Readit News logoReadit News
random32840 commented on Ask HN: I'm an incoming freshman to college for a CS major, what should I know?    · Posted by u/fish45
sosodev · 5 years ago
HN is probably the worst group to ask for advice. Most people here take their careers way too seriously.

You’ll notice that most people here are telling you to do some specific set of actions but few of them overlap significantly. That’s because there aren’t “right” things for you to do. They’re just pushing their biases on you.

I’d argue that you just take it easy and do whatever makes you happy. You can definitely still be successful that way.

I just finished my CS degree from a no-name state school with a below 3.0 gpa. But I still found a job making six figures (really good pay for my area) before I graduated. I attribute most of my success to the various pieces of software I wrote for fun. Just little things on my GitHub that helped me land a couple of internships.

random32840 · 5 years ago
> take it easy and do whatever makes you happy

Great advice if what makes you happy also happens to be lucrative. I did this, and it was a huge mistake I'm still paying for 7+ years later.

random32840 commented on Ask HN: I'm an incoming freshman to college for a CS major, what should I know?    · Posted by u/fish45
random32840 · 5 years ago
1. A large (and growing) chunk of the industry considers object oriented programming to be absolutely terrible, but that's what they'll teach you in college. Learn functional programming and data-oriented programming in your spare time before your mind has completely set into OO. Make each of the three approaches intuitive. It will be way better for you down the road, and it will help you actually evaluate which approach is best. There's a lot of dogma on each side.

2. In my opinion it's cliche to say "social skills are more important than just the ability to program". Totally depends on what you're actually doing. If your job is to optimise server farms, they're going to pay you based on how many CPU cycles you save, not your ability to present to management. If you measurably reduce power consumption, you could be completely mute and it would be fine. You'll earn crazy money.

Play to your strengths. If you have poor social skills, find a niche where that doesn't matter. A good heuristic is whether performance is measurable. If it is, it matters less that you have trouble communicating it.

3. "Minor in Something Fun" is common advice & fine if your degree was cheap. It's terrible advice if you're going into $150k of debt. If something goes wrong in that situation, you're screwed. Minor in something that you can fall back on.

What if you develop RSI and lose the ability to type large volumes of text? That's the point of a minor, it's a backup plan. Life is unpredictable, when you have $150k of non-dischargeable debt it's much better to have a minor in "engineering" than "ultimate frisbee".

Deleted Comment

random32840 commented on Wikimedia enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity   wikimediafoundation.org/n... · Posted by u/elsewhen
shadowgovt · 5 years ago
I wonder what that 70% looks like relative to other software engineering firms?
random32840 · 5 years ago
According to this chart[1], less women than Amazon, Facebook and Apple, more than Microsoft. When you normalise for tech workers only, it climbs to 77% men, which is about average for the industry.

[1] https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/4467.jpeg

random32840 commented on Wikimedia enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity   wikimediafoundation.org/n... · Posted by u/elsewhen
waterhouse · 5 years ago
> nowadays you need to be (or rather show) “diversity and inclusion” as a business if you want to appear as a “better” company (useful for soliciting VC investment when you don’t have a profitable business), regardless of whether diversity & inclusion has ever been a problem at the company.

Could you expand on this? My naive impression is that VCs do their best to make hard-nosed expected-value-in-USD estimates, perhaps specifically estimating the likelihood the company will be worth >$100M/$1B or whatever; and that acting like that is probably in their job description because they're investing other people's money who expect a return.

How does the phenomenon you describe fit in? Is there some group of VCs that believe that championing "diversity and inclusion" is likely to lead to 10x growth? Does the company making the pitch make that claim—or, as one reading of your words suggests, claim that not having achieved 10x growth in the past is due to the lack of such championing? Or do VCs face social pressure (from, I dunno, other VCs, journalists who write about them, whoever else they talk with) to make it look like they're funding virtuous causes (er, companies)? Seems like the last is most plausible.

random32840 · 5 years ago
Companies in general try to seem like they care about more than money. "Grey Goo Ltd. We care." Diversity rhetoric is an easy, pre-constructed set of Things to Say (TM) that you can use to project empathy - notably, without doing anything significant to back it up. Google is still 70% men.

But bear in mind San Francisco is incredibly liberal, SF programmers even more so. Companies based there will make overtures toward diversity & inclusion rhetoric to keep their workforce happy.

random32840 commented on Wikimedia enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity   wikimediafoundation.org/n... · Posted by u/elsewhen
SiempreViernes · 5 years ago
> The people involved in knitting probably just aren't heavy internet users.

The knitters manage to set up vast collection of patters for download just fine, and more people spent time knitting last month than there are programmers in the USA, so it is in fact more an issue of them not being present on wikipedia.

random32840 · 5 years ago
It could just be that the kind of people who knit are unlikely to enjoy writing dry, factual encyclopedias.
random32840 commented on UK government advisor caught out by Wayback machine   thenational.scot/news/184... · Posted by u/hermitcrab
Kliment · 5 years ago
It's all spinning mirrors and backroom smoke. Cummings is an accelerationist whose policy is destroy as much as possible so it can be rebuilt. There is no indication that he's in any way competent at making good use of data to inform policy - if anything he's good at finding people who can make data look about right to justify a policy he already likes.
random32840 · 5 years ago
I'm really not convinced he's ideologically driven. I imagine he makes a lot of money for doing what he does, given his track record.

Deleted Comment

random32840 commented on Today’s Javascript, from an outsider’s perspective   lea.verou.me/2020/05/toda... · Posted by u/llacb47
resu_nimda · 5 years ago
You could have a similar experience with virtually any other language/platform. “Someone who doesn’t know anything about C had a lot of trouble running some arbitrary C code they downloaded” wouldn’t raise a single eyebrow.

Turns out your kids actually manage to use the tools they built just fine.

random32840 · 5 years ago
C has much more of an excuse to be difficult & fragile. It's surgical. Web tech is designed to be abstract. If your abstraction introduces too much fragility or complexity or cost or overhead then it isn't worth it. Abstraction is a tax, it has a cost. Save the disrespect, in my experience greybeards understand that a lot better than we do.

Deleted Comment

u/random32840

KarmaCake day58April 18, 2020View Original