Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers
It's amazing what civil, mechanical, structural, electrical and all other "real world" engineers have built for us. They need to be paid way more than software engineers IMO considering how critical their work is. Yes, I know it's a pipe dream, cause supply and demand. "Have you seen how much big tech makes?".
Whenever my mind wanders off and lands on a video of practical engineering, it boggles my mind how complex real world systems are put in place. Big hats off to those engineering these systems so us pampered folks can whine about RTO vs WFH and Rust vs Go.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadThat's the answer. Because they choose to use a metaphor instead of speaking literally.
If anything, a giant in this case is an organization of humans who have toiled on those small improvements through many years.
For some people, there are literal geniuses/die-hards/quacks that changed the industry/tooling/mindset.
For other people, they believe there are no 10x engineers and society as a whole is always to credit.
However the fun answer is: Voltron. For example our smartphones were built by Steve Jobs piloting a Voltron’d up giant. It has Tesla as one hand, Edison as the other, and their rivalry drives a lot of the dialogue. Von Neumann and Clerk Maxwell make up the torso, and the main villain for the first couple seasons is actually Maxwell’s Demon.
The reason he said ‘giants’ is supposedly that it was a dig at Robert Hooke, who was famously short. Impressively, if true then he both managed to get this dig in and to be remembered for his humility as a result of it.
-- Brian K. Reid
I am terrible at Linear Algebra and Calculus.
I actually trained to be a commercial pilot prior to becoming a software engineer and I suck at math, which people would expect is extremely important in both fields.
Granted, in college I still had to get through advanced aerodynamics courses and stuff like that, but I studied just enough to pass those. In software engineering, I use almost zero math and I've been doing this now for decades.
Although it does help to actually learn the underlying theory, too: makes one just that much more capable
Coding and using coding tools is a bump in the road and then eventually that all fades into the background and you’re thinking just in terms of systems again.
Many engineers in all disciplines do things that are relatively easy and some of them also do novel things that are hard.
I don't think that is different in software.
Being raised in Asia, I learned college level math in highschool so math here is a piece of cake.
Also I am happy to get downvoted! Yay!
If you don't believe it is all that matters, you will quickly be reminded of how wrong you are to believe that.
But I'd also like to be able to afford to not share a bedroom with my kids. That costs a lot these days.
Unsure of where that’s going to lead us, but I know a lot of salty MechE’s who genuinely wanted to be MechE’s for whatever reasons they had, but just can’t pass up the salary increase to be had in… other lines of work - including being a simple handyman plumber.
On the topic of engineering specifically, yes engineers build reliable complex systems that make the world livable. Software engineers also build the invisible bits that runs the digital infrastructure of the world. Everyone counts.
I run a small software business, but also work part-time as an EMT and volunteer as a SAR medic.
I make approximately 12x more from my software business per hour worked (and I'm the lowest paid employee in the business) than I do working as an EMT (and obviously the volunteer isn't paid at all). I could make a lot more again in industry.
As an EMT, I work with people who are skilled, educated, hard-working, diligent, and who make enormous personal sacrifices (familially, financially, and mentally) for their patients. That includes the paramedics, nurses, doctors, and even SAR heli crews we hand over to.
And yet, to a rounding error, none of them will ever earn as much as I do as a part-time software developer.
Yes, there are other non-tangible benefits to working in healthcare - after all, that's why I do it.
There are also enormous costs, mostly in terms of time and psychological cost. And almost everyone I work with (although not all) could make more money working less hours in a better working environment.
So my hat goes off to all the labourers, but especially those I mentioned above, because they almost always have better options, but they don't leave. Almost always because they care more about their patients than their own personal bottom line.
Software companies have very little cost other than engineering.
For hardware, once your engineers have created a design, you still have to operate a factory, pay for expensive manufacturing equipment and expensive labor required to actually build the design.
Thus, you get much less "margin per engineer" and the available portion of gross margin that can be paid to engineering is much smaller.
Still, thank you OP. It's nice to get some recognition sometimes :)
Had I passed, I would have likely been stuck in mechanical engineering for life due to salary lock-in. Instead, I got an average job, learned systems admin and development on my own time and was able to transition to a sys admin position after only 2 years as an ME.
I continued learning development and made a career as a software engineer which was an infinitely happier path for me.
Beginning in the mid-70s something went horribly, horribly wrong with the way capital handles risk management, resulting in "real stuff" being undervalued by orders of magnitude, since it was by nature riskier. Hence that aforementuioned scene.
Russian-style command economies failed in some part because they lacked mechanisms for borrowing money from the future. The American system is staring failure right in the face because of its inability to quantify what future value implies. I imagine future history books will look at the two systems in parallel, the latest chapter in the ongoing story of telluric states and the thalassocracies that separate them. With all the non-nuclear states huddled underneath in their shuddering quasi-sovereignty.
This is probably the most flame-worthy thing I've ever said on HN, so go nuts.
I fail to grasp the sentence though. What's a thalassocracy supposed to be in today's world?
There's a similar train of thought that sea-based empires defeat land-based empires when the two do battle and some people view the conflict between the USSR and the United States during the cold war through that lense.
I take their overall point there to draw a parallel to small states as islands, small spits of sand, connected by the thalassocracies, or oceans, of the US and USSR. In some sense, this is actually reality, especially under the US system of global economic hegemony via free trade (or some approximate, thereof).
Not an LLM but maybe a francophone or a logophile.
The two organizational principles are so fundamentally different, they're almost apples and oranges.
From what I understand, Gosbank-supervised credit system relied entirely on dynamic metrics from Narkomfin and higher up in the government, which made the pricing of such "debt" completely opaque. Like, deliberately so, unlike our Western variants which are theoretically transparent. I won't editorialize that.
I am not a super-expert, but the story of Rowland Barin and the Eurobond - and its effects on Soviet economics - captivated me after the Western financial system effectively collapsed in 2007-2008.
I value hardware, but I value versatility more.
The scientists solving harder problems.
So many people should be appreciated
Lots of commenters are living and working in Europe or somewhere else outside the USA. We're not on the same salaried. More comparable to accountants and marketing.
One ritual I've started doing is thanking my car after every drive.
For the privilege I'm afforded by being able to drive freely unlike most of the world.
For the car itself for holding up so reliably.
And for the hundred+ years of engineering man hours and passion given to get where we are today.
In any population of drivers, the effort put in saves (literally) countless lives every day. And while things like sturdy bridges and the reliability of tall buildings are obviously important, driving involves flinging your fragile body extremely fast (in comparison to normal movement) while fighting tooth and nail against physics to perform as you want.
It keeps me humble and, as a bonus, makes me care for my car more through maintenance and cleanliness.
The low cost and amazing reliability, all things considered, of modern cars, absolutely amazes me.
I am not sure that's the case. Especially knowing the car injury stats and secondary effects of different kinds of pollution.
Motor travel let us distribute food, medicine, and specialized labor that would otherwise be impossible/impractical to do.
Sure you can argue that's not worth the non zero number of lives lost in the process, but we wouldn't be able to live the modern lifestyles we have today without it.
Like being able to go to a hospital filled with teams of experienced specialists to get better treatment.
That software engineers be pampered or not is a result of demand being high for the skills. In the long term, it's not a matter of industry culture (as this wouldn't survive financial pressure under stress) but really a simple result of relative rarity in the face of excessive demand.
Genius Engineer: Easy, the new intel bridge builder runs a million times faster than they used to, done!
And then each car has to wait for the bridge to be rebuilt, and people wonder why driving isn't any faster than it used to even though everything is a million times faster.
No you are not allowed to rewrite or refactor. Only add!
There's a reason software companies are making fortunes. The margins are incredibly high, high enough to more than compensate for inefficiencies such as lavish office spaces, low employee utilization, etc.