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.
My wife was in nursing school during/after the pandemic. One of her classmates/friends (37 year old mother of 3) was skeptical of the vaccines and wasn’t sure she was going to continue the nursing program because they were requiring vaccination. She contracted C-19 over the summer of ‘21, spent 2 months in the hospital before dying. Would she still be here for her kids if she’d taken the jab? It’s impossible to know, but more than likely she would have fared better than she did without it.
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.
I wouldn't let descriptions[1] of Rust as difficult to learn put you off. I'm long out of date with it so can't make confident comparisons with the Java of 2022 (2023!), but you might enjoy exploring what Rust brings to the table. It's certainly very capable, and those who become fluent with it claim the early productivity hit is eventually overweighted by the correctness/longevity of what you produce. I haven't reached that stage but have no reason to doubt the claims.
If you do interact with the Rust community, I suggest doing so in Shiny Happy Person guise.
[1] only the Rust community considers these 'complaints'
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?
This is just stuff that's flagged automatically by the compiler. You don't need to "reason" about it, the compiler will tell you how to fix it if it does come up.
> 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.
I agree 100%. The last thing I want to do is sell ('cause I've done it before). I'm terrible at it.
But:
> “Consider a law firm. Do the founding partners go out and hire a Lawyer Manager to order them around, and then do they hire a VP of Lawyering to order the manager around? Do they then hire a CEO to rule over everyone and a CFO to handle the finances and a COO to schedule court dates and such? Of course not. There’s no historical precedent for all that fluff. Rather, they handle facets of the business themselves. What they can’t or don’t want to handle, they delegate to subordinates that they hire. The partners don’t specialize in finance, sales, marketing, or operations. That would be silly. But they understand enough about it to act as the boss.”
Can I be successful as a terrible salesman with a product? Sure I can.
Can an amazing salesman be successful without a product? Nope.
I'm an immigrant to the UK. No-one exploited me. I had a choice of lots of countries to go to (EU passport) and chose the UK voluntarily.