushed to 1 billion instances[0] than a brain surgeon can by doing one extremely complicated thing on a few dozen or hundred people per year.

'curl' is not complicated, but it clearly has incredible economic value, and has an install base of over 1 billion devices.

[0] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/09/17/the-worlds-biggest-cu...

> Nobody has a hobby of learning the law texts on intellectual property

Speak for yourself buddy, i enjoy pulling up the Cornell law or my local jurisdictions legislative website to fully understand the laws around me. In college my hobby was reading the laws about public nuisances and noise violations (and none of our parties were ever shutdown!). I still do this today to fully educate myself. Along with other nonstandard hobbies like flying planes, studying neuroscience or genetics, and owning a server farm for fun..

> Many programmers have a bias in thinking

I think the odds of finding hobbies outside of software and hardware on HN is probably lower than the general public, but the very reason we have specialists in other fields is because of their dedication to their hobbies!

They were exaggerating, there are going to be counterexamples but their point still stands...

This is true, I had neighbor cringe hard when I didn't know how much to charge for assistance. The only way for me to somehow value what I do is to compare how much usual jobs charge even. I dont like this because it causes inflation and unworthy motives (and probably harms society). But it's how I manage to not die giving time for free.

One other way would be to demonstrate true mastery, but with the breadth of computing and its ever changing nature it's borderline not possible.

"Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property;"

I don't know anyone who likes learning about bones, but I have actually met a guy, who was really passionate about quirks of IP related laws (my company hired him as consultant to clarify some mundane and fuzzy issues we had with usage of fragments of published academic books). He could talk for hours about various cases he worked on and was citing paragraphs of some obscure laws, going with true passion into detailed analysis how a given case looks in view of local Polish, Romanian, EU and international regulations. I would compare him to Rust, Lisp advocates easily.

Wondering if I'm a fraud because I can name about as many bones as bash commands.

chmod's connected to, access permissions

(Maybe I'll come up with the whole song if I ever teach CS in grade school.)

sudo !!

> Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) usually put great investment into their career by doing side projects on their free time.

Who’s to say those that went to school didn’t enjoy the learning process of their degree? They are by this definition giving up free time in order to learn something and are as well making a great investment in not only time but money as well.

I think that this needs to be reread as “Programmers who are passionate about what they do usually end up being the best at what they do” since if you think about it, they are dedicating ~40 hrs a week to their hobby. Who’s to say someone can’t excel in a hobby if they can’t dedicate more than that? What about people who have more than 1 hobby?

the amount of programming/hour you get at a job vs on a hobby project is very different, though, and tends to go down as you get more responsibility.

Not that the other work you do instead of programming, like problem decomposition, spec authoring, review, etc., isn’t useful for improving your programming skills, but not having to coordinate with anyone means you can just write code on a hobby project.

I recently lead a project and even with a tight schedule and trying to focus on implementing as much as possible I spent maybe 30% of my time programming.

Note further that I don’t really do any programming outside of work and don’t think it’s necessary or even useful to spend that much extra time programming. Iterating implementation ideas like a scientist is the only way I’ve improved and that’s fairly independent of time spent.

Most people do not have a habit of reading the law, however this is a path to becoming a lawyer in a few states, including California. http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/want_to_avoid_the_cos...

> Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones)

Cite?

Let me guess, you're a self-trained coder.

There is a reason senior role hiring almost never cares about degrees on your resume.

Instead they’re looking at your community contributions and work experience.

This could be a temporary condition.

The principal value in my CS courses was access to systems and compilers (!) that I wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. Most of the people ostensibly hired to present the content didn't add much themselves (one was great, and we're still friends).

However, I've been really impressed with the depth and breadth of the coursework I've seen by way of close friends and younger relatives lately. A robotics class now seems like it might actually deliver on the promise of providing more knowledge in less time than designing/building/programming/etc a complex autonomous robot on your own (for example). You can still do it, but it's going to take a lot longer than just taking the bloody class, or you're going to miss out on a lot of depth/context.

Yes and no. One of the big problems with coursework at the undergrad level is you aren't typically actually practicing idea and model genesis. This is an important skill, and one that those hobbyists have practiced a lot.

Entirely temporary. I was rejected by google from 2006-2012 because I didn’t have a degree. Suddenly they need more programmers and they drop that requirement. Never mind I have formal CS training, they required a piece of paper.

I would not be surprised during the next recession that employers fall back to arbitrary demands like degrees or obscene amounts of experience.

What is “formal CS training”, if not a degree?

Possibly attending but not graduating (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg come to mind).

I spent time going to college but never graduated. I finished all the required CS courses and a bunch of optional ones plus a few grad level CS courses then left to migrate a Fortune 500 bank off of COBOL. My resume after that was a who’s who of fortune 500s and deeply technical positions but google said no degree, no job. I believe that was the founders attitude towards hiring which has since changed

Probably some. But competent employers will never fall back to degrees. They will always focus on... competence.

Not always true. For example, the AI/ML craze brought a lot of academics into industry and also brought a lot of their politics. For an AI/ML job at most places, prepare to be judged based on having the right credentials (good degree, school and publications) and looked down upon as scum if you don't have right ones.

Or again relevant experience. No one is gonna say no to a person coming out of e.g. Netflix’s search dept or Facebook or has decades of big data experience, regardless of their education.

Have you seen the actual coursework or just the end result?

To borrow from my graphics programming class from ~2008, we didn't actually do much. Every assignment, we were given an almost-working program, and the assignment was just to fill in a single function - the one I remember offhand was a simple linear interpolation.

Granted on the flipside, with my information retrieval and data mining courses, we weren't given any code to start with and had to implement everything completely from scratch.

that was a shitty graphics programming class.

In mine, which was pre 2000 (I'm old), we were doing matrix multiplication by hand to ensure we understood how the underlying transformations worked, building our own renderer's, and so forth.

I "self-trained" at coding before going to CS school. I don't have a citation for my claim (but it seems like a very reasonable theory to me).

I mean it’s true. I’m honestly not even that good of a coder (I didn’t do CS in college and I tend to “hack” a lot) but I’ve been living and breathing code for hobby projects and then work for the last 25 years, and I’m 35. I spend entire days coding nonstop (working on a side project after my job) and I’m still constantly learning. Boot camps or even college degrees are no substitute for this experience.

People who combine their natural interests with their work are intrinsically motivated. As such they tend to put in more hours and that has a compounding effect over time. Teaching oneself also has that effect.

If John Carmack had a twin who wasn't so inclined and just did programming as a 9-5 career, there's no way they'd be as skilled as he is. Plus they'd probably wait until being taught how to program instead of starting to teach themselves as a kid.

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