5 ms·
I absolutely agree. I've actually had this thought lingering in the back of my head as I'm in the midst of making the transition from primarily MS desktop/embe
by brandall10 15y ago
I absolutely agree.
I've actually had this thought lingering in the back of my head as I'm in the midst of making the transition from primarily MS desktop/embedded C++/C# guy to open source stack web app guy.
A few years back, in a review my supervisor put in a recommendation to go into management. I asked if I would be able to code anymore. Nope. I felt that was some subtle death trap - to lose my skills through non-use, and turned it down, 20% pay bump be damned.
So now this transition, and began to think of it in the same light. But it doesn't work. It's been 13 years since I graduated, and I'm probably better at most CS'esque interview questions than anytime since then. Why? Because of what I did that led me to making this transition, essentially becoming unhappy in my job and looking for anwers, which started with a book called "The Passionate Programmer", which led to maybe 20-30 other books, completing some classics (such as K&R C), some incomplete (SICP, only halfway thru chapter 2), but in general exploring my craft in a way that my job did not require me to. I'm a much better programmer because of it, language be damned.
So here's the question I have:
Who is more likely to be aware of things such as CLRS, SICP, Hacker News, Stack Overflow? Who is more likely to understand (or even be aware of) languages like Clojure, Haskell, Prolog, Python, Ruby, etc? Who is more likely to give you more lucid answers to problems with big data, having even touched a NoSQL database and pontificate on the advantages/drawbacks of that vs. relational? Your typical enterprise dev, or your typical open source web dev? After talking about all this stuff to a team of 30+ engineers over the past few years, I'd have to put my $$ on and double down firmly on the latter.
Of course, this is only an example of one engineer's experience. But I think there's a more meta issue at play here... it's more of the 501s vs. the non-501s, the latter being ones who well, just are more aware of what's actually going on in their respective industry. If the industry as a whole makes a tectonic shift toward algorithmically more difficult problems (ie. machine learning), I trust the open-source web devs will be on it and synthesize it faster than your typical enterprise guy will even be aware there is a need.
- tomrod 15y agoWell, I'm a math-y overtrained guy who just loves tech as a passionate hobby, and I found HN. I love the community here, and the new things I learn. I hope to never have to work where only people like me are employed. shudder.
- Retric 15y agoI work at a reasonably large (20+K) well respected consulting firm that has a significant number of software developers or ex software developers. Honestly, they do a lot of web development work and keep up with the latest things but really C# and SharePoint really are the best solutions for most of these projects. Advertising supported websites care a lot about scale on the cheap because serving banner advertising to 10 thousand people a day does not pay the rent even if the servers where free. But, when your actually selling stuff or managing internal projects it's all about manpower costs and .Net projects take less time to build. When a small project costs 10,000$ a day in manpower and needs 2-20k worth of server and say 100k worth of software it's still almost meaningless next to manpower costs.
- zdw 15y agoI call BS. I doubt most of the web dev people are spending anywhere near 5 figures a day in manpower, and often their software costs are 0. Outside of corporations, nobody specs out 6 figure 3rd party software budgets. If you're a MS shop with more money than brains (ie, more money to spend on hardware/software vs the skill of people you have on staff), sure, this might be true. It definitely wouldn't be true if you were a Unix shop, where the tradition has come around to be "free" software for everything.
- Retric 15y agoCurrent project 20-25k/day development budget (including 2 sysadmins and 4 testers) total users under 100. And oddly enough the customer is happy and wants to expand the project. I was once on a project that spent 3 million / year and we had less then 40 actual users of a standalone desktop application yet after 3 years we ended-up saving the client money.
- zdw 15y agoThere's obviously a economic disconnect between what you do, and what a bunch of 21 year old webdevs surviving on ramen do. The problem will be when one or the other ends up making a breakthrough that allows one group to eat the other's lunch. Obviously I and most of HN are betting on the webdevs.
- Drbble 15y agoAn "open source web dev who reads Hacker News" will do better machine learning than a Stats MS/PhD at a bank? OK, enjoy your ninja rockstars...
- brandall10 15y ago1) I said: "I trust the open-source web devs will be on it and synthesize it faster than your typical enterprise guy will even be aware there is a need." 2) The article: "It says here you went to the University of Pennsylvania for undergrad. Were you an engineer there?” We're not talking about quants here. If (quoting myself again): "the industry as a whole makes a tectonic shift toward algorithmically more difficult problems" we'll probably need to enlist the help of more than the top .1% of all software/cs folk. If you are a quant, I humbly apologize for implying mere mortals could even begin to grasp the fundamentals of a concept as abstract as machine learning. Norvig/Thrun/Ng might have something to say about that though.