AStellersSeaCow

FTA: "One possibility is that we have a shortage of programmers. If that’s the case, you’d expect more programmers to enter the field, bringing down compensation."

This is imo a big part of why high-end salaries have skyrocketed, but the author's reasoning is total "let them eat cake."

It's not that there's a shortage of programmers overall. There are lots of programmers working non-industry jobs for relatively piddly salaries who would leap at the opportunity to double or triple their compensation at a big name tech company - if they were qualified to do so.

The problem is that there's a shortage of people who have the aptitude and skills to work in a big tech company with very high expectations for even their entry-level engineers. I don't doubt that there are intangibles at play: soft skills, "cultural fit" biases, to a lesser extent academic pedigree, but none of that trumps needing to be an actual honest-to-goodness engineer, rather than a "programmer".

Plenty of other pieces (citation needed) have been written about the growing chasm between the two classifications of development jobs - engineers who can create software, vs. programmers who can write code - and I think the salary differences are just an aspect of that.

I agree that the shine has worn off startups, but don't agree with the reasoning. Startups were great in the 90s because VCs and investors were desperately hurling money at businesses that they didn't even remotely understand. Why work long hours in a stuffy traditional office at MSFT or IBM when you could make more at a carnival-like startup where you spend more time playing foosball than working?

Nowadays that equation is somewhat reversed. Most startups expect crushingly long hours, and typically pay considerably less than the tech giants and have vastly lower total compensation. There's still the slim chance of a huge payday, but the expected earnings are far lower. And while there's still plenty of "keep doubling down on legacy tech" at the giants, there's also way more genuine innovation than there used to be, whereas startups are the output of tech industry magnetic poetry sets as often as not: "instagram for urban farmers", etc.

In the end I also agree that we should push for facilitating more new companies, and the article underlines a lot of the hurdles we need to lower or remove. The big questions in my mind: whether that can be done in a way that doesn't just further empower the big established players, and whether anyone has the political willpower to hamstring successful, generally well-liked companies to increase competition.

Like I said, anecdotally. And I'm not talking about company policy, I'm talking about the behavior of individual engineers/managers during and after interviews. Even if a company has a policy that it WANTS to hire more women, it needs the people actually conducting the interviews on board for that policy to be meaningful.

I think there's a fair amount of reporting bias in this issue, personally. I'd totally non-scientifically split older (over age 35) engineers into three rough categories. This is not meant to be comprehensive or empirical, it's just mirroring my anecdotal experiences as someone who has been in tech for 20 years:

- Average or better engineers. Between the facts that they are competent and have 10+ years of experience, they tend to have zero problem finding and keeping good, well-paying jobs. If they run into ageism, it gets lost in the flood of other offers they're likely to get in the same round of interviewing.

- Below average engineers. These may be the source of some of the ageism complaints, but it's missing the forest for the trees. They are a common sight in government/non-profit orgs or old first-mover companies: folks who may have "senior" in their title but have been doing simplistic work on the same outdated project for their whole career. Have trouble finding new jobs when they are inevitably laid off not because of their age, but because they simply aren't good engineers.

- Dinosaurs, ie- people who were good or even great engineers ten or twenty years ago, but have not kept their skills and knowledge base current. These are the people who are most likely to be affected by legit ageism, in my experience. A slightly fictionalized representative scenario from hiring a position at my last job, for work on a Java webservice: "Well, the 50-year-old blew through the whiteboarding in textbook C and can concisely enumerate the advantages of different caching policies off the top of his head, but has never used Java, worked on a web service, or used an RCS more modern than subversion. The 25-year-old struggled a bit in the coding exercise and gave an imperfect answer in the theory questions, but his resume has a link to his Github, which includes a RESTful webservice he wrote in Java. And the 50yo asked for the tip of the salary range, about 20% more."

I've faced that sort of decision quite a few times, and it's not easy. I could see why the older candidate would suspect ageism played a role if they didn't get the job. But the power is in the candidate's hands to create the better outcome: if the 50yo spends some time familiarizing themselves with marketable modern technologies then they get hired over less experienced candidates the vast majority of the time.

On a personal note, in the above scenario we did end up bringing on the 50yo with amazing fundamentals, and he was a total dud - possibly the worst hire I've ever made. Bungled almost every Git interaction, couldn't work in Linux and frequently screwed up deployments, great imperative code but all his architecture was early 90s-style spaghetti. The important takeaway that I tried to stress with the team wasn't that older devs can't learn and shouldn't be hired, just that THAT dev couldn't learn and shouldn't have been hired.

Yeah, this. There is ageism out there, and it happens younger in tech than in other industries, but it's far less of an issue than all other forms of hiring discrimination I can think of.

I've been a part of hundreds of interviews for dozens of engineering positions at a variety of companies and organizations. While I have witnessed clear-cut ageism with qualified older candidates, it's with the distinct minority of older candidates, and typically only with borderline ones. Compare to even the most qualified female candidates, where there's almost always a strong undercurrent of sexism, or non-Asian minority candidates, where there's almost always a strong undercurrent of racism^.

So I won't deny that ageism is a problem but - in the case of white dudes - it's the jolt of a sudden uphill at the end of a couple decades of easy slightly downhill coast. Compared to continuous vertical climb that women and non-Asian minorities have to put up with in engineering, it's a pretty modest problem that the affected have both ample time and opportunity to prepare for.

^- The tech industry isn't, at least in my experiences, blatantly racist/sexist these days. Anecdotally, women and minorities have an easier time making it through HR/recruiter screening. It's a more subtle and pernicious effect in tech interviews, where correct answers are overscrutinized for flaws and even marginally incorrect answers are blown out of proportion. Never seen this with older (white/Asian, male) candidates.

Mostly thinking the "so noxiously but unusually bad it's briefly popular" type of creative output by people clearly lacking in much grounding or practice in their fields. 'Singers' like William Hung, 'writers' like Gene Ray, 'filmmakers' like Tommy Wiseau, or 'actors' like Robert Coates.

This is akin to saying that stepping on a nail is just as bad as walking into an industrial meat grinder, since they will both hurt your foot.

I don't think anyone is arguing that dams are zero impact. They can and do negatively impact local ecologies, and have the potential to impact animal populations at a broader scale. These problems can theoretically be offset to some degree with good planning and management, but thus far management has been uneven and middlingly successful.

I'm not being flippant and dismissing extinctions and the disruption of food chains as "breaking a few eggs": they are tragedies, but they are extremely small-scale tragedies compared to the ongoing disasters all other forms of reliable energy generation are inflicting on us. Hydro isn't above criticism, but blanket declarations that it's just as bad as fossil fuels is incredibly dangerous misinformation.

If your point of view is that any energy generation that in any way negatively impacts the environment are anathemas and that we should all be living in caves, then okay, but I don't know how you're powering your computer. Otherwise, you're being hyperbolic and enabling regressive and catastrophic ideas and practices.

You seem to be mixing and matching hardworking vs. curious, incremental improvement vs. innovation, and results-oriented vs. process-oriented, all of which are completely different topics.

Saying hard work is ego driven while curiosity has some more noble, ineffable motivation is the exact same sort of BS I was decrying before. Hard work can just as well be driven by a sense of responsibility, a desire for more predictable outcomes, or faith, while curiosity/playfulness can be an ego-saving measure to offset mediocrity that the person can't or won't work past. Neither is more morally right, imo.

But to meander back to the core of the discussion, I don't think it's possible to become notably good at anything without at least some motivation towards self-improvement and foundational skills. People who ride playfulness and curiosity into lasting renown are able to do so because they have some degree of mastery of the fundamentals. Some people manage to earn lasting renown without much curiosity or playfulness, just a single-minded drive towards mastering known techniques.

Few to no people have ever earned lasting renown by noodling around in a field they had zero grounding in until they randomly struck gold. Some have earned infamy with that approach, but that's a different topic.

Haha, no way. I've worked with or met a half dozen MacArthur fellows, and none of them were shy about bringing up that fact. You could argue that MacArthur selects for self-promoting geniuses, but such creatures clearly do exist.

>Hard work is overrated. What you really want is curiosity.

This is BS, and the kind of BS that results in lazy entitled adults expecting the world to be their oyster because they have kept their dreamer curiosity intact.

Out of the people I've know who are internationally-recognized academics and/or world-class engineers, many are both hard working and creative. Probably the majority of them, in fact. But many more are hard working and not especially creative: they doggedly pursue single lines of inquiry or development, and possibilities for truly new ideas or techniques - not just refinements - are exposed through the intellectual equivalent of brute force.

I don't know any internationally-recognized academics or world-class engineers who are creative but not hard working.

>What's frustrating to me is that there's this sort of all-or-nothing attitude about testing, where tests are seen as useless, or as a perfect indicator of skill or ability. The truth is in-between.

Yes. This is a major point people need to focus on.

I think, to bastardize a famous quote, that testing is the worst simple measure of aptitude, except all the others we've tried. In a perfect world, any admissions/hiring decision would be made after multiple independent in-depth examinations of a candidate's past work, plus extensive interviews. Since that level of vetting is unfeasible for all but a tiny sliver of the most desirable spots, we need ballpark estimates like testing that will be more predictive than coin flips.

There was this super weird club in my high school who went out to hospitals and gave long-term patients (mostly vegetables who were on indefinite life support) ghoulishly gaudy makeovers. They seemed to have no motivation in doing this "community service" beyond their own weird self-satisfaction. Didn't really seem worth challenging them over the utility/sanity of their efforts, but damned if anyone thought it was a good use of their time.

Anyhow, what's this thread about?

There's a simpler and broader point: don't use Big O as the sole means of analysis of a high level language's data structures. The theoretical time/space complexity of a data structure may or may not accurately reflect how it's actually implemented in that language.

"I don't think that the solution is to medicate children with a very serious life changing drug that alters the core aspects of a child's personality and behavior. ... Instead of forcing children to think one way, we should let them think the way they NATURALLY think, and flourish with their native mindset."

This is wildly inaccurate and ignorant, and basically perfectly sums up why the problem isn't being treated effectively.

1) The drugs aren't serious and life changing and they don't alter core aspects of your personality. People seem to confuse the effects of mild stimulants like ritalin and adderall with the effects of powerful antidepressants like prozac (I blame South Park, et al). Stimulants can have negative side effects, but they're more along the lines of what you'd expect from too much coffee: loss of appetite, hyperalertness and sleep problems, in extreme cases twitchiness and cardiovascular problems. These are well-understood, and any doctor would adjust/halt the drug if they got worrying. In terms of personality, the person is just getting a boost to their deficient executive function. The net result could be that they're less likely to do things impulsively, but not that they're less likely to do things, period.

2) I'm all for letting children think how they're going to think, and agree that our education system is far too constraining and cookie-cutter. But there's a huge and meaningful difference between "let kids think how they want" and "don't treat problems that are preventing kids from thinking lucidly". Some excellent research has shown that even if parents and teachers bend over backwards to facilitate kids with ADHD, unless they get some kind of treatment (and medication is both much more effective and far less expensive than behavioral therapy) they're still going to struggle.

So what people who advocate "let (kids) think the way they NATURALLY think" are effectively saying is "let some non-negligible fraction of kids have a dramatically lower chance of success and happiness in life rather than acknowledge that they have a disorder and treat it".

Exactly. My parents shied away from looking into ADD/ADHD treatment for me because of the blowback about overdiagnosing, instead ascribing to the more regressive and I daresay petulant "kids will be kids" outlook of my behavior and educational issues growing up. I didn't last one semester at college, and my life was a mess for close to my first ten years of adulthood, at which point I finally overcame the "this is just the way you are" mindset and sought treatment. Started on medication and my life turned around overnight.

So while it's certainly important to keep an eye on pharma, it's also wildly irresponsible, unfair, and unscientific to claim "it's mostly made-up because I don't like the implication that a lot of people have a mental problem". Particularly disgusting is including the anecdote about the person who faked ADHD symptoms to get stimulants, then killed himself when his supply was cut off: prescription drug abuse/addiction is a serious issue, but one that is completely separate from the proper diagnosis of a medical condition.

There's rightfully been a backlash against the "better living through chemistry" postwar mindset that every problem should be medicated. But I think in this case it's ultimately less about medicating and more about fear of and unwillingness to address mental issues.

Sorry, I only using functional programming for nefarious reason.

Nah, it's just thousand-island dressing.

As an aside, I think this sort of upbringing is a significant contributing factor to the personality type that shows up frequently in the most toxic online groups (MRAs, gamergaters, PUAs, etc). In my glimpses, it's been abundantly clear that many of them are highly intelligent and not much else: single, with shitty jobs, no exceptional skills, and dim prospects for the future. But because they grew up being told they were going to be rich and happy because they were so smart, it's clearly the rest of the world's fault that they didn't end up with the life they feel entitled to.

I get what you're saying - kids aren't code to be optimized with objective best practices. But on the other hand, it's very head-in-the-sand to think that parenting with the best intentions and love will always have a positive outcome. It's a good course of action for guaranteeing a happy childhood, but unless you're so affluent that your kids are assured a life on easy street, happiness isn't your only responsibility as a parent.

May be that love and fun is all the kids need to be both happy and successful, but maybe not: I had very hippyish parents who didn't go much beyond love and fun and blind support. Myself and my two siblings all had very happy childhoods, but only my very self-motivated sister wound up finding success and happiness as an adult right off the bat, took me a decade to get my footing, and my brother - who was unquestionably the happiest and most loved kid in the family - is a broken and miserable adult.

Ultimately it comes down to regarding your kids as individuals and tailoring your parenting to each kid, which is what this study is trying to help parents do w.r.t. smart kids.