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Canine Blues Arooo posted:I think the closer you get to foundational knowledge, the less likelihood you will have this problem. Perhaps a better way of saying this is, 'The more foundational your knowledge, the more equipped you are to make pragmatic choices'. I've met a lot of people who deeply miss the forest for the trees because they are "cs experts". Making a sensible distributed architecture (even if it's really simple!) or ergonomic APIs is a different skill set. You can be good at both, but being good at one does not automatically make you good at the other.
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Oct 26, 2022 22:45
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I can agree with Sussman's reasoning for why the MIT intro course changed languages. The nature of job HAS changed, but it hasn't changed to writing glue code, or any other single thing. The industry has become so much more specialized since the 80s and that makes it truly difficult to provide a generalized introduction course.
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Oct 26, 2022 23:08
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raminasi posted:Out of curiosity, how much personal experience do you have with modern web frontend development? To be fair, not much. The last time I've had to do Front End Web as a job was when JQuery was the hot poo poo. I have a couple small things in React + some other stuff, but the scope is constrained. I will say I think Typescript makes it way more tolerable, but it's also a half-measure and my take is that JS is just deeply flawed. I'm absolutely not an expert in front end web these days, but I'm also actively avoiding it. My life is C# and C++ these days and I'm so, so much happier in that space and every time I have to touch web, I feel very validated that I stay in C-land. An argument could be made here that I'm just on a different side of the cargo cult, and I think there is some validity to that - If you held my feet to fire to really explain all the technical differences and explicit trade-offs between QT or WPF and [insert web framework here], I couldn't. However, I do think I have enough foundational knowledge, and enough experience to say with moderate confidence that web kinda loving sucks. That's not to say that C++ is some bed of roses - christ no. I have plenty to complain about there. I will however will stan hard for C# :P. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Oct 26, 2022 |
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Oct 26, 2022 23:46
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Volmarias posted:Like it or not, let me know when you find (non sysadmin) computer speaker jobs that don't demand a computer science degree in the job posting. Imagine if everyone who wanted to be an electrical engineer had to have a BA in Physics because "that's what understanding how electricity works is, right? If you want to wire up lights go to electrician school" I don't think any of our job listings other than the ones specifically targeted at fresh college grads have the word "degree" (or a synonym) in them at all and I've interviewed people for senior positions who didn't have CS degrees so it's not a secret unlisted requirement or something.
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Oct 27, 2022 02:43
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:To be fair, not much. The last time I've had to do Front End Web as a job was when JQuery was the hot poo poo. I have a couple small things in React + some other stuff, but the scope is constrained. I will say I think Typescript makes it way more tolerable, but it's also a half-measure and my take is that JS is just deeply flawed. I'm absolutely not an expert in front end web these days, but I'm also actively avoiding it. My life is C# and C++ these days and I'm so, so much happier in that space and every time I have to touch web, I feel very validated that I stay in C-land. "Kinda loving sucks," sure, but when you disparagingly refer to people who "live in a browser" as "API technicians" who aren't doing real "software engineering," it doesn't at all square with my experience of working with extremely talented frontend devs who have to manage entire categories of complexity that I'm happily insulated from because I work in a simpler environment with better tools: backend development in C#. (Which, yes, it's great, but that doesn't make my work more real engineering than the stuff that React gurus do.) As an added twist, frontend's reputation as easier and less serious means that female engineers more often get channeled into it, and then the gender ratio subconsciously contributes to the sentiment that it's less serious work. It's a vicious little cycle.
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Oct 27, 2022 02:55
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Plorkyeran posted:I don't think any of our job listings other than the ones specifically targeted at fresh college grads have the word "degree" (or a synonym) in them at all and I've interviewed people for senior positions who didn't have CS degrees so it's not a secret unlisted requirement or something. Compiler development is relatively intense about needing both thoughtful algorithm design and formal theory, and my group nevertheless not only doesn't strictly require a CS degree but employs several people without one; we even have some people who never enrolled at college at all. Good algorithmic sensibility is pretty easy to pick up, especially if you have a good review culture to prod people into it. As for theory, well, it's usually not hard to teach the relevant stuff when it's important, and nobody should be designing theoretically complex systems by themselves; you don't need everyone to be a deep expert as long as you have some people around with enough of a theoretical baseline to recognize when something needs a closer look. Honestly, the biggest limitation I see which, theoretically, more education ought to help with is that a lot of people don't know how to write effectively. A lot of college graduates are still incompetent writers, though.
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Oct 27, 2022 05:50
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rjmccall posted:Compiler development is relatively intense about needing both thoughtful algorithm design and formal theory, and my group nevertheless not only doesn't strictly require a CS degree but employs several people without one; we even have some people who never enrolled at college at all. Good algorithmic sensibility is pretty easy to pick up, especially if you have a good review culture to prod people into it. As for theory, well, it's usually not hard to teach the relevant stuff when it's important, and nobody should be designing theoretically complex systems by themselves; you don't need everyone to be a deep expert as long as you have some people around with enough of a theoretical baseline to recognize when something needs a closer look. IMHO often the writing that's required with a college degree is not quite the right kind for our field --- essay and creative writing are all great in their own right, but technical writing has its own challenges. I think the closest I've gotten to it was actually in a math class (and one that was run highly atypically!)
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Oct 27, 2022 05:59
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I've never worked with JavaScript and I'm sure it's flawed as hell, but I've worked with God's Own Language (C++) for 20 years and it's a disaster. We figured out a long time ago how to mitigate the disaster, and I'd have to assume that JavaScript programmers have done the same
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Oct 27, 2022 06:16
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OddObserver posted:IMHO often the writing that's required with a college degree is not quite the right kind for our field --- essay and creative writing are all great in their own right, but technical writing has its own challenges. I think the closest I've gotten to it was actually in a math class (and one that was run highly atypically!) Yeah. A lot of collegiate writing is selective analysis, where you try to say something interesting about some small aspect of a broad subject. Technical writing tends to be some mix of writing authoritatively about some narrow subject and making a persuasive argument about what needs to be done there. When you do write analysis, you need to be thorough, and you need to convince your reader that you’re being thorough, which means you need to be well-organized and well-targeted to their level of understanding. Definitely a markedly different skill.
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Oct 27, 2022 06:32
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:I will however will stan hard for C# :P.
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Oct 27, 2022 07:37
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Sagacity posted:I hope you realize that there's also an entire category of engineer who thinks it is you who is doing the baby-level development, because you're not even doing any manual memory management. It's ok tho because you never have to respect their opinion on anything
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Oct 27, 2022 07:53
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A lot of undergrad writing assignments also push them towards excruciating verbosity (to meet word or page count guidelines with as little work as possible), so you've then got to teach them how to be succinct and convey more information in less space if you want them to communicate effectively.
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Oct 27, 2022 07:55
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raminasi posted:As an added twist, frontend's reputation as easier and less serious means that female engineers more often get channeled into it, and then the gender ratio subconsciously contributes to the sentiment that it's less serious work. It's a vicious little cycle. Echoed by OP saying they’d respect a “greybeard” over a front end dev.
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Oct 27, 2022 08:19
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raminasi posted:As an added twist, frontend's reputation as easier and less serious means that female engineers more often get channeled into it, and then the gender ratio subconsciously contributes to the sentiment that it's less serious work. It's a vicious little cycle. With this in mind front end (and its counterpart ui/ux design which also has a lot of women) is probably the nicer place to work than whatever is going on in the greybeard backend
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Oct 27, 2022 08:30
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Speaking as a "full stack" developer who does mainly TypeScript webdev and C# backend/DB stuff, but also some slightly more low-level video/audio stuff (still in C#), I would describe the frontend part as being by far the most difficult. The requirements are much fuzzier, and having to account directly for user behavior increases the complexity tenfold. Plus everybody and their grandmother has an opinion on everything, which isn't so much the case with backend. Admittedly my opinion might be colored by the type of backend work that I do.
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Oct 27, 2022 08:57
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For most of what I do, frontend work is harder on the programmer. However, I am also convinced that most of the hardness is self-inflicted from lovely state of JS and tooling like NPM. The rest of it is from the fact that frontend devs usually don't get to say "lol, I don't care that edgium cannot render the page properly because they are doing some stupid poo poo", while I do get to say "lol, I don't care that MSVC compiles this badly, our prod compiler is Clang".
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Oct 27, 2022 10:15
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OddObserver posted:IMHO often the writing that's required with a college degree is not quite the right kind for our field --- essay and creative writing are all great in their own right, but technical writing has its own challenges. I think the closest I've gotten to it was actually in a math class (and one that was run highly atypically!) My CS degree included a mandatory technical writing class and a few CS classes included technical writing assignments that attempted to mimic business writing. That's apparently fairly atypical, though. One of the neat things Northeastern does is they actually talk to managers who hired NEU interns and sometimes adjust parts of the curriculum based on that feedback.
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Oct 27, 2022 17:09
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LOOK I AM A TURTLE posted:Speaking as a "full stack" developer who does mainly TypeScript webdev and C# backend/DB stuff, but also some slightly more low-level video/audio stuff (still in C#), I would describe the frontend part as being by far the most difficult. The requirements are much fuzzier, and having to account directly for user behavior increases the complexity tenfold. Plus everybody and their grandmother has an opinion on everything, which isn't so much the case with backend. Admittedly my opinion might be colored by the type of backend work that I do. This 100% matches my experience. In addition, UI Layout is a skillset completely unknown / unrelated to most backend devs. (and you can argue it's not a CS thing, it's a design thing...except by virtue of it being part of your job, it is.) And I'm not even talking about like UI design, even just the skill necessary to turn a perfectly well designed draft into actual code is a lot. (It's entirely possible that some of the C++ folks snobbing so hard are great with building applications in it, but it's definitely not as common to have to deal with as it is for web devs.) I way prefer backend programming, but it also means that my ability to write software that people can directly use is a lot less.
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Oct 27, 2022 17:24
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I don't care whether people can use my software directly, I care about having chill work and being paid 
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Oct 27, 2022 17:57
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Sagacity posted:I hope you realize that there's also an entire category of engineer who thinks it is you who is doing the baby-level development, because you're not even doing any manual memory management. Oh absolutely. Some of the smartest folks I've ever seen are in graphics and holy poo poo is their job wild, but the people truly ensconced in C++ are always super interesting to talk to.
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Oct 27, 2022 19:08
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Those weenies over in graphics get to look at their output to find problems.
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Oct 27, 2022 19:10
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Let's not disparage any programming as not real or less worthy. Anything a computer can do has the ability to become complicated, and the presence of a clean and well-designed abstraction layer between your job and theirs only means you can't see their hard problems, not that they're not hard.
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Oct 27, 2022 19:14
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Bongo Bill posted:Let's not disparage any programming as not real or less worthy. I see someone's never read any of my code.
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Oct 27, 2022 19:20
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ultrafilter posted:Those weenies over in graphics get to look at their output to find problems. i do graphics stuff and this usually isn't true 
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Oct 28, 2022 16:29
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Sagacity posted:I hope you realize that there's also an entire category of engineer who thinks it is you who is doing the baby-level development, because you're not even doing any manual memory management. And there's another entire category who sneers at those guys because they're doing manual memory management, because if you're writing microcontroller firmware for a Cortex-M0 with 8k of SRAM, you're not getting malloc().
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Oct 28, 2022 16:35
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champagne posting posted:With this in mind front end (and its counterpart ui/ux design which also has a lot of women) is probably the nicer place to work than whatever is going on in the greybeard backend Maybe in the "chiller coworkers" sense, but potentially not in the money/prestige/organizational respect sense.
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Oct 28, 2022 16:35
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I’m just glad other people do the parts I don’t want to do or aren’t good at and I still get paid a bunch
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Oct 28, 2022 16:55
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feedmegin posted:And there's another entire category who sneers at those guys because they're doing manual memory management, because if you're writing microcontroller firmware for a Cortex-M0 with 8k of SRAM, you're not getting malloc(). 
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Oct 28, 2022 18:20
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One of the shittiest people I’ve worked with would brag about how he used to program punchcards then ask me to use machine learning to parse spreadsheets, despite not being in my department. I would explain why that is dumb and he would reiterate that AI is the way to do something that isn’t even my job. I think they just tucked him away over time for being an annoying rear end, and probably the racism too.
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Oct 28, 2022 18:43
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dougdrums posted:I’m just glad other people do the parts I don’t want to do or aren’t good at and I still get paid a bunch
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Oct 30, 2022 17:19
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#PopCultured #173.04166666667 🟨🟧🟨🟩🌟🌟 🔼🔼🔼🔨🌟🌟 https://histordle.com/popcultured/ This daily game website has a Daylight Saving Time bug in their game number. (It’s off by 1/24.)
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Nov 8, 2022 13:49
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smackfu posted:#PopCultured #173.04166666667 I've seen one of those where it literally didn't work after daylight savings changed, because it wasn't just displaying that calculated number, it was using it to index into its generated wordlist to figure out what the puzzle was.
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Nov 8, 2022 14:27
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Falsehoods programmers believe about dates: Subtracting 12:00:00 AM on one day from 12:00:00 AM on a different day will give you an integer number of days.
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Nov 8, 2022 14:29
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https://twitter.com/kubukoz/status/1590135952886075393
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Nov 9, 2022 08:30
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Nov 9, 2022 23:12
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This one's fantastic. It'll work well enough if it's the only thing you're running, but on a contentious system or under load you'd see failures cropping up. Perfect recipe to pass DOA testing then slaughter bigger testing or prod. At which point, naturally, you'd try to reduce it... where it starts passing again.
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Nov 9, 2022 23:20
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Reminds me of sleepsort.
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Nov 10, 2022 00:30
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Falsehoods programmers believe about time: it is monotonic
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Nov 10, 2022 21:57
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My new favorite thing to do at work is go on a spiel about time and that it’s not real. Lotta people don’t know that leap seconds (forwards AND backwards) exist and it kinda fucks them up.
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Nov 11, 2022 00:23
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necrotic posted:My new favorite thing to do at work is go on a spiel about time and that it’s not real. Lotta people don’t know that leap seconds (forwards AND backwards) exist and it kinda fucks them up. Leap years: embraced. DST hours: contentious. Leap seconds: hosed.
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