4 ms·

I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-

by petcat 2mo ago

I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development. This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway. [0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-workers-return-india-us-jobs-245525 https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...

sameesh 2mo ago
What's with people using the number "0" for their first reference? I have only ever seen that practice here at Hacker News.
- ebb_earl_co 2mo ago
  Lots of (most?) programming languages are 0-indexed so it feels natural for software developers and our ilk.
  - SoftTalker 2mo ago
    Not really. 0-based indexing is different from counting and starting with 0 in a counting context is weird. Would you ever say a set has zero elements when it actually contains a single element?
    - ebb_earl_co 2mo ago
      It's a remarkable coincidence that I'm reading the book The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan, and this passage on page 96 seems precisely relevant to this situation: """A Roman idiosyncrasy about counting reinforced this avoidance. The 360 degrees of longitude, for example, were always measured from the vernal equinox, which lies in the zodiacal sign of Aries. This should be zero degrees, 0°. It was common, however, to call it instead 'the first degree', Aries 1°, as Pliny did around 60 AD, upsetting his calculations and those of many who followed him. It amounts to this: if you lay out four marks on the ground and step from the first to the last, have you taken three paces or four? Clearly three; yet four marks were involved. To get the right answer it helps to call the starting-line 'zero'; then the number at the mark you step on will correspond to the number of your steps. But the Romans counted so that three days after Sunday was Tuesday; the Italian for the fifteenth century is the quattrocento — and all of us still call the two steps in music from C to E a major third, taking the number from the three tones involved.""" I wouldn't say that the set that has one element, labeled 0, _has_ zero elements; it has one element with the label 0. Right?
- layer8 2mo ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering, e.g. “computer programmers might use zeroth in situations where others might use first”.
- dabbz 2mo ago
  Hey everyone! I found the COBOL developer!
- Kaethar 2mo ago
  [dead]
florianherrengt 2mo ago
I’d expect that layer of the industry to shrink substantially. Although, I don’t think immigration or country of origin is particularly relevant here. I never worked in the US but there are plenty of "assembly line" developers here in London too. If your job is essentially taking a ticket and turning it into code without contributing much else, then yes, I think that category of developer is going to be decimated. That applies equally to everyone.

by petcat 2mo ago

sameesh 2mo ago

What's with people using the number "0" for their first reference? I have only ever seen that practice here at Hacker News.

ebb_earl_co 2mo ago
Lots of (most?) programming languages are 0-indexed so it feels natural for software developers and our ilk.
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  Not really. 0-based indexing is different from counting and starting with 0 in a counting context is weird. Would you ever say a set has zero elements when it actually contains a single element?
  - ebb_earl_co 2mo ago
    It's a remarkable coincidence that I'm reading the book The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan, and this passage on page 96 seems precisely relevant to this situation: """A Roman idiosyncrasy about counting reinforced this avoidance. The 360 degrees of longitude, for example, were always measured from the vernal equinox, which lies in the zodiacal sign of Aries. This should be zero degrees, 0°. It was common, however, to call it instead 'the first degree', Aries 1°, as Pliny did around 60 AD, upsetting his calculations and those of many who followed him. It amounts to this: if you lay out four marks on the ground and step from the first to the last, have you taken three paces or four? Clearly three; yet four marks were involved. To get the right answer it helps to call the starting-line 'zero'; then the number at the mark you step on will correspond to the number of your steps. But the Romans counted so that three days after Sunday was Tuesday; the Italian for the fifteenth century is the quattrocento — and all of us still call the two steps in music from C to E a major third, taking the number from the three tones involved.""" I wouldn't say that the set that has one element, labeled 0, _has_ zero elements; it has one element with the label 0. Right?
layer8 2mo ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering, e.g. “computer programmers might use zeroth in situations where others might use first”.
dabbz 2mo ago
Hey everyone! I found the COBOL developer!
Kaethar 2mo ago
[dead]

florianherrengt 2mo ago

I’d expect that layer of the industry to shrink substantially. Although, I don’t think immigration or country of origin is particularly relevant here. I never worked in the US but there are plenty of "assembly line" developers here in London too. If your job is essentially taking a ticket and turning it into code without contributing much else, then yes, I think that category of developer is going to be decimated. That applies equally to everyone.