Iftheshoefits

How is that even possible? Are you sure they weren't just having (to be crude) a brain fart?

Some of these stories about super experienced ("10+ years") developers not being able to answer the most basic of basic syntax or "algorithm" questions seem far-fetched to me.

Web development's difficulty is a shallow complexity that doesn't require (deep) problem solving ability so much as it requires a willingness to tolerate tedium.

The kicker is that, in my opinion, almost all of the complexity in webdev is superficial and to a high degree artificially (by choosing an inappropriate application data transport protocol,HTTP) introduced precisely because of the perception that developer talent in the field is cheap (cheaper than alternatives at least).

Edit: and from your other comment suggesting you can get a $60k offer to somebody implies there is not a real shortage of talent (good or otherwise) and that you consider webdev to be a commodity, and not actually "hard".

It makes him the kind of low-level or middle-manager that certain companies love. His purpose isn't to support his subordinate employees in their work, it's to make sure the company pays as little as possible for as much work as possible, and to act as the first line of defense against employees who aren't "100% on board".

Clearly he thinks that "asking for a raise" puts an employee in the "not 100% on board" category. That makes him terrible at reasoning, and perhaps poor at empathy, and strongly indicates he's not the kind of person an intelligent developer who desires to be treated like a human being should ever have to work for, but I'm not sure it makes him a bad manager per se. He might manage very well in other respects.

I'm not sure companies view it that way, and especially not companies like Facebook, whose product is the people who use their apps. As long as the person demonstrates he will use the product in spite of his problems with it, his opinions actually mean very little.

Think of it like a politician might: once you've donated to his campaign he has no incentive to give a fig what you think.

Of course people with lots of clout and wealth are special cases and the above don't necessarily apply to them.

This is true at most employers, and is one of the biggest contributors to churn and the lower-than-it-should-be pay in our industry. Companies whose offer includes (implicit or explicit) statements about how cool the projects are are peddling the same employees-are-pets nonsense that the "free food/perks" companies peddle, and there is no shortage of labor ready to lap it up.

How about if a person who develops software for a loving agrees that it seems more and more like a game. Words and phrases like "our stack", "you need X years of Y language," or "we need a Z language dev" and so on all read like rules in a role playing game to me. Sometimes after I read certain posts--and particularly posts gushing over some language's features--I feel a bit surprised the commenters don't mention hearing a "ding" after "leveling up".

Our industry is filled with tens of thousands of professionals carrying on quietly developing software boring and exciting, and inundated with loud mouths acting and speaking in ways strongly suggestive of a certain " gaminess."

I don't know about other applied fields but I was referring to the field of math itself with that remark.

Math is certainly required to understand the theory and to synthesize experimental observations into a working model, but I wouldn't put it at more than 50-60%. Most of the math is fairly basic relatively speaking, even at the highest levels of physics.

Where is your evidence that pay is "set by a giant, uncoordinated, massively competitive process?" Pay is set by a variety of factors that generally favor the wealthy and connected, usually in such a way that workers rarely benefit from expanded wealth (wage stagnation). Additionally there is a coordinated effort (see: any Koch political outfit or its allies) to weaken and destroy unions, which are the principle means other than law that laborers gain in wages and working conditions. Moreover, there is very strong evidence in the form of the subject of this thread that pay is set, at least to some non trivial extent, by acts of collusion.

It seems to me you believe very strongly in a black-and-white world where "the market" functions just fine. It is terribly out of sync with actual evidence, though, which you simply brush aside while scribing arguments containing numerous unsupported assertions and demands that others support their statements. As if we should simply accept your point of view as the truth by default.

Software engineers as a rule are grossly underpaid relative to the actual value they provide, whether they are employed at Google or Web Body Shop X in Podunk Midwest Town Y. Collusion of this sort is deleterious on the whole precisely because of the indirect but very much desired effects of wage depression, even if some individuals benefit and others are more disproportionately harmed.

Absolutely. People, and especially a very large fraction of people in the software industry, are loathe to think that anything other than ability and pure reason factor into, well, anything.

Maybe I've just had some poor experiences but I find it is safe to assume that the majority of decisions around office configuration, benefits, salary, etc., are made based on power dynamics, ego, and bean counting (which is itself a means of exerting control) rather than any other reason, especially rather than after considered thought given to employees' needs and desires.

What makes you think from an organizational perspective that there is a difference between them? It is far more likely that the engineers are viewed as having similar fungibility as the janitors than management is viewed as having similar fungibility (for example).

Your employees had the choice between drab isolating cubicles bathed in depressing internal lighting and something else, which they eventually chose. I think maybe you should reconsider what that means. Perhaps your engineers weren't as interested as other parries in pretending cubicles--no matter how fancy--are the same thing as offices.

Anecdotally, at my current job I prefer working in a room where there are from three to five other engineers and lots of electronics around over working in the cube I'm assigned, but if I had a genuinely private office with a window, even overlooking a parking lot, I'd take it and work there 99% of the time, and be more productive if past experience is any indication.

Not one single thing in your comment is factually correct. In fact, both points are demonstrably the opposite of the truth. Apple is not perfect. It is very good at marketing, very good at aesthetic design, decent to good at acquiring marginally above average hardware, and ranges poor to decent at software. The most important thing Apple is good at is marketing, and your comment demonstrates why.

It's the way that law is structured in many states, if not all, actually. In some states (and this includes CA), employers are actually entitled to withhold pay to exempt employees under certain circumstances (e.g. with respect to partial-day absences under appropriately structured PTO/vacation plans, which are trivial for companies to comply with).

That aside, the structure of the law and the practice of companies that are supposed to abide by it don't necessarily coincide. Generally even in labor-friendly states employers hold almost all the power and are unlikely to face any serious threat (e.g. via a lawsuit) from employees who challenge illegal labor practices like failing to pay for a full week in which any work is performed. They're especially unlikely to do so in the software industry, which as far as I can tell has a surplus of labor supply who: a) view themselves as Jon Galt or b) are all too eager to "prove" how great they are compared to other "devs" by, e.g., submitting themselves to onerous employment practices or c) believe, wrongly, that the entire industry is based on merit (intellectual, ability-based merit) and that "unfair" labor practices just can't happen to them (because they're so awesome) or d) some combination of all of that. These things have all conspired to help employers depress wages and maintain the completely farcical myth that "getting paid less for doing what you love" is fair.

Your situation is absolutely far, far outside the norm, even (especially?) in the software industry.

I've only left a job because of the boss one time. The other times were mainly because I was either unhappy with my role in the company or to pursue other career opportunities that presented better/more diverse challenges and superior compensation packages.

Engineers undercut each other all the time, implicitly, by going for the "do what you love and be paid for it!" nonsense companies throw, by feverishly working on unsupported open source projects for notoriety or to participate in the new culture of "github profile required or we won't consider you," and other ways I'm not listing here.

Those recruiters wouldn't be able to do what they do without at least some tacit approval or participation of labor.

> So many companies are making big bucks off Ruby, yet so little are willing to fork out a bit of money and time to make Ruby better. <

And why would/should they when there are quite literally dozens (or possibly hundreds or even thousands) of developers who will happily work on "making Ruby better" for no cost to said companies?

A large percentage of software developers will quite happily hack away at projects for nothing in return simply because they enjoy it (and would, quite incorrectly, claim that as compensation itself), in order to gain notoriety, boost their own ego, or any of a number of related reasons.

You're correct, of course, and I should probably have not used that loaded term.

I've encountered each of these myths "in the wild," and I dare say you'll see them thrown up repeatedly here on HN in various contexts.

The third item on that list especially is something you can almost certainly see every day in a random HN thread about programming languages (along with counterpoints).

In fact, 'safety', of which GC is a subset, is a huge objection, and one of the first, most frequently raised in my experience. People are afraid of pointers, some rightly (e.g. because they've personally experienced bad memory management code, or they've never worked outside of a dynamic language, etc.), but most not.

Depends on what you mean by "important." You noted yourself that "life got easier" once the language you used introduced generics.

Generics can drastically reduce the time required to implement features because less time is spent on re-implementing (nearly) identical algorithms for different data structures and more on simply using them to write something that works.

The cost paid for this is usually in the form of minor efficiency hits because data-specific efficiencies aren't exploited.

Also, consider me complaining about C's lack of generics. It is in fact the primary reason I prefer C++. If C had robust generics with reasonable syntax I'd strongly consider using it instead of C++.

The best, strongest interpretation of PG's essay merits far less charity than even exists in this thread. There is barely anything of substance in the whole piece, and the parts that are substantive are just so far out of line with the empirical data we have regarding this issue as to be baffling coming from somebody with the cache of PG. If I were not being "charitable" I'd use words like "peurile," "ignorant," "transparent demagoguery," and "thoroughly irrational." In the interest of being charitable, I'd simply describe the essay as being merely a master work on how to write a series of unsubstantiated assertions interleaved with assertions that have already been thoroughly debunked.

This doesn't even touch on the incredibly un-"charitable" opening to PG's essay, on which he explicitly casts opponents or those who might disagree with him as being anti-immigrant. There is no way to "charitably" interpret that sentiment in a positive way. It is purely negative and entirely unworthy of a person claiming to be interested in honest intellectual discussion.

> Unlike Musk's HyperLoop, the barrier for software is not materials and resources, it's simply minds. If you're working on a crappy, bloated codebase it's because some business person likely accurately assumes that a rewrite would be risky and slow (b/c of the supply and quality of labor). <

No, the business person knows it will cost money to rewrite and simply doesn't want to commit the resources. It almost certainly has nothing to do with the supply and quality of labor.

People can disagree with PG (and you) and also be intelligent.

For example, me. PG is partially wrong, objectively. About the only thing his essay has correct is that there exists intelligent, very good programmers outside the US.

The collusion suit that big tech companies recently settled, the wage stagnation even in our industry, and a wide variety of other facts suggest that keeping wages low is in fact a very important goal to technology companies, and that they will do anything--including illegal collusion--to keep them low.

If anything the notion that there just aren't enough qualified (well-qualified) workers in the US to fill tech positions is at best an extraordinary claim that PG's essay fails by a wide margin to substantiate.

0) technologies evolve over time. JSON-over-HTTP will be supplanted by something, eventually, which almost certainly will also be something that acts to commoditize labor

1) Not me, the market. I think it is silly, too.

You are correct, but missing a larger point: the ecosystem backing JSON-over-HTTP is large and expansive, and as a result development for apps built on that technology has effectively been commoditized.

Tim Cook was lying. That doesn't mean people who engage in work to support scientific and technological advancement (rather then mere iteration) are also lying.

That's an implicit point of using the heuristic. It's a kind of dog whistle in the context of ageism in the tech industry.

Well, "a lot of software engineering roles" have requirements and knowledge expectations that are far out of line with what the job actually requires. There are some "fundamental algorithms, including things like DFS and Dijkstra's" that simply aren't applicable to a lot of software engineering roles, big and small.

Most of the questions and interview ceremony around these things, especially for the aforementioned positions for which they're largely irrelevant, are exercises in hazing, ego building/busting (depending on which side of the interview you're on), and petty power plays.