Iftheshoefits

That's an incredibly privileged point of view. It is not frequently the case that students with the apitutude for college have the support they need from family and relevant experts at school to engage in the kind of thoughtful deliberation you suggest.

No, you can't pick it up "very, very quickly." That is a dismissive and indirect way to assert that engineering is somehow easier or requires less intellectual rigor than "higher" disciplines like CS or math.

The first sentence in the article encapsulates one of the biggest problems in this industry. It may apply to very specific roles within certain companies, or to specific subdisciplines, but in general the statement is little more than an unsupported assertion. It is very popular in a population heavily weighted by CS graduates, but popularity doesn't imply correctness.

As a thesis statement it is wildly out of sync with all but a few of the bullet items, most of which have almost no relation to "CS fundamentals". Working on projects outside of class/work is broadly applicable to any field, as is contributing to large projects as part of a team or group; neither of these requires "CS fundamentals." OO programming and learning specific languages are likewise disconnected. Some of the points aren't bad with respect to being required in order to be a good software engineer, but even those are too scant on detail (even for a bullet list).

Most of the "learn about" points are vague. In particular, as an example, the point about DS/algorithms is awful. What does "learn about" mean? Satellite engineers "learn about" materials, orbital mechanics, radiation and E&M, but they aren't in general expected to know the fundamentals (as a physicist would understand the term) of the theories of particle physics or gravitation for example.

The bullet points read like a survey of random computing related topics. There is no focus or cohesion connecting them to being a good software engineer. It reads like somebody's random meanderings when contemplating something they might find interesting within the field of computing. It's not a guide; it's a disconnected hodgepodge.

Remove everything that isn't related to being a good engineer (that would be almost all the points about sub-discipline-specific items, like machine learning), elaborate on the DS/Algorithms points, and provide something in the guide to actually support the opening statement (good luck).

That specific enough for you?

One thing I learned in the briefings I saw after getting my clearance was that the single biggest motivator for betrayal was a thrill-seeking narcissistic personality, followed closely by political agendas. Financial (including bribery/blackmail) and romantic blackmail concerns were so tenuously correlated as to be laughable to suggest they are meaningful as a potential exploitation.

Also, polygraphs are pseudoscientific nonsense.

You haven't established the link between wealth and an understanding of productivity so much as asserted that wealth is a proxy for knowledge/intelligence.

That's true, and it is a case that seems to be unique to the software field as far as engineering is concerned. I'm also unaware of any other engineering profession in which such shallow education and experience would be considered acceptable in any case. Usually a four-year degree from an accredited engineering school is a minimum requirement for even entry-level work. In these cases references and some casual "technical" discussions (but nothing like the pedantic Algo/DS grilling in a software interview) in the interviews will determine suitability, and the individual will effectively be considered a trainee for a time. That is also absent in the software industry, generally.

One plausible reason: the story is a "slow burn" story that hasn't had time to gain traction. Mainstream news acts more like an aggregator of information that percolates out of various niche segments' echo chambers: give it time.

Another thing to consider: what is particularly newsworthy about it to the general public? Software technology focused people would find this very news worthy. I have little sympathy for a business of any size that uses github as its primary repository: the most-current source should be maintained on an internal server, in my opinion, and companies that require github to be fully available to operate are doing it wrong. I mean one of the primary advantages of a distributed repo is that there is a complete history for every node that has synced with the most recent commit. There shouldn't be a strong dependence on a central repo.

There is not one single other engineering profession I'm aware of that thinks a "portfolio" consisting of past employment is insufficient, or that has academic trivia questions figure as largely in their interview process.

To me a request for portfolio contents beyond the contents of a resume is an indicator that the would-be employer is interested in people who are easily exploited or cajoled into working lots of unpaid overtime, or else that they don't actually trust the candidate's resume; both of these are negative indicators. A heavy focus on DS/algorithms for engineering positions is an indicator that the employer either doesn't understand the difference between academics/theory and engineering or, worse, thinks the latter is trivial, irrelevant, or otherwise beneath CS; both also negative indicators.

"Self made" defies precise definition. If you start with $999,999 and earn $1 by your own efforts, a strictly precise definition for "self made" would imply you were a "self made" millionaire. However it would also apply to somebody who started with $1 and earned $999,999 by his own efforts. Hence using "self made" in both cases renders the phrase so broad as to be empty of meaning.

Bill Gates is not a self-made millionaire, if that phrase is to have any meaning.

"a) most engineers suck at programming."

I find that to be not true. Most engineers suck at regurgitating the correct textbook CS algorithm or data structure from memory, but they are very good at engineering, which is what the overwhelming majority of programming is.

If I had to choose between a CS major and a ME for an engineering project that involved software development I'd choose the ME almost every time, all else being equal. The exceptions would be cases where academic CS knowledge is required. They exist but not nearly as frequently as Silicon Valley would have anybody believe.

This is a great comment. The category error you've identified is manifest in more than the comment you're replying to as well: it's at the heart of one of the biggest problems with software interviews in a certain sector of this industry (the heavy focus on academic CS in startups and many Bay Area tech companies).

Software workers are already treated as commodities, so even if one were to accept that last statement as fact it wouldn't actually have much relevance. Being a commodity worker with higher minimum compensation and even marginally better working environments is better than the status quo.

I'm a US citizen by birth. I just happen to have traveled and lived abroad for a time, and I find the labor laws especially, but the social welfare laws in general in the US to be rather backward and uncivilized: barbaric is a word I chose deliberately because in my opinion it is accurate.

There are a lot of women who would prefer to breastfeed but can't for a variety of physiological reasons, so this market would at least have the potential to exist even if America's maternity leave laws weren't barbaric.

It is cheating. The rules are quite clear, and these groups break those rules in a way that gives them an immediate and direct advantage over students who don't break the rules. The rules themselves may be subject to debate, but that these people engage in cheating really isn't.

They don't blow any curves necessarily but they do appear to be smarter or more able, and that impacts everything from teaching assignments to thesis committee solicitation.

Actually, it probably can't, at least in most of the cases where it would matter. The President can get the ball rolling in some of those cases, but in others there may actually be an act of Congress required, or other bureaucratic hoops to jump through.

The President is not the equivalent of the CEO of a private corporation. And like so many of the things around technology in government the last couple of years, this one is probably more for show than anything else.

Yes to the first, no to the second (I would almost certainly not qualify for the ones you listed--not for lack of talent, as I forgot more math by the time I took my PhD qualifying exams than most CS graduates ever learn, but for other reasons).

It is my second job in this area, and I'm a bit (~15%) better compensated this time than last.

If it's an exaggeration then this industry's labor pool is in even worse shape than I suspected.

To put this in context: I'd consider myself average, maybe slightly above in some contexts, below in (many more) others, and my current salary (full-time, all-in) is closer to $200k than $150k. The majority (about 80%) of that is base salary, not "bonus", stocks/options, or benefits. If I can get a ("senior developer" level, not management) job with that compensation, the people in this valley who are much better than me (and that would be most, or at least many, many others) ought to be able to command significantly more.

"Asshole" isn't the right word, assuming you mean they are working overtime regularly without pay. I'd probably use other words like "gullible" and "useful idiot[1]." And, yes, I would put them in the same tent as the other useful idiots who'd happily (as opppsed to out of desperation) take a job advertised as per the link in the article.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

See, the trouble is there are people in this industry who would work at this place, and that contributes to lower wages and poorer working conditions. Sure, I won't work there but the fact that others will has an impact on me at least indirectly. I think that's sufficient reason to call out this kind of job/company for the bullshit it is.

Seems to me they're about equal in merit. Also, in case your comment was directed at me, I didn't impugn anybody's integrity.

Perhaps you'd understand if people discounted your comment slightly because of your apparent close relationship with YC, then?

They have the best interests of founders in mind only insofar as their pocketbooks and reputation benefit from it. That's at best an intersection that doesn't contain all the elements in both sets.

Disclaimer: I'm a pretty cynical and skeptical person by nature. I'm especially suspicious when people with a lot of money at risk say, well, just about anything. My experiences have lead me to believe that it is an extremely rare individual who will not go to great lengths to protect and accumulate his wealth, even to an extent that many would consider sociopathic, and further that this trait is amplified geometrically as wealth is accumulated.

If they're working alone or with somebody who shares their passion, sure. What about the, oh, 90% of the rest of the time?

Sure, sometimes it is, undeniably. But given how immature in general this industry is--and that means both in terms of the span of its existence and in terms of the age of practitioners--it sure is suspicious how often X-that-has-been-around-forever-implented-in-Y comes up.

I mean how likely is it that "Hashtable/JS interpreter/JVM implemented in C" is going to be a big hit on HN? Not often. But since Go, JavaScript, and other insert new hotness language here are popular things somehow it's more interesting to retread old ideas with them. That's not the sign of a young master demonstrating his skill, it is the sign of an immature field that hasn't figured out how to distinguish what is new and important from what isn't.

It's unfortunate in particular for the people who do do these projects for fun or learning. These people have their work hijacked for a showoff culture's mutual backpatting.

Think of it in terms of a typical 13 year old boy acting out, e.g. by climbing real high in a tree or doing tricks on his bike, to impress friends/girls. That's all this shit is, except it is targeted to a slightly different audience who will go out of their way to deny it. Not saying that applies to this particular project, just to your comment more generally.

Sometimes it is done just to learn, but it seems a bit silly to do it in public as it were.

Reviews that all mention the same book, or even have little or no content, and have the same rating are suspicious and easily detectable by a trivial scan and compare against existing reviews. A harder problem is when the bogus review content becomes more "clever" (e.g. random rating differences, "entropy" in the content e.g. by misspellings, etc.).

I think in our industry it is a combination of the two. Our colleagues are quite happy to take pats on the back and ego stroking in lieu of compensation.

Thanks for illustrating my point.

That's part of it, sure. The other part of it in America is the successful suppression of any sort of labor movement and the success of efforts by the very rich to drive a wedge between the merely affluent and the middle and lower classes.

America has a real strong strain of the "I'm not poor, I'm merely a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" sentiment.