I gotta say still pretty regrettable take, if you will humor I am happy to explain why I say that.
First let me say I definitely value the hundreds of hours you would have spent on hard theoretical problems and while I wasn’t exposed to your curriculum, I regret I don’t have that.
However, I myself have definitely spent a substantial number of hours on distributed algorithms that were only available as published research (didn’t have a choice and that understanding I gained has been proven out), and my extended family is filled with PhDs, so I’ve been casually reading research papers since I was in my teens, this didn’t seem weird. A lot of my peers with and without degrees didn’t engage in this practice.
To explain further, I’ve also spent I can’t even tell you how much time on benchmarking and establishing performance bottlenecks and near as I can tell, no one has in university, or at least they’re not teaching it well enough, because it is shocking how badly this part of performance is understood. Let’s call it applied practical performance enhancement of software deployments.
In the end, I just can’t fully be in board with what you’re saying. Yes I wish I had that degree nowadays and I wish I could take 4 years out and go back and do it again. But I seriously did gain a lot of valuable experience that was hard won with that extra time and near as I can tell is super duper rare, especially because people keep hiring me for it.
I gotta say I’ve heard this take a lot, and I find it regrettable because I think everyone doesn’t understand what they’re missing, this is a pretty human trait. It’s pretty impossible to just know it all and to not know it so much that you’re just miles from even realizing you aren’t even close.
I’ve definitely first hand seen a lot of FAANG engineers (yes even them, some with PHDs) not realize something I had learned from experience during my first year working with computers and I’m certain I was missing things they learned early in university. In the end, together we solved some hard problems in spite of the unknown unknowns that each of us carried.
You may know all this and are just singling out the Hacker News crowd. But I read your comment and thought "surely he doesn’t think Java is much bigger than Python?" I’m not even sort of sure Python is smaller.
Solidly Germanic with an absurd amount of French, down to nearly identical spelling for many common words. I’m not talking about cognates but actually 100% the same spelling and meaning and they’re often not from some recent century but from old French.
I’m sure you have a solid basis for saying this but it’s basically impossible to write many sentences without by accident using French down to the original spelling.
I was going to highlight all the examples I used by accident myself in this post but I gave up because the links were making it too long.
Despite having worked 10x harder at it than I did Portuguese or Spanish. When speaking those two languages, it’s close enough to a correct accent that people often will ask if my family is Latino or Portuguese once they hear that im American or hear my English. This hasn’t happened 5 times but so many, I just assume it will happen now.
However my experience has been different in French, even if it’s obvious I’ve worked very hard at French (C1 now), my French friends are not begging to speak to me in French unless they have limited English skills… just because my pronunciation/cadence/intonation isn’t quite right or even remotely ok, despite having much more immersion in French than those other two languages. French also feels like I’m singing at a concert rather that just conversing.
Just sometimes your culture/brain/ linguistic mix result in happy or unhappy accidents.
Edit I’m sure someone will bring up cultural differences but I have several multilingual friends .. they all say my Spanish is beautiful and nearly to a person criticize my French (in a helpful friendly manner), this is true if they’re Latin American or French. Just seriously it’s a thing, brains are weird.
So I think some of us have done it out of having no other choice and found it lacking.
From the time I had to live a year going to paycheck advance every month because of an unexpected auto repair bill (leaving that cheap typically requires a used beat up car).
Or the time I woke up with an excruciating pain in my side and went to ER which resulted in bills that lead to years of payments.
People do this experiment every day in the USA and the experience is pretty bad.
EDIT
I’ll grant this is all a fine trade off for some people. But having lived it, I can definitely say no thank you.
Well met, I love that part of the world and I have many happy memories of my time there.
So I guess I just misunderstood where you were coming from but I’m interested as I also see in another thread you commented on this :
> Citizenship and residency have both benefits, but also obligations. GP moved to France without a good grasp of the local language.
Note: I'm importantly not talking about the native minority languages in France.
So can you elaborate a bit on your comment about minority languages? I believe there are way more multigenerational Spanish speakers in the former Spanish/Mexican parts of the USA than there are Basque, Alsacien, or Breton speakers, so if I understood you correctly you’re ok with some carve outs for the Alsaciens, Catalans, Bretons and Basques of France. If you disagree with the above statement or if I just misunderstood I’d be interested too.
PS yes I moved without perfect French, but it wasn’t for lack of trying and experience in learning similar languages, in the end, I just wasn’t willing to bail on my employer last minute who’d put all this money and planning into this, so I just muddled through. It worked out after all.
I learned fast enough it was my 4th language. I have passed the C1 level exam (advanced, I would have struggled in my mother tongue), responses below you are correct though, you can learn as you arrive. This is IMO the best of all worlds, as it brings in talent and encourages integration.
You are very right! For example, my work contract was in French and English. The French was the legally binding text. I found this an excellent balance.
Re France listen the French are super duper proud of their language and rightfully so, it’s still practical to communicate to your residents important information.
Re San Antonio, they actually are counting the metro area which brings in a lot of white suburbs and throws the numbers off a lot but in the interest of being balanced, let’s say I’ll concede the point.
There are still a lot of US citizens in San Antonio that speak Spanish primarily, I think you’d be surprised by this, I know I was the first 200 times I met someone like that, lots of people there with roots back several generations still speaking with English with an accent.
I understand everyone has different experiences and I have the advantage of having personal experience to the contrary so I don’t judge this opinion, I knew people where I grew up that believed this to be fact.
To better inform everyone their are plenty of French laws and announcements that are translated to English ( I moved there right before Covid and had to rely on said services at first ).
More complicated for your argument is there are parts of the USA that have had Spanish as the primary language since they joined the USA. San Antonio, Texas for example I don’t believe has ever been majority anglophone and it doesn’t become more anglophone the further south you go. My wife’s family has been in Texas since it was Spain, and they only in very recent generations switched to English primarily.
I’m not sure if you find any of this convincing, but I hope at least realize it is a bit more complicated than you may have realized.
Thanks I appreciate it, re safety violations, yeah some of it was those laws were just badly applied across the board, and it was hard to find a place without some degree of violating the letter of the law, so I think they just got flippant.
Re “source of sanity” I’ve caught myself doing the same with extra work, but sometimes it backfires when the little fun tool you wrote solves the purpose so well that it becomes the company standard and then the politics comes in, I don’t mean the “oh we need this feature super badly that breaks a bunch of other things can you do it for us” that’s just having a successful project. I mean when it starts figuring into political finger pointing and you’re forced to be involved in it all since you are the creator of a tool tangentially involved in some inter office politics. I’ve not figured out how to avoid that yet.
I’ll be honest I would have left by now if I could have, but I don’t regret my career in the slightest. I still code for fun, but our jobs are rarely about just coding, and the money has brought in a lot of toxicity.
I’m sorry this caused such a negative reaction but I think you stopped reading too soon, we agree more than disagree. Listen, I’ve paid my taxes on those jobs that I miss, so I know what it is I’m saying.
Yes was talking about the grounds crew, no one was harvesting trees for money, it was my favorite job and would happily do it again if I didn’t have family obligations (I had mentioned this in the post).
That said the farm I worked I knew the farmer and his dad pretty well and I worked there year round for a couple of years with breaks in the summer. Harvest time was insane and not all the years were good, but the family were comfortable and most of the time the workload was reasonable. It maybe different now but I lived in farm states then and I personally knew several well to do farmers that were living very well with more assets than I currently have. So I’m not sure I’m fully on board with your view of farming. It depends a lot on time and place I’m sure though, I’ll fully admit that I’m no expert.
I gotta say I worked as a farmhand, waiter, fast food manager, line cook, grounds crew (by far my favorite job, it was at a university and I got to do everything), plumber, electrician, day laborer, delivery driver for many things and I did a couple stints in factories all before I ever owned a computer (didn’t come from a background where you had one, I got my first one and it clicked, within a year, I was working at an ISP configuring Qmail and Bind, everyone just assuming I had been living with a computer since I was born).
I’ve had a wildly successful career in tech where I’ve gotten to do, what to me are crazy impressive things (I don’t want to brag about here
but you may have benefited from some of it, certainly all of you have done more impressive things than me, and thank you for that) and I don’t regret it a day, but as someone that’s worked in those " normal jobs", other than factory work I found the jobs themselves WILDLY more satisfying than anything I’m doing today.
Tech work did used to be a lot better and I still love learning new things but if I could make a few hundred grand a year and never do another OKR and garden I would take that so quickly you can’t even imagine (actually I’d take it for a 100 grand year).
Now I’m old and I have people that depend on me, so I do the OKR shuffle and play all the politics, and even lead on new tech that I think is being misapplied in the org but hell if I can get anyone to believe me and just use SQLite. But if I was single and had no kids, I’d gladly give up the 6 figure lifestyle to get my hands in the dirt again or even get through a hard rush in the kitchen with the team, there was so much more worthwhile about the jobs I had before, it was just the benefits sucked and couldn’t support a family in the USA without a lot of luck and sacrifice.
I think maybe it is possible that most of you that think these other jobs are so hard just didn’t come from a family where they were normal, but for me they were, and I don’t see anything wrong with them other than the pay and the benefits. They’re honest work.
That said I’d be ok if technology companies just let us do our jobs without all the bizarre AMA, self help talk and bizarre behavior from management.
First let me say I definitely value the hundreds of hours you would have spent on hard theoretical problems and while I wasn’t exposed to your curriculum, I regret I don’t have that.
However, I myself have definitely spent a substantial number of hours on distributed algorithms that were only available as published research (didn’t have a choice and that understanding I gained has been proven out), and my extended family is filled with PhDs, so I’ve been casually reading research papers since I was in my teens, this didn’t seem weird. A lot of my peers with and without degrees didn’t engage in this practice.
To explain further, I’ve also spent I can’t even tell you how much time on benchmarking and establishing performance bottlenecks and near as I can tell, no one has in university, or at least they’re not teaching it well enough, because it is shocking how badly this part of performance is understood. Let’s call it applied practical performance enhancement of software deployments.
In the end, I just can’t fully be in board with what you’re saying. Yes I wish I had that degree nowadays and I wish I could take 4 years out and go back and do it again. But I seriously did gain a lot of valuable experience that was hard won with that extra time and near as I can tell is super duper rare, especially because people keep hiring me for it.