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I have not experienced that "endless cycle of mindless mechanical labour that has become the software business". I am however experiencing the reality of 99% o

by avip 7y ago

I have not experienced that "endless cycle of mindless mechanical labour that has become the software business". I am however experiencing the reality of 99% of software products being, to be polite, unnecessary. And that does bother me. I've spent over 2 years now compromising any other consideration in the sake of building something that I see as important and useful. I've relocated, I took junior jobs, worked with tech stack I hate or know nothing about. I did some effort (not enough, yet). And you know what? it worked :) I now work on a product I love and feel related to. I cut my salary down ~25% (I could afford that thanks to my amazing better half). I also officially work 80% and occasionally from home. That whole package really helped me to reenergize and get myself together as I was very close to declaring myself "X-software developer" and pivot to some other profession.

Animats 7y ago
"I am however experiencing the reality of 99% of software products being, to be polite, unnecessary. And that does bother me." Yes. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” - Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook. I was lucky. I got to work on some good problems. Like "Can we get computers to talk reliably to each other over this Internet thing even when they come from different companies with different operating systems and operate over a wide variety of connections." And "Can we cram a useful CAD program into a rather small PC". And "Can we get a multiprocessor OS and computer to stay up for a month or two instead of crashing several times a day." Early in my career, there were many big problems that clearly needed solving. Now we're past that. Most of the high-value problems have been dealt with. Most new software is rather banal. Or hostile.
- adventured 7y ago
  > “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” - Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook. That's something that only people in a very small corner of the US tech industry actually believe. It's not even remotely close to being true. The people figuring out how to get other people to click on ads, are not the smartest people of any generation. Amusingly the people in the ad-click industry are the ones that spread that false premise (Hammerbacher) because it feels better to pretend to be super smart and wasting it, rather than the alternative. The smartest people of this generation work at SpaceX. They work on the Large Hadron Collider. They work for DARPA. They work for NASA or ESA or CNSA. They work for AMD, TSMC, Intel, nVidia or ARM. They work on CRISPR. They work for Intuitive Surgical or Illumina. They work for Boston Dynamics. They work for Biogen. They're working on the next gene therapy or the next cure for a massive killer disease ala Pharmasset. They're working on autonomous vehicles for Waymo or Tesla. They're working on hypersonic weapons for the Russian or Chinese militaries (which humiliates ad-click work by comparison to how difficult it is and the mental capabilities that it requires). They're working on new nuclear reactor technology. They're Jennifer Doudna or George Church, not Jeff Hammerbacher & the ad teams at Facebook or Google.
  - computerist 7y ago
    100% agreed. But it seems to me that OP isn't considering changing his professional field. Did you mean only researchers and scientists in the above-mentioned companies to be smart people or plain software worker bots as well?
  - 9dev 7y ago
    Thank you for this comment. I often share the frustration with the "visible" software market, eg. the loudest bunch on the internet, so it's easy to forget all those great and inspiring projects and the people making them possible.
  - buboard 7y ago
    That's needlessly adversarial. Smart people are useful in various positions. Lots of bureaucrats work on LHC, DARPA etc, lots of supersmart people are hired by Faangs (Hinton, Lecun). The distribution of genius is always extremely peaked with vast majority of scientists suffering some dunning kruger, wherever they are.
- nscalf 7y ago
  > Most of the high-value problems have been dealt with. I could not disagree with this more. Most of the underlying problems have been solved, now we don't have to worry about buying and setting up machines to run our servers, or making a computer be reliable before we can start working on our problems. This is the most exciting time ever to start working on real high-value problems, because there isn't a lot of stuff in the way stopping you from getting to work on it. There are still a ridiculous amount of high-value problems left to work on, for example, biology and computer science are just getting to a point where we can do meaningful work there. In 30 years, there will be someone talking about working in the underlying problems there and saying most of the high-value problems have been dealt with. Every field has a lot of crap optimized towards just making some profit, and the underlying tools have made it easier to build something just to make a buck, but you can choose to filter down to more exciting projects.
- WWLink 7y ago
  You can still do a lot of those kinda things on embedded machines. :)

by avip 7y ago

Animats 7y ago

"I am however experiencing the reality of 99% of software products being, to be polite, unnecessary. And that does bother me." Yes. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” - Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook. I was lucky. I got to work on some good problems. Like "Can we get computers to talk reliably to each other over this Internet thing even when they come from different companies with different operating systems and operate over a wide variety of connections." And "Can we cram a useful CAD program into a rather small PC". And "Can we get a multiprocessor OS and computer to stay up for a month or two instead of crashing several times a day." Early in my career, there were many big problems that clearly needed solving. Now we're past that. Most of the high-value problems have been dealt with. Most new software is rather banal. Or hostile.

adventured 7y ago
> “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” - Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook. That's something that only people in a very small corner of the US tech industry actually believe. It's not even remotely close to being true. The people figuring out how to get other people to click on ads, are not the smartest people of any generation. Amusingly the people in the ad-click industry are the ones that spread that false premise (Hammerbacher) because it feels better to pretend to be super smart and wasting it, rather than the alternative. The smartest people of this generation work at SpaceX. They work on the Large Hadron Collider. They work for DARPA. They work for NASA or ESA or CNSA. They work for AMD, TSMC, Intel, nVidia or ARM. They work on CRISPR. They work for Intuitive Surgical or Illumina. They work for Boston Dynamics. They work for Biogen. They're working on the next gene therapy or the next cure for a massive killer disease ala Pharmasset. They're working on autonomous vehicles for Waymo or Tesla. They're working on hypersonic weapons for the Russian or Chinese militaries (which humiliates ad-click work by comparison to how difficult it is and the mental capabilities that it requires). They're working on new nuclear reactor technology. They're Jennifer Doudna or George Church, not Jeff Hammerbacher & the ad teams at Facebook or Google.
- computerist 7y ago
  100% agreed. But it seems to me that OP isn't considering changing his professional field. Did you mean only researchers and scientists in the above-mentioned companies to be smart people or plain software worker bots as well?
- 9dev 7y ago
  Thank you for this comment. I often share the frustration with the "visible" software market, eg. the loudest bunch on the internet, so it's easy to forget all those great and inspiring projects and the people making them possible.
- buboard 7y ago
  That's needlessly adversarial. Smart people are useful in various positions. Lots of bureaucrats work on LHC, DARPA etc, lots of supersmart people are hired by Faangs (Hinton, Lecun). The distribution of genius is always extremely peaked with vast majority of scientists suffering some dunning kruger, wherever they are.
nscalf 7y ago
> Most of the high-value problems have been dealt with. I could not disagree with this more. Most of the underlying problems have been solved, now we don't have to worry about buying and setting up machines to run our servers, or making a computer be reliable before we can start working on our problems. This is the most exciting time ever to start working on real high-value problems, because there isn't a lot of stuff in the way stopping you from getting to work on it. There are still a ridiculous amount of high-value problems left to work on, for example, biology and computer science are just getting to a point where we can do meaningful work there. In 30 years, there will be someone talking about working in the underlying problems there and saying most of the high-value problems have been dealt with. Every field has a lot of crap optimized towards just making some profit, and the underlying tools have made it easier to build something just to make a buck, but you can choose to filter down to more exciting projects.
WWLink 7y ago
You can still do a lot of those kinda things on embedded machines. :)