RandomOpinion

It's a good idea, in principle; I've seen people who stayed too long in rest-and-vest environments become completely unable to function when the gravy train ended.

The key questions you should be asking yourself is whether you're ready to withstand the stress of being "the dumbest guy in the room" (it's hard on the ego, to say the least), whether you're willing to make the commitment to learn an enormous amount of material in a relatively small amount of time, and whether you can come up to speed with the people in your new environment fast enough to avoid being penalized or even potentially laid off (having a financial cushion or some other backup plan in case things don't work out would probably be a good idea).

> ...all it takes is one leak to end your monopoly

I don't know about that. Most significant software packages require ongoing maintenance (bug fixes, security patches, compatibility with other software) and add new features over time. A one-time leak certainly would be damaging but not necessarily fatal since most businesses want to have assured support and upgrades.

Businesses could prevent that by requiring employees to agree to a separate, permanent contract not to release any code as part of the conditions for being hired.

> CS students were completely lost with how to approach writing drivers and interfaces for the sensors and such. I thought that would be standard for CS.

No, that would be standard for computer engineering, not CS.

Try to have a conversation about hardware to many practicing software developers who were CS majors and they'll look at you as if you've grown a second head.

There are several Model 100s and 102s and even a PC-2 pocket computer. I can't say I've ever seen any of those at a thrift store.

Yup, this guy gets it. Slack and other real-time messaging apps should be treated as a phone call or a knock on the door; an intentional interruption for something important enough to warrant a real time conversation.

Everything else should be handled through email, to allow people to consider and tailor their responses, to allow others to be added to the conversation through a CC: of a single focused thread, and to provide a directly searchable historical record of conversations.

> The brain becomes relegated to the role of a cache instead of working as the whole of an individual's knowledge.

I have a pile of physics textbooks sitting nearby but that doesn't make me a qualified physicist. Availability of knowledge isn't worth a thing if it's never been integrated into your mind.

> The demonization of unions in the country is a pointless exercise and seems ideological.

Ideological? A vast multitude of people have cited ongoing examples of misbehavior and abuse that they themselves have personally witnessed, which you casually handwave away by saying it's just "ideological".

How about unions start actually cleaning up their act and making themselves respected champions of the worker again?

Rather interesting data points refuting the idea that butt-in-seat time matters for productivity and excellence matters, as some on HN have suggested:

"In 2014, the social networking company The Draugiem Group used a time-tracking productivity app to study what habits set their most productive employees apart.

Surprisingly, the top 10% of employees with the highest productivity didn’t put in longer hours than anyone else – often they didn't even work eight-hour days. Instead, the key to their productivity was that for every 52 minutes of focused work, they took a 17-minute break."

and

"One study from Illinois Institute of Technology by Raymond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr in 1951 found that scientists who spent 25 hours per week in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent just five."

Another interesting point hints at why the poorly done agile at most organizations is so painful and ineffective:

"... points to a study in the early 1980s that divided undergraduates into two groups: some were advised to set out monthly goals and study activities; others were told to plan activities and goals in much more detail, day by day.

While the researchers assumed that the well-structured daily plans would be most effective when it came to the execution of tasks, they were wrong: the detailed daily plans demotivated students. Harford argues that inevitable distractions often render the daily to-do list ineffective, while leaving room for improvisation in such a list can reap the best results."

The list of tasks for a sprint are never supposed to be a ironclad promise that all of them will be done and that they are precisely what will be worked on and nothing else; that's just micromanagement by story point. They are just a best guess using the information available at the time of sprint planning. If some tasks aren't completed, that's normal and expected, as long as there's a valid engineering reason other things needed to be done first to make progress toward the overall goal. (And there often are; "yak-shaving" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving) entered the software development lexicon for a reason.)

> If you only work a minimum number of hours within your field, you are unlikely to emerge as one of the peak achievers or thought leaders in your field. That's just because you learn more from experience, and working more hours gives you more experience.

Doesn't jibe with my experience. The best people I've met have broad curiosity and variety of interests that synergize to make them what they are. This may drive them to spend more time practicing their craft but that's an effect, not a cause.

The raw number of hours with one's butt in an office chair is irrelevant unless it's used wisely.

> Anyway, back to the original question. Does anybody else come on here and feel overwhelmed?

No, or at least not much. Most people have a specialization or two, whether it be front-end, back-end, mobile, application, embedded, games, etc., which limits the scope of what you really need to care deeply about.

Beyond that, it's a matter of your own personal curiosity and desire to expand your abilities; my reaction to most articles is "hmm, that's interesting; I'll remember that in case I ever need it" with just a scant few meriting a "I need to dive into that because I also want to have that knowledge / skill."

> To make a difference in the world? That sounds like a grandiose rationalization used to cover up an abyss underneath it. A sentiment is a poor substitute for purpose and justification, a vacuous idol whose twilight approaches.

What purpose and justification could there possibly be in "stop setting yourself impossible goals, lead a simple life, find humility", etc., as the original poster writes? That's just trying to put a good face on defeatism using flowery language. If that works for people, more power to them, but let's not pretend it's something that it isn't.

> ...once you stop setting yourself impossible goals, lead a simple life, find humility, have a minimum amount of discipline, you won't be so unhappy.

As George Bernard Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

I accept my unhappiness as the price of striving to be the best I can be, however little that might amount to. Anything less is a waste of my one and only chance (i.e. an all too brief existence) to make a difference in this world.

> Fixing the environment is an orthogonal issue.

Not at all. If we, as a species, don't fix the environment, we aren't going to be around long enough for space exploration to become technologically and economically practical.

Amen to this. TIS-100 is a puzzle game that happens to use assembly language as its means of expression. The barriers it puts up are wholly unrealistic and therefore it can't really to be said to "teach assembly language" in any particularly meaningful way.

> It's certainly understandable, but it's also worth remembering that for almost any business the idea that they could call, say, Microsoft and get their bug fixed is pretty much a fantasy.

If you believe that, you've never been in an organization which purchased the topmost tiers of a support contract before from one of the big tech companies before. It's actually quite impressive.

> I don't know if it's true, but I was told once that bing means disease in Mandarin.

Sort of but not really. It depends on the intonation and even with the right intonation (bing4 / bìng), the sound maps to several other possible words aside from "disease".

Much as I would like to agree with you, that war was already fought and lost in the early '00s. Port 80/443 were the two ports that couldn't ever be firewalled because web browsing depended on them, so everybody rushed to cram their RPC requests into some kind of HTTP-based protocol.

> When your kids depend on your paycheck, this is not such a simple matter, and making trades for "a lot of money now" doesn't seem like such a bad deal.

Sure, until the gravy train ends, and it always does (layoffs, reorganizations, etc.), and you wind up looking for a new job with skills that are irrelevant or out-of-date. Unless you're within spitting distance of retirement, staying in a job that isn't growing you and preparing you for your next job (or, worse, might be burning you out) is a massive risk.

> There's nothing stopping these veterans from going to a regular university, college, or community college and getting a real degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field.

Nothing? Have a little empathy, buddy. While I have some sympathy for your opinion of coding bootcamps, just bear in mind that it's not easy giving up something you've been doing for a couple of decades and going back to college with people half you age and then having to restart your career in an entirely new profession. The mental flexibility one has when one is young just isn't there anymore for these individuals.

> ...allowing access to a micro-programmable base...

What you're probably looking for is something like Forin's eMIPS (extensible MIPS) project that includes a block FPGA cells as part of the execution pipeline to allow creation of new instructions as needed.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emips/

Not that I know of. However, there's Avnet's Spartan-6 LX9 MicroBoard evaluation kit, which has a USB-stick form factor, is inexpensive, and is compatible with the free version of Xilinx's tools.

> Not that I can do anything about it, my conclusion over nearly 4 decades is that we have failed to take advantage of the increasingly denser silicon to make higher level machines, in particular machines that recognise the difference an instruction and a data element.

That's basically the CISC concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_instruction_set_comput...) all over again. The problem still being: which instructions do you choose to implement in hardware and how do you make a compiler smart enough to recognize when to use them? Remember, CISC went out of style because all of those high level instruction weren't being used when processor manufacturers generated statistics on commonly used software.

> The double slit experiment shows that light has properties traditionally associated with waves (as opposed to particles).

Even for photons sent through one at a time? Nope. That's not behavior associated with any type of wave.

> Is there any concrete evidence to believe in hypothesis 2 over hypothesis 1?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment. That's pretty concrete.

Plus all those fancy quantum computers that people are developing depend on the fact that quantum superposition exists.

> As a friendly pile-on, yes, you do have to agree to the terms of the GNU license or cease using the software.

That is incontrovertibly false and has always been false.

Per the GPL v.2, clause 5 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html):

"5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it."

A end-user is free to run GPL software without accepting the terms of the license. However, they may not distribute it (modified or not) without accepting the terms of the license.

One good solid exchange of nuclear weapons would do it. Once the manufacturing chains are broken and international commerce is halted, the collapse of civilization would occur pretty quickly. Even among the survivors bent on preserving knowledge, most digital records are on ephemeral media and the components of most electronic devices have a rated operating lifespan of only a decade or less.

Though somewhat dated, James Burke covers this quite well in the first episode of his classic "Connections" documentary. If anything, the situation is far worse now.

> I would never take a proctored test for an interview. ... Relying on testing alone is going to get you good test takers.

A conventional interview is basically a set of tests already. A conventional whiteboard coding interview segment is a proctored test, with the interviewer serving double duty as the proctor.

This proposal aims to reduce the stress by having an impartial proctor instead of an interviewer looking over one's shoulder as you code.

One option might be to take a training course for the PMP certification exam and the PMP exam itself, if you meet the qualifications. While the PMP has its detractors (and not without justification), it does enable you to "sling the lingo", so to speak, and also shows you're committed to making the change.

You're probably also going to need to shift your role at your current job so that you're overseeing projects, whether just as a senior engineer doing technical leadership or as an actual manager of people, instead of just coding. (Do not, however, ignore your coding skills; anecdotally, most software PM positions are for technical PMs and may still require a demonstration of coding skills. Non-technical PMs have a much harder time finding jobs.)

For a longer exposition that also covers the historical context more deeply, Jim Baggott's "The Meaning of Quantum Theory: A Guide For Students Of Chemistry and Physics" covers Bell's Theorem in Chapter 4 and also requires only basic knowledge of calculus.