9 ms·

We are done with “Hacking”

69 points by jestinjoy1 8y ago

gjvc 8y ago
The author of that piece quotes EWD, but not in full, which is odd -- were he to have done so, it would have strengthened his thesis, viz.: "Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
- lixtra 8y ago
  The strive for simplicity is very old in the hard sciences. It’s already displayed in Euclid’s elements. Every generation rediscovers a virtue of the previous ones.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  Love this quote! Although equally it rings a little too true in tech.
- edflsafoiewq 8y ago
  "Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay." -– C.A.R. Hoare
commandlinefan 8y ago
> This programming bible earned a famous comment from Bill Gates: "It took incredible discipline, and several months, for me to read it." I know he's a trillionaire and all and probably smarter than me but still - as somebody who spent a full three years reading and working through the problems in the first three books, I wonder how deep an understanding he could really have walked away with after just a few months.
- mirekrusin 8y ago
  Enough seems to be the answer?
- vertline3 8y ago
  He was in math 55a in Harvard, it was considered the hardest math undergrad course in the country back then. So I think it's maybe possible for him.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    I took Math 55. There is no way any of my fellow students (or anyone else for that matter) could meaningfully work through the full Art of Computer Programming (or even one of the volumes) in “several months”, even working on it full time, except in some similar way to my grandfather “seeing all the art” in the Louvre in a few hours.
    - vertline3 8y ago
      That's amazing you did that, maybe he meant book one. I read where he was working on early compilers also, so maybe he had some odd domain knowledge.
- hackermailman 8y ago
  I believe that quote just references Vol 1, not 2 and 3 so 'several months' it's doable.
  - mordae 8y ago
    ... Without doing the proofs.
- paulpauper 8y ago
  I did a google search of Art of Computer Programming and see a ton of math problems. I was expecting more along the lines of actual code like assembly or machine code or something . Like actual code. How is summing an infinite series supposed to help me code better (summing the series is much easier, ill grant you that..combining ajax +css+php is hard )
mjw1007 8y ago
Summary: « the skills required of professional and successful programmers are drastically different from the ones needed back in the 1990s. The profession now requires less mathematics and algorithms and instead emphasizes more skills under the umbrella term "sociotech." » <author> is founder and CEO of software engineering and management platform <blah>.
- protomyth 8y ago
  So, I can expect this generation's CASE tool that magically generates all the optimized code from requirements given to this years priestho..... SocioTech Specialist? I think their case for advancement of development technologies or how much social interaction was needed in the 90's is a bit flawed.
  - rjsw 8y ago
    The CASE tool will generate code from Instagram posts.
originalsimba 8y ago
They've now moved on to clickbaiting. Yeah I'm not interested in what they have to say.
Latteland 8y ago
I think there are different kinds of programming jobs, and this article is referring to the kind of dev job that puts together pieces to solve problems, but it doesn't work at the fundamental level. to build a new operating system using the capabilities of some new hardware aspect, or say writing a new database that uses nvram and vector instructions to go fast, instead of the older dbs that generated a query and interpreted it row by row. You can't always get there by putting packages together. There are still people creating fundamental new infrastructure or building blocks. But probably a lot more people are just gluing things together to solve a problem.
zakum1 8y ago
Having worked in corporate IT, with all its human and technical challenges, i agree that the "sociotech" elements are critical for engineering, but I also think that corporates massively misunderstand the value of the hacker culture and underestimate the extent to which the "sociotech" challenges are a direct result of having a weak "hacker" culture... we should challenge the "band aid" approach to fixing corporate bullshit
- mattdeboard 8y ago
  Agreed but due to the dynamic interplay between the two, balancing them well, as leaders must do, takes both high EQ/empathy, and enough tech background to be credible. (Even if that tech background is working as a non dev in technical teams) Based purely on my personal experiences, leaders who have both boxes ticked are even more unicorn-y than the fabled 10x engineer.
bor0 8y ago
> Programmers do not need to write much code anymore; all they need to do in most cases is wire together already available components. As if this stops you from re-inventing the wheel in attempt to understand more. Understanding things is what distinguishes programmers. I had exactly the same discussion with one of my friends that wants to become a programmer. His argument was that programming is not fun at all because all we do is use libraries and frameworks. My counter-argument was the paragraph above.
- wilsonnb3 8y ago
  I agree with your friend, for the most part. Most days I feel more like a combination of a preschool teacher and a switchboard operator than a computer scientist. I'm not really sure how your first paragraph is a counter-argument to your friend. Reinventing the wheel to learn is just busywork. Reinventing the wheel because you need the wheel and don't have one available is fun. Unfortunately the wheel is always available now.
  - bor0 8y ago
    Let's agree that re-inventing the wheel makes one more experienced, and also that it helps understanding things better. I believe that this distinction is what makes one a good/true programmer, compared to just lego play. Edit: Also, I disagree that re-inventing the wheel is just busywork. Compare a programmer that just uses .sort() and another one that uses .sort() and implemented his own sort (disregarding the fact that he is not using his own sort) and really understands the math behind it. Which one would you rely on?
    - bor0 8y ago
      Hacking for sure is different nowadays, but that does not stop anyone from learning and understanding more.
- l_t 8y ago
  I would tell your friend that programming best occurs at the appropriate level of abstraction to succinctly express the problem at hand. For example, if you are trying to write "business logic", you don't want to have to worry about allocating memory or ensuring data consistency. You just want to worry about business concerns. I suspect your friend has simply not tried any sufficiently difficult programming project. If your problem is non-trivial, you feel appropriately grateful for libraries that provide higher layers of abstraction.
wellpast 8y ago
> Programmers have to know how to write maintainable code... He implies that this somehow falls into “socitech” ability, which it is not. Maintainable code is precise, well-factored code — almost pedantic — which requires an orthogonal (if not counterpointed) talent to the more “social” talents. I would go further to say that a mathematical understanding or at least inclination is required to write maintainable code. (In the sense that the same is required to write a readable academic paper.) Another assumption he seems to make here is that somehow there are all these algorithmic hackers who sit and write algorithms all day. No, I doubt this has been some kind of norm ever. Most of what we (business software) programmers write is business logic and data processing with an occasional, infrequent need — but need nevertheless — to break out a unique algorithm. You can scale up all you want and into the future but we are always going to need to understand the difference between a O(n^2) and O(n) algorithm. I’m sick of these kinds of pieces that are pure philistinism. The future isn’t going to save you from your lack of technical skills, education and awareness. Stay curious and develop yourself — your social self as much as your craft and profession.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  > I would go further to say that a mathematical understanding or at least inclination is required to write maintainable code. Maintainable code is more an act of writing than of mathematics.
  - wellpast 8y ago
    And (good) writing is more an act of mathematics than what most people would construe.
    - meesterdude 8y ago
      uh... no. Not that there aren't mathematics found within writing, but that argument is irrelevant to this evaluation of taking a mathmatical, formulaic approach to code vs. one that is descriptive, and caters to the ignorances and shortcomings of the human reader.
paulpauper 8y ago
They have to know how to get help outside of an office or even a project team when working remotely and alone. Aside from Stack Overflow, which dominates the Q&A platform for programming market, there are documentation and code repositories that a professional programmer must know how to navigate. Those who previously only relied on colleagues and friends will now lose to those who know how to learn from the entire Internet. Wouldn't programmers know how to code it themselves without req. Stack Overflow? I would be pissed spending $100k /year on programmer who uses Stack Overflow.
- little_goat_boy 8y ago
  Have you ever employeed a programmer, or worked as one? Stack overflow is a valuable resource. I'd be pissed if my boss told me not to use it.
  - paulpauper 8y ago
    I have done both. It's valuable if you are a novice and need help creating a loop or an event or something like that. If I'm paying then I'm assuming you know how to do those things. Would google hire a coder who uses Stack Overflow instead of knowing how to code without it? I cannot imagine a JavaScript coder who works for Google needing Stack Overflow for JavaScript problems.
    - wilsonnb3 8y ago
      It's unreasonable to expect people to retain knowledge of every little corner of a programming language when there's an easily available reference they could use instead. "How often they need to refer to reference material" is a pretty terrible metric for measuring the abilities of a programmer.
      - slededit 8y ago
        Its not an unreasonable metric, if a round trip through Stack Overflow is in your thought loop then you will be significantly more limited than someone who doesn't need that. If you are doing something very obscure then its reasonable, but most programmers don't do obscure things on a daily basis. Its similar to being unable to do math in your head. You can get away with always using the calculator but you'll be outperformed by someone who can do it without dropping their pencil.
paulpauper 8y ago
3x salary inflation would mean $240k. This says it's only $90k: The average salary for a Programmer is $89,128 in San Francisco, CA. Salaries estimates are based on 238 salaries submitted anonymously to Glassdoor by Programmer employees in San Francisco, CA.... are coders really making $240k /year? https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/san-francisco-programmer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,13_IM759_KO14,24.htm https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/san-francisco-programmer-s...?
- closeparen 8y ago
  The term Programmer is typically used to represent a much lower-status, lower-paid view of the work than Software Engineer. Check Glassdoor - it’s a pretty substantial salary difference. Confused by the downvotes. Programmer: $89k. Software Engineer: $137k.
- blazespin 8y ago
  Yes, when you add rsus and sign on bonuses.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  Even here in Toronto I know many making that much or far more. Core framework devs make about $500k a year and AI devs with AI PhD's from good schools are in the seven figures per year.
  - usmannk 8y ago
    What’s an example of a “core framework dev”?
    - 3pt14159 8y ago
      Ember JS core team member, for example.
- herval 8y ago
  Yes - 220-250k is average total compensation for a senior in the bigcos in SF. Upwards to $500k+/y is not unheard of either... the variance is pretty crazy
codeonfire 8y ago
There is a dichotomy in tech between makers and takers. Some people try to be a maker or a few years and can't do it for a number of reasons. There is a common set of flawed thinking that causes them to decide that programming is dead. One, their world view is different because they might have more wealth and have decided that there is an infinite pool of makers to exploit. This is obviously flawed. Companies go for years without finding the right person. When they do find someone, the person they settle on is often a faker. Two, they think robots build the constituent components that go into systems. Those memory chips are made by actual people. Just because they are 300x cheaper does not mean that it is unimportant to know how they work. Three, the status quo is the end state of technology and now is the exploitation phase where we use tech instead of make tech. Fourth, they think everything is done for cash money instead of building capabilities. This guy also seems to think programmers are so mentally deficient they are unable communicate with the 'open source community' and that this is in some way how programmers discover new technologies. He also thinks people did not contribute code in the 1990s. Where did all this software come from? Typical business view of open source. Originally b-schools actually lectured that open source was anti-business like a trade union. Now I guess they think it is sort of a crutch for too-dumb-to-breathe programmers? There are tons of people like this guy in tech. Coded a year or two and found out the were a taker and not a maker. Still pretending to be a maker though. Their idealized programmer befits a corporation. Colors in the lines and writes "perfect code" which has no meaning other than has been annointed by CR's as to make it seem owned by the company rather than the individual. Their ideal programmer is someone who doesn't need to understand the details, works as a unit in a team, and gathers all of their knowledge by "getting help" from the company. It is absolutely blasphemy in the corporate world to suggest that anyone synthesize his or her own ideas. That's of course ridiculous but in a business setting, the takers absolutely must discount creative thought of employees 100% which literally the "product" up for grabs in tech companies. Obviously if people knew the value and how to exploit their own original ideas they wouldn't need the fucking company or takers. As far as math and algorithms, those are more important than ever. The reason you don't see people working on those is that those people are hidden from public and private view, jealously guarded by the takers who think they control them. Natural sciences did not fucking change since the 90's. A surface to air missile or high frequency trading algorithm or advanced simulation is as costly and valuable as ever. It's the author perception of what is valuable that has changed. He's looking for code monkeys to exploit who will "get help" and write "clean code" whatever the hell that means.
njovin 8y ago
The author repeatedly cites the availability of cheaper hardware as some sort of savior of modern programming but fails to mention that the volume of data and the real-time demands of modern products were not present for many older systems that ran on more expensive hardware.
- freeflight 8y ago
  Volumen of data of course increased, but how much of that increase does actually account for "growth" and not just "inefficiency bloat" as a result of cheap hardware resources? "Website obesity" [0] is a phenomenon where this is especially evident. [0] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
kough 8y ago
No mention here yet so I'll recommend: if you think this idea might have merit and would like to read the relevant literature, check out Deming's The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market [0]. Here's the abstract: > The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs re- quiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs - including many STEM occu- pations - shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth was particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and so- cial skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more effi- ciently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I investigate using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s. [0]: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/ddeming/files/deming_socialskills_aug16.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/ddeming/files/deming_socia...
- drunkpotato 8y ago
  This seems to be the sterile academic description of the phenomenon of bullshit jobs[0]. [0]. https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
mmaunder 8y ago
This post tries to abstract programming away into the OSS community, stackoverflow community, hardware providers etc, and takes the position that programming today requires you to use and direct those resources. Programmers create open source, write helpful SO posts and design hardware and OS. This reminds me of the assumption that the 'cloud' is making IT personel obsolete, when it's just someone else's computer and IT staff.
- mmt 8y ago
  > 'cloud' is making IT personel obsolete, when it's just someone else's computer and IT staff. Worse, it's just someone else's computer and mostly just hardware-IT staff, and that's not the difficult or expensive part, despite the current mythology among those who have never done it.
calahad 8y ago
"Programmers do not need to write much code anymore; all they need to do in most cases is wire together already available components." As a general statement, I feel like this is objectively false. Just look at how much code gets added to Github daily.
- wilsonnb3 8y ago
  I'm sure a lot of code gets added to GitHub every day, but the amount that's necessary (not a reimplementation of something that already exists) and not just glue code wiring other components together is probably pretty small.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  I'll take it a step further, the author is an idiot. I am a huge proponent of using existing libraries and plugins but it actually takes real code to make it function. Again this person is an idiot and clearly shouldn't be writing code or articles.
  - needlepont 8y ago
    He is pointing to a phenomenon I have witnessed which is copy-pasta and a mediocre understanding of the domain is enough to pass as a programmer these days.
  - P_I_Staker 8y ago
    Yikes, harsh. I mostly agree though. I thought this article was silly and couldn't even finish it. I'm not really sure what his point was. Since the conception of software engineering as a discipline, maintainability and code reuse has been highly desirable. It's just taken a while for it to sink in for some people. Re-using code simply means you write different code instead of wasting your time; but you're still writing code.
  - dang 8y ago
    Personal attacks aren't ok regardless of how wrong someone is, so please don't post them to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
antod 8y ago
As an aside, was a gigabyte of memory only $1000 back in 2000? I seem to remember it being higher than that.
- protomyth 8y ago
  https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm If you had enough memory slots on the motherboard.
- mmt 8y ago
  You may be remembering proprietary (e.g. Sun) versus commodity (the prices for which were even lower, according to the table in the sibling comment). This sort of markup still exists in "enterprise" hardware today, which is why moving to the cloud actually is a cost savings for some places. Of course, operating their own operating their own commodity hardware instead would save even more, but this is typically a political impossibility.
  - antod 8y ago
    Thinking back it was probably due to currency swings for NZD <-> USD. There was a period of few years back then when the exchange rate could be anywhere between $0.40 USD and $0.75 USD. So $1000 USD could mean very different amounts in NZD depending on exactly when my hazy memories were thinking about. There were also various Taiwanese earthquakes and resin factory fires etc that probably caused me to remember the price spikes better than the average prices. Well that's my excuse :)
craigsmansion 8y ago
> Edsger W. Dijkstra's words [..] grow increasingly more valuable every year. Using a Dijkstra quote in an article where sentences such as "The profession now requires less mathematics and algorithms and instead emphasizes more skills under the umbrella term `sociotech.' are used. I wonder what Prof. Dijkstra would have to say about this "sociotech" umbrella. Actually I don't, because that's the value of having an understanding of a subject matter deeper than an Internet search and a copy and paste: it prevents one from throwing quotes and invented words around that sound good, but ultimately mean nothing useful. > It seems that the future of programming rests less in math and more in sociotech relationships between people. Or: it seems that the future of making your fortune with software rests less in math and more in marketing. True though it may be, I don't know how this relates to the discipline of computer programming.
mycall 8y ago
> In 2018, they are currently making three times more That's news to me.
- mmt 8y ago
  The article also quotes a misinterpetation of a misstatement of Moore's Law: > "Computers [have] doubled in power every 18 months for the last 40 years." This, along with the salary estimate you mentioned made all the numbers in the article quite suspect. That doesn't necessarily invalidate whatever point the author was trying to make, but it does cast a shadow of lack of seriousness on the whole article.
afandian 8y ago
Long shot, as this is a CACM article. Does anyone in Oxford UK want a 2ft foot worth of paper CACM editions from 2012 to 2015 in Oxford UK? I have been avoiding throwing them out but now getting round to it. Let me know.
- sixstringtheory 8y ago
  If nobody takes them, there’s gotta be a small library somewhere that would accept them, or even one of those Little Free Libraries (if you have them there).
  - afandian 8y ago
    We have a local library run by the council, but I'm not sure if they'd take donations like this. Can't hurt to ask, I suppose. Then there's the countless libraries in the University of Oxford, some of which might want to stock it, but I'd be surprised if they didn't either already.
- gjvc 8y ago
  Yes, I'm in Oxford and will gladly take them off your hands.
Svoka 8y ago
Author, Yegor Bugayenko, is misogynist in worst of it. I listened to him being guest on a podcast, where he told that women brain is unfit to perform logical tasks, like coding or planning, and that women are much more fit at home kitchen than in any office. And I wish I was exaggerating, but one of the hosts was female programmer and he tried to convince her that she's inferior as professional because of her gender.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  Link?
  - Svoka 8y ago
    above
- freeflight 8y ago
  What podcast was it?
  - Svoka 8y ago
    https://radio-t.com/p/2017/06/03/podcast-548/ https://radio-t.com/p/2017/06/03/podcast-548/ (1:26:00) It is in russian though. Egor answers to a question, why his company has only 2 female coders from 500. His answers is a joke "Female Coders are like guinea pigs, neither Hyena neither Pigs. So lets not try to make programmers from women, because they they'are not women and not coders"
- chomp 8y ago
  Hey, I think this is an ad hominem argument and not really relevant to the hacking -> sociotech argument the author was trying to make.
  - Svoka 8y ago
    Any article from him is about self promotion. He is trying to promote his views among which are extremely sexist and disgusting ones. He also promotes his startup and anyone backing it should know whom they're dealing with.
hazeii 8y ago
>In order to win in this war, programmers had to be both trained and talented in computer science... Being long enough in the tooth to have been 'hacking' back then, I'd strongly disagree with that since - and rather obviously given the era - there was little training to be had. Rather, I'd characterise it as being a time where anyone (irrespective of talent or training) could get their own computer and be the master of it. Personally, I resent the system trying to take that control away from us (in this case, trying to pass us from an age of controlling our own computers to having to be licensed, controlled and directed in what we can do with them).

69 points by jestinjoy1 8y ago

gjvc 8y ago

The author of that piece quotes EWD, but not in full, which is odd -- were he to have done so, it would have strengthened his thesis, viz.: "Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

lixtra 8y ago
The strive for simplicity is very old in the hard sciences. It’s already displayed in Euclid’s elements. Every generation rediscovers a virtue of the previous ones.
meesterdude 8y ago
Love this quote! Although equally it rings a little too true in tech.
edflsafoiewq 8y ago
"Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay." -– C.A.R. Hoare

commandlinefan 8y ago

> This programming bible earned a famous comment from Bill Gates: "It took incredible discipline, and several months, for me to read it." I know he's a trillionaire and all and probably smarter than me but still - as somebody who spent a full three years reading and working through the problems in the first three books, I wonder how deep an understanding he could really have walked away with after just a few months.

mirekrusin 8y ago
Enough seems to be the answer?
vertline3 8y ago
He was in math 55a in Harvard, it was considered the hardest math undergrad course in the country back then. So I think it's maybe possible for him.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  I took Math 55. There is no way any of my fellow students (or anyone else for that matter) could meaningfully work through the full Art of Computer Programming (or even one of the volumes) in “several months”, even working on it full time, except in some similar way to my grandfather “seeing all the art” in the Louvre in a few hours.
  - vertline3 8y ago
    That's amazing you did that, maybe he meant book one. I read where he was working on early compilers also, so maybe he had some odd domain knowledge.
hackermailman 8y ago
I believe that quote just references Vol 1, not 2 and 3 so 'several months' it's doable.
- mordae 8y ago
  ... Without doing the proofs.
paulpauper 8y ago
I did a google search of Art of Computer Programming and see a ton of math problems. I was expecting more along the lines of actual code like assembly or machine code or something . Like actual code. How is summing an infinite series supposed to help me code better (summing the series is much easier, ill grant you that..combining ajax +css+php is hard )

mjw1007 8y ago

Summary: « the skills required of professional and successful programmers are drastically different from the ones needed back in the 1990s. The profession now requires less mathematics and algorithms and instead emphasizes more skills under the umbrella term "sociotech." » <author> is founder and CEO of software engineering and management platform <blah>.

protomyth 8y ago
So, I can expect this generation's CASE tool that magically generates all the optimized code from requirements given to this years priestho..... SocioTech Specialist? I think their case for advancement of development technologies or how much social interaction was needed in the 90's is a bit flawed.
- rjsw 8y ago
  The CASE tool will generate code from Instagram posts.

originalsimba 8y ago

They've now moved on to clickbaiting. Yeah I'm not interested in what they have to say.

Latteland 8y ago

I think there are different kinds of programming jobs, and this article is referring to the kind of dev job that puts together pieces to solve problems, but it doesn't work at the fundamental level. to build a new operating system using the capabilities of some new hardware aspect, or say writing a new database that uses nvram and vector instructions to go fast, instead of the older dbs that generated a query and interpreted it row by row. You can't always get there by putting packages together. There are still people creating fundamental new infrastructure or building blocks. But probably a lot more people are just gluing things together to solve a problem.

zakum1 8y ago

Having worked in corporate IT, with all its human and technical challenges, i agree that the "sociotech" elements are critical for engineering, but I also think that corporates massively misunderstand the value of the hacker culture and underestimate the extent to which the "sociotech" challenges are a direct result of having a weak "hacker" culture... we should challenge the "band aid" approach to fixing corporate bullshit

mattdeboard 8y ago
Agreed but due to the dynamic interplay between the two, balancing them well, as leaders must do, takes both high EQ/empathy, and enough tech background to be credible. (Even if that tech background is working as a non dev in technical teams) Based purely on my personal experiences, leaders who have both boxes ticked are even more unicorn-y than the fabled 10x engineer.

bor0 8y ago

> Programmers do not need to write much code anymore; all they need to do in most cases is wire together already available components. As if this stops you from re-inventing the wheel in attempt to understand more. Understanding things is what distinguishes programmers. I had exactly the same discussion with one of my friends that wants to become a programmer. His argument was that programming is not fun at all because all we do is use libraries and frameworks. My counter-argument was the paragraph above.

wilsonnb3 8y ago
I agree with your friend, for the most part. Most days I feel more like a combination of a preschool teacher and a switchboard operator than a computer scientist. I'm not really sure how your first paragraph is a counter-argument to your friend. Reinventing the wheel to learn is just busywork. Reinventing the wheel because you need the wheel and don't have one available is fun. Unfortunately the wheel is always available now.
- bor0 8y ago
  Let's agree that re-inventing the wheel makes one more experienced, and also that it helps understanding things better. I believe that this distinction is what makes one a good/true programmer, compared to just lego play. Edit: Also, I disagree that re-inventing the wheel is just busywork. Compare a programmer that just uses .sort() and another one that uses .sort() and implemented his own sort (disregarding the fact that he is not using his own sort) and really understands the math behind it. Which one would you rely on?
  - bor0 8y ago
    Hacking for sure is different nowadays, but that does not stop anyone from learning and understanding more.
l_t 8y ago
I would tell your friend that programming best occurs at the appropriate level of abstraction to succinctly express the problem at hand. For example, if you are trying to write "business logic", you don't want to have to worry about allocating memory or ensuring data consistency. You just want to worry about business concerns. I suspect your friend has simply not tried any sufficiently difficult programming project. If your problem is non-trivial, you feel appropriately grateful for libraries that provide higher layers of abstraction.

wellpast 8y ago

> Programmers have to know how to write maintainable code... He implies that this somehow falls into “socitech” ability, which it is not. Maintainable code is precise, well-factored code — almost pedantic — which requires an orthogonal (if not counterpointed) talent to the more “social” talents. I would go further to say that a mathematical understanding or at least inclination is required to write maintainable code. (In the sense that the same is required to write a readable academic paper.) Another assumption he seems to make here is that somehow there are all these algorithmic hackers who sit and write algorithms all day. No, I doubt this has been some kind of norm ever. Most of what we (business software) programmers write is business logic and data processing with an occasional, infrequent need — but need nevertheless — to break out a unique algorithm. You can scale up all you want and into the future but we are always going to need to understand the difference between a O(n^2) and O(n) algorithm. I’m sick of these kinds of pieces that are pure philistinism. The future isn’t going to save you from your lack of technical skills, education and awareness. Stay curious and develop yourself — your social self as much as your craft and profession.

meesterdude 8y ago
> I would go further to say that a mathematical understanding or at least inclination is required to write maintainable code. Maintainable code is more an act of writing than of mathematics.
- wellpast 8y ago
  And (good) writing is more an act of mathematics than what most people would construe.
  - meesterdude 8y ago
    uh... no. Not that there aren't mathematics found within writing, but that argument is irrelevant to this evaluation of taking a mathmatical, formulaic approach to code vs. one that is descriptive, and caters to the ignorances and shortcomings of the human reader.

paulpauper 8y ago

They have to know how to get help outside of an office or even a project team when working remotely and alone. Aside from Stack Overflow, which dominates the Q&A platform for programming market, there are documentation and code repositories that a professional programmer must know how to navigate. Those who previously only relied on colleagues and friends will now lose to those who know how to learn from the entire Internet. Wouldn't programmers know how to code it themselves without req. Stack Overflow? I would be pissed spending $100k /year on programmer who uses Stack Overflow.

little_goat_boy 8y ago
Have you ever employeed a programmer, or worked as one? Stack overflow is a valuable resource. I'd be pissed if my boss told me not to use it.
- paulpauper 8y ago
  I have done both. It's valuable if you are a novice and need help creating a loop or an event or something like that. If I'm paying then I'm assuming you know how to do those things. Would google hire a coder who uses Stack Overflow instead of knowing how to code without it? I cannot imagine a JavaScript coder who works for Google needing Stack Overflow for JavaScript problems.
  - wilsonnb3 8y ago
    It's unreasonable to expect people to retain knowledge of every little corner of a programming language when there's an easily available reference they could use instead. "How often they need to refer to reference material" is a pretty terrible metric for measuring the abilities of a programmer.
    - slededit 8y ago
      Its not an unreasonable metric, if a round trip through Stack Overflow is in your thought loop then you will be significantly more limited than someone who doesn't need that. If you are doing something very obscure then its reasonable, but most programmers don't do obscure things on a daily basis. Its similar to being unable to do math in your head. You can get away with always using the calculator but you'll be outperformed by someone who can do it without dropping their pencil.

paulpauper 8y ago

3x salary inflation would mean $240k. This says it's only $90k: The average salary for a Programmer is $89,128 in San Francisco, CA. Salaries estimates are based on 238 salaries submitted anonymously to Glassdoor by Programmer employees in San Francisco, CA.... are coders really making $240k /year? https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/san-francisco-programmer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,13_IM759_KO14,24.htm https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/san-francisco-programmer-s...?

closeparen 8y ago
The term Programmer is typically used to represent a much lower-status, lower-paid view of the work than Software Engineer. Check Glassdoor - it’s a pretty substantial salary difference. Confused by the downvotes. Programmer: $89k. Software Engineer: $137k.
blazespin 8y ago
Yes, when you add rsus and sign on bonuses.
3pt14159 8y ago
Even here in Toronto I know many making that much or far more. Core framework devs make about $500k a year and AI devs with AI PhD's from good schools are in the seven figures per year.
- usmannk 8y ago
  What’s an example of a “core framework dev”?
  - 3pt14159 8y ago
    Ember JS core team member, for example.
herval 8y ago
Yes - 220-250k is average total compensation for a senior in the bigcos in SF. Upwards to $500k+/y is not unheard of either... the variance is pretty crazy

codeonfire 8y ago

There is a dichotomy in tech between makers and takers. Some people try to be a maker or a few years and can't do it for a number of reasons. There is a common set of flawed thinking that causes them to decide that programming is dead. One, their world view is different because they might have more wealth and have decided that there is an infinite pool of makers to exploit. This is obviously flawed. Companies go for years without finding the right person. When they do find someone, the person they settle on is often a faker. Two, they think robots build the constituent components that go into systems. Those memory chips are made by actual people. Just because they are 300x cheaper does not mean that it is unimportant to know how they work. Three, the status quo is the end state of technology and now is the exploitation phase where we use tech instead of make tech. Fourth, they think everything is done for cash money instead of building capabilities. This guy also seems to think programmers are so mentally deficient they are unable communicate with the 'open source community' and that this is in some way how programmers discover new technologies. He also thinks people did not contribute code in the 1990s. Where did all this software come from? Typical business view of open source. Originally b-schools actually lectured that open source was anti-business like a trade union. Now I guess they think it is sort of a crutch for too-dumb-to-breathe programmers? There are tons of people like this guy in tech. Coded a year or two and found out the were a taker and not a maker. Still pretending to be a maker though. Their idealized programmer befits a corporation. Colors in the lines and writes "perfect code" which has no meaning other than has been annointed by CR's as to make it seem owned by the company rather than the individual. Their ideal programmer is someone who doesn't need to understand the details, works as a unit in a team, and gathers all of their knowledge by "getting help" from the company. It is absolutely blasphemy in the corporate world to suggest that anyone synthesize his or her own ideas. That's of course ridiculous but in a business setting, the takers absolutely must discount creative thought of employees 100% which literally the "product" up for grabs in tech companies. Obviously if people knew the value and how to exploit their own original ideas they wouldn't need the fucking company or takers. As far as math and algorithms, those are more important than ever. The reason you don't see people working on those is that those people are hidden from public and private view, jealously guarded by the takers who think they control them. Natural sciences did not fucking change since the 90's. A surface to air missile or high frequency trading algorithm or advanced simulation is as costly and valuable as ever. It's the author perception of what is valuable that has changed. He's looking for code monkeys to exploit who will "get help" and write "clean code" whatever the hell that means.

njovin 8y ago

The author repeatedly cites the availability of cheaper hardware as some sort of savior of modern programming but fails to mention that the volume of data and the real-time demands of modern products were not present for many older systems that ran on more expensive hardware.

freeflight 8y ago
Volumen of data of course increased, but how much of that increase does actually account for "growth" and not just "inefficiency bloat" as a result of cheap hardware resources? "Website obesity" [0] is a phenomenon where this is especially evident. [0] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

kough 8y ago

No mention here yet so I'll recommend: if you think this idea might have merit and would like to read the relevant literature, check out Deming's The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market [0]. Here's the abstract: > The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs re- quiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs - including many STEM occu- pations - shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth was particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and so- cial skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more effi- ciently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I investigate using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s. [0]: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/ddeming/files/deming_socialskills_aug16.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/ddeming/files/deming_socia...

drunkpotato 8y ago
This seems to be the sterile academic description of the phenomenon of bullshit jobs[0]. [0]. https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

mmaunder 8y ago

This post tries to abstract programming away into the OSS community, stackoverflow community, hardware providers etc, and takes the position that programming today requires you to use and direct those resources. Programmers create open source, write helpful SO posts and design hardware and OS. This reminds me of the assumption that the 'cloud' is making IT personel obsolete, when it's just someone else's computer and IT staff.

mmt 8y ago
> 'cloud' is making IT personel obsolete, when it's just someone else's computer and IT staff. Worse, it's just someone else's computer and mostly just hardware-IT staff, and that's not the difficult or expensive part, despite the current mythology among those who have never done it.

calahad 8y ago

"Programmers do not need to write much code anymore; all they need to do in most cases is wire together already available components." As a general statement, I feel like this is objectively false. Just look at how much code gets added to Github daily.

wilsonnb3 8y ago
I'm sure a lot of code gets added to GitHub every day, but the amount that's necessary (not a reimplementation of something that already exists) and not just glue code wiring other components together is probably pretty small.
paulie_a 8y ago
I'll take it a step further, the author is an idiot. I am a huge proponent of using existing libraries and plugins but it actually takes real code to make it function. Again this person is an idiot and clearly shouldn't be writing code or articles.
- needlepont 8y ago
  He is pointing to a phenomenon I have witnessed which is copy-pasta and a mediocre understanding of the domain is enough to pass as a programmer these days.
- P_I_Staker 8y ago
  Yikes, harsh. I mostly agree though. I thought this article was silly and couldn't even finish it. I'm not really sure what his point was. Since the conception of software engineering as a discipline, maintainability and code reuse has been highly desirable. It's just taken a while for it to sink in for some people. Re-using code simply means you write different code instead of wasting your time; but you're still writing code.
- dang 8y ago
  Personal attacks aren't ok regardless of how wrong someone is, so please don't post them to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

antod 8y ago

As an aside, was a gigabyte of memory only $1000 back in 2000? I seem to remember it being higher than that.

protomyth 8y ago
https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm If you had enough memory slots on the motherboard.
mmt 8y ago
You may be remembering proprietary (e.g. Sun) versus commodity (the prices for which were even lower, according to the table in the sibling comment). This sort of markup still exists in "enterprise" hardware today, which is why moving to the cloud actually is a cost savings for some places. Of course, operating their own operating their own commodity hardware instead would save even more, but this is typically a political impossibility.
- antod 8y ago
  Thinking back it was probably due to currency swings for NZD <-> USD. There was a period of few years back then when the exchange rate could be anywhere between $0.40 USD and $0.75 USD. So $1000 USD could mean very different amounts in NZD depending on exactly when my hazy memories were thinking about. There were also various Taiwanese earthquakes and resin factory fires etc that probably caused me to remember the price spikes better than the average prices. Well that's my excuse :)

craigsmansion 8y ago

> Edsger W. Dijkstra's words [..] grow increasingly more valuable every year. Using a Dijkstra quote in an article where sentences such as "The profession now requires less mathematics and algorithms and instead emphasizes more skills under the umbrella term `sociotech.' are used. I wonder what Prof. Dijkstra would have to say about this "sociotech" umbrella. Actually I don't, because that's the value of having an understanding of a subject matter deeper than an Internet search and a copy and paste: it prevents one from throwing quotes and invented words around that sound good, but ultimately mean nothing useful. > It seems that the future of programming rests less in math and more in sociotech relationships between people. Or: it seems that the future of making your fortune with software rests less in math and more in marketing. True though it may be, I don't know how this relates to the discipline of computer programming.

mycall 8y ago

> In 2018, they are currently making three times more That's news to me.

mmt 8y ago
The article also quotes a misinterpetation of a misstatement of Moore's Law: > "Computers [have] doubled in power every 18 months for the last 40 years." This, along with the salary estimate you mentioned made all the numbers in the article quite suspect. That doesn't necessarily invalidate whatever point the author was trying to make, but it does cast a shadow of lack of seriousness on the whole article.

afandian 8y ago

Long shot, as this is a CACM article. Does anyone in Oxford UK want a 2ft foot worth of paper CACM editions from 2012 to 2015 in Oxford UK? I have been avoiding throwing them out but now getting round to it. Let me know.

sixstringtheory 8y ago
If nobody takes them, there’s gotta be a small library somewhere that would accept them, or even one of those Little Free Libraries (if you have them there).
- afandian 8y ago
  We have a local library run by the council, but I'm not sure if they'd take donations like this. Can't hurt to ask, I suppose. Then there's the countless libraries in the University of Oxford, some of which might want to stock it, but I'd be surprised if they didn't either already.
gjvc 8y ago
Yes, I'm in Oxford and will gladly take them off your hands.

Svoka 8y ago

Author, Yegor Bugayenko, is misogynist in worst of it. I listened to him being guest on a podcast, where he told that women brain is unfit to perform logical tasks, like coding or planning, and that women are much more fit at home kitchen than in any office. And I wish I was exaggerating, but one of the hosts was female programmer and he tried to convince her that she's inferior as professional because of her gender.

paulddraper 8y ago
Link?
- Svoka 8y ago
  above
freeflight 8y ago
What podcast was it?
- Svoka 8y ago
  https://radio-t.com/p/2017/06/03/podcast-548/ https://radio-t.com/p/2017/06/03/podcast-548/ (1:26:00) It is in russian though. Egor answers to a question, why his company has only 2 female coders from 500. His answers is a joke "Female Coders are like guinea pigs, neither Hyena neither Pigs. So lets not try to make programmers from women, because they they'are not women and not coders"
chomp 8y ago
Hey, I think this is an ad hominem argument and not really relevant to the hacking -> sociotech argument the author was trying to make.
- Svoka 8y ago
  Any article from him is about self promotion. He is trying to promote his views among which are extremely sexist and disgusting ones. He also promotes his startup and anyone backing it should know whom they're dealing with.

hazeii 8y ago

>In order to win in this war, programmers had to be both trained and talented in computer science... Being long enough in the tooth to have been 'hacking' back then, I'd strongly disagree with that since - and rather obviously given the era - there was little training to be had. Rather, I'd characterise it as being a time where anyone (irrespective of talent or training) could get their own computer and be the master of it. Personally, I resent the system trying to take that control away from us (in this case, trying to pass us from an age of controlling our own computers to having to be licensed, controlled and directed in what we can do with them).