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What makes me take it less seriously is framing it as a crisis in mental health. As much as people don't like comparisons the marketplace for our labor is inherently comparative, and people will optimize for the most money with the least hours/stress. I get that I'm providing anecdata but like I've said in previous comments, the stuff that software engineers I know complain about is from a much more privileged position than other occupations. Burnout is real, but if your version of burnout is someone else's idea of a mildly challenging day (which is my experience) it doesn't have the impact you want it to have. You may not realize it but there are roles in medicine where the work itself is inherently stressful regardless of how many concessions your employer provides.
If your goal is to argue that software engineers deserve higher compensation and better hours and more autonomy given the value they provide, it would garner more sympathy from someone like me. Proclaiming your suffering is at a boiling point feels like a lack of awareness.
> Software Engineers and Tech co-founders, like us, are more prone to hitting the lows.
I don't see where anyone was comparing software engineering/engineers to another profession. I certainly don't see where it was proclaimed a crisis.
I don't think it's productive to tell people others have it worse when they are promoting a discussion around mental health. I also don't think being well paid and having what appear to be great working conditions preclude you from having mental health issues.
Think of an alternate universe where Apple does the opposite: every new model they push the envelope and double the baseline RAM compared to the previous year. In that world you’d have all the software growing in memory use without bound. Consumers would be forced into a treadmill of computer upgrades like we haven’t seen since the 90’s when CPUs were skyrocketing in performance every year.
For anyone who forgets what the 90’s was like, here’s an example with Mac models:
1990 saw the launch of the Mac LC which had a 16 MHz Motorola 68020
1999 brought the Power Mac G4 at up to 500 MHz
That’s a 31-fold increase in clock rate (and several times that in overall performance) in the same timespan we’re discussing. Software that was written for the G4 had no chance of running on the LC (ignoring CPU architecture differences).
MacBook Airs are the mainline consumer machine these days. Apple does not want users to feel like they need to upgrade them every year (despite what people say).
I think the other "inconveniences" of Lisp could be more tolerable for beginners if learning the language didn't require learning a new IDE (or OS, depending on how you define Emacs!). But at that point you'd have to forego a major benefit of using Lisp (its REPL); you'd be back to writing "dead" programs, not image-based "live" ones.
Another problem I've faced with Lisp is lack of good documentation (except for Racket, but then again, Racket doesn't have Common Lisp's powerful REPL). Every website that teaches Lisp is in ugly HTML+CSS-only style, compare that to the more user-friendly websites of other languages.
Then there's the issue of up-to-date learning material. Aside from the fact that there are very few resources to learn Lisp, the ones that are available are too old too. "Practical Common Lisp" (2005), "Common Lisp Recipes" (2015), "ANSI Common Lisp" (1995), etc.
I like the philosophy of (s-exp) but modern lisps have ruined its simplicity for me by introducing additional bracket notations [like this]. It's confusing for me as a beginner to distinguish between (this) and [that], and honestly goes against the whole idea of "code and data look the same" motto.
If you depend on dependency pinning due to unmaintained code then you should go deal with the problem directly. Say you pin 10 external libraries to three year old versions, how many security holes does that expose you to?
That's really my issue with dependency pinning, you end up with software that are just allowed to rot, making upgrades more difficult with every passing year.
This is about the characteristics of a newly released algorithm.
People that want others to do things like avoid plastic straws but themselves have 2.5 unadopted kids per household are obviously being somewhat hypocritical
Of course using a plastic straw isn't what got us into this mess and small individual choices like that won't save us.