"How many of you are from consulting? Oh that's bad. You should do something.
No seriously, I don't think there nothing inherently evil in consulting, I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action states and accumulate scar tissue for those mistakes and to pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can.
Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better.
You do get a broad cut at companies but it's very thin, it's like a picture of a banana, you might get a very accurate picture but it's only 2 dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get 3 dimensional, so you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends, I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes, but you never really taste it, that is what I think."
I'd argue the opposite really, re: 'using C/C++ at all is probably "too clever"'. By using modern C++ features it is possible to enforce a Rust-like model of ownership, without any memory management (eg. we don't use 'new' or 'delete' anywhere in our codebase). This helps reduce what the author calls "complicated, Klein-bottle-wannabe tricks", labyrinthine Java classes of GC goodness where you don't know where the code begins/ends.
The weed work is the most painful though. We get through it at work because we have to. But for any personal hobby projects, I feel nails scraping blackboard level of frustration when some build issue or other trivial minutiae come up.
No seriously, I don't think there nothing inherently evil in consulting, I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action states and accumulate scar tissue for those mistakes and to pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can.
Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better.
You do get a broad cut at companies but it's very thin, it's like a picture of a banana, you might get a very accurate picture but it's only 2 dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get 3 dimensional, so you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends, I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes, but you never really taste it, that is what I think."