thebackup

This was my first thought as well, just from reading the title.

I took a functional programming in Haskell course first year in Uni without having much previous programming experience at all. Quite early in the course we were tasked with implementing a huge bidirectional graph and an efficient shortest path algorithm for finding the fastest way between any two nodes. I hadn’t taken any DSA course and was totally unaware of graphs and shortest path algorithms and the course material was pure Haskell syntax. I failed miserably and so did most of the others.

Capital M is for Mega. I would use duration_s and duration_ms.

const duration_ms = 1000 * duration_s

And _us for microsec.

const duration_us = 1000 * duration_ms

But then the tool would probably reject my code for not following the naming conventions which ”disallows using underscores in variable names”.

Guess what I wanted to say is that there are always exceptions to the rule and there should always be some way to turn off the automatic checker for certain sections of the code.

I see, wow. Thanks for the info.

I don’t work for Google and have no insight in what the average Google job pays, but $99 per day is basically my entire salary (after taxes etc.).

Will give it a go. But probably it’ll take another generation or two before it’s good enough.

I second this. My impressions so far are pretty much the same. Have been trying to get ChatGPT to generate code for some algorithms that are pretty close to well known implementations but with some twists and it absolutely fails no matter how much I tried to provide hints to change the suggestions it gave me. In the end I just went back to hand coding them since it actually saves me the frustration of trying to get ChatGPT to bend in the direction I need.

Agreed. A comment can also explain things that a function name cannot. I’m all for splitting code into paragraphs with a well written comment above each. Of course I also extract functions, but only when there are obvious benefit, like removing repetition.

I'm having a hard time believing that world's top talent in software development are fighting to get into Swiss banking. What makes you think that the brightest people are striving to get employment at your bank?

I mostly write C++ and I would love to use CLion, but my employer won’t pay for the license fees, so my choices are VSCode or Eclipse.

I'll have a look a the book. Thanks!

My experience is that the expectations on what your average engineer should be able to handle has grown enormously during the last 10 years or so. Working both with large distributed systems and medium size monolithic systems I have seen the expectations become a lot higher in both.

When I started my career the engineers at our company were assigned a very specific part of the product that they were experts on. Usually there were 1 or 2 engineers assigned to a specific area and they knew it really well. Then we went Agile(tm) and the engineers were grouped into 6 to 9 person teams that were assigned features that spanned several areas of the product. The teams also got involved in customer interaction, planning, testing and documentation. The days when you could focus on a single part of the system and become really good at it were gone.

Next big change came when the teams moved from being feature teams to devops teams. None of the previous responsibilities were removed but we now became responsible also for setting up and running the (cloud) infrastructure and deploying our own software.

In some ways I agree that these changes have empowered us. But it is also, as you say, exhausting. Once I was simply a programmer; now I'm a domain expert, project manager, programmer, tester, technical writer, database admin, operations engineer, and so on.

Thanks for this comment. A very interesting observation. Do you have any thoughts regarding American companies that are established in Europe, shouldn't they be able to introduce that American culture in their European offices?

It's hard to answer your question without actually experiencing the differences first hand. It's not like we don't have visible poverty in Sweden. Almost every day I see people digging through the public trash bins for bottles and cans that pays a little for recycling and there are beggars in front of the stores and approaching you on the street asking for a money.

There is however a base pension that each senior citizen is entitled to. About 15% of the elderly only gets the minimal amount which in many cases doesn't cover basic expenses, like rent and food, so they need to be on social welfare as well.

But would I accept a 100% salary increase if it meant that social welfare had to be removed and people couldn't afford a place to live and to put food on the table? Of course not. Would I like if people that study hard and get well educated also get well paid jobs? Yes!

It’s interesting to see these salary levels. A senior developer (10+ years of experience) here in Sweden is paid less than their entry level salary. The difference in pay between Europe and the US seems huge. I wonder why.

Premature optimization is a common disease amongst C and C++ devs. I often come across code that is written in an obscure/complex way just because someone thought execution speed triumphs code readability. In most cases (around 9 times out of 10) it is on a non-time-critical path of the code and the developer who wrote it didn't even bother to run a profiler on it. My work would be significantly easier if we could learn to prioritize code readability.

You only work 7h per day minus lunch break? Sounds sweet. Do you get paid for full time? I usually work 7am to 4pm but lately we have been ordered to work overtime so currently I am doing 7am to 5pm and a couple of hours extra on Saturdays. Personal life pretty much consists of taking care of the kids and maintaining the house.

Where can I get some of this high paid, asynchronous, uninterrupted, and self-scheduled work?

I read Clean Code in 2010 and trying out and applying some of the principles really helped to make my code more maintainable. Now over 10 years later I have come to realize that you cannot set up too many rules on how to structure and write code. It is like forcing all authors to apply the same writing style or all artists to draw their paintings with the exact same technique. With that analogy in mind, I think that one of the biggest contributors to messy code is having a lot of developers, all with different preferences, working in the same code base. Just imagine having 100 different writers trying to write a book, this is the challenge we are trying to address.

I don't know about Facebook but here in Sweden we have several systems where you need to use Google, and of course accept Google's terms in order to do that. One example is the health care centers and hospitals that uses Google Maps. Another example being the schools that forces the students to use Chromebooks (and apps like GMail, Google Classroom, Google Docs, etc), and Google forms for requesting information about the kids need for after school care.

I do not like that Google get to know when I need to visit the hospital, or collect information about my children's activities in school. But currently we do not have an option.

I see your point. I have friends that put GPS trackers on their kids "just in case they get abducted by a sexual predator". It does happen that kids get taken, however it's more likely that they get hit by lightning... and a GPS tracker wont really protect them anyhow. The absolute majority of abuse towards children are also done by people that are close to them (parents, relatives, teachers). I have put a lot of time and effort into building a relation with my kids where it's ok to talk about anything. My oldest have also been practicing self-defense for over 5 years now.

I understand that a lot of parents are positive to the parental control and supervision that you describe, I am not that kind of parent. I want the relationship with my kids to be built on trust and honesty. My two boys make mistakes sometimes, probably more than I know of, but that is fine, it's part of growing up. They also don't use social media, instead they text their friends by SMS or simply call them when they want to talk or meet up. So far they have never complained about missing out on anything.

I don’t believe in BDUF:ing even regulations too much, better to get a toothless first version out in the wild and then tweak it when in place.

I’m in Sweden, so Scandinavia. Every company I know has 40h work weeks. Lunch break is not included so if you start working at 8, take a 1 hour lunch break around 12, then you can log off at 17.