jaabe

Well I do interview self-taught people when their CVs are stellar, but I’ve yet to find one that was the better option.

I’m sure you can potentially get a CS degree and never learn anything but I don’t get the point that makes. I wouldn’t hire those people either. I don’t think it’s true though. I’ve never met anyone who went through 5 years of university without picking up anything useful.

I think everyone can learn to write an app by following a few YouTube videos. This is how we’ve got our project managers and lean-operators to write RPA projects in python after all.

On the flip side, I’ve never personally met anyone who went through 5 years of university and came out knowing nothing.

The thing with CS is that it’s not the programming itself that’s actually valuable. It’s being able to create efficient, safe and maintainable code. If you can’t tell me the bigO of your program, if you don’t know how to remove the top node of a binary search tree or if you think using NPM packages to do simple computation is a good idea, then I just can’t use you, because it’ll be way too expensive to teach you.

If you suck at our specific tooling, but have already proven you can obtain a university degree, then I know that I can re-school you relatively cheap by sending you on a few courses.

I’m sorry this is rubbing non-educated programmers wrong, but an education is actually valuable, and it will be increasingly so as the younger generations are all getting them.

You can certainly have a degree in CS and suck, but the odds of that happening are much lower than with people who don’t have a CS degree. Why should I waste the resources if I have enough decent candidates?

The rockstar developer is kind of a myth. If you compile 100 applicants into the 5-8 best ones, then the truth is that you could probably hire any of them and get good results.

That doesn’t mean self-educated people should give up. Especially because very few countries have as easy access to education as we do.

I’ve hired a lot of people, I do a lot of networking and I work as an examiner for CS students, I’ve never seen someone who was self-educated remotely compare to someone with a degree. It just doesn’t happen in a country where anyone who wants to put in the work can get a degree.

Which was kind of my point. The people who failed to get a degree are typically the people who won’t become great when they are self-taught either.

I can see why you would chose not to get an education in a country like America, where it would be a huge financial burden to do so, but we literally pay people to attend their free education.

I’ve never hired someone who was self-taught, not because self-taught people can’t be equal or better, but because you’re trying to buy security and stability. The most expensive mistake you can make as a manager is hiring the wrong person, and self-educated people just aren’t worth the risk when you have a dozen other candidates who are great. I’m Danish though and things are a little different here because education is free. In face the government will even pay you a small amount of monthly money while you study. So we don’t have that many self-educated people, and those who are, are typically self-educated for a range of reasons that put them at a disadvantage from the get go.

So my point isn’t to discourage you, but to make you aware that managers might see your lack of formal education as a risk that you need to mitigate.

Everyone can learn to program, but learning how to program, correctly, efficiently and safe comes with formal education and you probably need to show that you know at least something about how to make CS based decisions. Maybe you do, if so great. If you don’t, spend a little time researching best practices, read up on design patterns and maybe complete the MITX intro course(s) to CS on edx.org.

I’m not sure knowing a specific framework is really all that valuable. If your can build something with LAMP/JS that makes money then you’ve already demonstrated your ability to write software. On the other hand it wouldn’t hurt you either.

No.

But I probably should have been more clear. I mean, first of all, there are more cities than Copenhagen. I have a 3 room 92m^2 apartment that is 15 minute walking distance from Aarhus H that cost us 2.2 million. Secondly, I’d personally call a place like Valby “downtown” Copenhagen even though it would probably be more correct to label it surburbia like you do.

But does medium have readers? I mean, I read medium articles when they appear here on HN, but I’m not really a medium reader, and unlike personal blogs, where I will bookmark you if I find you interesting I’ll never come back to a medium author unless it’s by chance.

I mean, that’s as anecdotal as it gets, but I’ve never been very unique in my media consumption, so I’m fairly certain I’m not alone in this.

In Denmark where I live you can loan 1 million Danish kroner at around 5k each month. A decent downtown apartment in a bigger city or a house in the suburbs is 2-4 million. Renting the equivalent is 10-15k, and with renting you obviously skip a lot of the maintenance cost and taxes. On the flip side loans are tax-deductible, meaning you actually don’t pay 20k to borrow 4 million, you pay 12k.

It can still be cheaper to rent, at least if you look at the small scale. Because in 30 years, those 4 million will be yours while people who rent will still have nothing. It’s also risky, because maybe those 4 million will really be 1 million.

Over all, owning real estate in a safe location is always going to be much better than renting. At least in Denmark. Hell, if you can manage to buy around 15-30 lower-cost apartments in a university city and rent them out, you’ll be able to pay your loans and have enough spare in passive income that you never have to work again.

Do you have a medium account? Because I don’t, and I don’t think anyone in my network does either.

I can see why you would use YouTube, videos aren’t easy to self host, but I’m really not sure why anyone would chose medium above self-hosting or even using github pages.

But maybe I’m just special, and maybe everyone else has a medium account?

I think there is a lot of tinkering available still. Raspberry pis and IOT are areas where you can really go nuts.

I do hope we’ll see hardware open up again, and maybe we will with the increasing focus on sustainability.

In Denmark we have a fairly recent political party called Liberal Alliance. They were funded by billionaire, bank owner and businessman Lars Seier Christensen for almost 10 years and at their height achieved 7% of the votes and a spot in our government. At some point Lars Seiers brother founded a political party and Liberal Alliance fell out of favour with the billionaire.

In our very recent election Liberal Alliance was decimated and Lars Seiers brothers party was voted in and is now bigger than Liberal Alliance.

Now, I’m not suggesting anything that you will need a tinfoil hat for. There are a lot of reasons things went the way they did for these two political parties, and most of them could have happened without the easy access to money. I do, however, think it’s a worrying show of how just much influence, a single billionaire can have in a small democracy, compared to the average citizen.

My wife is using my old mbp late 2015 and it does everything she needs a laptop to do. If I hadn’t gotten myself a usb-c setup both in the office and at work it would also be doing everything I need a laptop to do. We’ve gotten to a point where laptops are powerful enough that their performance isn’t actually that important to a lot of us. longevity, battery life and weight were always important, but now other key features are power consumption and sustainability.

I really hope that by the time I need to replace my mbp 2018 someone will have cooked up a solar powered laptop made by environmentally friendly components that’s easy to repair. 20 years ago I would have primarily looked at performance, now I don’t even give it a glance.

That’s just me of course, but I suspect I may not be alone with those hopes.

As I understood it, scripting languages will still be available to the user, they just won’t have ancient versions preinstalled. Of course that also means you can’t rely on them being installed at all as a developer.

Which means you should start bundling the stuff you need to run your app, and, they’d like you not to use the same ancient batteries as they have previously made available, because, well they are ancient.

I think the top submissions have declined somewhat over the years. Maybe it’s just my personal taste that’s changed, but I like two types of articles. The ones that are interesting and the ones that are actually useful to me. There is still a lot of interesting articles on HN, that diver story from yesterday is a great example of one. It’s rare I see an article that’s actually useful though. Google cloud being down, and google engineers explaining what was going one is one of the few useful thing I’ve seen on HN in 2019. (And that actually mainly involved the comment section).

I realise that you will always get a lot of hype-technologies on a technology focused social media, but they are actually not that interesting to me. Sure Rust is cool, but chances are that I won’t actually ever meet someone who uses Rust professionally in my lifetime. This frankly makes the majority of Rust related content rather irrelevant to me, and I say Rust, but I could be mentioning a range of the other cool, new and not-adopted technologies. Now, I’m not saying that those articles shouldn’t be here, because I think they absolutely should. It’s obviously more news-worthy to write about something new and cool, rather than something old and tried. When the majority, or all, the content is made up of technologies that will probably never see real world adoption, however, well then HN becomes somewhat irrelevant, at least to me. Maybe that means I’m just on the wrong web-page though.

I’m Danish and I realise our benefits and rights are generally a lot better than most places, but I would never work 70 hours a week unless I owned the company. So I think you have the right idea in leaving as soon as you can.

Is it? Because I’m fairly nearsighted and have astigmatism, which can make text on screens very blurry when there is a low contrast, and it’s a lot worse with dark mode.

Still, I agree that having both a light and a dark mode is better than having just one of them.

I think this is horrible advice, and while it’s anecdotal I’ve seen no reason to suggest that not writing code comments leads to higher quality code.

I once managed a developer who at a time could have written this very blogpost. He was also a big fan of the solid principles, and I think he generally wrote good code. I actually also agree with parts of the article. If you name your properties and functions in a reasonable way, then you don’t need a comment telling the future what you put in firstName on an employee object or what getEmployees() does. When it comes to business logic and intend, however, you need to help the future. My developer learned this the hard way when some business logic changed and he had to fix a system he had written a couple of years earlier. Suddenly the once so clear code wasn’t clear anymore, and he had to spent a week reintroducing himself to exactly what intent had gone into making the system. Maybe he was just bad at practicing what he preached, but he started writing code comments after that.

And that’s someone unable to get into their own mindset, it’s much, much worse if the code is handed off to someone else. If I task two developers with solving the same problem, as clear as they possible can using self-explaining code. Well, I’ll get two very different results, because what clear code is, is very subjective.

If actual usage reflected front page position we’d all be talking about C, C#, JAVA or PHP.

I follow a few job agents because I do part time work as an examiner for applied CS students, and I occasionally advice on what languages they should teach to make sure their students are job ready, and nothing has really changed for a decade. Python demand is really the only area that has seen a real increase, but not for developers as you need some sort of degree in either statistics or math to get the ML/BI jobs.

It’s always a little sad to see students who spend a lot of time buying into the hype and building their final projects in something like Rust or Go and before that node/express. Because they’ll have a much harder time finding a job than the ones who didn’t do that. Not because learning Rust is bad, but because it’s safer (and cheaper) to chose their competition and it’s not like there is really a lack of freshly educated developers anymore.

I think it’s a lot easier to be anonymous if you keep them, but never use them for anything real. I quit using Facebook two years ago, but I didn’t stop posting the occasional picture of some event I attended.

I simply uninstalled all their apps and deleted anything that I had ever posted which wasn’t completely irrelevant. I also deleted almost every picture of myself and prohibited people from ever tagging me.

This way I look like a normal boring guy who likes board games if you glance over my profile, but you couldn’t actually get anything to use against me.

It’s very Orwellian I guess, but it means I never have to explain why I’m not on social media.

We’re required to have password expiration by law in the public sector of Denmark. So I’m sure we’ll continue to have it for at least some years to come.

I must admit I never really understood the function of it. Obviously lifetime access is more damaging than 3 months access, but the truly devastating thing is the unauthorised access itself not the length of it. Also the policy results in really bad practices like people using summer2019 as their password or writing their current password down on post it’s. We tried blocking stuff like summer2019, but people get really creative. People also forget to renew their passwords, costing hundred of hours in the process.

We have 2FA now, which will soon be required by our adoption of the GDPR, but you have to wonder why we didn’t get that decades ago instead of the password expiration.

There is Runbox, a Norwegian fastmail equivalent if you’re looking for something non-American, but g-suite e-mail offers privacy.

It’s a quite interesting question. Our national tax ministry has had almost nothing of expensive scandals over the past 15 years.

Two years ago they setup a focused devops team inside their organisation. I don’t know the exact details of it because my knowledge is from a 45 minute summit talk, but apparently this team managed to build a national scale system in 3 months that actually work. That would have cost them billion on the private market, and would likely never have worked, yet they did it with a relatively small team.

Maybe the problem is scale. I mean, sometimes I wonder why our contract include numerous product owners, key account managers, groups business analysts, project managers and God knows what else.

This is a little unrelated to buying big systems, but when we wanted to build a RPA setup, one of the consultant agencies had an offer which included 6 business side people and one technician. I mention it, because sometimes buying enterprise systems feels exactly like that.

Why does it need refactoring? Because you think you can write it better or because you can actually improve its efficiency?

If it’s the former, don’t. If it’s the latter turn it into a task and have it prioritised.

I’ve worked in the private sector though, things weren’t better there.

When you buy big enterprise systems you enter contracts that aren’t easy to exit. You also bind so much money into those contracts that you don’t really want to leave them either, even if the company sucks at delivering. Maybe you’ll fight them in the courts for a few years and maybe they’ll compensate you a few hundred million, but once you enter these deals you’re basically in them until the law dictates that you have to do another round of bidding.

I’ve done this with a lot of difference companies and a lot of different development and project management philosophies though, and they all fail.

We’ve gone full waterfall, we’ve gone full agile and everything in between. We’ve done long detailed requirement specifications and we’ve invited companies into the heart of our business, to let them literally work inside our offices sitting shoulder to shoulder with our domain knowledge. None of it produces high quality software.

The highest quality software we have, aside from a few small suppliers, is the software we build ourselves. It’s anecdotal again, but it’s the same story I hear in my network of digitalisation managers across the countries public sector and banking.

What high quality software?

I work in the public sector in Denmark, we operate 300-500 systems from private suppliers and none of them work, none of them are particularly cheap either.

Our medical software on life supporting machinery is about the only software that actually always does what it’s supposed to, but it goes decades without changes. Everything else is a broken mess, regardless of what principles of development the companies adhere to.

I think the only software that we operate, which is both high quality, stable, secure and capable of adding/removing features when we ask is our dental software, and that’s actually some of the cheapest software that we buy. It’s not made by a tech/development-house though, it’s made by a couple of former dentists who do it as a side product on their main business which is selling dentist equipment.

So maybe the real issue lies with the development houses? But our experiences are obviously anecdotal so it’s hard to say.

I work in the Danish public sector and we currently have 300 systems from various contractors. Almost all of them are moving toward a C#/JAVA api based backend and an Angular front. Only one of those systems uses Vue. None of them use React.

Outside the public sector React is a bit more popular, but it’s still mainly used outside of enterprise and Vue rarely sees any use.

The job-market doesn’t seem to follow the tech hype cycles much, at least not when you live in a country like mine.

Having worked both in the public and private sectors I think it’s actually the exact opposite. If we miss a deadline, or if a system goes down when it really wasn’t supposed to the consequences can be as severe as someone dying because life-necessary data wasn’t available. The only sector which is as focused on security, on-time-delivery and risk-management that we are is banking, which is frankly rather similar to the public sector, except their business focus is much more narrow and they generally have a lot more resources.

This is actually part of the reason we try to think about what technology we use and how we use it. We have too many critical systems and too few people, so we need to be extremely efficient in our choices. If something is cool, but adds complexity, then it’s just not worth it.

Because we are the public sector we do a lot of benchmarking though, and we actually have ASP WebForms legacy apps that are rated as high as your favourite mobile app by our citizens. Which was my point, your users don’t actually care about your tech-stack when it delivers.

It’s completely anecdotal but I do hire people and I work as a part time examiner for CS students, so I do come into contact with what motivates people. Unfortunately I see a lot of fear driving people to push forward, picking up technologies because they think they have to, not because they actually need them.

I mean, if I do a quick search on the Danish job agents, no one is looking for someone who knows GraphQL. Yet I see people desperately trying to learn it in their free time because they are afraid of becoming obsolete.

I wonder where this fear comes from. It’s a fairly recent thing in my experience, and it’s not like it’s a buyers market. We still desperately need more developers.

You don’t actually have to setup your web-development environment like the hype dictates. I mean, work in a Danish municipality with more than 5k employees and 60k citizens who directly use our, mainly web-based, solutions daily. We build around 50 a year, and maintain a few hundred of them, and almost none of them are build with a JavaScript MVVM framework.

Not because Vue/React/Angular aren’t nice, but because we don’t have to. If it doesn’t need to run offline, then a MVC framework with Ajax will do just fine, and they are extremely productive. Both because errors are server side, but also because asp mvc hasn’t really seen radical changes for almost a decade. We also rarely put things in containers, we don’t do automated CI/CD and we certainly don’t orchestrate things with Kubernetes. Not that there is anything wrong with doing that, but we’re not Netflix, we can publish a new build directly to an IIS during a slow period and no one will notice the service being gone for 5 seconds.

Sometimes I think it pays to do a little JOMO instead of all that FOMO. Especially if you don’t want to burn out. Changes are a constant in our business, but you need to make absolutely certain that adopting those changes make sense, and it has to make sense in the real world, not on hacker news. Our business doesn’t care one bit about the front-end tech stack, as long as it performs like they want it could be written in ASP webforms.