31 ms·

It takes a PhD to develop that

• mwcampbell 5y ago
  I pity the developer (or maybe manager) at Microsoft who wrote the GitHub comment on which this article's title is based. (And no, I never met him when I was at Microsoft.) If he's in the Seattle area, he's likely not even awake yet, but when he is, I expect he's going to have a bad day. Assuming he's not already sick of the Windows Terminal versus refterm drama, it would be interesting to read his perspective.
  • johnjj257 5y ago
    Holy shit you sound annoying and wrong about Everything in this thread
  • zibzab 5y ago
    yeah, i would be really sad if I was at the receiving end of this. One guy is not 100% correct one day (because we overworked devs always are?), and the next day someone has written a blog text painting him as a subpar dev and now he is on front page of HN used as an example...
    • zadjii 5y ago
      Yea, it's been a generally shit experience. Knowing the sense of humor of the original "PhD" comment, yea, I read that as a light-hearted jest, which was definitely lost in transit. Communicating on the internet is hard. Miscommunications are easy, and this one happened to spiral quickly. It saddens me that this whole incident was used to balkanize the community rather than to work constructively together.
  • DHowett 5y ago
    As the guy responsible for that comment (and the dev lead for the team! Hi!) I can say it haunts me pretty much weekly. My parenthetical-laden snarky sense of humor, my use of italics to indicate speech-like emphasis and pretty much everything else about that comment has been dissected to parts as small as possible. In the end, though? Yeah, I was completely wrong. I don’t know much about graphics engineering and I’m glad(^) that we were shown up by somebody who does. I’ve been working in software for nearly 20 years, and I’m firmly in the “knows enough to be dangerous; doesn’t know everything” category the article is missing. It’s not, as some have characterized in this comment section, because I moved into leadership; rather, it is because there is not a single axis on which to measure all engineers. I’m inexperienced in graphics and text layout, and my critical mistake was not respecting the experience somebody else brought to the table. In other fields, perhaps I fall higher on the experienced/wet-behind-the-ears scale. (^) I may flatly disagree with his presentation and his group of fans taking every opportunity to slander us, but I’m happy that it’s generally possible for us to improve performance and engineering efficiency using the technique he described. :)
    • mwcampbell 5y ago
      > his group of fans taking every opportunity to slander us Conversely, I think I went overboard defending you and your team, to the point of making my own over-broad generalization about game devs in another subthread [1]. I'm glad it's practical to get the best of both worlds in this case. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744315
      • zadjii 5y ago
        Such is the nature of a flame war. It's also REALLY hard to take thread after thread of discussion about how this thing you built is totally shite, and not try to respond in some way. It's hard to clearly communicate on the internet "we could do better here, we'd love some help, but you don't need to be an asshole about it". Once casey was set on his warpath, I think it was just too late.
    • ripley12 5y ago
      My sympathies to you and the rest of the WT team. I think you’re doing a bang-up job under difficult platform constraints (that most people don’t appreciate), and the amount of vitriol spilled over this one interaction has been really disappointing. Just remember that there’s a huge number of people who appreciate the work you’re doing to modernize terminal experiences on Windows (nearly 78k GitHub stars!)
• pram 5y ago
  At one of my previous companies they hired two engineers specifically for performance. They were sharp guys. Problem was, they were put on their own team/silo and basically no one involved them in any of the work. Their PRs were considered more of an unpleasant intrusion into other peoples sprints. They became useless because of the terrible organization! Total wasted talent because "performance" was an afterthought in every respect.
• Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  This would be a nice thesis. Unfortunately we have software like memcached, redis, nginx, Envoy, Kafka, Zookeeper, and more that come straight from professional programmers which makes this thesis more complicated than this post makes it sound. Perhaps Occam's Razor should apply here.
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    That software from a pool of millions of SWE across the world. And importantly this software created outside of corporate structures! I think these exceptions prove the rule. Most SWE are working for companies that don’t make money reinventing architecture. Leading a bunch of people to use existing tools to sell something to customers is probably where most of the value comes from in SME world and probably most of the big company world too. Everywhere I have worked the very experienced people are probably doing the “the same year repeated many times” rather than a pyramid of experience taking on more complex engineering challenges. There is a lot of money in glue code.
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "Everywhere I have worked the very experienced people are probably doing the “the same year repeated many times” Yeah...
• intricatedetail 5y ago
  It's a shame that engineers commit their time for free for the benefit of multi billion corporation. Why do they do it? These corporations are not your friends.
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    Puzzles me. It’s ironic you give stuff away as “free software” for “the masses”, you are just helping the Pandora papers mob get richer. Unless that software is genuinely disruptive. Tor, BitTorrent for example. But that’s more rate. Memcached, Redis being free just helps corporations really.
  • simonh 5y ago
    Maybe because they are working with people, and treat them as people. After all corporations are made up of human beings.
  • forgotpwd16 5y ago
    I think you will like that: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm/issues/17 https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm/issues/17
    • fellellor 5y ago
      Is there an aggregator for “coding drama”? Because this was all very fun to see.
      • syockit 5y ago
        There's one for github drama, but it's not limited to coding.
• j_barbossa 5y ago
  On the one hand you have idealists who think the most important thing in the world is getting the last bit of performance out of every program. On the other side you have businesses who don't care too much about performance of their applications (especially when no money can be made out of it) as long as 80% of use cases are covered. Whichever side you sympathize with, it's pretty arrogant to think the other side is completely wrong.
• jtdev 5y ago
  Such an interesting case. We need to encourage respectfully disagreeable people like the developer who raised this issue. A less disagreeable person would have stopped pushing after receiving the GitHub feedback regarding how complex the problem was.
• lmm 5y ago
  This seems like giving up. The article is right about the problems but seems temperamentally opposed to actually fixing them. Number of people under you is a terrible metric in many ways, but it is at least objective (ish) and hard to fake; so is years of experience. If you take the position that programming skill requires years of particular kinds of learning and there is no way to assess whether someone with x years on their CV has actually done y years of that kind of learning... well, maybe that's true, but what's the actionable takeaway from that?
  • ithkuil 5y ago
    I don't disagree. That said, the first step in solving a problem is to understand that there is one and what are its root causes. EDIT: I think sometimes to goal of some prose is to be thought provoking, i.e. to allow us to find somebody else who perhaps will find a better solution if only they had been stimulated enough to care about a problem
  • willvarfar 5y ago
    When you interview a line manager and he boasts that he led a team of 100 engineers, do you question that he could have done the job with 10 better-picked engineers? You get what you measure. If you reward bloat, you get train wrecks.
• thriftwy 5y ago
  Nope! It's just that in corporate world, developers rarely do what they think is relevant for them. The people who did Windows terminal probably cared a lot about COM or WinAPI or maybe CS, but I think it's fair to imagine how they were not fans of text-oriented interfaces. It just did not occur that they should be extracting last bit of performance here. People can type just that fast, after all.
  • tasogare 5y ago
    Windows terminal is a shit show. The dev blogs posts are all about useless features such as image background while fundamentals like unicode input are still broken.
    • thriftwy 5y ago
      Like Windows Notepad. I suspect it was never designed for anything more than trivial cases, and then it never got requirements overhaul later in subsequent versions of Windows.
      • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        I was under the impression that Windows Terminal is a recent greenfield project.
        • dagw 5y ago
          Yea. Microsoft has two terminals. Command Prompt (cmd.exe) which is the default that comes with Windows, has been around forever and basically never seen a significant update. And the new Windows Terminal which is the recent greenfield project that only works on recent versions on Windows 10 and doesn't ship with Windows by default (yet). Unfortunately people often get the two confused when talking about "the windows terminal".
          • thriftwy 5y ago
            Corporate practices are to blame here also, where instead of improving the existing solution, a new project is launched, which often carries nothing from the previous one. Then the public will conflate two products, and some will avoid the new one not knowing if it's here to stay (another corporate antipattern).
• onion2k 5y ago
  A few hours later another programmer came up with the prototype of a much faster terminal renderer, proving that for an experienced programmer a terminal renderer is a fun weekend project and far away from being a multiyear long research undertaking. I have no idea if this is the case here, and I suspect it might not be, but pretty much every time I've seen a developer complain that something is slow and then 'prove' that it can be faster by making a proof-of-concept the only reason theirs is faster is because it doesn't implement the important-but-slow bits and it ignores most of the edge cases. You shouldn't automatically assume something is actually bad just because someone shows a better proof-of-concept 'alternative'. They may have just ignored half the stuff it needs to do.
  • maxnoe 5y ago
    This. My time library is so much faster and smaller than yours. Timezones? Nah, didn't implement it. My font rendering is so much simpler and faster than yours. Nah, only 8 bit encodings. Also no RTL. Ligatures? Come on. The list goes on.
    • eska 5y ago
      Except that in this case it’s the other way around. This weekend project has better support for things like like ligatures, combinations of Arabic characters, RTL, etc
    • jiggawatts 5y ago
      Don't assume. Casey Muratori produced a highly correct Unicode renderer with correct VT code support. Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE
  • thih9 5y ago
    This seems referenced in the repo itself, see the “feature support” section [1]. That being said, is anyone aware of a significant missing feature that would impact performance? [1]: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm#feature-support https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm#feature-support
• moralestapia 5y ago
  This reflects a lot of what goes on in Academia as well. Also, if you think you can counter a "that's not possible" with a working proof of said thing working, think again, most people don't like to be shown they're wrong, particularly tenured professors. That's one of the fastest ways to sabotage your own developing career. "Yes men" climb the ladder much easier, but then work doesn't do itself so that's the catch. Cue exploitation of interns and other newcomers and you almost have the whole picture on how things get actually done. Hence why "science advances one funeral at a time". Once someone reaches its own Peter level [1], it stops being a productive force and becomes a plug that jams everything behind it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
  • dr_hooo 5y ago
    I would really be surprised if any tenured professor would shut down a solution to a well known hard problem just based on his ego. More likely the solution is not as well presented, researched or thought through as it seems (I'm assuming we're not talking about astrophysics here).
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • aahortwwy 5y ago
      > I would really be surprised I wouldn't.
  • joeberon 5y ago
    It really depends on the person, but yes you have to get to know them to know how they will react. I find that this is more of a problem in the US, where tenured professors often develop these vast impenetrable egos, while in other countries, such as in the UK or Germany, they are more pragmatic. That said it is still entirely individual, and I knew who to avoid when I had certain ideas in my PhD. Also, our German group leader asked me to take a feature from my software package because he was worried that the Americans would get upset at an early PhD student showing them up.
• NhanH 5y ago
  > A few hours later another programmer came up with the prototype of a much faster terminal renderer, proving that for an experienced programmer a terminal renderer is a fun weekend project and far away from being a multiyear long research undertaking. I read through the Github issue and can't find the prototype mentioned here. Can anyone link the PR/code if they know it please?
  • formerly_proven 5y ago
    FWIW he wrote it on the same day @Microsoft locked the issue to prevent further posts by non-Microsoft people.
  • macmac 5y ago
    Here you go: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm
  • RealityVoid 5y ago
    I was curious as well, I dug a bit and I found this: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm I think he just went ahead and created a completely different terminal. Also, some background, the original raiser of the PR is Casey Muratori, of Handmade Hero fame: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaTznQhurW5AaiYPbhEA-KA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaTznQhurW5AaiYPbhEA-KA https://github.com/cmuratori/ https://github.com/cmuratori/ https://caseymuratori.com/ https://caseymuratori.com/
• choeger 5y ago
  Counter argument: If the experienced programmers stay where they are, software development will forever remain craftsmanship. A single developer can only tutor so many juniors. In fact, I think that teaching and encouraging to learn is the most important thing in SE. And that has to begin with leadership figures that don't believe their own knowledge gets obsolete after one year just because the latest framework got released. SE should not be an art form. It should be founded in solid science and abstraction should allow us to keep our knowledge applicable. You're not a bad engineer because you never touched the latest hypetech or programming language. You are a bad engineer if you only consider yourself a "frontend developer with react on chrome". All IMO, of course.
  • bayindirh 5y ago
    I'm somewhere in the middle. I see software development as an art form, however it's not disconnected from its solid scientific roots. Sometimes, the art part is for fun (i.e.: your weekend project), sometimes it's for pushing systems to the limit (i.e.: scientific programming, demoscene, or where performance is really needed). In my case, the art is exploiting the hardware or the theory in a way that it works smoothly and very performant for the cases you have. This doesn't mean the deadlines doesn't matter, and explicit, slow, but very robust code doesn't have its place. On the contrary, it has many places. We need to make the correct trade-offs to get our job done the best way possible. On the mentoring side, training people is hard, because of both parties. Low ego, open mindedness and being open to being wrong is very important. I try to mentor some people around me, and I encourage them to go further than I did. Lastly, I find passing the "old way" to new generations very valuable. While these old ways are inevitably lower level and less hip, they're tried, stood the test of the time, and generally performant enough (or very performant in some cases).
  • csande17 5y ago
    > SE should not be an art form. It should be founded in solid science and abstraction should allow us to keep our knowledge applicable. Software engineering can never be anything but an art form! A lot of fields of endeavor have both mechanical "science-based" components and creative "art form" ones. An inexperienced chef can get some productive cooking done by mechanically following the steps of a recipe someone else wrote--cutting up vegetables, operating the stove, and so on--without making culinary decisions of their own. Experienced chefs, though, come up with ideas for things to cook, which you can't effectively do just by following some procedure. You need to have some creative je-ne-sais-quoi. In software engineering, we have no long-term need for the first category of people. Any programming task that doesn't require human creativity can be automated. (When's the last time you decided which CPU registers corresponded to which variable names in your program?) An effective programmer uses abstraction for precisely this purpose. They spend all day, every day on making the hard decisions, and they let the computer handle the rest. This is why Enterprise Software Architecture techniques have always been and will always be doomed to fail. You can't have senior engineers come up with rules that junior engineers can just mechanically follow to write good code. If you could, you wouldn't need the junior engineers, since you could just tell a compiler or code generator or something to follow the rules instead. Everyone who works on a codebase needs to be capable of making good decisions about code, in a way you can't boil down to science and checklists, or the best they can ever do is waste their own time producing repetitive boilerplate.
• cryptica 5y ago
  PhDs often make the worst possible developers. People with PhDs (especially in Mathematics) are often lacking the most critical characteristic of a good developer; they don't know why they do things. Being good at math requires being able to solve problems whose solutions often do not have any practical uses or whose practical uses may not be clear. This is very different from how software problems should be approached. Software development is more about finding the right problems than it is about solving problems; to find the right problems, you need to understand the 'why' in as much detail as possible. Every line of code should be easily justified by how it brings the system closer to achieve its purpose. The PhD diploma itself doesn't have much practical use in financial terms; it's not a good investment to get a PhD for purely practical reasons. Detatchment from practicality is the worst attribute someone can have as a developer.
  • mattip 5y ago
    A bit if a generalisation. For a different view: currently almost all the core devs for NumPy and SciPy (those are the ones I know personally) have doctorates.
    • dagw 5y ago
      I think that we can agree that if you want to become a generalist programmer, able to hop from random web startup to random web startup, then a PhD is probably not that useful. If however you want to become more of specialist, say being able to develop novel solutions to complex fluid dynamics problems then a PhD is very useful place to start.
  • zhdc1 5y ago
    Meh, it's better to treat software development and underlying academic competencies, like mathematics, as completely separate fields. Sure, the latter helps the former, but rear in seat experience is best for (I'm assuming) both.
  • CogitoCogito 5y ago
    > Being good at math requires being able to solve problems whose solutions often do not have any practical uses or whose practical uses may not be clear to you. This is very different from how software problems should be approached. I don't really agree. Being good at mathematical research requires recognizing the "core organization structure of a system" and solving the "core problem at hand". I'd argue that it's essentially the same in programming (and business) as well. The main difference is that a mathematical researcher is able to ignore non-pertinent information, while in practice those issues (usually) need to be dealt with. That said I wouldn't say that PhDs (math or otherwise) make great developers. Their skill in development is a result of experience in developing software within the software industry and not something they gain simply due to "being intelligent" or by working on their on on their POC research implementations. But I'd point out that it's basically the same for professional software developers as well.
• zhdc1 5y ago
  If you read the article, the author is discussing a conversation on Github and developer experience. The article isn't an indictment about academia (it doesn't even really come up at all). Re the author's competence argument, given how complex software development is as a field, a better approach should be to always assume that there's a person out there who can solve a problem quicker and more competently than your guesstimate. Of course, you should also assume that they're not going to, and that you - with all of your issues, lack of experience, and general :/ 'iness - is the one who's either going to have to fix it or find someone who can.
• otheracc 5y ago
  Hm... It's totally okay, to not be able to do it. Nobody can know everything. Doesn't mean you are in a "lower" category compared to your colleagues. Okay, it's not a global problem (ie. "needs PHD") but just a personal problem (ie. "I have no clue how to solve it"). Trying to get as much stuff done as possible, I've said similar things in the past, though. Not really thought about it before typing. Happens... Nobody got hurt in the process, right? Let's forgive this little misinterpretation and move on.
  • Azsy 5y ago
    Nobody here seems to be focused on the specifics of the case. But i think moving on would leave a great opportunity to re-evaluate corporate SE choices. At the very least we can agree its a good thing that the dev was able to fork/re-implement the tool with the given API. But for me it raises the larger question. How useful is this form of software engineering management? The tool is relativity simple enough to re-implement ( Which is a good thing ), but at the same time an entire team/governance structure was put in place to act out a set of motions, without pushing what is possible. To be blunt, it sounds miserable to have to work like that.
• Iv 5y ago
  Maybe it takes PhD to develop that through the Microsoft development process.
• oakfr 5y ago
  It saddens me to see, time and again, the role of leadership painted in such a dire and incorrect way. Leadership is a lot more than about "shuffling paper" in an "ivory tower". As a lead (in any decent company), you get to participate in critical design reviews; you get to read and review code; you get to shape the trajectory of others; you get to participate in discussions with the product teams. If you work smart, you get free time that you can use to keep coding. All of this can be extremely rewarding. You are not serving our domain by painting this kind of picture of leadership. The truth is, you can excel as a software engineer, but you can also excel as a lead. And none is better than the other. I dedicate this message to the "wet behind the ears" people you are referring to who would never consider the role if they were to stick to this poor vision you're delivering.
  • zohch 5y ago
    > It saddens me to see, time and again, the role of leadership painted in such a dire and incorrect way. It saddens me to time and again be stuck with "leaders" who don't know what they are talking about and think they need to weigh in on everything, even though they add negative value when they do so, because they want to justify their mostly pointless job. In a 14 year career, I have had "leadership" that is not completely horrible for about 6 months, but that I still would not call good, at best it is mediocre. If only most "leaders" were wet behind the ears instead of bordering on grossly incompetent. If people's experience of leadership is that it is almost always dead-weight, then the problem is that it is almost always dead-weight, not that people call it out for being almost always dead-weight. And by the way, I have never met one person who thought they were a good leader that was even slightly so. People who think they are good leaders are almost invariably pompous, arrogant and ignorant.
    • joshuamorton 5y ago
      So have you met any good leaders? Or are you saying that good leaders are nearly impossible to find (and therefore perhaps the job is difficult?)
      • zohch 5y ago
• galkk 5y ago
  cmuratori is great software engineer, for sure, but, god, this bug report poisons the well right from the start (see below). Also the report is actually quite bad, because 40x performance drop, that is stated, could be actually nothing. If something takes 1 millisecond instead of 25 microseconds (numbers from the head, to illustrate the point), it might be an issue, but also might mean nothing. This is the thing that requires clarification, from my pov. Regarding poisoning the well: instead of writing " Expected Behavior Despite the increased parsing load, modern CPUs should not have a problem parsing per-character color escape codes quickly. I would expect the performance of the terminal to be able to sustain roughly the same frame rate with per-character color codes as without, and if there was a performance drop, I wouldn't expect it to be anything close to 40x. " he could just write Expected behavior Frame rate of output with per-char color codes is similar to non-colored output.
  • yobbo 5y ago
    > Expected Behavior Whether this is interpreted as unfriendly depends on the stance of the reader. I can easily make this sound somewhere between "celebratory" or "intriguing" when I read it. If I were the author and performance/bug-reports somehow meant negative consequences for me, then it would sound hostile.
  • mwcampbell 5y ago
    > 40x performance drop that is stated could be actually nothing. It isn't though. The performance difference between Windows Terminal and refterm is dramatic enough that he could demonstrate it in a video.
    • galkk 5y ago
      And that is why I'm saying that initial bug report could be done better. For example, out of curiosity I did the test from the last message: doing "cat big.txt" in WSL2. In Windows terminal it took 1.5s, but in Kitty terminal, that is running under wslg (same ubuntu version), it takes 0.34s. Powershell, from the other side, is awful (20-25s).
      • deleted 5y ago
• sitzkrieg 5y ago
  i swear half of this is sunken cost fallacy of cs educations
  • rhizome 5y ago
    Which half?
• mytailorisrich 5y ago
  The github issue is a gem. The reporter is basically being fobbed off by being flooded by random buzzwords and data points, none of them specific, but he keeps trying to drill down to specifics by asking questions. The tone gets quite condescending towards him. He gets out of all this with flying colours. He should consider adding that Github issue to his resume.
  • vblap 5y ago
    Yeah, typical Microsoft developers (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362). That issue was pretty mild, they felt threatened and used CoC principles ("combative") to shut down the threat. This is how they also ruin "open" source projects like Python now.
    • zadjii 5y ago
      That's a pretty terrible interpretation of events here. Along side the "combative" phrasing was a bit of self reflection > Setting the technical merits of your suggestion aside though: peppering your comments with clauses like “it’s that simple” or “extremely simple” and, somewhat unexpectedly “am I missing something?” can be read as impugning the reader. Some folks may be a little put off by your style here. I certainly am, but I am still trying to process exactly why that is. That post is literally not trying to shut down the conversation, it's simply reflecting on the tone of the commentator. elsewhere in the comment he even prompts for more discussion on the topic. At no point is the CoC invoked.
  • cyber_kinetist 5y ago
    He is already well-known enough in his field past the point of writing a resume, and I don't think he really would want to enter the corporate IT world that he intensely despises (even with lots of cash). Plus he's already busy on his own working on various projects: the video game 1935 (which we don't really know that much of), Star Code Galaxy (a CS course focusing on fundamentals), and Handmade Hero (A live recording / tutorial of making a game from scratch). He's already really
• pjc50 5y ago
  > the software industry doesn’t value technical excellence as much as it values having warm bodies report to you. One of those can easily and objectively be measured, and the other one can't. Various orgs have tried to measure financial "value", imperfect in and of itself, but then face serious problems attributing that to individual developers. Fundamentally, discussing "good" software is performing subjective evaluations against subjective criteria. There's no easy route out of that.
• TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Yup, this. Something I've been ranting about[0] for a while: there is no technical progression ladder. The Senior->Principal-> ... path seems to be a faux-management track, with all the managerial responsibilities and little of the authority. Software is shitty in big part because it's mostly written by juniors, as almost anyone who has any clue moves over (or gets pushed over) to managerial or faux-managerial roles. I've been thinking about a more charitable interpretation of this recently. Another thing I rant about[1] is that tools we use for programming are not expressive enough. It takes too much work to say simple things, the coding feedback loop is ridiculously long. So how this connects? In a way, junior programmers can be seen as a Mechanical Turk version of a Sufficiently Smart Compiler - it lets the more experienced people skip some of the tedium with the tooling and deal with higher-level concepts, which get translated to actual code by an army of juniors and interns. Except, this doesn't work that well - the coding feedback loop is even slower. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27417462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27417462 [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28568053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28568053
  • zurfer 5y ago
    I really appreciate this perspective. Better tooling to enable individuals to penetrate more layers of abstraction sound great. To some extend e.g. with cloud providers this is already happening. We have more powerful building blocks than ever. However, I feel the idea of experienced vs. junior programmer is not helping this discussion much. Experience can also hurt to some extend, because you need to unlearn things.
    • TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > To some extend e.g. with cloud providers this is already happening. We have more powerful building blocks than ever. This is not ideal though. Cloud services have a pretty short half-life, and trap you in business relationships that you shouldn't need just to build software. (I know, I can't stop complaining.) > I feel the idea of experienced vs. junior programmer is not helping this discussion much. Experience can also hurt to some extend, because you need to unlearn things. That is true, but I still think the idea is sound - there's much more universal, transferable programming-related experience juniors gain than things they'll need to unlearn later. The problem I see here is that, just as those developers gain that experience, they get pushed out to management / faux-management. In principle, this should lead to at least some improvement in quality - as increasingly better people are tutoring the next generation and directing it - but I feel we've reached a fixed point in terms of software skill, with most software being written at a pretty low level.
• baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  I understand that different people have different skill sets, that's totally fine. I don't think every single senior developer at Microsoft should have the skillset to fix performance issues like this. That said, however, I do think developers should be able to recognize when a task requires a skill that they do not have. In those cases it's best to reach out to someone within the organization who has that skill. Or, you know, you can be a senior developer at Microsoft and condescendingly claim that it's impossible, or "takes a PhD to develop that". I guess this is what you get when you fill organizations with people who don't care about performance, computer science or algorithms. I'm going to use this case as another example to point to when people argue that algorithm skills are useless and shouldn't be used when interviewing.
  • jstimpfle 5y ago
    I don't think this is about algorithms.
    • baobabKoodaa 5y ago
      Yes it is. When you have 2 programs that do the same thing, except one program is orders of magnitude faster than the other, it's almost* always because the faster program is written with better algorithmic time complexity. (*In some cases the big-O time complexity may be the same for 2 programs, but one program can still be much faster in practice due to micro-optimizations, heuristics, etc. Even in cases like this, people who are good at algorithms will be better at writing these heuristics and micro-optimizations than people who don't care about algorithms.)
      • hnfong 5y ago
        In practice things are much more nuanced than what you learn in school and textbooks. Sometimes you have a convenient library that sort of does what you want, but it does a lot more. Do you just use it, or do you re-implement only the subset that you need which can be optimized to run much faster? That's not an algorithm question but more of a software engineering tradeoff between impact (how badly your users/business need it faster), resources and priority (how much time you can spend on optimization), and whether you want to maintain that code (as opposed to calling the library making it somebody else's problem). Sometimes the correct thing to do is really to call the slower library instead of writing your own highly optimized routines. In this case of terminal emulation, apparently the folks at Microsoft wasn't aware of the faster solution, which you could say is an algorithm issue (but that's kind of stretching things a bit -- you surely wouldn't see terminal emulation in an algorithm in a textbook, and the fact that one has memorized the textbook algorithms for an interview doesn't automatically mean they would figure out a better way of emulating a terminal. Presumably Microsoft does some whiteboarding on algorithms as well but that didn't prevent this fiasco from happening). Anyway the concerns I mentioned above are probably still relevant here (the directdraw run thing was a convenient and slow library that apparently did much more than they needed). Algorithm "skills" are probably overrated in the sense that people can memorize textbook algorithms and their analyses all they want, but real world problems are often more complicated than that, and those "skills" don't necessarily translate/apply. For one, there's no general way to prove lower bounds, so a less imaginative programmer might just assume their inefficient implementation is all that is possible, until somebody else points out a better method. People are getting technical interviews wrong if (as interviewers) they ask standardized algorithm questions -- the candidates expect them and prepare for them, memorizing them if need be. But as the interviewer, ideally they'd want to be able to find the candidate who can discover a good solution for a novel problem they never saw or thought about before. I'd further claim that while some of these skills can be learned and improved through training, there's a different "ceiling" for everyone since a lot of the intuition and imaginative aspects of problem solving can't really be taught or acquired. I've done a couple years of competitive programming in my younger years, and I can clearly observe that, when pressed with hard problems, there's a clear difference between how well people respond. The model in the original article assumes that these kind of skills come with experience, but in my experience that's mostly not true if you're dealing with "hard-ish" problems like how to vastly optimize text layout in terminals.
• ezoe 5y ago
  Other example of slow performance in MS is file system access and process creation.
  • kevingadd 5y ago
    fwiw, file system access is kind of a bad example - it's slow because the design allows people to hook into it. once you've made promises to end users that limits the kinds of optimizations you can do and how far you can go with those optimizations. For one example, if you were to make file I/O bypass antivirus software in 'performance sensitive cases', few enterprise admins would accept that. That performance optimization would be disabled in a millisecond. You can do directory exclusions, but some of the I/O still has to go through the filter to be checked against the exclusion list.
• numpad0 5y ago
  > it seems to me that the software industry doesn’t value technical excellence as much as it values having warm bodies report to you Naturally. Computers don't pay, these wet bodies pay progressively for values they perceive. Technology is merely an instrument to add amounts of currency value to products that it is to hold. Also, a business that relies on technical excellence of small groups of individuals is not a business well conceived. Logical complexity impregnated into an artifact, logical or physical, is a completely separate phenomenon to currency values it holds within the system of human economy. Took me way too long to get it. The fact that the two are considered same is itself probably something worth discussions.
• Jensson 5y ago
  The worst part is that the kind of arguments he was met with is exactly the kind of arguments people use to get headcount and climb the ladder within corporations. Spending a little time writing a well designed and fully working solution => Good job, now take the next ticket! Spending a lot of time explaining why something can't be done with this budget => Promoted to manager! Spending a year of time explaining why the project need a much bigger budget to deliver features => Promoted to director! This is the main problem.
  • siva7 5y ago
    This is neither the problem nor what the article is talking about. Your argument is so overgeneralized that i don't even know where to start taking it apart.
    • Jensson 5y ago
      Cultural issues are almost always tied to performance evaluations at a company, so it is highly relevant. If this wasn't the problem then their manager would have reprimanded them for posting such nonsense. But either these objections were made by the manager or the manager agrees with them. Why would a manager who is fine with such bullshit still have his job? Because it goes all the way up the chain, otherwise someone would have cut it off a long time ago.
• deleted 5y ago
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• chenglou 5y ago
  In case this isn't clear, RefTerm is: 1. Faster in every case tested 2. More fully-featured, including i18n 3. Easier to read and maintain (see for yourself) 4. Shorter 5. Using existing libs, aka interops well ...So none of these typical hand-wavy dismissals apply: 1. "Is it really faster for edge cases" 2. "He probably didn't implement certain features like Arabic and Chinese" 3. "Businesses just wants enough" 4. "Businesses just wants enough" 5. "It probably makes some closed-world assumption" The performance of RefTerm didn't come from some big tradeoff; it came from using the right perspective and keeping things simple. Sure, past a certain complexity threshold, you'd have to work for extra perf, but from my observations, folks who immediately jump to the wrong implicit conclusion that "good perf must have required compromises" got conditioned to think this way because the software they work on are already (often unnecessarily) complex.
  • fouric 5y ago
    I don't think dismissal 1 applies anyway - even if RefTerm didn't implement, say, variable-width fonts - you could just build a terminal that uses RefTerm's fast algorithms for the common case, then falls back to the Windows Terminal's slower algorithms for the more general case.
• deleted 5y ago
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• Trex_Egg 5y ago
  Nice ending by the way.
• chromanoid 5y ago
  Reminds me of the Expert Beginner: How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/ https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...
• yobbo 5y ago
  > I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively… Yes, it might be seen as combative since it amounts to saying "you guys seem to be clueless". When proven in experiments, it means that the combativeness was justified. Imo, the language in this quote is almost unacceptable. It's a roundabout way of saying "stand back little peon, you are not important enough to be thinking about problems that concern us." It's inevitable that when people overestimate their competence and judgement, the moment when humility is forced on them is experienced as painful. Adjust prejudices and move on.
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  I tihnk I generally agree with this, but also wonder what the alternative is. If you step outside your own industry, do you want plumbers that have a hobbiest appreciation of the intricacies of fluid dynamics, or do you want someone to come and unblock your toilet in the middle of the night? There's possibly a middle ground where the geniuses invent toilet technology in such a way that it is easy to install and maintain, and "normal" people do all the other boring bits, like stocking warehouses, transporting it, selling the house it sits in, answering the phone etc. It feels like we've generally got there in both plumbing and in software and is that a bad thing overall?
  • incrudible 5y ago
    I just want Microsoft to develop a proper terminal application and not handwave away complaints about performance with "that's a PhD right there". Even if it was a PhD, I'd then expect a PhD to be put to the task, because this is a crucial component of the operating system. Realistically though, a PhD is the opposite of what you want here. A PhD is almost by definition an inexperienced programmer. It's also someone who is likely to fall in love with their ideas, putting aesthetics or purity above practicality and effectiveness.
    • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      I was more responding to the article, which used that specific example as a jumping off point to talk about management structure in software development generally. I don't use Windows, but I do use Kitty terminal (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) and from my interactions with that project and trying to get code ligatures working in my setup I've learned that terminals are really complex, both for technical and legacy/ecosystem reasons so my gut reaction is to support the MS engineers, without having read deeply into that specific issue. edit: having read some more of the original ticket, I'm more firmly on the MS developers side. I think the other person is both rude and uninformed about what they are talking about, which is a terrible combination.
      • incrudible 5y ago
• jimmyvalmer 5y ago
  tldr; common sense.
• yxhuvud 5y ago
  I feel this is missing the elephant in the room, which is that experts are not interchangeable. They have typically specialized in whatever they have spent lots on time doing, and so developers in different sectors develop a lot of different skills that are typically not very useful for developers in different sectors. A result from that is that what may be trivial for people in one sector is hard for people in a different sector, and vice versa. Often people will not know enough about sectors different from the one they operate in to know what is hard or not in other sectors.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• MontyCarloHall 5y ago
  In my experience, basic coding skills can really atrophy in senior developers who quit writing code years ago and are full-time architects/managers. I’ve interviewed more than a handful of extremely accomplished people with decades of experience as developers and then engineering managers who couldn’t answer extremely basic coding questions (we’re talking “efficiently find duplicates in a list” or “compute Fibonacci numbers” basic). These people never could get past the O(n^2) brute force solution for finding duplicates (or the brute force compute every Fibonacci number starting from 1, 1), because they hadn’t thought about even basic algorithmic complexity in so long. And when people like this are giving orders from the top, you can see how software can get so slow. I have no doubt that when these people were actually still coding, they could have answered my questions in their sleep. Quitting coding for engineering management really does one a disservice IMO. To this article’s point, I’ve also had the pleasure of working with people with decades of experience who never quit coding even as senior managers and their level of competence and productivity is astounding.
  • knuthsat 5y ago
    I really cannot fathom how one could forget fundamentals. I can prove the average complexity of quicksort with simple math transformations of initial recurrence equation which I do not even have remembered but I'm sure I could derive. Last time I did this was maybe 8 years ago if not more. Yet somehow an accomplished dev cannot spot accidentally quadratic behavior when coding in something that is not Haskell. IMO, the average dev and average accomplished dev is no longer the kind that knows the fundamentals. Not that it's necessary in all cases but eventually everything will look an equivalent of a doctoral thesis when the average codes the spaghetti mess. Recently I was reviewing code with map(find).sort(indexOf) (O(n^2 log n + n^2) behavior) when it could have been a simple dict; map(dict.get) (O(n)). This person has 10 years of coding experience. When looking at the resume, the dev is pretty accomplished, productive, and worthy of the salary. But I assume the knowledge of fundamentals was missing from the start.
  • sumtechguy 5y ago
    This is why I am considering leaving my current position. "oh we have something you can work on, but first can you..." 3 straight years of this...
• lbriner 5y ago
  Saying that is is a multiyear long undertaking was probably a little silly and makes it sound like the person who said that can't have been involved wi4th the software otherwise they would have known this but there might also be another explanation that we have seen, particularly with Microsoft: You can't sell the things that make people just like the software, only new headline features do that. Example 1: When you open visual studio 2019, you get a search box by default that allows you to type in your project name and it looks for it in the MRU list. Except this is intolerably slow! I suspect it might not be the searching itself, perhaps a tonne of threads are doing something but it is terrible. ANY search algorithm looking through a list of no more than 50 things should be instance, theirs takes up to around 10 seconds and does fuzzy search by default! Why don't they fix it? They wouldn't sell any more units by fixing it and you won't upgrade to the newer improved version. Example 2: When you install nuget packages in visual studio on netfx projects, it modifies the assembly redirects in web.config by re-writing the entire file even if there are no changes. Oh, and it adds extra spaces and stuff so that the diff tools think every single line has changed. I have to manually delete all of the entries, build it again, let visual studio warn me about missing redirects, double-click the warning and VS writes the file in the original style revealing the maybe 2 actual changes. This is total horsesh*t but they won't fix it. Why? You should be using dotnet core, even if your project is 5 years old and established. It's a shame because there are lots of things to like about MS tooling compared to lots of competitors but each of these things will be a coffin nail that eventually will cause people to jump ship.
• imcotton 5y ago
  The very ticket [1] is locked by this epic ending: > You were overly confident in your opinion, but I hope this website helps you understand that it's actually really damn hard. > The reason your program shows a high FPS under other terminal emulators is simply, because their rendering pipeline works independent of VT ingestion. Gnome Terminal is not laying out text faster than your display refresh rate either. And of course, again, this is something WT will probably do as well in the future... but this project is nowhere near as old as Gnome Terminal is. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomment-862852850 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
• firebaze 5y ago
  In other news: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/11405 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/11405
• jkjoijoijhhhbh 5y ago
  Peter principle
• stephc_int13 5y ago
  This story should be pinned somewhere for all to see.
• stefs 5y ago
  inexperienced developers are unable - or just rarely - ask themselves the question: "is the current performance in the right ballpark of where it should be?" here it's obvious - muratori took one look at that thing and just knew that "no, 2-3 fps is definitely, completely off". i, too, had a couple of those moments where i got my hands on some code and thought: "that just can't be right" and then found O² algorithms, byte-by-byte io copy routines, database abuse or duplicated work. if you don't have the rough reference points of what should be right, you often just don't question correctly working code.
• xyzelement 5y ago
  This is both annoying and understandable. For the dev team, to dive into this performance optimization would mean punting something else from their roadmap. I suspect they weighed their perceived chances of success against the projected cost and reached a certain conclusion which in retrospect seems wrong. The independent developer did not have that "hurdle" as he simply did this at the expense of whatever other fun programming challenges he may have done those weekends. It's awesome that he turned out to be right. But I suspect if he turned out wrong we'd never hear about it. There was likely no tradeoff analysis on his part in undertaking this project, while the dev team did have to do one. On the flip side, I have seen developers get really hung up on what is academically difficult rather than what is practically doable. I had a young developer who worked for me get really upset and hung up on the fact that something he was asked to do was NP equivalent, meaning there's no non-exponential time algorithm to implement what I was asking for. It took me weeks to realize this was messing with him and then about 5 mins to dig into the data and show that input length never practically exceeds like 7, so an exponential algorithm was fine. So I can see how a dev could get stuck thinking something is really hard when it really isn't. But I don't think it makes them a bad dev, it's just hard to transcend your own perspective.
  • Agentlien 5y ago
    I remember clearly when I first gained a real appreciation for the importance of measuring and considering your actual data. I was trying to optimize a slow project doing some polyhedron dissection on large (~1M polyhedrons) meshes in real-time. As a first attempt I had my sights set on a function which tried to find a certain point on a surface by making an educated guess and then iteratively bumping its estimate in the right direction. I figured "I can solve this analytically instead!". I did, and it made things approximately twice as slow. After scratching my head and outputting some data I realized my constant time solution required a number of expensive operations including sqrt and the iterative approach ran on average ~1 iteration and at most 3 iterations for just a handful of these millions of triangles.
    • xyzelement 5y ago
      > I realized my constant time solution required a number of expensive operations including sqrt and the iterative approach ran on average ~1 iteration Yeah! It's deeply unsatisfying to forego algorithmic optimization but it often isn't necessary. EG, when I do Advent of Code, I often write a naive algorithm that works correctly on the sample input, and then runs a really long time on the actual problem input. Before I go redo the algorithm, I often run it with PyPy instead of the standard Python, and 80% of the time it terminates quickly enough. Similarly, whenever I happen to do AoC in C++, my naive algorithms happen to magically be fast enough out of the box so I don't even think about better algorithms. It's unfortunately counter to the intuition that you get from a CS programs that obsess with Big-O notation rather than implementation speed. Big-O is really important but it seems like the input size where it starts to dominate implementation is much larger than our intuition suggests. (of course it's also easy to write really bad algos that suck even on small input)
• easton_s 5y ago
  I remember a post Msoft Dev wrote about adding a fairly simple feature to a web api. The code itself could be written by a single dev in a day or two, but the logistics needed for testing, documenting, supporting and communicating this involved hundreds of people with thousands of man hours. It also would bind them to maintaining this feature almost indefinitely. Because of that last point alone it took months to years to get a signoff on features.
• c7DJTLrn 5y ago
  The difference here is that the developer of RefTerm is an experienced, professional developer passionate about his craft and building good software. Microsoft is a faceless entity composed of people who mostly don't care about what they do during the day and are just getting by so they can get paid. There's no shame in that. But there is shame in patronising someone when they demonstrate something to be false and locking the thread on GitHub such that no further discussion is possible... Microsoft is sluggish and delivers products that do the job and nothing more. Sadly, that's the modus operandi of most software companies. That's why nimble little startups are still managing to steal pieces of various markets. I use Windows Terminal quite often and have definitely noticed its terrible performance. So this is definitely something visible in the real world and not just nitpicking.
  • mwcampbell 5y ago
    > Microsoft is a faceless entity composed of people who mostly don't care about what they do during the day and are just getting by so they can get paid. Regardless of what you think about Microsoft the company, please remember that the individual workers and managers are people who can be hurt by our tendency to form self-righteous mobs. And according to another commenter [1], one of the people working on Windows Terminal was hurt to the point that they quit. Full disclosure: I'm inclined to defend the Microsoft team here because I was at Microsoft (on the Windows accessibility team) for a while. I don't think that I or my former teammates fit the stereotype you described. And while I never met any of the developers on the Windows Terminal team (at least not knowingly), I could very easily have crossed paths with one of them; I believe my team used to be in the same building as theirs. So I'm inclined to be charitable. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28746624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28746624
    • adamdusty 5y ago
      Those individual workers hurt the project and the community around it by setting the precedent that you need to create your own competing product to verify that bugs can be fixed without PhD research. Nobody should be harassed over their open source project, but that doesn't mean actions don't trigger reactions.
• jameshart 5y ago
  I'm not sure "It doesn't take a PhD, just years of experience" is quite the rejoinder the author thinks it is. Aren't they both just ways of saying "It takes someone with a rare subset of highly specific knowledge to solve this problem"? The MS person was saying "Sure, there's probably a way to make this faster but I don't have anyone on my team who knows how to do that. If I had the budget to go out and hire someone with a PhD maybe I could do it." That then Casey Muratori could show up and do it in his spare time doesn't really refute that argument, does it? This is someeone who has spent years actually doing hardocre R&D work, and literally published techniques that advance the state of human knowledge in the field of GUI rendering[0]. His resume is kind of a living example of 'PhD, or equivalent professional experience'. So sure, it might be nice if MS's career structure led to them having more Muratoris on staff, but I don't think the expectation that every product team should have one or two developers of that caliber on it is a reasonable one. It IS a good argument for why MS should accept open source contributions, though. [0] https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0001 https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0001
  • reyqn 5y ago
    It's not really what the MS devs said though: "I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation" This seems to mean, nobody has ever done that, it is a research project (a doctorate thesis must be about something that has never been researched before, at least where I live). This particular problem cannot be a PhD subject, because it has already been researched, solved and done multiple times, by different persons and on different projects. Someone can use the knowledge already widely available on the internet to grasp what the issue is, and implement a solution in their own project. Years of experience aren't a PhD. Years of experience can help you understand a thesis, but only if the research doesn't exist yet, can it be considered a doctoral research project.
    • jameshart 5y ago
      So the comment that the 'PhD' reference was responding to was Muratori laying out how he figured a simple terminal renderer could be implemented, using two texture lookups in a single drawcall [0]. In the course of that, Muratori allowed, almost in passing, that of course you would need, in order to do that: > a glyph atlas encoding the cell-glyph coverage in whatever way makes it easiest to compute your ClearType blending values Now, it does not strike me as beyond the realm of possibility that that step might be suitable for academic research. It calls for an efficient encoding of cleartype-ready glyph data with comprehensive coverage of unicode glyph space (not codepoint space). That's not trivial, and - as the DHowett reply suggests - it would take a literature review to determine if someone has already accomplished this (and he also suggested that so far as he was aware this was not how any other terminal was implemented, implying this is not simply some well known solved problem). I mean, sure, he could be wrong about that - it might be exactly how another terminal implements it; there might already be published research on the topic; or it might just be much simpler than it appears. But it's not crazy to, on glancing at that problem, consider that it seems like it might actually require genuine original high level research. [0]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomment-862822530 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
• greyhair 5y ago
  From the linked article itself, I can attest to the constant push to move up into 'leadership' roles, particularly in some companies. I have stayed and worked as an engineer for 37 years. I have been 'team lead' a half dozen times, but never a full manager role. Why? Because I would be a poor manager. I have personally experienced managers that where technically brilliant, but not good at managing (or inspiring) the technical staff. They should have remained as engineers/scientists. Some corporations used to have parallel paths for technical staff that had management level pay and benefits, but the suits in the 'C suite' have eliminated that for the most part over the last twenty years. Bell Laboratories (now a shell of its former self) was once one of those places. So in the current environment, there is constant pressure to move up or move out. Even startups are no longer immune to that. If you want to have enough shares for it to really matter in a liquidity event, you need to have a team of people below you, or at least a director level title. The startup environment in 2000 was completely different, and technically astute engineers (mechanical, electrical, software) could attract strong stock grants as engineers. That has changed. I am fortunate in that after 37 years of doing this, I am at a position where I don't even have to think about these issues any longer. I feel sorry for younger engineers breaking into the field, the management pyramid is such a PITA. And back to the topic of strong technical engineers that are poor managers? If you get stuck into one of those situations, constant micro management, constant downward pressure of "you don't know what you are doing", get out. Find a new position elsewhere. Good managers will coach you when you need help, but will let you do your own work. Good managers will help identify your deficiencies but also guide you to work that plays to your strengths. Good managers will provide you opportunity for growth. I learned this early in my career, blessed with having an awesome manager. Since then, every job I have had, first thing I did was figure out which managers were good, and which ones were not, and made sure that I never had to work under a bad manager. So you can make a career in engineering, but it has to be a choice, and you have to learn to manage your managers. Also note, while I recognize that I would be a poor manager (for various reasons), mentoring is a different skill set. If you are a senior engineer, take every opportunity to mentor a starter in the field.
• xoac 5y ago
  Would just like to say that: 1. WT is probably my favorite Microsoft product 2. Since this whole affair, the developers have apologized and corrected themselves which is usually unacknowledged in these discussions. 3. The developers have made a number of performance improvements since (most of which are in the latest preview release). 4. This episode is constantly retold and used to bully the developers even after these apologies and this has lead to one of the developers to quit (paradoxically one of the devs who after these posts made the most effort to figure out where the bottlenecks are).
  • rfrey 5y ago
    If that's the case, they should really link those developments/retractions/apologies in the comments of that issue. The way the comments end in that issue is a really bad look, and there's no hint to the reader that there was any further developments, either in the code or the dev team.
    • xoac 5y ago
      Maybe, yeah. I don't have everything ready at hand but maybe take a look at: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/releases/tag/v1.11.2421.0 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/releases/tag/v1.11.242... (Latest release, check the PRs linked under performance) https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10461 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10461 (Issue discussing rendering from a glyph atlas) https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462 (This is where one of the contributors quit) https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10623 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10623 (Bullying example)
• mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  Most of the industry seems structured to keep devs at an intermediate level: resume-driven hiring, ageism, proliferation of open source that prioritizes easy over simple, little discussion of software design, complete lack of education/resources to move devs past that, and incentives that push people into management. Another thing I realized when writing this: where do experienced devs congregate? (It isn't Twitter.)
• smichel17 5y ago
  I think a significant contributing factor is that management is a local maximum. I am a self-identified "sort of knows what they are doing" (albeit, sometimes insecure about that) professional programmer. I've also had the chance to take a leadership position. So, I think I have a useful perspective here. The amount "I" can accomplish in a leadership position is so much higher than by coding directly. So, on the margins, it's really hard to justify time spent coding, compared to coordinating others. It's incredibly easy to imagine stagnating as a coder due to not doing very much of it. Yet, clearly when everyone follows this route, software quality suffers. I don't have any particular solutions. Perhaps eventually the rate of expansion of programmers will slow, and we'll end up with too many sort of knows what they're doing" programmers for everyone to move to management, so people/companies will start waiting until programmers hit the experienced mark to make the leap.
• loufe 5y ago
  I work as a mining engineer and in my eyes these stages are effectively the same as the author describes in the software world. I'd even argue they apply to most "professional" careers.
• allo37 5y ago
  I noticed that when you propose a new idea, often there is no shortage of resident "experts" giving you hand-wavy reasons as to why it can't work, won't work, etc. I kind of feel like you DO need a PhD just to have enough clout for these kinds of people to trust you.
• hintymad 5y ago
  > Based on my limited anecdotal evidence, it seems to me that the software industry doesn’t value technical excellence as much as it values having warm bodies report to you. This in turn limits the amount of experience an average programmer working on these big projects will have, just because they are incentivized to leave the hands on implementation work for some sort of a leadership role as soon as possible. +10000. This is so true. It's not just that people are incentivized to leave hands-on work. Every level of the management genuinely believe that a senior engineer should not spend much time on hands-on work but instead should focus on "tech leadership", which in a big company means going to meetings, influencing other teams, writing white papers, and of course "coordinating".
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > Due to the way the programmer’s ranking system works, an average company will have a big crowd of inexperienced people and very few who can tackle complex problems. For this reason, the vast majority of software is written by the ones who are still learning the ropes. I wonder if another reason is just that it’s such a growing industry. The number of CS grads each year are growing, and I know tons of people who sidestepped into the profession from other degrees as well. The number of jobs too. If the job market is twice the size it was a decade ago, half the employees are going to be new no matter what. Perhaps hilariously, that huge demand means high wages, means more early retirements, means fewer senior people too.
• hnfong 5y ago
  There are a couple claims/assumptions in the article that feel weird to me. 1. The article derides those using "years of experience as some sort of a badge of knowledge", yet keeps on referring to "experienced" programmers as if they were better. Maybe it's terminology, but in my experience (no pun intended) there's no useful correlation between the time one is writing software and their ability to tackle hard problems. "Experience" seem to matter much less than talent, imagination and passion. 2. Article says "Sitting in an office and shuffling papers around for a decade doesn’t make you a master programmer. Writing software does." -- writing software for a decade really doesn't automatically make somebody a master programmer. The author states elsewhere in the article: "I believe your self interest and curiosity matter more than the years spent writing getters and setters". So, which one is true? As mentioned in the previous point, I tend to think the latter. 3. The article mentions "the vast majority of software is written by the ones who are still learning the ropes" as if it were a bad thing. It really isn't, in fact this is the only way people can get "experience" in a growing industry where junior devs outnumber senior devs simply due to how large the industry has grown over the past ~40 years. It has everything to do with exponential growth in the software industry and has nothing to do with programmers going into middle management and leadership roles. 4. To make sure software is competently written even if most of them are written by junior devs, the managers/leads have to make sure everybody is assigned tasks that they can handle, perhaps with supervision by a more senior/skilled dev. The job for the tech lead is to figure out which is which, and ensure that the critical parts are competently dealt with by appropriately skilled people. This is a skill that requires competence and experience. Unless you have an endless supply of senior devs, you definitely want to "distract" the senior developers from their implementation work and put them in charge of this work. 5. Article says "the experienced programmers will take care of the design problems, but that is not going to save your bacon if the implementation of a great design is terrible." -- this is of course true if you have a team of truly terrible programmers, but not necessarily true if they are just "mediocre". Design decisions include choice of language and architecture (and sometimes process), and some demand more of the developers than others. There are ways to isolate bad implementation with clean(ish) interfaces, so that "big ball of complicated code" becomes small balls of bad code that can be fixed up bit by bit. 6. This is one of the most confused claims in the article: "If you want to produce a high quality software, you also need enough experienced people in the trenches that are not merely delegating the orders from the ivory tower." The only way this can work is if you only hire "experienced" people and reject all junior devs. Because in the author's ideal world there's really no place for junior devs. They can't be mentored because that will distract "experienced programmers" from the real work in the trenches. They can't be groomed for management roles because then they can't become "experienced programmers". It really sounds like to me that the author doesn't really know how to properly manage junior devs in a team and simply assumes that if "experienced programmers" who have kept writing software in the trenches were able to keep writing software, then the result would automagically not suck. I don't think the real world works that way, not until the software industry collapses and only the best programmers are able to keep being employed. In all it feels like the author was trying to sound insightful by stringing together a story that, at best, is just pointing out that "experienced programmers" are better than "wet behind the ears" without providing a suggested solution, and at worst, making up superficial narratives that doesn't really hold up when you try to poke it. Sure, for every senior dev taking on management or mentoring duties, the team loses out some quality man-hours on coding, but that is presumably a positive trade overall, or people would stop doing that. The only way to keep "experienced programmers" focused on coding are: don't hire junior devs, don't mentor junior devs and don't let technical staff enter management. I'm pretty sure that's not what the author tried to say, and unless I'm missing some obvious solution pointed out somewhere, the whole point of the article seems to be spinning a flamewar from github into a sentimental narrative that doesn't lead to any conclusions..
• StillBored 5y ago
  Maybe everyone needs their ansi.sys moment though. Back in the early 1990's, I, and probably half the programmers using DOS, rewrote the dos ansi.sys driver/TSR because its was _SLOW_. mostly IIRC because it was calling the BIOS text output, but also because it was a pretty solid implementation of the ANSI terminal/esc sequence "standard". So, the first half took about an hour or two to handle output (just write a character at the right location in the framebuffer) and get the INT/TSR boilerplate right. Then for the next 20 hours fight with all the edge cases the cropped up with corrupted text in various TUI programs that were calling the DOS string functions. Then as the size+perf approached NANSI.sys (http://www.kegel.com/nansi/ http://www.kegel.com/nansi/) give up... Learning experience.
• Shorel 5y ago
  Whatever the comments from both Microsoft and Casey Muratori about particular details of their implementations, Windows lacks a terminal like Linux Kitty (there's an unrelated Kitty that's just a fork of PuTTY). And by that I mean speed and features. Kitty is fast and a joy to use, and it is the software I miss the most when I am using Windows.
• PicassoCTs 5y ago
  The problem with the excuse parade is, that it has to justify itself. They have to be special, the avant-garde, selected through countless interviews to live well inside the castle. If some wandering apprentice can outperform them, the hot air escape from the "rockstar" developer, wrestling with complex code sitting inside the compound of a FAMG firm. Then nothing remains, but embarrassed silence. And the question, why this people are paid for, if they waste the customers money, aka performance of the customers computational platform and the outcome is so sub-par. Which is why they are sitting all in one huge meeting today.
• mbrodersen 5y ago
  My company hired a number of PhDs. They were all smart and well educated but for some reason couldn’t turn that knowledge into working software. So they were all fired in less that a year.