username90

There is definitely a shortage of decent CEO's, which is why companies are forced to hire and try to work with the charlatans they have today. That is also why the salaries are increasing, they try to get one of the few good ones.

They don't even view making 200k per year as "making it". Joining a top tech company doesn't require luck or connections, anyone can do it if they got the talent and just practice programming enough.

Of course when you confront them they retreat to their motte and say that talent is also luck, and not getting cancer is luck etc, and therefore everything in life is actually luck, so they weren't wrong!

I know for sure that Google doesn't do it and I think many of your other examples doesn't either. Some teams at Google might do it, but it isn't the norm and I didn't see any that did. Many teams do daily stand-ups, but that is about it and even stand-ups aren't that common. There are no sprints etc and I don't think I ever saw the word scrum in any message boards there even.

> Well it depends, are you doing high school level mathematics, or are you trying to solve highly complex mathematical problems and/or devise new theorems?

Most people actually considers high school mathematics hard. It is easy to forget this when we are talking about how easy or hard things are for the average person.

> In a more practical sense, I'd say no, because there's not easy places to apply basic programming skills.

I'd argue that the reason there aren't many places to apply programming skill is because most people don't know programming. If you know almost everyone knows basic programming then you can build out public API's for almost every service taking code, and that would deliver tremendous value to everyone and coding would suddenly become a must for all people to learn since it helps so much.

But as is we spend trillions of dollars worth of programmer man hours trying to build out non-programming API's for doing simple tasks and wouldn't be needed if the target audience just had minimal levels of programming knowledge.

We call STEM hard since most people fail to learn it to a passable level even when enticed with tons of money.

You can try to explain away their failures to learn in many ways, but the fact is that most people fail to learn STEM well enough to get a job doing it and instead they go to other fields considered less hard. You could say "They just didn't try hard enough" or "they just went into it with the wrong mindset" or "they just need to spend more time doing it" etc, but all of those things are signs that the field is hard.

STEM is hard since we can test for it. There are tons of bad teachers out there because they can be bad and we can't do much about it. But someone being bad at STEM is obvious and therefore all the bad people will get filtered out. That filtering is what people refer to when they say STEM is hard, the hard part is to not get filtered out, fields without such filters are not hard.

Of course even fields without filters are hard to deliver a lot of value in, but that isn't what people mean. A person being a teacher doesn't tell you anything about how good they are at teaching, but a person being a mathematician or physicist tells you a great deal how good they are at mathematics or physics.

You can pretty easily and effectively do parts of the work of a doctor by looking up symptoms online and buy off the shelf medicine, it doesn't solve all cases but it solves a lot of cases. Does that mean medicine is easy? No.

And the bar for delivering value via programming is way higher than medicine. Just knowing how to do a few loops and print statements doesn't take much, but also doesn't help basically anyone do their job. In a few jobs it helps, but most people doesn't need that kind of simple text processing in their jobs, and those who do are usually already automated by dedicated programmers.

Edit: With that I'd say, people will learn to program simple scripts once we build enough interfaces for such programs to be useful to the average person. But as is we are making programming harder and harder via tons of build scripts etc making just setting up a project properly often take hours to days. We are moving in the wrong direction here if we want average people to code.

That isn't really true, software projects fails all the time even when everyone knows what to build. A recent well known example is Cyberpunk 2077, its engine couldn't handle anything less than the latest hardware causing tons of bugs.

If you know what to build and that thing is something trivial that many has already built before, then sure it isn't hard. But any time you try to push and deliver software doing things that other companies doesn't it will be hard. If your business suite covers more cases than all other business suites then that is impressive and hard, etc.

You are arguing a different point, the post said that black men and black women are the most imprisoned groups. Black men are more imprisoned than white men, yes, but white men are more imprisoned than black women.

Womens issues and black issues are completely different, don't just mix them up randomly like this.

Try to write a commercial OS that can compete with IOS, Windows or Linux. I doubt it is much easier, there are so many features people expect from a modern OS.

The point is that when you compete with the best in the world in any area then it will be hard to win. Low level code is only easy when low level code isn't an important part of your product. For example backends to web apps, you don't write any low level code for them. The networking is handled via application server frameworks, the data storage is handled via pre packaged database programs so you don't even have to open a file etc. It isn't low level, it is just high level glue code between different libraries. This works just fine since you aren't trying to compete using low level code, so using off the shelf products without almost any code written by you is fine. But when your product requires you to compete using low level code then it is really hard.

The healthcare industry used exactly that argument to bottleneck the economy and create a lot of inefficiencies so healthcare can't be provided to everyone. Lots of lives would be saved if it got a lot easier for immigrant doctors to practice, but that would be too efficient and not "robust" enough so they can't do it.

It is almost as if writing the low level code required to make a browser run well is hard...

The accounting package is much easier to design if you have the same level of requirements for them. If the goal is to make a toy product then making an accounting package is trivial while a OS is not. If the goal is to make a product that will get a lot of users then making an OS is almost impossible while plenty of people sell accounting packages. Low level is only easier than high level if you don't intend to sell the low level program but do intend to sell the high level program.

Every programming job is hard enough that the average programmer doing it will struggle, since it is those you will be compared against. So there is no hard or easy, you just struggle with different things. If you have a comparative advantage doing low level tasks then that will be easier for you, if you have a comparative advantage doing high level tasks then those will be easier.

Of course if a field is very popular compared to demand that they can be more selective then those jobs will be harder, since you are compared against better people. Game development is one such area.

I don't understand the downvotes, are managers really fine with ruining the productivity of their reports just because their own performance wouldn't be hurt in the same scenario? Or don't they recognize that switching to a task you have had a lot of deliberate practice doing costs a lot less than switching to a task you know you are bad at?

Engineer: I would be more productive if we changed X.

Manager: You are lying, I am not hurt by X, you shouldn't be either!!! Just try harder and you will be just as productive!

I've found the reverse, it is easy to context switch between tasks you have practiced a lot with. But you still need to practice a lot at doing them, making someone now and then do a task they aren't good at and evaluating them at that task will absolutely ruin their productivity. In this case we are talking about meetings for software engineers who haven't been managers.

So you spent years practicing being a manager and now you no longer think meetings are a big deal. But how does that help all the software engineers who didn't practice being a manager for many years and therefore still gets very distracted by meetings?

Nah, people falls somewhere on the adhd spectrum and people further in on that will have a harder time focusing when a big thing is coming up. That isn't a skill you train, but a thing you are born with. You can make it look like you are less distracted, and it isn't like managers notice your productivity, but you can't really be less distracted.

You can however practice a specific thing so it no longer feels like a big deal. If you have gone to a thousand meetings then having another one wont be distracting. But most software engineers don't do enough management work to get over that hurdle.

Maybe the product you launched wouldn't have gained traction if you delivered a bit slower or lacked a few of the features? The strategy you used worked, why do people so often say "I got successful doing this, but don't do what I did do this other thing instead!"?

> Above stuff is from my experience at Google

Google needs microservices, their codebase is many thousands times too big to deploy as a single unit. They also have the money to focus on reliability over velocity. The startup with 2 developers doesn't need microservices, and the things you are talking about aren't things that a startup should think about before they have any users. Yet they still often goes with microservices because that is what the big boys do. It is those cases we talk about here.

With microservices the other team can easily accidentally ddos your server bringing down the system. Ensuring they don't do that require them to build their microservice properly. And if you can trust them to do that then you can trust them to be a good steward in a monolith. So I don't see how microservices are better, it just lets you easier ignore problems but those problems are still there.

Also if you want to stop the other team from abusing your code then you can easily fix that. Most languages lets you deliver code in an interface that they can't easily break either, try that before microservices.

Many times they use new tech because they want to leave, and using new tech helps you find a new job. A good way to fix this problem is therefore to make your engineers not want to leave.

I can't imagine trying to code without being able to align characters on different rows...

Has anyone calculated how much money he saved on ads doing that? Seems like a huge efficiency advantage compared to competitors.

Then why did Activision Blizzards stock just drop 8%? Clearly the market believes they wont recover nicely after this.

Activision Blizzard stock dropped 8% today, this is much larger than what happened at Riot.

If 1% of a fanbase of 10 million gets mad then you have 100k angry people. And of those a percent or so will be insane people who likely will murder someone in real life at some point, its just statistics. And those one thousand insane people will create a lot of ruckus, but that doesn't mean their views are shared with the community in general.

But that applies to anywhere though. As a man you can sit alone in a bar and nobody will bother you, as a woman lots of people will come up and start to speak with you and possibly get angry if you don't want to speak with them. The fact that the same happens in games isn't evidence that there is something particularly wrong about gamers, rather it is the exact same social game that happens in all leisure spaces.

Of course it would be better if women didn't have to deal with it, but you can't just blame this on gamers since men everywhere does the same thing.

You put way too much credit in the intelligence of hate mobs. People attack others for nonsense all the time. And I don't view gender bias as misogyny. Women are biased to believe women and men are biased to believe men, that is just natural. So men accusing women leads to male hate mobs, and women accusing men leads to female hate mobs. Of course male hate mobs are usually more vicious, but the workings are the same.