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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

From real experience and will probably get in trouble for saying this: I worked with Julia developers who are scientists. They write software like they write scripts. So everything we had was absolutely not production worthy but running in production. The whole company was built on stilts like this. I still wonder how it actually worked and never came crashing down.

Also, personal gripe and absolutely not the fault of Julia creators: I hate 1-based indexing.

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There is a wealth of startups out there takings small hordes of junior devs out of non-CS grads. Learning on the go, they become proper devs or get into business a few year later. Projects get out there by pure force of will.

They are like the E. Coli of devs, cheap to make experiment with, and very adaptable to any environment.

This is true. Biotech/Physics/Math grads getting into the ad-tech/SaaS grind kind of makes me sad though. Under-utlization of talent. No doubt there are interesting challenges in literally every field, just that scientists are good at doing science - Design of Experiments, Theorizing stuff, grokking mathematics that would make me faint, etc. and the same people fucking around with webpack/JS tooling, learning how IAM works or spending their time on fixing CI/CD pipelines is depressing. We need some sort of a division of labor here.

My situation is slightly different from what you describe, but yeah, we have scientists and data scientists involved in writing Python packages, setting up CI/CD pipelines, dealing with auth and frontends for APIs. There's talk of dividing labor up a bit better so that we can focus on science and data work, but there's hardly enough engineering staff as it is and they're largely not much better from a software engineering perspective (and half of them hardly know any Python, which our non-engineers have 100% standardized on). It's kind of a mess right now.

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