Hacker News Reader

Comment by eldavido | Hacker News Reader

McKenzie (original article's author) worked probably a decade outside a major center of tech R&D before taking a job at Stripe. A lot of his advice is written from that viewpoint. It's valuable because a lot of the world operates as he describes.

I think the big lesson is that life inside industry clusters (finance/media in NY, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, oil and gas in Houston) is quite different from life outside. In industry clusters, jobs are way more specialized, standards are higher, and "geek skills" pay off way more. A few jobs ago, we engaged a consultant for decent money to tune our postgres implementation. I can't imagine that job existing, or paying that well, outside of a major center of Internet software development like SF/SV. I'm sure there are analogs in oil and gas, or any other clustered industry.

View on HN

> I'm sure there are analogs in oil and gas, or any other clustered industry.

My dad was the ops officer on an Air Force base in the 1960s. His job was to keep the base operational. The Vietnam War was ramping up, and the AF's need for transport airplanes outstripped their jets, so they pulled a bunch of propeller transports out of retirement.

The mechanics, however, were unable to get the old propeller engines to produce the rated power. They followed the directions in the manual, and it just didn't deliver. Frustrated, they pulled out of retirement some old mechanics from WW2.

Those old guys never looked at the manual, they just listened to the engines, tinkered with them, and soon got them delivering the power.

There's a lot of specialized expertise that never makes it into any manuals. But I still love the idea that those giant engines were tuned by ear :-) Those mechanics were the real deal.

This reminds me of a story I once heard about shipbuilding during WW2. Supposedly, although designs and blueprints were made in great detail, following them today wouldn't give working ships, because the workers implementing them at the time saw where the designs wouldn't work and fixed them of their own initiative.

In a way, the opposite of today's optimizing compilers.

JIT optimization?

There have been some regressions in the D compiler due to not documenting the "why" of some things in the code, that a later person unwound.

This was part of what got the RAF Nimrod programme eventually cancelled; they were ancient airframes that required an ongoing supply of spare parts, but as you describe building parts from the original plans didn't fit properly.

Yes, each airframe was essentially a completely different aircraft, although each was notionally built from the same plans. Bids for upgrades that were generated against a single reference airframe went massively over budget when executed because no two planes were the same.

The other thing that got the programme cancelled was the crash of Nimrod MR2 Aircraft XV230 in Afghanistan in 2006, as described in exhaustive detail in the Haddon Cave report [0 - pdf]. Part of the cause was design flaws introduced over years of updates, that interacted with each other fatally.

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

This happens all the time when you get stuff made. It's generally good and useful, but the real challenge is in getting these changes documented, and getting the changes verified against the original specification. The Hyatt Regency walkway collapse was a good example of this going wrong: while the original design was flawed, the fact that it wasn't easily manufactured meant it then got modified, and even though the builder discussed the changes with the designers, the designers did not check that their original calculations still applied and as a result the structure was substantially weakened and collapsed.

Also, making sure this process for exists and is documented precisely is one of the reasons medical devices are so expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse

That's also true of WW2 aircraft. Drawings exist for, say, the P-51, but you can't build the airplane from the drawings because the drawings were made after the fact. The real design was the tooling and mechanics.

When I was in Ireland studying my mentor told me a similar story. An old electric engineer was just tinkering his circuit board with his oscilloscope, he's so familiar with signals he can diagnose based on analogue information. My mentor also tried to explain to me (a computing student) what control theory is about. He said if you can send an impulse signal to a system and can tweak with that input, you basically got yourself a system in control theory (might be too naive a version but that's what my memory serves me).

Control/signal processing theory (it's basically the same maths) should be more common on CS courses: it's extremely useful for analysing a wide range of systems. Basically any system which is supposed to be self-regulating can be understood as a control system, and this is extremely relevant in today's distributed auto-scaling cloud systems (as well as important for a lot of DSP).

Fantastic comment. Kudos.

I think this is also highly relevant to perceptions of the value of higher education within programmer circles.

I can see how CMU's Systems or Theory courses might seem like a complete waste of time outside of the Industry Cluster, where you really don't need to know all that stuff. But I also see the fairly obscene 10x+ difference between the "first job out of undergrad at NoName" programmer salaries and the "first job out of PhD school at MIT" programmer salaries.

I’m confused, first job out of undergrad vs first job out of a PhD is going to have a massive salary difference in any field and from any two decent schools. What am I missing?

Uhhh, “any field” that isn’t a humanities field maybe.

“nothing” vs “something” is a pretty big difference

Are you suggesting no one but MIT PhD grads get jobs?

Nope.

Could you be more clear then, the GP comment is already causing enough confusion.

The comment states pretty clearly that fresh PhDs looking for jobs in the humanities enjoy the advantage of "something" over the "nothing" that fresh BAs get. That isn't a difference of 10x -- it's much better.

In the terms of your first comment, the suggestion is that fresh bachelors trying to work in humanities don't get jobs. MIT was not mentioned.

People who major in humanities do get jobs. I know a ton of them--albeit mostly from good schools. And they're not in retail or whatever. There just isn't necessarily the clear career path that there is with, say, a CS degree and the entry salary is probably not nearly as good.

A PhD in English lit or whatever basically only makes sense if you want to teach and that's not a great track these days.

> What am I missing?

>> 10x

That depends on your PhD research area (even if in CS) and country.

In many countries PhDs are only valuable in academia and industrial research institutes, but your salary is capped quite a bit long term.

In Asia a new grad fresh out of college is seen as more employable than a new PhD grad by most companies and salary differences would be minimal. I wouldn't recommend doing a PhD if you're out for a high salary there.

On the other hand in some European countries just having any PhD degree will open up career paths and salaries unavailable to non PhDs regardless of actual skills.

I was speaking specifically about the US. In the US, such a degree signals dedication and work ethic at the very least.

But your still going to make more on average with a BSC in a FANG in industry than a PhD at a tier 1 RnD place like JPL ? CERN.

I know as I started work at the worlds leading Research association for hydrodynamics and left for the commercial world as the pay was so bad.

I work for a German multinational, can confirm.

You will not easily be reaching upper management without a PhD.

I can’t think of any C levels or one level below that aren’t credentialed as such.

No MDs or JDs? (JD is a doctorate degree many laywers in the US have.)

I can't speak for him, but in Germany PhD, MD and JD all have the same title ("Doktor", abbr. "Dr."). So I guess that includes doctors and lawyers.

"first job out of undergrad at NoName" is like 150k all-in I think. So I'm surprised if it's 10x.

The average at our NoName was in the 60s.

The flip side of this advice is that unless you really don't mind being tied to a single metro center, try to avoid becoming too specialized. Even if you like the city, one problem is that even during industry boom times, rising cost of living is likely to eat most of your career gains.

If you're going to bet your whole career on an unrivaled mastery of the minutiae of Postgres performance, then you better like the Bay Area. If your focus is to be a maestro of credit derivative trading, then I hope you don't mind spending your life in New York.

But general-purpose skills like sales, management, and accounting are likely to be valued almost everywhere. And therefore give you the freedom to live nearly anywhere. It might be scoffed down by the ultra-skilled industry professionals. But a guy who knows how to run an ice cream shop in many senses has a lot more career freedom and stability than a Google engineer or Goldman trader.

On the other hand, mid-tier accounting has a two year part-time ramp-up time for an otherwise experienced professional. From world-class $db expert to... $generic_backend_dev... has, what? a few weeks of figure out how to chameleon to the local interview culture?

> But a guy who knows how to run an ice cream shop in many senses has a lot more career freedom and stability than a Google engineer or Goldman trader.

Yeah, probably a lot of ice cream vendors in the midwest right now who are really glad that they're not Goldman traders!

I cant see your point, I dont know enought about goldman traders but I am certain that a google engineer can get a random senior dev job as easy, if not easier, than a random ice cream shop manager can get another job paying as well as a dev job.

Pretty sure it's still relevant. Don't call yourself a programmer doesn't really clash with accentuating you have higly specialized skills.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com