I worked as a barman, a shelf stacker, a fruit picker, a stock picker (I mean the guy at the back of the warehouse stacking trolleys with orders) before I transitioned to software.
I was on minimum wage. I wasn't exploited, it was a means to an end.
I don't think you would really care about me as an individual. I think you just didn't want my type here.
A configuration management system. Actually I didn't build it, but have used different implementations at every job. Why can't this just be a commodity? It's not exactly doing anything very different in each case.
I believe I remember reading about that in the book "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose back in the late 90s. It was something that has stuck with me ever since, even though I didn't follow up on the AI route.
> I feel the covid fearmongering by governments, medical companies, medical authorities, and the media has made public discourse in general (let alone specifically medical) even more prohibitive.
The fact that you still call it "fearmongering" with nearly 7 million people dead and how many others with negative long term health conditions from the virus tells you why there is a backlash against anti-intellectualism.
You are certainly not prohibited from challenging the status quo. You know that because there are thousands and thousands of anti-mainstream videos and blogs that tell us viruses aren't real, or covid is just the flu, or vaccinations cause more issues than covid itself, and, and, and....
Engaging in rich discourse happens while scientists are trying to form a consensus. But eventually a consensus is formed and then the outliers who mostly only generate noise tend to get ignored. 1 in 1000000 times then may be correct and successfully challenge the status quo, but mostly they're wrong but convinced beyond any reasonableness that they are not wrong. You cannot argue against all of these people, it is just too tedious, so in the end they just get ignored or stopped from spreading nonsense on certain forums.
This is our company. Frankly, I don't agree with this approach. We're a hedge fund that uses Java for low latency trading systems. Someone pushed for Rust to be used for a new project, because they wanted to use it, and now we have a split codebase. We have duplicate code (eg. connections to external APIs) written in Java and Rust, and now we have two sets of code to maintain whenever one of those APIs change.
I always get annoyed when I hear about people suggesting to push for a language in a company because they feel it would be a good fit. Sure, maybe it would be, but now the company will always require experts not in one language but two, and developers are no longer as fungible between teams.
Having said that, from a selfish perspective, I will use it to write some production Rust code in the future.
I write low latency Java for a living (usual finance type stuff). Our fund has started to use some Rust but I've not yet delved. I'm still trying to resolve whether it will be worth my time to do so. I'm one of those unusual people who really enjoys Java programming for the most part because it both allows you to be very productive but also offers enough sophistication to achieve really high performance.
As someone who hasn't looked at Rust, reading all this makes me never want to. Am I missing something? Is it actually easier to reason about the language than it feels like from reading this text?
> In a law firm, the partners call the shots and the rest of the staff is there to support them. In tech companies, the structure is inverted. The engineers are at the bottom of the power hierarchy, even though it's the engineers that generate the most value.
Hmm, as a software engineer, I'm not so sure this is true.
I'd have to sell my product to generate revenue, and I'm not a very good sales person. I can't just generate value by writing code. I need people to pay me money to use that code.
> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition. As a result, decisions that are undesirable by the majority are consistently made.
Could you explain this a bit more? Surely if they are proportionally elected and have the numbers to outvote the current government, then they're representing the majority views, not minority?
In the UK, our government gets elected by winning 40% of the vote and therefore almost every decision it takes is against the wishes of the majority of voters.
Good luck with that. We are now mostly a remote company but we still pay top rates for the best employees, some of whom like to come in to the office every day, some work from home 50% of the time, some come in one day a week and some work pretty much full time remote. All are in Europe (most in the UK) so we don't suffer from timezone issues or all the pitfalls of extreme offshoring that has plagued every project I've seen that has ever tried it.
I think you're going to need a lot of luck, because I doubt your approach will work.
I was on minimum wage. I wasn't exploited, it was a means to an end.
I don't think you would really care about me as an individual. I think you just didn't want my type here.