Comment by ci5er | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ci5er | Hacker News Reader

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I've got a - maybe silly - question: Do you think that software engineers read about the business of technology?

I mean, some of these behemoths (or used-to-be behemoths) of technology, like Oracle and Intel and Microsoft (Ok - everyone knows them) and Dell and Apple (mostly the 2nd one) and places like SAP (which is arguably the biggest database and logistics and supply chain (sans the EDI middle-ware vendors on the planet) and Synnix (which is arguably the largest ODM supplier of white label servers to the largest data centers in the world), and, well, Wistron? BBG? (Submarine - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/submarine-cables/) Satellites? Aerospace? What it takes to wire our world together?

This is not a criticism - it is simply curiousity - as a tech person - you don't read up on (or do you think people do or do not read up on?) the way the world works technologically?

My son graduated with an engineering degree recently and his friends always want me to take them to lunch (free food!), but also so I can tell them how the world is connected (power, telecom, SDN, Satellites (launch - cradle-to-grave), and I'm always a little amazed because I grew up libraries of books and they've got google, but want to be lectured?

I guess I don't understand. If you have a moment, could you edumacate me?

>I grew up libraries of books and they've got google, but want to be lectured?

Your son and his friends know you. Your experience is lived, and real, as real as you sitting next to them. Reading books is abstract, the language can be obscure, archaic, verbose, flowery, dense, etc. Your son and friends know how to read your emotions and communicate effectively with you. An hour of your stories could likely replace dozens to hundreds of hours of reading because you can tailor your stories on fly the in a way no author ever can.

Thank you for that. (I'm not being glib.)

EDIT: I think your learning style and mine are much different. I remember when I had to do a biological proposal to DARPA (I guess I didn't have to), I went to the University of Texas bookstore and got every book they had on molecular biology - and read them over two days at a Starbucks on the deck (beautiful day, but hot), and then wrote the proposal and had the interview. (I'm an EE,CS and Physics guy who knows jack-shit about molecular biology). I never figured I ever had time to talk to anybody as long as I had 30 vertical centimeters of books on the floor that had to be processed by dawn. Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe I'm just broken.

Whatever you are, you're not broken if you can actually process 30cm of books in a few hours.

I do read about these things, but I can also spend my time with lots of other stimulating/important stuff. Priorities, maybe?

Fair enough - I was just curious if the average modern software developer read books by Andy Grove ("Paranoid"), or Crossing the Chasm, or the biography of Steve Jobs, or kept track of what's up with the top 250 global tech companies on planet Earth every week for 20 years.

Now, that's a little unfair because I read really fast.

But - I guess I was just curious about how a tech person couldn't know about SAP.

NOT as a criticism, btw -- just I don't know how this could be? They are not a secret company. I just (apparently) don't know how young software engineers are wired? (Yeah yeah - Ok boomer, I get it)

But, because people actually do matter to me - I would like to understand better how they are wired...

EDIT: I am also stimulated by my healthcare projects and my energy projects and my stupid stupid project to build a carbon-nanotube elevator to the sky (which may have more funding than practical deliverables!), but I am completely stimulated. I assumed you were too, so it wasn't intended to be an either/or.

EDIT2: If you don't know the answer to the question I was asking, don't worry about it. Nobody else appears to know either. Just because I have a question doesn't mean that there is an answer. Thank you for engaging and have a good night.

I would guess - at least for a lot of developers in my cohort - we came into tech at a time when every few years there was some big improvement to software productivity. Staying current with language features, new languages, and new paradigms could be the difference between getting that next job or not. Especially since people younger in their career are often expected (yes, even in tech) to be current with all the latest and greatest. A new graduate with only C experience is going to have a much much smaller pool of potential jobs than one with React and NodeJS. We've gotten trained (and paid) to assume the old isn't effective, and the new must be better. Obviously this isn't always the case, but I think it leads to a culture of obsessing about the new hotness and ignoring everything else.

That makes perfect sense. They are looking for jobs. (Which is not bad!)

"We" were going to build a new world. So I guess we were some kind of idiots. After I sold my first "game" on an Apple 2 in 1984 (they paid me a lot), I went to work a semiconductor manufacture, and AT&T and Apple and General Magic and Motorola were going to re-invent the world. Good engineering work - bad vision. Didn't work.

Meanwhile in Japan, where I worked, I translated Nintendo Games (In addition to the adobe and lucas arts stuff, which was more for Sega) to the 6502 (hey, I'm old), and made money trying to make the meet the new.

I think it was easier back then. I think there was less intergenerational hostility.

Why do we have inter-generational hostility? I know how to bring the old arcades alive! :-) (Actually I know how to activate satellites - if we want low-cost back-haul - packets here - packets there - There are 0.1% utilized GPRS networks out there.

AND Now we are getting into topics that you don't want to hear about.

I do really appreciate your willingness to share tonight. You broke open a couple of pre-conceptions. And I guess that's the reason you talk to people.

Thank you.

I think it’s a bit of a personality type thing. I’m 30, know a fair bit about SAP and ERP systems in general despite never having really used any (small electronics company I work for uses a really crap MRP from a tiny company in New Zealand, which I suspect was probably selected because the operations manager was mates with somebody who implemented it it and/or because it was cheap and our accountant is a penny-pincher).

But for me, I just find my self researching all sorts of things that aren’t even related to my job. From aviation to renewable energy to database systems to carrier network hardware to finance and economics to chemical process engineering, etc. I just find myself almost infinitely curious, and meet others like that occasionally but it doesn’t seem to be how most people are wired. I don’t think it needs to be the norm to be for most jobs, but I find it’s a huge advantage for the kind of higher level product architect/systems engineering roles I’m doing more of.

In some ways it’s detrimental - I find it really difficult to keep motivated to do the deeper-level nitty-gritty engineering tasks because I’m always more interested in everything going on at a higher level in our products, so when involved in hiring I don’t try and select for people like me. I think tech companies need some but also people who are happy to focus on deeper-level work.

Thank you for that.

This is something a lot of us lack. Do you know of any resources which can help in learning about the business side of the technology?

Start here: https://www.andykessler.com/andy_kessler/excerpts/How_We_Got...

Message me after. I am at wmarchibald@gmail.com

EDIT: Oh! Also "Eat People" by same author - Kessler : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0049U4KC6/

Semi-edited: Everybody else will say Zero to whatever, and the Hard things about Hard Things, and Jimmie's book Good to Great and Crossing the Chasm, and you might call me mad (and I may be!), I am the only person who will recommend a book called "Eat People". (It is a good book, though)

EDIT2: U - akjha - Please let me know what you thought. You have my email address.

Please let me know how those two resources treated you and we can go from there. (Part of it will require that I know where you want you career to go)

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