That attitude is totally bizarre to me. Why would you not want to know how things work?
I guess that's why some people don't get climate change: to them it's just some weird belief for scientists rather than something you can understand yourself.
When they say physics they aren't talking about it as you know it. What they are actually talking about is a corruption of the meaning.
To them, physics is just boring math that you solve problems that have no basis in reality. Its just formulas you have to memorize that don't let you do useful things, and formulas by themselves are useless knowledge, so they believe. This is what current textbooks teach, no intuition, no practical knowledge, contradictory information.
Its not about how things work because that isn't what is being taught. It may have been at one time, but now its all just useless formulas to these people. Such is the corruption and degradation of education today.
I thought about it for a minute. I came to the conclusion that OpenAI would have likely tanked (perhaps even within days) had Altman not returned to maintain the status quo, and engineers didn't want to be out of work and left with worthless stock.
If 80% is spent in progress meetings, scrum point estimation, and other acts of performative taylorism, yes.
If 80% is spent understanding reading about the ___domain in which you are working, talking to your users and ___domain experts, documenting your work, and mentoring juniors or being mentored by seniors, there should be nothing depressing about that.
I probably spend around 80% of my time coding in a senior role with around 12 years experience. I think it depends highly on where and what you work on.
If you have 8-10 engineers you’re supervising and are the person interfacing with management, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to spend half your time coordinating, teaching, and planning.
So scale down the expected SDE 1 quotas (~50% coding), and you get around 25-30% coding time.
I think a lot of people confuse being an experienced career engineer with being a technical lead; that’s the real jump from SDE 2 to SDE 3.
I think I'd get a lot less than 25-30% coding time while managing 8-10 people (and also depending on what you're doing while "supervising", if there's a dedicated project/product manager in addition to you, how senior are the other engineers, etc)! In fact at that point I think I'd be managing too many people ("ideally" 1 lead/manager isn't managing more than 5 ICs).
My experience of Big Co is that you have both a manager (HR and business sense) and a supervising/lead engineer (SDE 3) for a product.
I don’t think I explained that well — but a 3:3:1 to 5:5:1 SDE 1:2:3 mix is fairly standard across industry. (Again, with an SDM doing the managing.)
I used the word “supervising” because I wanted to distinguish that technical leadership from managing, but didn’t explain enough. Sorry for the confusion.
If you considering code reading part of coding, coding 20% of the time is certainly not enough.
The article is meant for a neurotypical ideal average employee.
There are many effective programmers that have different workflows.
A trait of a good manager is allow different people to be effective in the collaboration of writing software together.
The article paints an unreal rosy picture where "everything runs smoothly and has forward momentum".
Working with a live system is messy. There is always compromise because there is never enough time to keep everything smooth.
It is very common to be stuck at some problem. That moment you let a problem clunk around your brain and you randomly think of a solution in the shower or at the grocery store is way too common.
And honestly fun.
A great software developer doesn't have a computer. He lives alone in a cabin in the woods. He knows it is better that way as it minimizes harm to others and allows him to skip all of the meetings forever, until the end of time...
It depends heavily on the company and the team you're on. If you are a more seasoned professional, you probably get the luxury of filtering on this criterion. And a lot of people also really enjoy the other eighty percent.
Not all engineering is coding. If I'm debugging a couple of hard to find problems this week I won't write lots of code but I'll certainly be doing valuable engineering.
Maybe, but you also have to consider how much preexisting code has been prewritten in frameworks and libraries. Consider how much of “coding” is spent integrating that code instead of typing out new lines of code.
Yes, pretty sad. Even worse, these 20% coding can be fixing bugs in different projects your team work on, and on which you have only a basic understanding.
The percentage of coding on a project that I get to design is even lower.
Is "Semantic CSS" just... CSS? There's no such thing as "Semantic CSS". There is Semantic HTML. I suppose there is CSS for Semantic HTML.
I've read the article and can't figure out if this is comparing the CSS framework Semantic UI to Tailwind?
If we're comparing CSS to a CSS framework, it seems fairly obvious to me that it's going to be bigger in size, and slower to load, and that the amount of code required to be generic (rather than totally specific) would be larger too.
it's just CSS yes, with the focus on naming your classes depending on the content you style instead of their looks. "article-excerpt" instead of "bg-white padding-2 shadow rounded".
It's tracking every visitors' cursor and sharing it with every other visitor.
Why would a frontend developer demonstrate their ability to do frontend programming on their personal, not altogether super-serious blog? I meant that rhetorically but it's a flex. I agree, not the best design in the world if you're catering for particular needs, but simple and fun enough. You should check out dark mode.
In that vein, I think it's okay if we let people have fun. That might not work for everyone, but why should we let perfect be the worst enemy of fun?
because it shows that they don't understand important design aspects
while it doesn't really show off their technical skills because it could be some plugin or copy pasted code, only someone who looks at the code would know better. But if someone care enough about you to look at your code you don't need to show of that skill on you normal web-site and can have some separate tech demo.
> okay if we let people have fun
yes people having fun is always fine especially if you don't care if anyone ever reads your blog or looks at it for whatever reason (e.g. hiring)
but the moment you want people to look at it for whatever reason then there is tension
i.e. people don't get hired to have fun
and if you want others to read you blog you probably shouldn't assault them with constant distractions
Creative expression allows us to push ourselves, both in what we think we can do, and often the technical aspects about how we do it too. Even if the idea doesn't stick, you've tried something new.
In a world of Tailwinds and Bootstraps and the same five templates copied again and again and again, let's celebrate the people willing to push things and learn from their inevitable but ultimately valuable mistakes. And let's have some fun along the way.
Not every website, even technical ones, need to have an eye towards professional advancement. Sometimes they're just for fun. I welcome it, as it's a thing that gets more rare on the web as time goes by.
I assume the creator didn't anticipate this amount of readers at the same time and having one or two other cursors on the page does sound fun and not too distracting. They should probably limit the maximum amount of other cursors displayed to a sensible amount
I stopped in the middle of reading the post just for this. It was so distracting I was unable to focus on the text. It's a fun gimmick, but the result is that someone who wanted to read the post, stopped in the middle.
It's revenge against anyone with certain kinds of visual impairments and/or concentration issues because the ex-spouse of the author which turned out to be a terrible person had such.
(sarcasm try 2)
It's revenge against anyone using JS on the net with the author trying to subtle hint that JS is bad.
(realistic)
It's probably on of:
- the website is a static view of some collaborative tool which has that functionality build in by default
- some form of well intended but not well working functionality add to the site as it was some form of school/study project, in that case I'm worried about the author suffering unexpected very much higher cost due to it ending up on HN ...
Hi, author here. In case you really want to know: no, it’s custom-made and works exactly as intended. There are two main reasons:
1. Fun. Modern internet is boring, most blog posts are just black text on white background. Hard to remember where you read what. And you can’t really have fun without breaking some expectations.
2. Sense of community. Internet is a lonely place, and I don’t necessarily like that. I like the feeling of “right now, someone else reading the same thing as I do”. It’s human presence transferred over the network.
I understand not everybody might like it. Some people just like when things are “normal” and everything is the same. Others might not like feeling of human presence. For those, I’m not hiding my content, reader mode is one click away, I make sure it works very well.
As for “unexpectedly ended up on HN”, it’s not at all unexpected. Practically every one of my general topic articles ends up here. It’s so predictable I rely on HN to be my comment section.
2. I only understood that it was actual other people's mouse cursors when I read that here. So it didn't really engender a sense of community, although after some time I did think you are very good at modelling actual human mouse movements. Now that I know it, it's pretty neat though.
The cursors will only be a problem during front page HN traffic. And the opt-out for people who care is reader mode / disable js / static mirror. Not sure if there's any better way to appease the fun-havers and the plain content preferrers at the same time. Maybe a "hide cursors" button on screen? I, for one, had a delightful moment poking other cursors.
I don't know what you people are talking about. I'm just glad I always browse with Javascript turned off. If you didn't see the writing on the wall and permanently turn Javascript off around 2006, you have no right to complain about anything.
Meanwhile, ironic irony is ironic: "Hey, idiots! Learn to use Unicode already! Usability and stuff! Oh, btw, here is some extremely annoying Javascript pollution on your screen because we are all still children, right? Har har! Pranks are so kewl!!!1!"
It's not "easy" to find mutton in the UK either. My definition of easy (as for the vast majority of the population) is "is it in the supermarket". I don't think I've _ever_ seen mutton in a major UK supermarket. It's somewhat of a catch-22, but the supermarkets don't stock it because there is no demand (modern palates prefer less "gamey" flavours), and there's no demand because it isn't stocked.
