My impression is there are a segment of technically-minded backend engineers who look down on frontend work - who cares what the damn thing looks like as long as it works?
I think the truth is, most engineers just aren't comfortable with A) working with stakeholders and translating requirements to specs, aka soft skills, B) any sort of design (which is actually hard!) or C) learning the HTML/CSS/JS ecosystem. Also, I found learning how to write frontend applications to be just as challenging as writing CRUD apps.
Except that in Go, you always return the error alongside the value, like this:
return 0, errors.New("unable to get price")
It's less elegant than Options but still, very common practice. GP's company clearly hasn't bought into Go if they're using a library that doesn't follow well-known conventions.
Sounds like your company is just using a unidiomatic library. It's poor practice to return a zero value as an error instead of, well, returning the error. As someone else said, it's standard practice in the vast majority of all go code to return a value, error tuple and check at each call site. In fact, it's so common that it's the number 2 complaint about go code after not having generics (error handling too verbose).
Go has its problems, and it isn't a perfect language, but I have never felt unproductive using it. In fact, my company uses it for all backend services. It has a great stdlib and first class tooling. Most of the discussion in this thread seems to be coming from people who barely use it or have only dabbled with go.
As a tangent, it's really tiring to see HN engage ad nauseum in these pointless language debates. Every language has its place; use it when it's appropriate.
My read on it is the author is saying that seemingly small changes can have big impacts. I agree it could have been worded better, though I doubt he's trying to promote himself as a genius (as other people are saying) because he clearly highlights the effort his team put into the project in the footnote.
Probably cost of training. You'd have to hire consultants to teach best practices and that could cost significantly more than hiring a new engineer. Plus there are other risks to maintaining two codebases in different languages.
Whether you hire an outside consultant or not doesn’t matter. You have to pay the cost one way or another, either by your employees spending time learning the language + experimenting + making mistakes, or by going through some training and hopefully making less mistakes (not guaranteed).
Not saying this applies to every company, but I've worked at two different companies that have done something similar:
* Healthcare startup that basically outsourced its entire infra/security team from a consulting company. The consultants rewrote everything and took over engineering leadership, basically acting as gatekeepers for anything SRE-related.
* Worked at an older DNS company that hired a bunch of consultants to help engineers migrate their web framework from Play to Spring. Said engineers used Play because it was shiny but didn't have the Scala expertise to keep maintaining it, so they moved to pure Java.
I had the same reaction. However, I work for a small team with driven developers. It is expected from our engineers to learn “best practices” on their own time when we introduce new technologies. We are also compensated extremely well according to these expectations. If you have a team of engineers with a different mindset, you will need consultants.
But you'd still be in the same time zone, no? For different queries, like the one you mentioned, that might be reasonable, but asking for the time in London means the assistant should infer England's time zone, if you're in Ohio.
True, there are definitely edge cases to account for. Maybe the problem is these AI assistants are trying to make everything ___location-aware when that may not always be the desired behavior. If there are ambiguities the assistant could ask you to clarify, but that might make for a worse UX.
As someone who works with Python a lot, Coffeescript always looked more like Ruby to me, especially with all the syntactic sugar (lack of parens, keywords like `unless` or `isnt`, #{} for string interpolation, etc)
Why do you think it's a huge disadvantage? Your advice seems defeatist, and at best, is highly discouraging. Do you really think it's a good idea to tell a young high schooler to game the system to get into college?
Yeah... I wouldn't listen to GP, because being Asian-American is not a disadvantage, and gaming the system is bad advice. As someone who is Asian and went to a predominantly Asian high school, I saw tons of my schoolmates succeed in getting admitted to great colleges. College applications, like job applications, are really all about how you present yourself and how you tell your story. If you have a strong essay, you have a good chance at convincing an admissions officer to let you in.
My advice to you would be to:
a) Talk to a counselor about your essay. My fiancee worked at a SAT prep school and she helped tons of people get into Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Ivy League schools. Your essay matters a lot. It's the only thing that shows you're more than a statistic, and gives you a chance to show off your passions. Having someone look at this helps a lot.
b) Apply to as many schools as you can. Don't fixate on individual schools, try to get as many opportunities as you can. College admissions, like job applications, are mostly a numbers game, so the more place you apply to, the higher your chances you'll get into something you like.
c) Don't be too disappointed if you don't get into your first choice. In the end, college is really more about what you make of it, rather than the pedigree of the school itself. I've worked with tons of great engineers with degrees from top universities and small community college alike. College pedigree doesn't determine your success, hard work and discipline do. Having a passion for CS is great too.
Good luck! Don't give up hope, I'm sure you'll get into a good school.
You should read the GP a bit closer. He already got rejected by his first choice. This is one of the reasons why he said that being Asian-American is a disadvantage.
And he's right -- it is a disadvantage in terms of getting into American universities. You can read my story in response to the GP. You can read countless anecdotes online. You can read the stats from the various studies and court trials.
Asian-Americans still do okay in American life in general, after college. One just has to be ready to accept that the university you attend does not have the final say in how your life unfolds.
While I agree with some of your points re: online companies doing well, I don't see how you can take anecdata about local grocery stores and extrapolate it to the rest of the economy. Also, don't forget that 16 million (that's 5%!) Americans are unemployed right now. Can you imagine the damage that's going to do to businesses across the country?
If that isn't a sign that a recession is coming, I don't know what is.
The US is a very different beast altogether. I'm a bit far away from there but as a spectator, I'd say the US had the absolutely __WORST__ reaction to this situation. Given that about 40 to 45% of all confirmed covid19 cases are in the US suggests that to put it mildly. As a matter of fact, most of the world's reaction was nothing short of appalling. But there are exceptions to the rule: as an eastern European myself, most of the countries in Europe, east of Germany have managed to contain the situation really well. It might have something to do with considerable experiences with crisis(of different nature in all 1 billion instances over the past 100 years), but let's hope that's been to our benefit for once. Again - only time will tell
I never said average Joe won't be affected by this. What I am saying is that the big players will still be big once this is over but there will be new players as well. Also China will likely lose ground in the global production lines, and companies will likely look at alternatives, even if they have to make a compromise with scale and price. Investors like safe bets and what the current situation has taught is is that China isn't a safe option. We knew that already but the nets around the foxconn factories are a bit... Out of sight, out of mind.
16 million is a horrific number and I sincerely hope they pull through without paying a heavy price. But put your mind in a different mindset - 16 million is an incredible amount of manpower. For the 16 million - that's a tragedy but for the people with deep pockets - that's a once in a lifetime opportunity if they play their cards well. And I'm more than certain that many out there will.
Best I can tell, the stock market is trying to look mid-term and investors are assuming (read speculating) that his whole thing will blow over and life will resume its normal cadence.
Obviously this isn't reality but if you have enough money to be considered an "investor", the 16 million unemployed aren't the people in the forefront of your mind. They're also probably watching the covid task force briefings while wearing the same rose colored glasses that our mango unchained has.
> Also, don't forget that 16 million(!!) Americans are unemployed right now.
It's actually worse than that. The 16.8 million figure is for new jobless claims over the last three weeks [1]. There's additional people who were already unemployed before this, and there may be even more who've lost their jobs but haven't been able to successfully file a unemployment claim yet (due to the systems being overwhelmed).
I think the truth is, most engineers just aren't comfortable with A) working with stakeholders and translating requirements to specs, aka soft skills, B) any sort of design (which is actually hard!) or C) learning the HTML/CSS/JS ecosystem. Also, I found learning how to write frontend applications to be just as challenging as writing CRUD apps.