skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you know if you're just not cut out for software engineering?
Hi HN,

I'm having a personal crisis,trying to figure out if software engineering is for me or if I've been sticking with it due to golden handcuffs.

I come from a non-traditional engineering background (though related to computer science). It was a program I sort of fell into and enjoyed enough to stick with for four years.

I've been out of school, in industry, for almost 5 years. I've had the luxury of working for a medium-sized org, as well as a startup, and have shipped a handful of products.

The problem is, I'm not engaged while at work. I find myself zoning off, 1000-yard-stare-style. I am tired or disinterested in the work going on around me -- both in the larger org, as well as on my team and even my own work.

This was the reason I left the larger org for a startup, hoping to find a place where I felt more engaged. Yet, the feelings persist. I'm apathetic about the problems of my company as well as the technical problems we have to resolve. Some of my coworkers seem to revel in it, and obsess over the latest industry happenings and what not. Meanwhile, I'm glancing at the clock, waiting for 6PM so I can go home.

I should note here that I always hit my deadlines, so I'm not dead weight on the team. I just don't.. care that much about it.

Now, I'm trying to determine if this is a case of a poor company fit, a case of "golden handcuffs", or something else. Salary is a big motivator for me and I've been fortunate in that department. Yet I also don't have the drive to tackle side projects and my own things outside of work. I'll learn what's required to get the job done. But at the end of the day I'm not learning for fun or working on a side-hustle. I leave work at work.

Could this be indicative of software engineering not being right for me? It's the only field I've ever considered pursuing, and I don't have anything else pulling me.
All true, but how do you put an asset value on a particular patent? So if you've got a $100M fund and it spends $50M on acquiring patents and then the other $50M on prosecuting them as it can, it isn't possible to predict if one of the patents will be a gold mine or a dud. I think the closest thing I can imagine that would be like this would be mineral rights contracts. You spend $50M on mineral rights contracts on some amount of land and the rest on trying to develop useful resources out of those plots. If one has some easy to reach dense and salable minerals it pays for the others. But a plot that hasn't been geologically surveyed? What is it worth?
My dissenting opinion is that this is good. I am not a Windows user and only peripherally use their services however ironically I believe Microsoft is now the challenger if monopolies:

- Bing is one of the only english search engines with a big userbase; provides a google alternative. I like ddg but it isnt mainstream yet.

- Provides alternative to gmail and enterprise services

- a big 3 cloud provider, competes with AWS and GC. Likely why this github acq makes sense

- runs linkedin to keep fb in competition

There are a lot of examples where they drop the ball, but they are surprisingly the challenger in a lot of new markets providing an alt to the leader/incumbent
"because Github was a neutral third-party without any priorities"...what are you talking about? They are a company with a purpose to make money. And when I think about some of the other possible buyers, I am fine with Microsoft.
I do wonder how much of the issue stems from lack of engagement with the surrounding community.

Anecdote: when I was 7 or 8 I rode my bicycle down the block and came upon a middle aged man who was working on some part of a plane in his driveway. I was then fascinated with everything aeroplane, and hung out a second to pester him with questions. He sent me home with a small chunk of foam he'd cut away from some structure inside it.

I showed my parents my score and they immediately freaked out on me for having talked to a stranger at all, and told me never to go to that house again. Of course if they knew that that was Mr. Donahue working on his homebuilt, it probably would have been a different story.
From a recent github blog post: "Millions of developers trust us with their data—and protecting their privacy is a top priority for us."

Now these millions of developers will face a dilemma.
I love open source, but it doesn't mean I think absolutely everything must be open source... the most important part here _is_ (git), github was (omg I'm already speaking past tense) a decent platform sprinkling some nice simple collaboration on top and convenience, it's not vital, and it's replaceable (so we have choice), and for a long time it was the best there was.

People are disappointed because many of us don't trust or like MS and want nothing to do with them, people complain about Google removing their "do no evil" clause, Microsoft basically has a fucking "do evil" clause but they will always tell you the opposite, they are probably even being sincere, it's just not true though.
Yes, and worse yet, people today believe they are wholly incapable of the things that happened in the Holocaust. I have regular conversations with people (especially people who consider themselves progressive) who adamantly say they are flat-out incapable of that kind of violence. If you want a good measure for when another Holocaust is possible, I think that's the best measuring stick: When regular people think they're not capable of those things.
I am not sure you can use one example of a hardware company failing as proof of anything. Just as you couldn't use the success of a software or hardware company proving the opposite, that there isn't a problem.
It's the contrarian dynamic: people are motivated to post objections to what they disagree with or dislike. Then other people are motivated by those comments to comment the reverse way, i.e. to object to the objections.
I agree with many of your points, in theory.

I'll just say that my views come mainly from experience, specifically ECL (Embeddable Common Lisp, a CL implementation) and (this was further back, so my memory is fuzzy) a tool for generating executables from Perl scripts. I don't think I'm using an especially unusual setup, or unusual compilers, and I would guess that these tools probably target a very narrow subset of C. Despite this, my experience with these sorts of tools has been anything but "works out of the box". On the contrary, there appear to be a great number of degrees of freedom, even with standard-ish setups, that can trip up these tools. Because of the additional layers of abstraction, the error messages you get are very poor. Some header file is missing or in an unexpected place, or worse some generated code fails to compile. As an end-user, it's basically impossible to debug these in a reasonable way.

You can certainly have internal errors using LLVM, but in my experience fewer of them are platform-dependent. Therefore there is a greater chance that something that works for the developer will work for the user. Also, if error handling is done properly, if a failure does occur it can often mapped back to the original source program. This is much better as far as usability goes, since the user almost never wants to debug some compiler's generated code.
No, a normal cost-of-living calculation assumes that you will spend a typical portion of your money on non-local things.

For the conversion to be wrong, you first need to show that your personal situation is far from the norm. For example, you could show that you are saving 80% of your income toward retirement, or that you insist on having a violinist play during a private at-home dinner every night.

So... are you that weird?

If you aren't so weird, then the cost-of-living calculation is correct.
Actually my real point was: scratch an itch and find you have lice living off you. No, err that's not it.

It is genuinely nice to see hard work pay off. Github have seriously put their back into it to create an environment that a lot of people feel comfortable with. I sincerely hope that MS do not fuck it up and wish them both all the best.

We still have git itself - that has never changed. That is the power of open source software.
true, thanks for the correction.
You can easily migrate your repo to a different service, so having lots of developers rely on GitHub isn't really a big deal. Many large projects have GitHub mirrors.

I'd say the biggest issue is that Git doesn't include better built-in support for issues, wikis, PRs / code reviews, and releases. Compare that to Fossil [0], which lets you bundle up everything into a single file. If there was better built-in support you could migrate everything more easily to self-hosted alternatives like Gitea [1]. Regardless, it's possible to migrate manually, even if it's a bit more work.

[0] https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi...

[1] https://gitea.io/en-US/
Thanks for this comment.

Most of the discussio here is just centered around Microsofts goodwill and trustworthiness, mostly ignoring that MS wouldn't make this investment without a solid plan and path to profitability.

That doesn't have to be bad per se, I guess there are a lot of options like integrating Github well with Azure and providing alternatives to AWS CodeCommit / pipelines, ...
If Microsoft decides to make GitHub free for all, this can honestly have a devastating affect on GitLab and Bitbucket. I really think Microsoft is a lot more interested in:

- capturing developer data for ML/AI research

- identify new product ideas

- identify ways to improve existing products

- create a funnel to existing products
I had built and published 4 different Chrome extensions:

- Random Facts: a random fact about numbers with a beautiful image on new tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random-facts-on-ne...

- Game of Thrones Quotes: a random GoT quote on every new tab. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/game-of-thrones-qu...

- Open Wikipedia: an extension to overcome the Wikipedia blocks in Turkey. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikipedia-a%C3%A7%...

- Open Imgur: an extension to overcome the Imgur blocks in Turkey. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imgur-a%C3%A7%C4%B...

All of the extensions are open source; the links can be found in the extension descriptions.
Probably because its fairly low-risk. I have ~270 Github repos. About a year ago I made a ~5 line Python script that added Gitlab as another origin to each repo. I still use (used) Gitlab as my main host, I'm a paying customer - but for me to flick over to Gitlab is a one-liner.
The problem is, people can make claims of racism, but you can't counter them or say they are exaggerated, so people think you live in some podunk racist state that's 100 years out of date and for the vast majority of people it's just not true.

Killeen is a military town in the middle of nowhere. It has a weird population. But the sibling comment that talks about people hanging Confederate flags isn't representative. California has nutters and boonies too.

San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and Austin are the fastest growing cities in the nation. TX has a larger minority population than it does other. If it was such a racist backwater I think my friends would say something about it, but I too get the impression that the level of racism is about the same as any other major city.

I don't mean to demean their experiences, but I also don't believe it's representative of a state that in 20 years is going to be as important as CA if it isn't already in various areas. If you were transported to a neighborhood in any of those cities, you'd have a hard time figuring out you weren't in NY< CA, or any other major state/city.

When people write off entire states because of politics, that's missing a lot of nuance. If you want to do that, you can also ignore Atlanta, at your own fault, which has as compelling a minority cultural boom as anywhere in the country. Someone needs to tell Don Glover to get the hell out of there.

It's just as offensive to natives of various places to hear their home stereotyped as it is for races to hear their race stereotyped.
Funny enough, I don't feel that way about Skype anymore. Yeah, Microsoft destroyed it, but, on the other hand, why did I even use it? Right, because there was nothing else back then, and Skype was "good enough". And everyone else was using it. Even though, honestly, it always was some buggy proprietary piece of shit, dragging all that legacy of the Delphi era into 201x. If anything, it may be even good it's not so dominant anymore, even though we still don't have anything decent to completely replace it.
This is a great article. However, I would like to add that there is a small proportion of the population who are sociopaths and are simply bad.
> How do you know that's the case?

How do I know what is the case? The fact that anyone with functioning limbs could do his job? That comes from him and the job description he gave me.

> And it's pretty clear the company is making enough money to cover it

Yeah I think you forgot about those factories which don't reside in the US.
Eh? It’s literally three shell commands to install GitLab. One to add their GPG key, one to add the upstream repo, and one to apt-get install the package. I bet there’s a curl | bash script to do all three as “one step”.

If you’re going to complain about something, at least pick something legit like managing backups or server uptime. The install itself couldn’t be simpler.
Part of me wonders if this is in part to the rumor that Github and Micro$oft are talking about M$ purchasing Github. I cannot say that I am thrilled at that prospect.
Aside from Wunderlist, who was acquired and running on AWS, and had to switch to Azure and rewrite a bunch of their code to become ToDo.
Except then you're always at the mercy of a landlord who can raise your rental rates, and you won't be building any equity. There's no rent control on the Peninsula. I know people who have gotten a $600/month rent increase and been totally screwed. Whereas owners benefit from Prop 13 which is basically rent control for owners- their property taxes never go up.
250k is exceptional for Atlanta. It's the norm for the Bay Area (for a BigTechCo mid career engineer). An apples-to-apples comparison would probably be more like 400k in the Bay Area vs 250k in Atlanta.

Of course, Atlanta might still win that on cost of living, but it's a more reasonable comparison.
This very article shows that rich tend to succeed and poor tend to fail regardless of whether the grab the marshmallow or not.

But a summary of other issues include:

If intelligence corresponds to wealth, we would expect Nobel prize winners and widely cited scientist to be the richest people.

Royal families and their descendants, having concentrated their genes, should also be the most inventive, artistic or scientifically productive people.

It is possible to improve earnings skills, the degree to which it can be improved is the degree to which it is behavioral rather than genetic.

Rich people are scattered through the world and through history and thus have maximum genetic difference. They can not reasonably share a common gene that skips over millions of people between them, let alone crossing the Atlantic to end up in Montezuma's line. And if there were such genes, they would be extremely conspicuous.

Yet in spite of great interest and success in sequencing, no gene correlating to wealth has been found.

If some genes corresponded to earnings, it would have a geographic origin and concentration as do eye color, lactose tolerance, epicanthic folds, malaria-resistance/cycle-cell etc. Yet every region has a few rich people and many poor.

In fact, regions change in wealth over time: nations like Egypt were rich for millennia while Scandinavia and Japan were poor. This does not happen with genes eg blue eyes don't emerge and disappear over millennia at random around the world.

All of the above points to wealth acquisition as a essentially a purely behavioral activity. Even if there were any genetic components, they would be negligible to the point of being undetectable.

Pardon me for summaries rather than finding dozens of links but here is one readable citation:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11711-smarter-people-...
> Is it possible to make link time optimization work with dynamic loading?

No, but nor can you with regular ol' linking against shared libraries. Or against static libraries (except for some mundane stuff like function reordering). LTO requires toolchain support and occurs before code generation.
" I haven't found, say, OSHA to be toothless in practice"

OSHA is toothless in practice. For large companies the fines are negligible.

https://www.ishn.com/articles/108358-osha-issues-tiny-penalt...

"OSHA has fined Tower King II Inc. $12,934 for the death of three workers who were attempting to install a new antenna on a communications tower in Miami. This is the maximum fine for one serious citation. "

"U.S. Rarely Seeks Charges For Deaths in Workplace"

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/us/us-rarely-seeks-charge...

Also, under Trump
That's literally a few hundred people, not the norm
It's simple: we're looking for thoughtful conversation. We don't much care about your opinions, but if you express them in flamebaity or shallow ways, we'll ask you to do better. Please do better.
> 60k is about the minimum to live comfortably in the US

My friend lives in Loves Park IL, near where I (we) grew up. You're delierious if you think it costs even 60k (120k since most families have two earners) to live there. Go experience the rest of the country some time.
Time to migrate to SourceForge.
Not just startups. Indie/one-person shops too. Everybody’s getting drowned out.
It's 100% related, but I would also not read too much into the numbers. There will always be a small minority that hates Microsoft like no tomorrow and this is very much reflected on reddit (https://reddit.com/r/programming) right now.
What's so bad about Rob's ego? If you want a language by people who say yes! to everything, we already have C++ and C#.
> Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization,

It's economics 101, really: division of labour and economies of scale. A company like Github can build and sustain capabilities that are flatly uneconomical for their customers to build themselves.

In terms of strategy, Github's lockin doesn't come from git. It comes from everything around it: issues, pull requests etc. This functionality can be replicated, but data has inertia. The more you have, the less you want to move it.

For an instructive parallel, consider how easy it is to use AWS Lambda with all of AWS's data-centric services.
Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof

Linus invented git because Linux needed a new code repo thingie. He was only focused on one project - Linux. He released git as GPL. GitHub n Co are value add sites with fees for services and are more than welcome to use GPL software for obvious reasons.
> The salaries here are higher, but the housing prices are much, much higher.

I'm Australian so YMMV, but six months ago I took a 25% pay cut to move out of Sydney to somewhere with lower housing costs and a shorter commute. I'm never going back.
Closer to a few thousand, and even if, so?
Not really... the homeless by choice types are tweakers who move to SF to intentionally live on the streets and have easy access to cheap and plentiful drugs. SF basically created hamsterdam, and addicts from all over the country flock here so they can get high and enjoy life on the streets with impunity.

The street denizens in SF building encampments, shitting on the sidewalk, breaking into cars to get their fix and blatantly operating chop shops aren't hard up people who are just down on their luck and between jobs... these types move here to specifically live on the streets and get high all the time.
As [Microsoft CEO Satya] Nadella increasingly moves the company away from complete dependence on the Windows operating system to more in-house development on Linux, the company needs new ways to connect with the broader developer community.

If you told me ten years ago that someday Microsoft would buy GitHub as part of its strategy to do "more in-house development on Linux", I'd have assumed the acquisition was announced on April 1.
I'm a paying Github customer, I'm very uncomfortable with giving Microsoft any money. Not after what they have done to me. Not after what they have done to my friends, and my family. Time heals all wounds they say, but fool me twice...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI
> Id consider such arguments if they applied to CEO's or similarly were reducing corporate expenses on things of questionable value

No argument from me; I think it's absurd at both ends. If I had to keep one I would absolutely keep paying my friend ~60k / year.
"dump the husk"

Great, I can see it written in the spine of an evil management book!
Aye:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junio_Hamano
Adding Free SSL Certificates to Static Websites via AWS Certificate Manager
Except he also loved it himself.
Agreed on all of your points. I've lived primarily in Miami and Atlanta. After being in SF for a couple of years I only wish I had moved here sooner. The weather is a huge factor for me, and the geographical beauty of the west coast is unparalleled in my opinion. I would possibly consider other cities such as Denver/Boulder, or Portland, but I'll definitely never move back to the southeast.
> 3. Rich man in the car paradox.

> When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.” Subconscious or not, this is how people think.

Just realized that that is how I think... :facepalm:
>It's just as offensive to natives of various places to hear their home stereotyped as it is for races to hear their race stereotyped.

This is such an insane false equivalence, especially given Texas’ history of institutionalized racism, I don’t even know where to begin.
Definitely the political angle in most of these regulatory institutions is frustrating. And money in politics as an extension.
I started working with TypeScript over vanilla JS a year or so ago. It's completely changed the way I work. Having autocomplete, pointing out silly errors (forgetting to return a value, forgetting to set a prop on a React component, forgetting to add a member to an object) before I refresh the page, and being able to pick up old code without having to reread through it to figure out what the hell it actually spits back out is a godsend. The latter has sped up my productivity significantly; being able to get the output from a library, hover over the variable, and see the exact shape of the output saves an incredible amount of time when doing mundane day-to-day tasks.
I–V–vi–IV is just a chord progression. Using it does not make a song unoriginal. You can build a billion melodies on it in just one mode of a scale. Then there's all the other stuff: instrument choice, arrangement, rhythm, lyrics (if you have them).

A song is so much more than a chord progression.

For those playing along at home: modern pop favorite I–V–vi–IV is also the chord progression used in some arrangements of the 1788 classic Auld Lang Syne.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2380044
From VA, Live in Austin for nearly a decade... have never seen a confederate flag on a house in TX... VA on the other hand..
Euh, you mean Amazon