Reliable? What a quaint idea for a modern car. Mercedes and BMW in particular have been designing cars that fail just after the initial lease period (think plastic water pumps, timing chains at the back of the engine, wet rubber timing belts, CVT transmissions).
Some crazy, unfixable magnetic suspension that lasts 3 years and requires $5000 a corner shocks is par for the course these days.
Smallblock Chevys have a timing chain at the front but it's basically never a failure point. I agree with your other points, however; the trend is to optimise for short-term efficiency and cost, resulting in complex and relatively fragile designs.
The flip side: is it beneficial to anyone to have cars junked at 200k miles with water pumps that have another 500k miles on them? Overengineering has costs, in both price and weight.
Yeah, I'm adding Audi to the list. Car just totaled for a blown engine with no determining reason a few months out of warranty. Audi won't touch it. Not worth the engine replacement cost.
Possibly antibiotic use paired with higher standards of hygiene. You're supposed to pick up your initial load of gut flora from your mother then the environment should really do the rest.
We (rightly) keep things cleaner now, but maybe too clean?
I am not sure how the system for most grocery stores works now, but in the ancient past there was a central authority that set the prices for individual stores (so in Australia, the Coles or Woolworths all have individualised prices per store for items except for advertised sale items).
The computer in the store that drives the POS scanners then can print out the shelf label stickers and a poor sod goes and replaces the stickers on the shelves.
This is all a big secret of course, so asking a grocery store for their prices is going to get you nowhere.
You could try scraping the websites, but often the price for online shopping is different to what is in store.
Best bet would be to offer an incentive for people to scan their receipts into your app. I don't know what kind of incentive you could build to do that, maybe for every 5 receipts you could offer a coupon or something. Not much of an idea and a massive PITA, it would also only give prices on those things that people bought.
edit: also gets complicated for multi-item discounts or combination discounts
It’s not incompetence it’s regulations and inertia. Getting your central banking system past the regulators in most countries is difficult enough that it shades the effort required to replace the core systems.
Has anybody played with newlib, but grown the complexity as the system came together?
It seems like one thing to get a bare-bones printf() working to get you started on a bit of hardware, but as the complexity of the system grows you might want to move on from (say) pushing characters out of a serial interface onto pushing them onto a bitmapped display.
Does newlib allow you to put different hooks in there as the complexity of the system increases?
Newlib provides both a standard printf, which is necessarily big, and a printf that does not support any of the floating-point format specifiers.
The latter is small enough so that I have used it in the past with various small microcontrollers, from ancient types based on PowerPC or ARM7TDMI to more recent MCUs with Cortex-M0+.
You just need to make the right configuration choice.
The ‘bee was how a lot of us Australians of a certain age got into computers. The only real competition it had was the C64 as other things like the Apple II and IBM compatibles were just too expensive in comparison to that $399 intro price.
It was a bit weird to program for, as you said the basic was not quite the same as the popular platforms. It did mean you learned a lot about the machine itself, how memory was laid out, how to get those PCG graphics right.
It’s funny now to be able to see very similar cultures sprang up around less successful machines in other countries.
Wow that was long and surprisingly nuanced. One thing I’ve thought about recently looking at my own daughters is that they are bombarded with a lot of fake “this is the good life” that rarely includes children.
As a consequence perhaps the right time to have them will never eventuate. A lot of our Gen X contemporaries who put off child rearing for this reason ended up with heartbreaking fertility issues.
However I don’t think a smaller population is necessarily a bad thing.
Anecdata: I can count only a few couples in my circle of friends - who mostly had kids in their late 30s and early 40s - who didn’t end up having long and sometimes heartbreaking IVF, copious miscarriages, kids with trisomy, and in our case, stillbirth.
I think part of the problem was an assumption that modern medicine around childbirth is actually better than it is, and thus delaying having kids is a safe choice.
I consider myself very lucky indeed to have two healthy sons and my advice to my eldest is to get on with having kids as soon as you’ve met the right person, ideally in your 20s…
I suspect part of the problem is that many people think fertility is like a step function with a sharp transition by menopause age (~45 years), when it steadily decreases since much earlier, in your 30s. Biology books in school should have a nice graph showing this clearly.
Our experience was that conceiving before 30 was much easier than even early thirties. Watching our friends and colleagues struggling as you said with AI and fertility treatments was a real eye opener. I certainly don’t want to pressure my kids but they definitely should be more aware than they are.
A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits, implicitly or explicitly depending on the problem a person it's currently working on, it takes an incredible amount of effort to relax your mind at the end of the day.
I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it, and by the end of the project I was so exhausted that I had to take a whole week to cool down my brain and relax my body.
It took me a whole month to fully recover!
I have worked as a construction worker with my father and I know how to grow my own fruits and veggies; I know the struggles with those things...but trust me, you cannot compare the two by any means!
Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!
Don't say that to a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, or fast food employee.
> Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!
Going home at the end of the day and not having to think about work is sure great, except that fast food employee is probably doing their second job. As for that farmer, in one respect or other they're almost certainly operating their own business. Not managing. Operating. They're going to have trouble setting aside the stress of the job at night as well. Construction workers, well, they will be all over the map. Some will be like farmers, operating their own business. Some may be doing heavy or dangerous labor. Day to day, their job may rank as tiring. Over extended periods, they are expending their body. Short of switching to a trade, their career is on a clock. Truck drivers have their own issues to deal with. Again, a lot of them are operating their own business (even when the work arrangements make it feel like they're employed by someone else). If they're working within an urban area, they're typically driving in less than ideal circumstances for hours on end and dealing with a system that tries to make the system's problems the trucker's problems. Some long-haul drivers may earn a decent paycheck, at the cost of being on the road for days on end and being pushed outside of the safety envelope.
So yeah, everyone has something to complain about. But if you want those people to think that SWE's are arrogant jerks, then just go on saying how much worse your job is than yours.
hmm, kind of feel like you're cherry-picking the most difficult versions of those jobs. No need to to into too much depth, but for instance, yeah, not all fast-food employees are working two jobs (many seem to be high-schoolers?). Not all farmers own their own business and are employees. I had a roommate who was a truck driver. He was simply an employee and worked a 9-5 and didn't own his own truck (many of them do, but this is becoming less common).
Although, I agree, there is a lot of blue-collar work that is tough, especially on the body - have done a few weeks of construction work myself, it can destroy your body quickly if you don't learn how to pace yourself and use your body correctly (it's not something I personally would ever want to do long term). But there is also a ton of cushy blue-collar work that are easy - my roommate works at an Amazon warehouse, and she says that her role is mindless work that anyone can do sorting items in boxes.
Yeah, I am probably somewhat biased, but saying that the average fast-food employee's job is more difficult that an average SWE's job (with its deadlines, stress and politics, not to mention all the years of studying), that seems like a stretch. I'm all for the blue-collar worker, but let's be reasonable. Yeah, at least from what I've seen, often, it's not their jobs that are tough, it's the circumstances of their life (many of course are low paying, which makes everything difficult) and lack of advantages they had growing up...
... although, I do admit there are a lot of devs that once they get over the learning curve just coast at their jobs, learning little that is new and working on the same system year after years. Hmm, interesting...
I wouldn't do much calling it cherry picking as looking at people who choose something as a career path. For example: a high school student, or even a university student, working in fast food aren't fully supporting themselves with the job (nevermind supporting a family). Farm labourers are also different from farmers. Truck driving is all over the map, but most variants have their own stressors.
I'm not going to pretend that software development is devoid of stress. That said, virtually every job has stress, deadlines, politics, and other such nonsense.
If we look at their lives outside of work, can see where you're coming from (as mentioned, a few of my current and past roommates worked blue-collar jobs, and couple of them really had a tough time financially, and one of them emotionally). But if we're talking about the job themselves, as mentioned, seems like most blue-collar jobs are less demanding, and is stable at many levels, and doesn't require much training.
Yeah, at least to me in this thread, seems like we were referring to jobs themselves, not their overall lives.
But, I do agree, if we look at their lives overall compared to white collar, it seems like it can be just as stressful, especially because of the lack advantages growing up (growing up in a stable financial household, education, resources...).
> A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits,
Its so weird that development that pays well over $200K uses about 5% of the brainpower I used for college, when I got paid about $9 an hour to clean plates for 40 hours a week.
Maybe it's time to switch to a new role/project?? :)
But, agree, many tech jobs require you to initially mount a difficult learning curve, then coast, doing the same thing over and over (although, for better and for worse, this was rarely what my jobs in tech were like. Was always jumping around having to learn new things).
It's actually quite common and typical for freelancers.
Unfortunately when you evaluate a project, initially everything looks and feel just right, that you wouldn't have any problem delivering the end result as soon as possible.
But..! We know how customers ask for small "favors" of "tiny" changes that won't affect the whole project, or so they think(!), which eventually end up delaying the whole development as they become painful hurdles, only to find yourself struggling to deliver the project so you can get paid in time.
think this is more about that there is a variety of types of work in tech. As you probably have experienced yourself, if you join a fast moving startup, they'll work you to the bone, whereas a large, a wealthy corporation will let you just go to meetings 50% of the time.
Hmm, i guess in my opinion, think most devs would agree that startups in general are more work than the average corporate job. Maybe we don't have a basis to have a discussion if we don't hold common beliefs in our field. No worries I guess (shrug)
Just want to echo the person who already replied, but contracting is a different world. One might argue that when you're a contractor you're also an independent businessman — and thus you own the responsibility of win or die.
Both construction and mowing lawns are two jobs I can say felt much more rewarding than programming. Each day you walked away with a sense of having "built" something (or, er, tidied up in the case of mowing lawns).
And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying.
There are a lot of programming jobs where people never get to build anything, only fix things that other people didn't do well enough. Many people have never seen greenfield. Other people work jobs where they're pumping out new creative works. So when people talk about how spiritually satisfying programming is we're gonna hear this discordance.
> And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying.
May I add that Agile (which appears to be the currently prevalent work methodology in SE) takes away much of the gratification of software engineering?
I think you're conflating job satisfaction and the difficulty of doing it.
Software engineering can bring immense joy, but it is often a hard job to do. While it may not be physically demanding like some trades, it is often intellectually demanding and stressful, especially with tight deadlines and evolving technologies.
You know that intellectual tasks, such as those found in software engineering, can require significant mental effort and may burn more calories than some physical jobs due to constant cognitive engagement and stress?
Winning in software is as easy as winning in chess. Often times you're making ripples with just the flick of a wrist. You make a few clicks and suddenly you're matched against someone from across the world. Other times you're just staring at the monitor, looking intently but doing nothing.
Even children could make it to the top of the world in this activity of intense sitting.
Actually when I was gutting salmon in Alaska, making pizzas at Godfather's, mowing lawns, working as dishwasher in the dorms to pay tuition ... these all were much less stressful jobs that I look back on almost fondly. (Well, maybe not the cannery.)
How about this: tell a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee: software engineering is so easy, you should go do it.
Clearly, being a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee is easier for them, and software engineering is harder, otherwise they would have switched to the easier and better paying job.
Sure. But people here are talking about frequenting chains in their hometown. If national chains are the best options in your local area, it's a sign you need to move to a better area.
People live in a given area for lots of reasons that may not include restaurant selection. I rarely eat out around my house—though there are a few restaurants that are better than national chains
Some crazy, unfixable magnetic suspension that lasts 3 years and requires $5000 a corner shocks is par for the course these days.
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