Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

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> is just hard and so demanding.

Keep telling yourself that. What we do is soooo hard and special and we're soooo smart. There are plenty of smart people, and guess what - they used to go into harder and more demanding jobs in search of high pay.

Plenty of would-be bankers end up in tech, and plenty of would-be-could-be doctors end up in tech. Plenty of people who care more about success and money than twos complement are ending up in tech.

Investment Banking? Way worse hours, way worse culture. Medicine? Way longer hours, way more difficult road to a career.

Tech? Easy path (BS in CS is easy), than LC for a few weeks, and boom, you'll land a job - unlike medicine which takes a decade and 2 degrees. Most people can stop work after a 9-5, except maybe for on-call which IB and Medicine both deal with in their own way. Tech isn't nearly as dependent on networking and socializing as IB, which means way more smart people who want good pay can do it, even if they aren't born into a great professional network.

> It’s not possible to do this without having some level of “nerdiness” or love of technical things.

Plenty of people aren't nerdy but are smart are filling up Silicon Valley and those open-offices across the country. Google's Operating System research teams? Probably nerdy. ACME Co's Random CRUD App team? Chill guy making a lot of money without knowing or caring about how compilers work, but very happy he can afford to visit Tahoe every weekend.

At my last FAANG job one of my coworkers didn't know what UDP or TCP were, and didn't care and wouldn't learn. Didn't want to learn about anything unless it was needed next sprint. He wasn't the best at his job, but he could do it just fine. Missed some opportunities to be more efficient by leaning on prior art and existing libs he never learned about, but got his work done and supported business goals. Parents told him to get a good job so he did.

> Keep telling yourself that. What we do is soooo hard and special and we're soooo smart.

I flip-flop every 6 months between thinking that everybody can do this and being absolutely floored that I myself can keep up with this.

One day we're writing HTML and CSS, and a few years later we're learning about the shadow DOM and why we may want to use React Native Web to run React Native on the web.

One day we're writing a LAMP CRUD app, and a few years later we're deploying a service mesh for resilience, visibility, and configurable networking - concepts that didn't even exist when we were writing CRUD apps.

I'm not a doctor/surgeon, but I don't think that the kind of work they do changes year to year at this pace?

I guess you could say that none of these concepts are really that difficult conceptually, but...what is...? Algebraic Topology? Chaos Theory?

> flip-flop every 6 months between thinking that everybody can do this and being absolutely floored that I myself can keep up with this.

I agree that it takes a certain way of thinking to be able to reason about strict logic and symbolic relationships. Just ask someone what (X or Y) equals when X and Y are both true. I knew people in my CS classes right up until the end that couldn't tell you correctly (because people in regular English think of "or" as "exclusive or" and its hard for some people to change their understanding).

I disagree with the concept about the rapidly changing tech jargon. I think in SF tech startup scene it may be that crazy, but once I start a job, I use their stack, and it stays that way for years. Different companies different stacks though. Big-Tech is even easier since they have their own custom stacks that are pretty stable.

> I'm not a doctor/surgeon, but I don't think that the kind of work they do changes year to year at this pace?

On the contrary. It changes all the time. They always have to be learning about new medication, new surgical techniques, new diseases. Ask a doctor in 2019 to diagnose the Sars-Cov-2019 Novel Coronavirus. Then ask them about ivermectin.

> I guess you could say that none of these concepts are really that difficult conceptually, but...what is...? Algebraic Topology? Chaos Theory?

I would say that real theory is actually pretty hard in CS. Math is famously unapproachable to people who don't "get it" and I think CS theory shares similar logical rigor - honestly similar to law and how it is a "different" logic than most people are ready for.

I know rocket scientists, and their classes were actually-intense math - but conceptually/logically easy IFF you could do the math. The basic biology of how a viral infection works is pretty straightforward (and taught to 13yo's), but again, thats not the hard part of the job of a doctor.

But most CRUD apps are not. And most people write CRUD apps. At my BigTech jobs, the company always had custom-in-house build tools that were great at doing deterministic reproducible builds and they were always based on strong theory and rigor and had white papers. But how many people actually have to do that at those companies?

A lot of the difficulty to modern web development and so forth don’t even feel like engineering, so much as navigating bureaucracy. The scale of complexity in modern codebases has turned us into software bureaucrats.

It's a bit of both. Most of the work in our space is a lot lamer than we like to make it out to be. Almost anyone, with a modicum of training can do this. The hard problems, and by "the hard problems" I'm not talking about crazy algorithms but rather what does one do when the poop hits the fan, that's harder. Most people could still do it, but it takes a lot more training and experience.

One is development. The other is system ops. Some people like to handle both, and others don't.

I spent the last year migrating our backend off of heroku onto bare metal Proxmox servers with unlimited VMs. It blew my mind that 0, literally 0, of my developers took up my offer to give them free VMs (including KDE/Gnome with NoMachine/NX!!).

It turns out that my devs just want to be devs, and not use their free time to play on sys ops and k8s and ceph clusters.

When I saw this happen, I started hiring staff for sysops separately than expecting my devs to do so, and see much more clarity in output.

In summary, if you're writing the LAMP CRUD app, maybe someone else oughta be the one to deploy the service mesh.

I just disagree that the work done by doctors & IB are at all comparable to what is done by tech workers.

Tech is poaching from academia and quantitative finance people -- not the normal professional careers because the type of thinking that is needed is very different from IB & law & medicine. It's not about hours.

I know plenty of doctors and lawyers and consultants and IB. The only people I know in other careers who I think could make it as well as the top tech workers have are people who are in physics and other STEM academia (my major) or quants who work for major market making firms (ie. Jane St, Citadel).

> ACME Co's Random CRUD App team

"ACME co" et al aren't paying $300k+.

> I just disagree that the work done by doctors & IB are at all comparable to what is done by tech workers.

You're over thinking this. I'm talking about high school and college students picking majors. I'm talking about what parents telling their kids to do. Immigrants moving to America picking a career to support their family.

No one quits Goldman Sachs's deal floor to work at Facebook. They skip the finance class and go to data structures freshman year. The alum they met at google are rich and happy and the alum from wall street are bitter and tired and overworked.

> the type of thinking that is needed is very different

Eh, its different but its not that crazy. Most of tech is not that hard. The harder part of being at a top firm anywhere is being generally successful enough to achieve the goal. The top few % of people that go to top school and go to top wall street banks or consulting firms or get into med school can do that.

> "ACME co" et al aren't paying $300k+.

You can replace acme with any tech company. You can work at apple making 300k and making a crud app. Tons of Silicon Valley companies are paying 300k+ for engineers and many of those engineers aren't solving problems that are particularly hard.

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