5 ms·

Sorry, but this denigrating about leetcoders just strikes me as delusional in a different way. The people that I know that spend a lot of time doing leetcoding

Sorry, but this denigrating about leetcoders just strikes me as delusional in a different way. The people that I know that spend a lot of time doing leetcoding and learning new tech are 1. Also really good at general programming, and 2. In the top 20% of actual enthusiasm for their job. If these people cant find jobs reliably, what should you actually do to have a decent shot at getting hired? We can't just tell everyone "just make sure youre in the top 2%".

Avicebron 2y ago
We've been telling plenty of other professions/people that, "make sure you're in the top 2%" as a society forever? That's part of the problem, we need to make sure that if someone is part of the 86% then they also can afford a house, feed themselves and their family etc etc
- drchickensalad 2y ago
  This is a really good point that honestly I've been neglecting considering. I try to help and push my friends to be better than most (because honestly most are quite lazy and entitled) but still you can't ignore the societal ramifications of most people getting less than they expect.
  - borgdefenser 2y ago
    If you read Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Schumpeter, published at the end of the depression and during WW2, most of his predictions were spot on economically besides solving the housing problem. There was a housing problem then too that he thought would be solved in time by the market. He thought we would see something like assembly line, prefabricated housing at some point that would drive down prices. What I suspect is that once people own real estate, the last thing they want is something that drives prices down and everyone making the decisions needed to solve this problem owns real estate. That plus the margins won't be that high so you have to do large volume and the red tape is too much to be able to do that at scale. So instead of we do nothing and we will keep doing nothing for another 100 years.
    - drchickensalad 2y ago
      Yeah that's a really good analysis. It feels emotionally true because when I buy many terabytes of high quality SSD, I have no preference to "keep the valuation" of my SSD investment, I just want more faster for cheaper! If the price goes down tomorrow and my friend gets in for less than I just paid, it's not screwing me over. In fact I'm probably buying more on the future so I love the increased supply! This is not true at all for housing lol. As someone who bought Manhattan real estate, I can feel the shitty incentives every day, and it's really destructive of a system.
- menzoic 2y ago
  This has nothing to do with earning a livable wage. It’s not like the top 2% are only earning enough to barely get by.
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    Top 2% maybe not. But top 10%? In a lot of economies the property ponzi scheme has reached such levels that even a top-10% salary is barely enough to actually afford decent accommodation (and employers collude with real estate interests with things like RTO/etc meaning you need that accommodation and don't have cheaper alternatives).
    - JustExAWS 2y ago
      In almost every major city in the US, a regular old “senior” enterprise dev with 5-7 years of experience should be making at least twice the median wage for the city.
      - Nextgrid 2y ago
        Which just means the housing prices can increase to match. Where else are people going to go?
Nextgrid 2y ago
My point is that LeetCode and buzzwords became the unofficial benchmark for a software engineer during the distorted/ZIRP era. You had to be good at it to get in, and once in you could just coast your way through, not that anyone would mind because so many of your peers and superiors are doing the same thing and none of it matters as the company itself may be coasting on investor money and never intending on making a profit. Unfortunately, LeetCode skills and "architecture astronomy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut) are a very poor proxy for actually driving profit. This doesn't mean a LeetCoder (for fun or to play the game - as long as they understand it is a game) can't also be a good contributor in today's market, but their value would come more from experience solving actual business problems and ability to collect/define/argue requirements and then translate them into a system (which may or may not even be code - sometimes a Google Form is all that's needed) rather than whether they know LeetCode. When it comes to solving business problems and actually driving profit, programming in abstract terms (the kind that LeetCode and most interview processes select for) is worthless - LLMs can do it just fine. The hard part is understanding/fleshing out the business requirements (including being aware of what you don't know, and planning for that or seeking outside help), refining your solution with the relevant stakeholders, and being aware of high-level constraints including regulatory requirements, security, etc. Once you have a good enough specification, programming it is the generally the easy part.
- bradlys 2y ago
  Are you advocating for everyone to create their own SaaS here or what? End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales. Most ICs are never going to be in a position where the CEO is going to listen to them about what product we should develop and be given the time and resources to investigate that stuff. Your assertion doesn’t even acknowledge infra engineers who clearly don’t work on product facing work. It’s a bit ridiculous.
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    I see the era of permanent tech employment as coming to an end, and tech will have to transition to being closer to a trade. You don't expect to pay builders/plumbers/architects/electricians and keep them around forever after your house is built right? You will at best only need them occasionally on a one-off basis for any fixes or alternations. A properly designed tech solution (aka, not one designed to pad a resume) for upkeep should only require a small fraction of the manpower needed to originally build it. I expect companies keeping in-house "skeleton crews" to run things and handle maintenance and small changes, with larger ones being done by a (potentially returning) cast of contractors who come in on a project basis. So the solution for permanent employment would be to either join one of those skeleton crews or join an agency/consultancy. Otherwise, the only way out is freelance and curating your own client portfolio. Maybe you can partner with others and form a coop to have more manpower and handle bigger projects - essentially building your own agency. > Your assertion doesn’t even acknowledge infra engineers My assertion is that engineers who want to succeed in the current market will need to know enough infra/sysadmin to support their solution, or farm it out to someone who will. If they don't, someone else will outcompete them. Infra is also a huge breeding ground for resume padding and architecture astronomy (and there were no incentives to discourage it - in fact cloud providers are still laughing all the way to the bank). It doesn't inherently mean all that complexity was necessary. So I expect "infra" specialization to become a nicher skill, one or permanent skeleton/maintenance crews or hyperscalers who actually need the complexity. > who clearly don’t work on product facing work I'm intentionally being vague when I talk about "solutions" and solving business problems. I do not mean it should be an app, a product or even have a UI. A cron job running a shell script to copy files from one place to another may very well be the right solution to some business requirements. Infra engineers would be a perfect fit for problems that don't involve significant UI work (I myself prefer those as I hate frontend with a passion). I think the era of high specialization in tech might be in decline; tools are good enough and hardware is good enough and the field is mature enough that most business problems can be solved just fine by a generalist (bringing in specialists on an ad-hoc basis when needed) - or otherwise they'll get outcompeted by someone who can.

Avicebron 2y ago

We've been telling plenty of other professions/people that, "make sure you're in the top 2%" as a society forever? That's part of the problem, we need to make sure that if someone is part of the 86% then they also can afford a house, feed themselves and their family etc etc

drchickensalad 2y ago
This is a really good point that honestly I've been neglecting considering. I try to help and push my friends to be better than most (because honestly most are quite lazy and entitled) but still you can't ignore the societal ramifications of most people getting less than they expect.
- borgdefenser 2y ago
  If you read Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Schumpeter, published at the end of the depression and during WW2, most of his predictions were spot on economically besides solving the housing problem. There was a housing problem then too that he thought would be solved in time by the market. He thought we would see something like assembly line, prefabricated housing at some point that would drive down prices. What I suspect is that once people own real estate, the last thing they want is something that drives prices down and everyone making the decisions needed to solve this problem owns real estate. That plus the margins won't be that high so you have to do large volume and the red tape is too much to be able to do that at scale. So instead of we do nothing and we will keep doing nothing for another 100 years.
  - drchickensalad 2y ago
    Yeah that's a really good analysis. It feels emotionally true because when I buy many terabytes of high quality SSD, I have no preference to "keep the valuation" of my SSD investment, I just want more faster for cheaper! If the price goes down tomorrow and my friend gets in for less than I just paid, it's not screwing me over. In fact I'm probably buying more on the future so I love the increased supply! This is not true at all for housing lol. As someone who bought Manhattan real estate, I can feel the shitty incentives every day, and it's really destructive of a system.
menzoic 2y ago
This has nothing to do with earning a livable wage. It’s not like the top 2% are only earning enough to barely get by.
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  Top 2% maybe not. But top 10%? In a lot of economies the property ponzi scheme has reached such levels that even a top-10% salary is barely enough to actually afford decent accommodation (and employers collude with real estate interests with things like RTO/etc meaning you need that accommodation and don't have cheaper alternatives).
  - JustExAWS 2y ago
    In almost every major city in the US, a regular old “senior” enterprise dev with 5-7 years of experience should be making at least twice the median wage for the city.
    - Nextgrid 2y ago
      Which just means the housing prices can increase to match. Where else are people going to go?

Nextgrid 2y ago

My point is that LeetCode and buzzwords became the unofficial benchmark for a software engineer during the distorted/ZIRP era. You had to be good at it to get in, and once in you could just coast your way through, not that anyone would mind because so many of your peers and superiors are doing the same thing and none of it matters as the company itself may be coasting on investor money and never intending on making a profit. Unfortunately, LeetCode skills and "architecture astronomy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut) are a very poor proxy for actually driving profit. This doesn't mean a LeetCoder (for fun or to play the game - as long as they understand it is a game) can't also be a good contributor in today's market, but their value would come more from experience solving actual business problems and ability to collect/define/argue requirements and then translate them into a system (which may or may not even be code - sometimes a Google Form is all that's needed) rather than whether they know LeetCode. When it comes to solving business problems and actually driving profit, programming in abstract terms (the kind that LeetCode and most interview processes select for) is worthless - LLMs can do it just fine. The hard part is understanding/fleshing out the business requirements (including being aware of what you don't know, and planning for that or seeking outside help), refining your solution with the relevant stakeholders, and being aware of high-level constraints including regulatory requirements, security, etc. Once you have a good enough specification, programming it is the generally the easy part.

bradlys 2y ago
Are you advocating for everyone to create their own SaaS here or what? End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales. Most ICs are never going to be in a position where the CEO is going to listen to them about what product we should develop and be given the time and resources to investigate that stuff. Your assertion doesn’t even acknowledge infra engineers who clearly don’t work on product facing work. It’s a bit ridiculous.
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  I see the era of permanent tech employment as coming to an end, and tech will have to transition to being closer to a trade. You don't expect to pay builders/plumbers/architects/electricians and keep them around forever after your house is built right? You will at best only need them occasionally on a one-off basis for any fixes or alternations. A properly designed tech solution (aka, not one designed to pad a resume) for upkeep should only require a small fraction of the manpower needed to originally build it. I expect companies keeping in-house "skeleton crews" to run things and handle maintenance and small changes, with larger ones being done by a (potentially returning) cast of contractors who come in on a project basis. So the solution for permanent employment would be to either join one of those skeleton crews or join an agency/consultancy. Otherwise, the only way out is freelance and curating your own client portfolio. Maybe you can partner with others and form a coop to have more manpower and handle bigger projects - essentially building your own agency. > Your assertion doesn’t even acknowledge infra engineers My assertion is that engineers who want to succeed in the current market will need to know enough infra/sysadmin to support their solution, or farm it out to someone who will. If they don't, someone else will outcompete them. Infra is also a huge breeding ground for resume padding and architecture astronomy (and there were no incentives to discourage it - in fact cloud providers are still laughing all the way to the bank). It doesn't inherently mean all that complexity was necessary. So I expect "infra" specialization to become a nicher skill, one or permanent skeleton/maintenance crews or hyperscalers who actually need the complexity. > who clearly don’t work on product facing work I'm intentionally being vague when I talk about "solutions" and solving business problems. I do not mean it should be an app, a product or even have a UI. A cron job running a shell script to copy files from one place to another may very well be the right solution to some business requirements. Infra engineers would be a perfect fit for problems that don't involve significant UI work (I myself prefer those as I hate frontend with a passion). I think the era of high specialization in tech might be in decline; tools are good enough and hardware is good enough and the field is mature enough that most business problems can be solved just fine by a generalist (bringing in specialists on an ad-hoc basis when needed) - or otherwise they'll get outcompeted by someone who can.