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> Yeah, but "making your code 100x faster" might cost significantly more than just adding 100x servers. Cost? No. But it certainly requires more talent. Unfor
by otabdeveloper4 6y ago
> Yeah, but "making your code 100x faster" might cost significantly more than just adding 100x servers.
Cost? No. But it certainly requires more talent.
Unfortunately, programming talent doesn't scale with cost at all. In that it's like a creative endeavor: you can hire 10000 "professional writers" if you want, but that won't get you another Shakespeare.
Which is why I find the "software engineer" moniker silly. Software isn't at all like engineering.
- boffinism 6y agoFwiw engineering talent doesn't scale with cost either. What you've described is actually one of the areas software and engineering are similar, not divergent.
- choeger 6y agoThat has nothing to do with talent IMO. Every software engineer worth their salt should be able to inspect a full stack, measure and evaluate the performance. Instead you have 80% people stuck in whatever the current fashion is (js, I look at you) and that cannot tell a png from a .so . So in the end, it is more about attitude, not talent.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago> software engineer worth their salt... ...is a scotsman that doesn't exist.
- freshhawk 6y agoAgreed. When we focus on the part of the spectrum of optimizations that do require talent, we're thinking of the exceptional, interesting, makes-a-viral-post-on-HN stuff. The bulk of the work, in my experience, is simpler than the programming part. It's just a culture/priority thing. Like how most of the industry used to not use source control. Now we do, we didn't need to add "talent" to get that done either.
- vendiddy 6y agoI agree. One heuristic is the specs of our computers 20 years ago had. Those computers were an order of magnitude slower. Yet many equivalent apps today run at about the same speed. Performance is not being prioritized. And I suppose back then, devs had no choice given the resource constraints they had. I've seen many times devs paying for larger databases instance without first even taking a few hours to try and optimize their queries.
- xxpor 6y agoThe depressing part of all of this is performance optimization is really fun! I love sitting down with flamegraphs and other profiler output and making things faster.
- Hamuko 6y ago>Cost? No. But it certainly requires more talent. Talented people usually cost a lot to optimize your code to be faster. And the more time they spend optimizing existing code, the less time they spend writing new code.
- t-writescode 6y agoThe more time they spend potentially unlocking the ability to write new code, though. And faster code in existing places can unlock new business opportunities which can unlock more money.
- lultimouomo 6y agoI don't think 100x more structural engineers can make a bridge with a hundred times longer span either.
- doctor_eval 6y agoThe term “software engineer” was invented to describe the work being done by Margaret Hamilton and her team, when developing the guidance software for the Apollo moon landings. It definitely is a form of engineering. From Wikipedia: > When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. It was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. Not because of his acceptance of the new 'term' per se, but because we had earned his and the acceptance of the others in the room as being in an engineering field in its own right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en...
- jhgb 6y ago> The term “software engineer” was invented to describe the work being done by Margaret Hamilton and her team, when developing the guidance software for the Apollo moon landings. There's a considerable debate about when and where this term was "invented", apparently with some oral histories placing it even into (late?) 1950s. As for grandparent's comment, I think it was referring to the fact that the nature of the job is completely different. For example a large portion of a traditional engineer's job deals with fighting the natural world. A bolt may rust away and stop doing what it was doing until then. A source code line in the form of a=a+7; won't do any such thing. As long as it exists it will keep doing the same thing. Hence software engineers have to deal with a completely different set of issues, to the extent that calling it "engineering" is to a certain extent metaphorical.
- heelix 6y agoCode rots/rusts faster than most physical objects. Requirements change, libraries update at a breakneck speed. I've had to deal with some (functional) languages that don't allow you to change the the variable where some would allow that sort of modification just fine for your simple example. Change is everywhere.
- nmfisher 6y agoI’m not sure what you’re talking about. I’m not going to ask my developer - who I pay $2000 a day - to spend 10 days optimising my codebase to avoid an extra $5000 in server costs. It doesn’t matter if they’re a 10xer or a 1xer, their time always has a price tag.
- timkofu 6y agoEngineering is using science to build technology, using engineering principles that are common to all engineering disciplines. Software Engineering is using engineering engineering principles to build software. Project management methodologies like scrum are implementation level details, together with platform (user interface, programming language, database e.t.c). Software Engineering starts at the feasibility study, followed by detailed design, then comes the implementation phase. Most Software Engineering job posts only list implementation phase requirements, which I reckon has led to SE being misunderstood.