Started 15-20 years ago, whereas Uber and Tesla hopped on the bandwagon late and tried to play catchup. I remember talking about the self-driving project at Google in 2008 or something like that. (IIRC they were trying to use Haskell for something.)
And this is why I now have to read 30 page design docs that could have been 3 pages and said the same thing.
Please try to understand why people have such strong dislike of floral writing, especially in technical texts. If you read a lot of papers or designs, it makes your life miserable.
Yes, it's the usual advice of how artists/authors/scientists make something: 1) Make the thing, 2) Try removing each part, 3) If the work fails without that part, put it back.
For example, adverbs are good when readers might have the wrong image without them. E.g., "Alice [quickly] walked." Most of the time, writing is better without words like "very" or "quite."
When it comes to technical writing the only thing I can really discuss is documentation, and the key thing I'm personally looking for there is structure.
It could be about basically anything, just please, pretty please, for the love of god, make it structured. And I don't mean sections with catchy headings, I mean as structured and reference-like as possible.
I want to minimize the amount of time I spend reading prose and searching around, as well as the chance of missing things. I want to hit CTRL+F and be put where I need to be stat and have that be enough. Structure alone can convey a lot of the idea behind how something works - please trust me to able to utilize it to make basic leaps in logic.
A bad example for this is AWS documentation. It's a mish-mash of prose and structured reference. A good example is the AWS CLI documentation (although if they lead with example usages first, that'd be even better).
Writing good technical text is an art. There is a certain amount of fluff that helps, and it’s almost unnoticeable when it’s there. Without it, it’s too terse. Quite often, my complaint of technical documentation is “it did exactly what the docs said it would do, except in a situation that I didn’t expect it to do that”.
This is nihilistic nonsense. The author's problem is that he's only ever seemingly worked on web stuff. People stay in their domain far too often and then come up with big statements like "I have 20 years of experience and don't know what I'm doing." Is that maybe because you stick around a domain and layer defined by people with an average 2 years of experience, many of whom learned their job from a Youtube tutorial?
It's possible for organizations to get better, even good at building software. The foundations of the field haven't changed much, people just don't learn about them and go on to build towers of overwrought abstraction, which is the thing that keeps constantly changing.
If you think of React and Redux as foundational, then everything you say has water under it. Go open a TCP socket.
One thing that certainly has changed, over these years, is that the size of applications is much, much larger now.
And, certainly, we never had to think about security in the 90's, for regular-degular business apps, anyway. Now, the security dimension is it own barrel of worms, both affecting our software design and requiring network security specialists as well, configuring our boxen. I doubt very many of us are working on pure intranet apps.
So, yeah, the roots are the same, but the trunk is much larger, higher and much more expansively bushy, and its environment is considerably more dangerous.
It's definitely harder, as you say. Not only do you have to think about technical aspects of security and privacy, but also the legal requirements for those things, and how they differ across countries.
But the complexity is not so much worse than it was in 2016, and yet in 2016 we could manage it.
The type of things I see in the FAANG world lately would not be happening 10 years ago: CI that randomly fails 5% of the time because everybody knows React, but nobody knows how to set up a Linux machine. The fact that USB drivers on M1 macs are still broken and nobody at Apple knows how to fix them, or that Apple seems to have no one on staff who knows what EDID is.
We're not failing because of new complexity, it's the stuff we put up to manage the old complexity that we can no longer service. And that won't get better until we accept that the answer is not "rebuild it from scratch, but this time let's have new grads do it with no training."
> I doubt very many of us are working on pure intranet apps.
I think this is part of the problem. The reason why your Mac will kernel panic if you plug in two external screens from the same production run is because nobody is working on "purely intranet apps" like the display driver.
I don't want to sound like I believe we were somehow smarter 10 years ago. But you had relatively solid foundations to build on and people were incentivized and given mentorship to attain mastery. We need to bring that back.
Yes to all that, but the blame -- as always -- belongs to the money people. They are the ones chasing shiny new sh_t instead of fixing what their existing systems are f_cking up royally. It bears remembering that those money folks are the ones choosing the CTOs, which is less likely to do with their technical solidity, but more likely to be because they will fall in line. But that's just my educated guess, by understanding money-centric folks and how they almost always operate. The love of money has corrupted and is corrupting so many branches of modern life.
> t bears remembering that those money folks are the ones choosing the CTOs, which is less likely to do with their technical solidity, but more likely to be because they will fall in line.
Wish somebody told me that 25 years ago. I woke up to this reality way too late in my life and career. Now I started getting that it's about emitting the right signals: mostly that you are meek and malleable, if you want to get hired at certain places.
I of course refused to do that, many times, to the detriment of my career. Though maybe it was just shitty luck 7-8 times in a row, who knows. Also Eastern Europe is far from a good environment, so...
Same here, but I never sold my soul to them, so, while not having nearly as much money, I have my self respect. I hope you feel good about fighting the good fight, even if you did so by remaining in your natural, more innocent, state.
I faced really strong criticism lately for criticizing (in the context of C++) a Safe C++ proposal that basically copies Rust into C++.
With all good and bad things this entails.
It seems there is a push from some people (that I hope it is not successful in its current shape, I personally find it a wrong approach) to just bifurcate C++ type system and standard library.
What I found a lot of is literally, intellectual dishonesty in some of the arguments to push in that direction.
Not that it is not a possible direction, but claims like: "there is no other way", "it is the only feasible solution", etc. without exploring other alternative, from which Swift/Hylo value semantics/subscripts (subscripts is basically controlled references for mutation without a full borrow checker) and adding compile-time enforced law of exclusivity semantics without a new type system are possible (and better, IMHO) alternatives... well, you can see the thread.
There seems to be a lot of obsession as "the only right way is the Rust way" and everything else is directly discardable by authors and some people supporting them.
You hire juniors on potential, seniors to fix a gap. Right now, 90% of hiring is focused on plugging gaps in the next 6 months - that's just where we are in the cycle.
As to why we're here, I think it's obvious at this point that tech massively overhired between 2016 and 2022.
Finally, the growth areas haven't completely disappeared, they've just shifted. If you're a junior right now, you should be getting into ML or something, not webdev. Plenty of entry level roles in ML.
As a physics student, I feel compelled to point out, to any readers who might now go read Hossenfelders other articles, that many of her views are generally not shared by a majority of physicists today.
She is a real physicist and not a kook, but she has been criticized for presenting her views (e.g. superdeterminism) as having much more acceptance than they actually do. She ignores and misrepresents counter-arguments regularly. Her ideas about, e.g. the explanatory power of entanglement wrt processions of moons around (IIRC) Jupiter are certainly well outside what I’d describe as regular astrophysics.
The golden standard of science communication was set by Sagan, and he always carefully pointed out when he was expressing a personal opinion, as opposed to one shared by the majority. Sabine Hossenfelder is no Sagan.
Is there any scientist science communicators that this criticism wouldn't apply to?
As far as criticism goes, I appreciate how professionally you stated this PSA. Most don't make the same points as gracefully. Best of luck with your studies.
Neil deGrasse Tyson; if he is working on a s riot prepared by someone else like on a TV Show, he is quite a nice communicator. But, if he does not have such a script, I would say unless he is debunking a flat earther or some actor’s mythical views of mathematics, I would just ignore it. If he talks about biology, which he often does, I would just leave.
He comments on fields in which he’s unqualified, and his remake of Nova had a ton of unnecessary swearing. And goes on TV and talks about politics. That’s when he lost me.
Sagan was political, more so than Tyson. Sometimes science intersects with politics in ways that can’t be avoided. Nuclear proliferation, land management, etc. So how can you just turn off any scientist who touches politics? Or is it just a certain kind of politics that turns you off?
Sagan always felt respectful, while Tyson feels like he’s looking down on everyone around him. Some of his hosts have also said he’s a huge jerk. I think he would be a very bad role model for the field.
What are you talking about, my marginal tax rate in Switzerland is 50%. When I last went to Prague, I changed trains at a station that prominently said it was financed by “friendship funds” from Switzerland. My taxes already are paying for Germany’s transport infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Swiss students couldn’t go on Erasmus for a year, because someone in Brussels threw a hissy fit.
I’m a fan of the EU, but let’s not pretend it’s not throwing its weight around, just like any other huge federal government.
I don’t buy the idea that it’s mainly because of network complexity and line length. Local lines, even ones that don’t share tracks with any other trains, are routinely cancelled or delayed, as well. Other large countries manage to run trains on time (Japan, Spain…).
DB is uniquely bad and I don’t think we should be making excuses for them.
