7 ms·

Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage,

Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture. The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myself am director level engineering talent—and I get offers for such all the time—and yet I don't even remotely consider myself an engineer. Because I can make a website? Because I know a little python, ruby and node? Come on. I've never written anything that lives in a real production environment and you want to hire me as your director of engineering? Are you mad?

objclxt 11y ago
> [...] and yet I don't even remotely consider myself an engineer. I phone screened somebody not so long ago who asked me if it was the "kind of job where you have to write a lot of code", because they "weren't that sort of software engineer". Didn't quite know what to make of that.
- wwweston 11y ago
  That person might be perfect for my job. I've been largely reading mountains of code that other people have written, until I understand what it does, and then make (usually small) changes in order to either fix a defect or add functionality. I don't love it. Maybe the person you screened should be doing my job.
- sbov 11y ago
  Some of the funnest jobs are when you delete lots of code.
- Apocryphon 11y ago
  Maybe he was an IT person who doesn't know what IT is called.
- swalsh 11y ago
  It could be an awful way of saying he prefers maintenance to new development.
lintiness 11y ago
interest rates are nosediving around the globe as i type. euribor a year out is -.33% BID. us rates are going LOWER.
vdnkh 11y ago
If you have an engineering degree from an accredited program, you're an engineer. If you don't you're not. The US is very lax with usage of the word but in other countries it's classed in the same way "Doctor" is.
- sbov 11y ago
  The funny thing being, most of the best "software engineers" are people without software engineering degrees. Because the practice has existed longer than the degree has.
  - heraclez 11y ago
    That's not the reason. If that were the reason, death would swiftly make it so the best engineers are those with degrees. The reason is because they learned out of innate curiosity and true passion. You always go farther with those. However, you go even farther with curiosity, passion and a degree.
  - theandrewbailey 11y ago
    I guess that the vast majority of "software engineers" of any kind (not just the best) don't have software engineering degrees. Maybe you were thinking computer science degrees?
- cylinder 11y ago
  US is very lax with words, in general.
- bebop 11y ago
  I would even go so far as to say that you are not an engineer until you are a PE. This is coming from a "Software Engineer".
adventured 11y ago
Interest rates aren't going to tick up. The Fed isn't going to raise rates, they're going to cut and launch a new round of QE. That's not even a debate at this point, it's blatantly obvious. Will that end at some point with another asset crash? Maybe, however it's not going to happen soon. The Fed will print your brains out first to support stocks and real-estate. They have a lot of room to abuse the dollar from where it's at today.
- brandur 11y ago
  If I was a betting man, I'd side with you on this one in that low interest rates may be a permanent fixture until the Fed has pushed to the extreme and the system can bend no further. Can you elaborate on why you think it's "blatantly obvious" though? I can't make any of these types of guesses with high confidence.
api 11y ago
Tangent but: I doubt the rate raise will stick. They'll probably have to cut it again. I see a "planet Japan" scenario in which global central banks are zero-bound for decades, if not "forever". Rapid growth is over. There are no more frontiers and birth rates are stabilizing. From an ecological point of view the stabilization of birth rates is good, but it basically breaks all the economic assumptions of the past 250+ years. A heavily leveraged credit economy does not work without fairly rapid growth, and until the economy is fundamentally restructured toward something built for a more steady-state mode of operation we'll have to hack it by constantly printing money to prevent deflationary collapse. The only thing that might change this is something like the opening of the final frontier-- space. But in that case I'm not sure if it would... distances between say Earth and Mars are so vast that any Martian economy would effectively be a separate entity. It might experience rapid growth but I'm not sure if that would translate over here. The Homeworld might still be like Japan-- a zero-bound no-growth economy. I suppose an AI explosion that wasn't destructive might change things too by creating a lot of new non-corporeal economic entities, but we're well off into sci-fi land here. Edit: I don't necessarily mean that all forms of "growth" are over. We could still have tremendous growth in knowledge, technological capability, standard of living, and some amount of economic growth. But heavily leveraged inflationary credit economics requires crazy exponential growth in an absolute sense. Without crazy growth it breaks, and the only way to keep it nominally running is to pump money into it to prevent cascading default. In a sense I think the "pop Austrians" are right that the present system is broken, but they've historically had the failure mode exactly wrong. The failure mode is not hyperinflation-- it's hyperdeflation that's permanently held at bay by money printing ("Japan"). That's because pop Austrians don't get the money multiplier. Almost all money in circulation is credit/debt, not M1. You'd have to print absurd amounts of money and make sure it's distributed more widely than banks to cause a non-localized hyperinflation in a credit economy. (Localized hyperinflation is possible due to bubbles but these usually collapse.) Of course another way of keeping the illusion alive is to pump up localized credit bubbles repeatedly. These give the illusion to certain sectors or regions that the economy is still growing the way it should... for a while. But then they pop and you need another round of money printing to prevent hyperdeflation. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile these bubbles distort the price structure of the economy, such as by making housing ridiculous or driving certain commodities crazy.
rorykoehler 11y ago
The latest is data scientist or even scientist in general. People have realised that marketing and charisma will get them most of the way so they bs and reap the rewards. Sad but true.
luckydude 11y ago
It's the dotcom stuff all over again. I remember interviewing some guy who wanted to be my VP of engineering. Have you ever fired anyone? "Nope" Have you ever shipped a product and supported it for more than a year? "Nope" Do you have any quality engineers that would come with you? "Nope" Have you ever managed a manager? "Nope" I noped his ass out the door. Fear not, this craziness will pass.
- amyjess 11y ago
  You can thank companies giving out VP or Director titles to their first technical hires for that. At my last company, my boss was the first technical hire. His title was Director of Software Engineering. He got that title and the responsibilities that came with it solely because he was the first technical hire. He had no management experience at all. He was a great engineer, but he couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag. He had the double whammy of both not knowing a thing about process and not understanding people. He didn't think having a process was necessary because his own code was amazing, he wrote the initial versions of our software all by himself in what actually is a solid example of a well-engineered project, and he couldn't fathom how anyone's code could be less than amazing. He also couldn't handle stress, and he had a habit of screaming at his subordinates and treating us like children whenever he got stressed. His management was the biggest reason I quit.
  - fossuser 11y ago
    I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I think engineers/developers/hackers tend to undervalue the skills necessary to manage a project well. Basically considering the work a lot easier than writing code or building something and thinking that anyone can do it (including themselves in your example). I think the reason for this is because a lot of people can do a shitty job managing a team and it's not as obvious as when people do a shitty job programming (or at least there are more people that can be a bad manager undetected than can be a bad programmer). It's harder to bullshit technical skills, but a bad manager could have good enough social/political skills to get power and it's probably also more likely to attract people looking for power. Engineering seems to provide a filter to avoid some of this naturally. That said being a really effective PM, Manager, VP is a skill different from programming and with a similar depth that shouldn't be dismissed easily. This is more obvious to HN probably because startup founders often have to get better at it in order to build a company. Since it tends to rely a decent amount on empathy and social skills in addition to being able to understand the technical pieces/prioritization it's also harder to know how good you'll be at it when starting. It is something you can get better at though, just takes investment/learning like anything else. Reminds me of Tom West from Soul of a New Machine.
debaserab2 11y ago
> I've never written anything that lives in a real production environment You've never maintained a production app and you're getting offers as director of engineering?
- mikeryan 11y ago
  A good friend (and ex boss) is a VP of engineering at a very large publicly traded "ex-startup" he has no engineering background outside of what he's picked up managing engineering teams (and I've seen him hack around every so often). At the Director or VP level in many companies managing engineers doesn't always mean you're actually an engineer, and in fact you may not want your best engineers in those roles.
  - Liuser 11y ago
    I would've thought having technical experience and the ability to get your hands dirty would be a requirement of being VP of Engineering (or similar). Two things that immediately come to mind is the ability to make competent technical decisions and estimate required time/resources required. Strong engineering/technical background is a requirement for the two. How do you even get into this leadership role without having the foundation? I completely agree that you may not want your best engineers in this role because interfacing with and leading people is a completely separate skill, but I would still think any competent exec with a technical title will have some technical experience.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  I have written code full-time for the past 7 years and been an engineer for the past 13, but have never maintained a "production app". There are large numbers of software engineers operating in fields where there is no such concept.
  - debaserab2 11y ago
    What is that exactly? I'm really curious. Presumably the code you write gets used by someone, right?
heraclez 11y ago
In Canada, you get sued if you call yourself an engineer when you're not part of an order of engineers. Even if you're a bona fide engineer, but not enrolled in the order, calling yourself one opens the floodgates of hell where spaghetti coders do the same and get hired by retarded HR departments to take the lead on some mission-critical software. I like this. I am a self-learned developer. When my peers call themselves engineers, I spit my coffee.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  I wish it were a protected word in the states, maybe an Engineering association sitting over it. Would help with things like H1B flooding
  - heraclez 11y ago
    As an experienced Canadian developer who is seeking a work visa to work in the US, it is actually extremely difficult to get one. It seems as though the US prioritizes shit-developers/wannabe-engineers over experienced Canadian developers. Which kind of makes sense, in that you feed your own before feeding your neighbour. So I really doubt that H1B flooding is a thing. Open to debate though.
    - popmystack 11y ago
      The first part of your statement doesn't really agree with your last.
    - jobu 11y ago
      It's difficult for people like you specifically because of the H1B flooding. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-game-h-1b-visa-program-leaving-smaller-ones-in-the-cold.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-game-h-... "Many of the visas are given out through a lottery, and a small number of giant global outsourcing companies had flooded the system with applications, significantly increasing their chances of success. While he had one application in last year’s lottery and lost, one of the outsourcing companies applied for at least 14,000." A quick fix would be to award H1B based on salary instead of lottery.

objclxt 11y ago

> [...] and yet I don't even remotely consider myself an engineer. I phone screened somebody not so long ago who asked me if it was the "kind of job where you have to write a lot of code", because they "weren't that sort of software engineer". Didn't quite know what to make of that.

wwweston 11y ago
That person might be perfect for my job. I've been largely reading mountains of code that other people have written, until I understand what it does, and then make (usually small) changes in order to either fix a defect or add functionality. I don't love it. Maybe the person you screened should be doing my job.
sbov 11y ago
Some of the funnest jobs are when you delete lots of code.
Apocryphon 11y ago
Maybe he was an IT person who doesn't know what IT is called.
swalsh 11y ago
It could be an awful way of saying he prefers maintenance to new development.

lintiness 11y ago

interest rates are nosediving around the globe as i type. euribor a year out is -.33% BID. us rates are going LOWER.

vdnkh 11y ago

If you have an engineering degree from an accredited program, you're an engineer. If you don't you're not. The US is very lax with usage of the word but in other countries it's classed in the same way "Doctor" is.

sbov 11y ago
The funny thing being, most of the best "software engineers" are people without software engineering degrees. Because the practice has existed longer than the degree has.
- heraclez 11y ago
  That's not the reason. If that were the reason, death would swiftly make it so the best engineers are those with degrees. The reason is because they learned out of innate curiosity and true passion. You always go farther with those. However, you go even farther with curiosity, passion and a degree.
- theandrewbailey 11y ago
  I guess that the vast majority of "software engineers" of any kind (not just the best) don't have software engineering degrees. Maybe you were thinking computer science degrees?
cylinder 11y ago
US is very lax with words, in general.
bebop 11y ago
I would even go so far as to say that you are not an engineer until you are a PE. This is coming from a "Software Engineer".

adventured 11y ago

Interest rates aren't going to tick up. The Fed isn't going to raise rates, they're going to cut and launch a new round of QE. That's not even a debate at this point, it's blatantly obvious. Will that end at some point with another asset crash? Maybe, however it's not going to happen soon. The Fed will print your brains out first to support stocks and real-estate. They have a lot of room to abuse the dollar from where it's at today.

brandur 11y ago
If I was a betting man, I'd side with you on this one in that low interest rates may be a permanent fixture until the Fed has pushed to the extreme and the system can bend no further. Can you elaborate on why you think it's "blatantly obvious" though? I can't make any of these types of guesses with high confidence.

api 11y ago

Tangent but: I doubt the rate raise will stick. They'll probably have to cut it again. I see a "planet Japan" scenario in which global central banks are zero-bound for decades, if not "forever". Rapid growth is over. There are no more frontiers and birth rates are stabilizing. From an ecological point of view the stabilization of birth rates is good, but it basically breaks all the economic assumptions of the past 250+ years. A heavily leveraged credit economy does not work without fairly rapid growth, and until the economy is fundamentally restructured toward something built for a more steady-state mode of operation we'll have to hack it by constantly printing money to prevent deflationary collapse. The only thing that might change this is something like the opening of the final frontier-- space. But in that case I'm not sure if it would... distances between say Earth and Mars are so vast that any Martian economy would effectively be a separate entity. It might experience rapid growth but I'm not sure if that would translate over here. The Homeworld might still be like Japan-- a zero-bound no-growth economy. I suppose an AI explosion that wasn't destructive might change things too by creating a lot of new non-corporeal economic entities, but we're well off into sci-fi land here. Edit: I don't necessarily mean that all forms of "growth" are over. We could still have tremendous growth in knowledge, technological capability, standard of living, and some amount of economic growth. But heavily leveraged inflationary credit economics requires crazy exponential growth in an absolute sense. Without crazy growth it breaks, and the only way to keep it nominally running is to pump money into it to prevent cascading default. In a sense I think the "pop Austrians" are right that the present system is broken, but they've historically had the failure mode exactly wrong. The failure mode is not hyperinflation-- it's hyperdeflation that's permanently held at bay by money printing ("Japan"). That's because pop Austrians don't get the money multiplier. Almost all money in circulation is credit/debt, not M1. You'd have to print absurd amounts of money and make sure it's distributed more widely than banks to cause a non-localized hyperinflation in a credit economy. (Localized hyperinflation is possible due to bubbles but these usually collapse.) Of course another way of keeping the illusion alive is to pump up localized credit bubbles repeatedly. These give the illusion to certain sectors or regions that the economy is still growing the way it should... for a while. But then they pop and you need another round of money printing to prevent hyperdeflation. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile these bubbles distort the price structure of the economy, such as by making housing ridiculous or driving certain commodities crazy.

rorykoehler 11y ago

The latest is data scientist or even scientist in general. People have realised that marketing and charisma will get them most of the way so they bs and reap the rewards. Sad but true.

luckydude 11y ago

It's the dotcom stuff all over again. I remember interviewing some guy who wanted to be my VP of engineering. Have you ever fired anyone? "Nope" Have you ever shipped a product and supported it for more than a year? "Nope" Do you have any quality engineers that would come with you? "Nope" Have you ever managed a manager? "Nope" I noped his ass out the door. Fear not, this craziness will pass.

amyjess 11y ago
You can thank companies giving out VP or Director titles to their first technical hires for that. At my last company, my boss was the first technical hire. His title was Director of Software Engineering. He got that title and the responsibilities that came with it solely because he was the first technical hire. He had no management experience at all. He was a great engineer, but he couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag. He had the double whammy of both not knowing a thing about process and not understanding people. He didn't think having a process was necessary because his own code was amazing, he wrote the initial versions of our software all by himself in what actually is a solid example of a well-engineered project, and he couldn't fathom how anyone's code could be less than amazing. He also couldn't handle stress, and he had a habit of screaming at his subordinates and treating us like children whenever he got stressed. His management was the biggest reason I quit.
- fossuser 11y ago
  I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I think engineers/developers/hackers tend to undervalue the skills necessary to manage a project well. Basically considering the work a lot easier than writing code or building something and thinking that anyone can do it (including themselves in your example). I think the reason for this is because a lot of people can do a shitty job managing a team and it's not as obvious as when people do a shitty job programming (or at least there are more people that can be a bad manager undetected than can be a bad programmer). It's harder to bullshit technical skills, but a bad manager could have good enough social/political skills to get power and it's probably also more likely to attract people looking for power. Engineering seems to provide a filter to avoid some of this naturally. That said being a really effective PM, Manager, VP is a skill different from programming and with a similar depth that shouldn't be dismissed easily. This is more obvious to HN probably because startup founders often have to get better at it in order to build a company. Since it tends to rely a decent amount on empathy and social skills in addition to being able to understand the technical pieces/prioritization it's also harder to know how good you'll be at it when starting. It is something you can get better at though, just takes investment/learning like anything else. Reminds me of Tom West from Soul of a New Machine.

debaserab2 11y ago

> I've never written anything that lives in a real production environment You've never maintained a production app and you're getting offers as director of engineering?

mikeryan 11y ago
A good friend (and ex boss) is a VP of engineering at a very large publicly traded "ex-startup" he has no engineering background outside of what he's picked up managing engineering teams (and I've seen him hack around every so often). At the Director or VP level in many companies managing engineers doesn't always mean you're actually an engineer, and in fact you may not want your best engineers in those roles.
- Liuser 11y ago
  I would've thought having technical experience and the ability to get your hands dirty would be a requirement of being VP of Engineering (or similar). Two things that immediately come to mind is the ability to make competent technical decisions and estimate required time/resources required. Strong engineering/technical background is a requirement for the two. How do you even get into this leadership role without having the foundation? I completely agree that you may not want your best engineers in this role because interfacing with and leading people is a completely separate skill, but I would still think any competent exec with a technical title will have some technical experience.
vonmoltke 11y ago
I have written code full-time for the past 7 years and been an engineer for the past 13, but have never maintained a "production app". There are large numbers of software engineers operating in fields where there is no such concept.
- debaserab2 11y ago
  What is that exactly? I'm really curious. Presumably the code you write gets used by someone, right?

heraclez 11y ago

In Canada, you get sued if you call yourself an engineer when you're not part of an order of engineers. Even if you're a bona fide engineer, but not enrolled in the order, calling yourself one opens the floodgates of hell where spaghetti coders do the same and get hired by retarded HR departments to take the lead on some mission-critical software. I like this. I am a self-learned developer. When my peers call themselves engineers, I spit my coffee.

brianwawok 11y ago
I wish it were a protected word in the states, maybe an Engineering association sitting over it. Would help with things like H1B flooding
- heraclez 11y ago
  As an experienced Canadian developer who is seeking a work visa to work in the US, it is actually extremely difficult to get one. It seems as though the US prioritizes shit-developers/wannabe-engineers over experienced Canadian developers. Which kind of makes sense, in that you feed your own before feeding your neighbour. So I really doubt that H1B flooding is a thing. Open to debate though.
  - popmystack 11y ago
    The first part of your statement doesn't really agree with your last.
  - jobu 11y ago
    It's difficult for people like you specifically because of the H1B flooding. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-game-h-1b-visa-program-leaving-smaller-ones-in-the-cold.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-game-h-... "Many of the visas are given out through a lottery, and a small number of giant global outsourcing companies had flooded the system with applications, significantly increasing their chances of success. While he had one application in last year’s lottery and lost, one of the outsourcing companies applied for at least 14,000." A quick fix would be to award H1B based on salary instead of lottery.