Readit NewsThe problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure).
Then they finished school, tried to actually become a tenured professor, and found out being awesome isn't good enough. You actually have to be spectacular. So they failed, unlike their old professors who encouraged them the whole way.
So there they are. Ph.D in hand after a decade of hard work, but no tenure in sight. What would you do in their position? Find and adjunct job that's at least someone related to what you've spent your life doing? Or roll the dice again and spend thousands of dollars you don't have to go to some javascript bootcamp or something (that you'll probably fail, since you're no technical whiz kid, because you spent the last decade focusing on medieval literature)?
IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all.
To counter your anecdote with one, I work at a reasonably famous tech company in SF, and my manager has definitely elevated my productivity as well the amount of things I had visibility into.
I'm switching teams in a week and one of my big regrets is leaving my manager.
> I'll realize "That wouldn't have happened here before you rose up the ranks. You've made all of these people's lives better."
Yeah so what, they might like you (if they even find out its due to your hard work) but if you don't enjoy it what's the point? Eventually you'll be just another manager who doesn't have up to date tech skills and is due to get laid off.
I went into middle management. It sucked. I went back into a senior dev role, tiny pay cut but much more employable and fun.
Imagine a world where you didn't need to spend a whole week every year, per project, just keeping your existing software alive. Imagine not having to put off development of the stuff you want to build to accommodate technical debt introduced by 3rd parties.
That's the reality in Windows-land, at least. And I seem to remember it being like that in the past on the Unix side too.
It's all we've got, but it is assuredly not good. Hopefully WebAssembly comes to fruition and we can leave this dark era behind.
If that takes you forever, consider that it may also be your lack of familiarity as much as the lack of type system/compiler. Despite my preference for the back end, I have spent plenty of time on the front end and can pump out changes very quickly.
Reminds me of the old joke, where a respected scientist is announcing he has some great cure for the disease of the day and is presenting the impressive results to an audience, when someone pipes up and asks:
'How did this compare to the control group?'
The presenter is indignant and says, "Excuse me? You're asking if I randomly selected half of these poor souls to be deprived of the medicine, just to see what would happen to them?"
'...yes.'
"Of course not! That would have condemned half of them to an avoidable death!"
'...but which half?'
A prominent placebo researcher, Dr. Fabrizio Benedetti, was able to show just how peculiar the placebo effect really is. After inducing pain in participants for seven days whilst treating them with morphine, Benedetti secretly switched the pain medication to salt water. Luckily for him, the participants’ reports of pain went unchanged. Then things got weirder. Benedetti didn’t want to stop there, so he [secretively] gave the participants a morphine blocker and, bizarrely, the participants found that their pain returned, suggesting a form of biochemical reaction to the salt water placebo.
So you give people morphine and it works (to block pain). Switch it secretly with salt water and it still works. Secretly add a real morphine blocker and it no longer works. Bizarre.
I know this was a quote from the article, but... Does it really suggest that? Isn't it possible something else is going on?
I feel this problem and I wonder, is there any ready-made solution for that?