dwc

> So sometimes I wish I could go back to the old days but my nostalgia is probably rose tinted.

It seems like nostalgia is a big thing over the past few years. Old game emulators, people getting back into C64 or whatever. I guess it's fun for some people. I've considered playing with such stuff, but I know I'd miss some of the real advances we've made since then.

But my major projects at work are in C. My previous job was about 50% C, 50% scripting languages. For all C's deficiencies it's a known quantity and does its job well enough. And knowing C well is a rare enough skill to be valuable, apparently.

When I don't need C I'd much rather reach for something like ocaml/haskell, a lisp, erlang/elixir, or something. Basically I ignore all the "C replacement" languages because I can either use C or pick something way better.

While your statement is true, it doesn't explain nearly all of the problems.

The shift from tenured to adjunct positions in academia doesn't have anything to do with the quality of applicants. The shift in tech from salaried employees to contractors (offshored or not) has nothing to do with the pool of qualified applicants. Lower pay for positions that create the same value are not the fault of the worker.

When these sorts of issues become structural there are far fewer options for individuals to pursue. Whatever path they choose, their chances of success is less.

This article agrees with other articles and books I've been reading on the topic.

One interesting and troubling aside:

This is focused on the working class and so doesn't talk very much about college educated people. But it does mention education, and still holds it up as a way forward. Well, that's also being hollowed out.

There's a large and growing number of college graduates who cannot find a decent job and who amass large amounts of student debt. They did everything they were supposed to, but the jobs aren't there. Or the jobs are not what they used to be (see adjuncts v. tenure in academia, for instance). Or after all that schooling and debt, you have to "pay to play" by taking long term unpaid internships in expensive cities, which only the affluent can afford.

This is bad on its own for people who would normally go to college and get white collar jobs, but it also destroys upward mobility for the working class.

It's not just about unions and manufacturing any more. Hollowing out the middle class has become structural.

Ah, the never ending debate about passion.

What if you put that aside for a while and think about it in terms of going with your strengths instead? Same thing, different angle. If there's any choice about what job you might take, take the one where you can add the most value, relatively. That's a job where you'll be appreciated more and hopefully compensated well for. The thing is, there's a correlation there to passion, but passion is not required.

Years ago I had little opinion on climate change. During the big email scandal[1] I decided to look into it myself, as an outsider. I downloaded the leaked emails. I downloaded various data sets. I also followed online arguments between climate scientists and climate skeptics.

After trying to grok the mammoth amounts of data, I realized that it would take me forever just to come up to speed. I decided to focus on the arguments. What I found was that the climate scientists could answer every objection, and I could trace back to the data itself and validate what they were saying. The "skeptics" would either: repeat their claim without acknowledging the rebuttal, or would switch to arguing something else completely, or would not reply at all only to go somewhere else and repeat their rebutted claim(s) without modification. Being something of a skeptic myself (in an evidence-based way), I recognize this pattern of behavior. It's not skepticism; it's denial. It's a marketing campaign.

When you have a true skeptic of climate change look into it, you end up with the Koch-funded Richard Muller deciding that, yeah, it's real science done well and that climate change is real.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann#CRU_email_cont...

There are so many things, of course. But here are two things I wish I'd understood better a long time ago:

* Think in the problem space / avoid thinking in implementation details. Structure your solution along lines that make sense in the problem space, name variables for that, etc.

* Do the simplest thing that solves the problem at hand, but no simpler. Small, simple implementations are easier to change when (not if, when) unanticipated changes come up. If you anticipate additional functionality, leave the door open to those changes rather than writing code for them now.

Yeah, that sounds a lot like my early days. Cold applying is horrible. Since then I let friends know that I'm looking, check out interesting places to see if anyone I know works there, etc. My last job hunt involved applying to a single place, with an internal recommendation. Same for the previous job. Etc. The last time I applied cold was in the 90s.

I realize that getting to this point takes time, and usually involves working in the same town for a good while. But when you can do it it's a nice way to get your resume on someone's desk for real consideration rather than, say, getting culled by a recruiter because you don't have the exact incantation they were told to look for.

I love classical music, but not for coding. It's too musically interesting and it pulls me off task. I'll be fine and then it gets to that one part, and then I'll notice that I've been actively listening to the music and not coding for 10 minutes.

I tend toward electronia (usually) without vocals. I'll find a suitable artist and get several of their albums and listen to all the albums on loop. For me this is enough to quickly gain that familiarity you mention, hearing the same songs in the same order all day long.

Serious question: after figuring it out, did you have a somewhat better grasp of linked list mechanics than before?

> past an age a fellow just wants to learn a single reliable stack and collect a weekly paycheck

That's a bit too strong. Surely there are people like that. But I'm "past an age" and there's always some newish thing I'm learning. However, I'm in no rush to start adopting them for real projects. I want to know the payback from switching, and neither hype nor the word "modern" cut it. I want to know what this language is good for and what it's not so good for. So I learn things and evaluate them, and over time I add things to my working set of languages and tools.

But then I'd have to give up mapping caps lock to control.

From the US here, but close enough to the border with Mexico to have grown up eating spicy foods. I agree completely. I have been growing peppers for a while now, and selecting the pepper for a dish is a lot more than choosing the level of heat. There's a wonderful variety of flavor to be found.

You left out a plausible (and common) option: a more expensive pastry chef can make pastries that sell better.

This is what's in play when you see a line out the door at some shop. The prices may not be that much more expensive, but the quality is that much better.

This always cracks me up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmWRhhvf60Y

Another point is that it's good to encourage viewers to watch popular shows, so that caching at the edge works better. Having a rotating, small number of AAA movies at a time encourages this. Multiple browse categories based on current popularity encourage this. While Netflix offers tons of choices, the network is most efficient if everyone is watching the same thing, and and it's not at all surprising if Netflix guides people toward that behavior.

> the sales lady who sits next to me who holds conference calls all day long from her desk

I've had this situation in the past a few times and to some degree today. If we have to have open office plans then at least take some effort into grouping "talkers" together away from "heads down" people.

Is that so hard? There's no real economic argument, as it's just putting some thought into where people sit. There's no collaboration argument, because people on the same team would site together. Etc. From the reactions when I've brought it up, that's a completely unreasonable request. The whole idea than anyone's productivity might benefit from a quiet work environment seems to make management/HR upset.

Note that I wrote that meditation teaches concentration as a tool, not as the end goal. Focus and concentration are useful outside of meditation, too. If you learned the concentration parts and left the rest, I'm sure the meditation people would think that you'd done yourself a disservice, but do you care?

> I cannot do these steps for programming or math in "any environment".

I have noticed that sometimes, when I'm really deep in flow on a problem, I can power through people starting a conversation standing right behind my back. I can't get into a flow state with such distractions, but sometimes I can maintain it. I imagine you've had similar experiences.

What if you had explicitly practiced concentration to the degree that you could enter a state of flow in those circumstances? With training, is that possible for some people? Most people?

As delluminatus says, Buddhism. Zen, Vipassana, and others teach concentration as a tool (not the end goal).

There are many, many books. See Mindfulness in Plain English[1] for a good one that's available to read free online.

1. http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html and more directly http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe1-4.html

Several times over the years I've had an office with a door. Normally I kept the door open, but I would close it if I had work that required extreme (for me) concentration, or if the environment outside was excessively distracting that day, etc. IME, this is quite common for other people as well.

Since I have trouble concentrating when people are talking and get quite unhappy about it but managed to keep my door open the vast majority of the time, I have to wonder. Was Bell Labs an excessively noisy place, or were the closed door people there those kind of people?

There are disciplines that have been teaching concentration for hundreds of years that produce people who can concentrate at will under pretty much any circumstance. To teach beginners they choose a very quiet, distraction-free environment.

Your advice seems to advocate throwing people into the deep end and taking a sink or swim approach. Train people to concentrate until it's something that's familiar and available to them on demand, and then they can do it in the face of distraction.

That you managed to make it work the way you did is great. Some people may have much more trouble than you did in similar circumstances.

Early fifties here.

> Your use of the word "burn" concerns me. I'd prefer the word "invest".

I agree, but... sometimes it really is "burn". I don't keep up with front-end tech these days. If/when I need to work with it I'll learn it, and not before. If I spent time getting up to a real working knowledge now, there's every chance that in, say, 4 years when I needed to work in that space that I'd have to start learning from scratch again rather than brush up.

I do spend time learning new (to me) things, but I'm very selective. I devote most of my time to learning things that will give me alternate ways of doing things, rather than learning every nut and bolt of the latest framework.

Hopefully people will take the age of the writing into consideration. As someone who has learned about Norway over the past several years, it was very interesting to read this account.

> The purpose of a type system is to prove something about the code

The workaday purpose of these type systems is to write more of your intentions into the actual program code and get the compiler to enforce them on your behalf.

That may seem like a mere restatement, but the shift in viewpoint can give tangible benefits to someone who is new to ML-style languages and isn't convinced that making the compiler happy is doing them more good than the pain it's causing them.

> And the correctness is limited only to certain properties of the program, that a given type system supports.

In case there are readers not familiar with the current state of things, you can pick solid languages today whose type systems support a LOT. It is completely fair (and good) to point out that this isn't a panacea, but it can significantly help.

I used emacs at a very basic level for many years, and then I switched to vim and I was very happy. The way of vi fit me so much better than all the chords with emacs. I used vim for about 10 years. Lately I've transitioned back to emacs, because VimL/VimScript or whatever you call it is a nightmare, and I began looking into org mode in emacs and I wanted it very much.

So I installed emacs with evil, got into a place where vi key bindings didn't work and I was stuck. So I turned off evil and stuck with normal emacs for a while. Until I knew I wouldn't be stuck if I got thrown out of vi key bindings. Then I turned evil mode back on.

No need to wait a year or more. Just Get a basic familiarity with plain emacs and then switch to evil. You get the best of both worlds.

They are a fixture in the U.S., too, in my experience.

There's not always a 1:1 mapping of words between languages, so the nuance of "climate" vs. "weather" in English might get confusing.

Just say ポッキー and you'll say it right every time.

Your version, "and there's an even easier way...", does sound nicer than, "If even this is too much effort, ..."

There's a difference in tone there.

Came here to say something similar. However, this is true only at a large enough scope. For an essay it shouldn't be a problem but for a slogan it can be and often is. There's a range between the two, and also a range within words about how untranslatable they are. Usually "untranslatability" comes down to how much meaning/nuance is carried in the word. A five word Swedish sentence using lagom[1] might translate easily into English, or you might have to use a paragraph to get the meaning across.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagom