sage76

> proficient within 500-800 hours of playtime

Depends on the definition of proficient.

It would take someone of great natural talent to get to global in 500 hours.

This is true. Even at mid levels of faceit, people throw full executes and run around clicking heads easily.

Except MBA claims to be a signal of management capability. With that prior assumption, it is a catastrophic failure.

> Many of us who really enjoy software development feel a bit like rock stars.

For a bunch of supposedly smart people, I am always disappointed at how easy it is to exploit developers.

The devs did the deathmarch, and the vendor and CTO gain the accolades, enabling their bullshit.

For any dev who thinks they are a "rockstar", they should have been privy to some conversations I have overheard among product managers and senior management. They would have been disabused of this "rockstar" notion really fast.

Yeah agreed. In fact, orgs that try to pretend like they have no hierarchy frequently have worse culture and higher employee turnover. See: Valve.

> how to exaggerate in ways that you can plausibly defend later, how to figure out what someone wants to hear and tell it back to them in a way that makes you look good, how to take something you did and explain it in a way that makes you look like a much bigger contributor than you were.

How do I learn this? Some people seem to have this gift naturally.

Nice. How does it send the mail? Do you need a local mailserver running?

Just curious, do you remember the name of the book and how big it was in terms of content and exercises?

Pattern recognition and machine learning by Christopher Bishop.

I am writing a solution manual to this textbook, by solving EVERY DAMN exercise and writing it up in latex.

It is EXTREMELY time consuming.

The actual solution manual is already available online.

I might gain an understanding of this field, but I doubt I will ever get an interesting job because of this effort.

Unless I revise this stuff, I will forget most of it in a few years.

Why am I doing this? Idk. Vanity perhaps?

Somebody stop me....

> most academics are tone-deaf and incredibly petty individuals

Yep, their egos get inflated from interacting with students all the time.

If you have been teaching the same subject for 10 or more years, and you are constantly interacting with people who are learning it for the first time and struggling, it's easy to become arrogant.

I'll go 1 step further and say that most of the advice academics give out in terms of learning has been counterproductive for me.

There have been some exceptions, but I have been disappointed for the most part.

Yeah, whenever we had this issue in a class, we just ended up focussing on doing WHATEVER IT TOOK wink wink to pass.

The CEO was caught cheating in a Chess tournament.

> Altman will put in some ambitious but clueless Microsoft manager to run it and move on to his next thing

Gervais principle agrees with you.

The point about context switching being costly is definitely something that the general public doesn't get.

If you ask most people whether they can multitask, they will proudly say yes.

Bosses don't care about deep work either. I have been in jobs where they interrupted me every half an hour. I remember switching between 4 or more tasks trying to get anything done. It would all just get muddled in my head making it hard to keep track of what I was doing.

For anyone who is familiar with his work, are his assertions scientifically backed or is it more pop psychology?

I'm not in Europe, but at least in India, I hear a lot of news of layoffs.

I left the field but my friends tell me the market is brutal.

So maybe it's not you.

> The kind whose ancient family estates are now AirBnBs in the Empty Diagonal of France where tourists can cosplay as grape stompers or characters in a French New Wave film where some tortured artist flees to the countryside and ends up seducing and roughly stealing the virginity of his cousin by reading her poetry on a blanket in the middle of a field before an art thief swindler shoots him on the veranda for double-crossing him in a counterfeiting job gone wrong.

What an entertaining run on sentence lol.

Any movie recommendations of the type you described? Cringey-funny would be great.

Thanks.

A series of bad experiences. Hard to explain in a comment.

> Anyone else dropping out of this field? What are you going into next?

Already out.

Haven't decided what next, but I am 100% done with being a fullstack or backend dev.

> you must atomize your anticipated work into individual bite-sized and estimated tasks

Based on a 2 line description from a product manager, so you actually have no clue on the scope of the task until you start working on it.

This is how at my last company, my team got every estimate wrong and engineers got fired.

Yes the salt is real.

So you kept your job along with your Middle East studies?

Maths stuff. Pattern recognition and machine learning by Bishop.

Nothing yet. Just studying things that interest me.

But I have to figure out something in the near future. It just can't be software development.

If you don't know, hiring managers won't know the number either.

Just make some plausible sounding number up and add it to your resume.

To be clear, I hate this sort of shit, but the game is the game.

It's about signaling to hiring managers that you are willing to play along with their bullshit.

None of the companies I worked at disclosed to the engineers what features led to what results. So I made shit up and nobody called me out on it.

> I am finding that more and more people are looking for extremely specific and narrow experience. Like, if you haven't used <x> technology and worked in <y> domain, they don't want to even speak to you. They'd almost rather higher a new grad who happened to work in <x> than someone with experience in many languages and domains. It's really weird. I've been thinking a lot about how to make my own path, because it's exhausting trying to apply and work for myopic places.

Exactly why I left this industry permanently.

Do people really finish these books cover to cover?

I have been working on Bishop's PRML, and it is extremely time consuming to really finish the book, and do all the exercises.

I saw a blog from a guy who did the same, and it took him 1500+ hours.

Not a single person in my masters program finished any of these books. They just did the courses and googled whatever else was necessary.

Same here, I feel like I could have done a lot more at college, knowing what I know now. I couldn't see the big picture, and I felt uninspired most of the time.