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.
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 value hardware, but I value versatility more.
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 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).
The two organizational principles are so fundamentally different, they're almost apples and oranges.
I fail to grasp the sentence though. What's a thalassocracy supposed to be in today's world?
Not an LLM but maybe a francophone or a logophile.
Although it does help to actually learn the underlying theory, too: makes one just that much more capable
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.
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.
I am terrible at Linear Algebra and Calculus.
-- Brian K. Reid
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
The low cost and amazing reliability, all things considered, of modern cars, absolutely amazes me.
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.
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.
There is nothing pampered about WFH or Rust vs Go. I feel like you are despising software engineers to make others look better? It is not a competition and you can praise others without putting down software engineers.
Would you feel better if software engineers got paid a lot less as office wage slaves?
Truth is, those fields get paid less (not always btw) because there are too many people in them vs the demand. Learning software enginetring is very hard and unpleasant for most people. Most people don't want to be stuck in frony of a computer working om intangible code either and that's why you get paid more.
I try to get relatives to get in tech but they simply don't want to and do other things, which is fine. But it is unfair to say people who don't want to work in better paying fields (and stabilize the pay) should get paid more despite thr crowding in their field. You can still appreciate them for taking on lesser paying jobs that have more value to society and you shouldn't stop there, everyone from janitors to contractors add a lot lf societal value.
I feel like this hits the nail on the head. Neither me nor anyone else I know would work as a software engineer if the pay were significantly lower. I daydream of stacking shelves. If that paid half, I’d absolutely take it over software engineering. But it only pays 1/4, so I kill myself in software engineering and burn out every few years with enough money to pay for sabbaticals. My point is that if software engineering paid less, you wouldn’t get good software because none of the good engineers would actually work software engineering jobs.
I spent many evenings and weekends doing techy stuff to be where i am. I spent and am spending all of my holiday season offtime learning/studying.
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.
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.
Software can market itself through its aesthetic and cultural appeal, thus attracting disproportionate interest from managers and investors. A new project can produce a beautiful demo with no underlying functionality.
I'm not sure there's a clear rational relationship between the cost of software development and the value it produces. I've read The Mythical Man Month.
One problem with traditional engineering is that we don't have the tools to make ourselves maximally efficient, such as JIRA and Scrum. The reality of getting things physically made and tested adds some slack to our work flow. Personally I prefer that, coming from the "hardware" side. My friends who are programmers at my age work a lot harder than I do, and many are burnt out. I have the luxury of using programming as a tool without anybody managing how I do it.
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.
But, I must admit, in modern tech, each day larger share get software.
For example, because of sanctions, Russians have troubles in buy industrial chips for automobiles, and their govt decided, to accept manufacture new autos without modern safety systems - no airbags, no abs, no esc, etc.
Military jet planes are now micro datacenters, for example, F-35 just have few racks with triple redundant computers, because they are nearly impossible to fly without software; similar thing with Russian Su-27 and all their relatives (Su-33, Su-35) - to be more maneuverable, they designed to be extremely unstable, so software constantly correct their air-dynamic configuration, also their air-dynamic configuration automatically change with speed change.
If You prefer numbers, from ~ F-16, about half cost of military jet plane is software.
Why so? Sounds silly to me as a soft engineer, cause software dev is:
1. A lot of the time – connected to the "real world" engineering, so it is just as real, modern real world and civil engineering can't function without software.
2. A lot more abstract, so we literally build whole factories in our brains, sometimes just one or two of us while real factories are built by hundreds of men
3. Well, a modern-day thing existing for less than a century, where real-world engineering in accumulating knowledge for centuries, essentially turning soft.
IMO all real engineering will eventually turn software and cloud, in decades it will be possible to design real-world production and logistic pipelines just with code and abstracted robotic resources, like in factorio
Any creation for positive impact on the world, whether engineering or humanities should be applauded and paid well. Unfortunately that rarely happens.
So much of the world would be unlivable if it weren't for inventions of the past that are no longer considered interesting.
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!
