deltaonefour (u/deltaonefour)

deltaonefour commented on Why BART uses a nonstandard broad gauge bart.gov/news/articles/20... · Posted by u/runarberg

Just coming from Hong Kong or Tokyo I don't understand how someone can write an article like this without feeling completely embarrassed. Bart is a symbol of American incompetence.

It's like, ok, unique decision on the broad gauge. But the Bart is a piece of shit. So why should I care?

A real topical blog post would be one comparing Bart to say the train systems in China; but instead they ignore the obvious and focus on this irrelevant detail.

deltaonefour commented on Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast? · Posted by u/swat535

woojoo666 · 4 years ago

These aren't just random libraries that some FAANG dev worked on in their free time. These are company-released libraries and frameworks, that have full time employees working on them. If these companies are willing to pay FAANG engineer salaries for these employees, I expect it to be FAANG level work

As for anecdotal evidence, sure I have some, my professional experience is pretty evenly split between Java and Javascript, both backend and frontend. I feel like they are of equal difficulty, and to me this is obvious as well. It was always in my power to scale up the difficulty as high as I wanted. I have no doubt you won't be happy with this answer though

deltaonefour · 4 years ago

>These aren't just random libraries that some FAANG dev worked on in their free time. These are company-released libraries and frameworks, that have full time employees working on them. If these companies are willing to pay FAANG engineer salaries for these employees, I expect it to be FAANG level work

You seem to view FAANG as some school of superior humans. I can assure you the amount of variance in intelligence is quite high.

But let's assume everything you said was true. It doesn't change the fact that FAANG can put full time employees on EASY problems to produce "FAANG level" work. FAANG companies have a bunch of menial developer jobs that need doing. And if the only people in the building are geniuses then the geniuses are the only people available to clean the toilet. Yeah and you can probably expect them to build a robot (that no one will use) that automatically cleans the toilet.

Additionally I should mention that google in FAANG is a bit different in terms of web. They use C++ for most of their backend services for scale, so it's a step above typical web development. Although I'm very sure it's not too far away as their developers extensively use frameworks so the experience of development doesn't deviate too much from your traditional golang or java app.

>As for anecdotal evidence, sure I have some, my professional experience is pretty evenly split between Java and Javascript, both backend and frontend. I feel like they are of equal difficulty

A web dev includes both "backend" and "frontend" your statement shows that your experience is exclusively web dev and as I suspected very javascript focused. When I said web dev was easy, I wasn't talking about just front end. I was talking about everything from the front end all the way to the back end. This includes architecture, optimizing queries and all that jazz.

>I have no doubt you won't be happy with this answer though

No of course not. Don't attribute it to some predictive power you have about my bias. It's not, I stated plainly what was needed. I literally stated what it takes for me to be interested, and you literally stated that you had nothing. I'm pretty sure your opinion will change if you ever do a big software engineering career switch outside of web.

Well you did say you have experience with Java but you never said what you were doing with that Java. So if you're one of the few developers doing things outside of web with java then I stand corrected.

deltaonefour commented on Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast? · Posted by u/swat535

woojoo666 · 4 years ago

> These things are trivial compared to what other fields of software engineering have to deal with (and other fields have to deal with all this stuff too along with extra harder stuff as well)

I disagree but I suspect an argument about difficulty will go nowhere until we have a proper way of measuring such things. But for reference, many Javascript tools and frameworks are made by FAANG teams (like React, Angular, Yarn, etc). If smart people are working on these problems, I would expect them to be hard.

deltaonefour · 4 years ago

>If smart people are working on these problems, I would expect them to be hard.

This isn't a logical statement. Who says smart people can't work on easy problems? Is there some rule that says smart people HAVE to work on smart problems? FAANGs definitely has a bunch of mundane problems to work on, and they have an over abundance of smart people to work on those problems.

>I suspect an argument about difficulty will go nowhere until we have a proper way of measuring such things.

Not everything has to be done through scientific measurement. If I punch someone in the face I don't need some scientific measurement to tell me he will be in pain? No. Anecdotal experience is enough here, and such "measurements" only serve to make things too pedantic.

The same applies to web development compared with other fields of software development. I think it's actually quite obvious. If you disagree, which you're free to do, then I would ask, do you have the relevant anecdotal experience? Have you worked on something outside of javascript or web development?

If not then I would say your experience and thoughts are biased. Among most people who have experience in software development outside of web, it's obvious them. If I'm wrong and you do have extensive experience outside of web then I'm actually interested in what you have to say because it's like hearing someone say that being punched in the face is not painful at all.

deltaonefour commented on Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast? · Posted by u/swat535

Dracophoenix · 4 years ago

It doesn't take a complicated renderer to make a usable browser. The very first web dev built his own browser in a few megabytes of C and created his own markup language (based on SGML). Everything we use today is based on that work. So I think it's a relevant marker for when the line between advanced web development and "regular" coding gets blurry.

>It's hard to fully define and arguing about the borders of this field is sort of pointless.

I don't think it's pointless at all. If advanced pure web dev is relatively less complicated ,even at the highest levels, then it's important to define where the line ends and begins. I might not have the answer, but I think it's an interesting question worth asking instead of leaving such definitions up to a God of the Gaps-like argument.

deltaonefour · 4 years ago

>It doesn't take a complicated renderer to make a usable browser.

99.9% of front end web developers and back-end as well won't even know how to begin to do this in C or C++. Nowadays to even build a trivial renderer in C or C++ using vulkan is not something someone can pull up a tutorial for and learn. Not like React or Vue or even some backend framework.

>I don't think it's pointless at all. If advanced pure web dev is relatively less complicated ,even at the highest levels, then it's important to define where the line ends and begins

You accomplish nothing with this other then to put one set of developers in a stupid bucket and another set in a smart bucket. These buckets are real but specifying and talking about the bucket only pisses people off. Additionally the line is very complicated and has several dimensions and in many areas the line is not a line, but a gradient.

You'd only be aware of of this dichotomy if you worked outside of web development (and not in datascience).