[HN Gopher] Be in a field where tech is the limit
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Be in a field where tech is the limit
Author : MperorM
Score : 87 points
Date : 2021-05-07 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mathiaskirkbonde.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mathiaskirkbonde.substack.com)
| ArtWomb wrote:
| "Software is simply the encoding of human thought, and as such
| has an almost unbounded design space"
|
| https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1385928617943838721
| ojbyrne wrote:
| So presumably cdixon writes software for a living...
| theodric wrote:
| This reminds me of Harry Mulisch congratulating authors for
| being very, very smart in _De ontdekking van de hemel_
| sho_hn wrote:
| I don't know the context of the quote, but I don't think it's
| necessarily elitist.
|
| I have a lot of non-programmer friends who sometimes say that
| programming must be very dry and boring. My shiny go-to
| example to convince them otherwise is a nice desktop
| planetarium app, which you can't develop without first
| learning how the solar system works. Once you do you can
| write that down in code - an executable, computing form of
| knowledge, a living document that allows you to tinker,
| refine, share, reproduce. Software truly is pretty neat as a
| human societal tool with a wide range of applications.
|
| It should be for everyone. The other thing I tell them: If
| you've ever been in bed in the morning and planned out your
| steps for how to get that cup of coffee you need, designing
| an efficient bed-to-coffee algorithm, you've already been a a
| programmer.
| whymauri wrote:
| Fields where tech is the limit are fields that don't care about
| tech. As result, working as a software or tech IC in these fields
| is a grind. Never again -- no thanks!
| whateveracct wrote:
| i think going in a field where they'll pay you plenty without
| noticing you barely spend time working is the play
|
| the brightest don't spend their time & energy making others
| wealthy
| nicbou wrote:
| That also has its disadvantages. Being stuck in an office with
| little work, but little else in the way of entertainment slowly
| burns you out. Having next to no work for two months wasn't as
| pleasant as I thought it would be.
|
| Fields where you don't make other people wealthy aren't so rosy
| either. They bring their own drama to the table.
| whateveracct wrote:
| The trick there is to work remotely. You can just build
| software, make art, do your own side-business 8hrs/day while
| hitting the employer's bar of "I'll keep paying this guy" and
| keep that income flowing.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I did that for a year or so in finance. Realised I was wasting
| my one life. I want to be useful.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Use your free time to build stuff, save the money to bootstrap
| and when your project gains traction, leave and build your own
| things so that you're not making someone else wealthy.
|
| The brightest absolutely do spend their time and energy making
| others wealthy (ex: I would consider most senior eng at FAANG
| to be bright and although they are definitely rich, they are
| not wealthy). I suspect that's because of the cycle of
| responsibilities and spending most of their incomes.
| whateveracct wrote:
| The thing about FAANGs and BigCos is they have more money
| than they know how to spend. The majority of that headcount
| spend is just to capture "talent" so others don't have it.
|
| I've seen millions of dollars-worth of software development
| waste as FAANG and BigCo. Nobody bats at eye. Because it's a
| bizarro world with no consequences. All you gotta do is not
| get wrapped up in it and collect checks ;)
| beambot wrote:
| Or different people just have different value functions, and
| many of them don't care about "wealth maximization" when
| they're already comfortably in the 1%...
| rawtxapp wrote:
| For sure, everybody has different goals in life, but the
| thing is they are creating wealth, just not for themselves
| is all.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| I am interested to learn about fields where software engineers
| can help to bring about innovation and push those fields forward,
| providing some of the tech that is missing there. I would like to
| apply my skills in a transdisciplinary manner and work on
| projects that are not just B2B SaaS products.
|
| One option is research software engineering, where SWEs team up
| with researchers to produce better code for models and
| simulations. Are there any research fields where synthesis of
| domain knowledge, programming skills, and computational thinking
| could bring great benefits?
| amelius wrote:
| You could become a scientific programmer.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| Is a scientific programmer similar to a research software
| engineer (RSE)?
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Biotech is one, we are still nowhere near close to
| understanding the secrets of the human body, there remains lots
| of incurable conditions, etc.
|
| I think the speed at which they were able to develop mrna
| vaccines just shows how far along we've come, but also how much
| more we have to go. Things like protein folding at deepmind
| definitely requires all these things you mention.
| [deleted]
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| Drugs/medicine (both research and manufacturing). The pockets
| of potential pharma clients are immensely deep while the fields
| are largely dominated by haphazard taped-together tools
| consisting of paper, excel, and visualbasic, handled by
| outsourced contractors and constrained IT departments. If you
| can shave off some time to get drugs to market using modern
| technology you will enjoy financial success.
|
| I imagine that technology in any kind of manufacturing or
| mining field is going to be similar or predominately dominated
| by one or two big players that haven't faced an innovative
| competitor in decades.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > the fields are largely dominated by haphazard taped-
| together tools consisting of paper, excel, and visualbasic,
| handled by outsourced contractors and constrained IT
| departments.
|
| Ditto for Wall Street. The "innovation" tends to sit on top
| of woefully outdated systems rather than replace them.
| carabiner wrote:
| Mechanical engineering is one. The problem is gaining buy-in
| from the old guard that your newfangled tech will make their
| lives easier, not harder. To do so, you might need to get a
| mechanical engineering degree and work as one for a few years.
| Reminds me of how FarmLogs was started by someone who grew up
| on a farm. Ultimately the block is communication/persuasion,
| not technical though.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Mech e problems are more regulatory and data driven. Lack of
| testing data and consensus amongst experts are what good back
| innovation. Mechanical stuff kills people, even if it's has
| software people blame the gun not the bad software
| tobr wrote:
| I'm not convinced by this - "Innovation happens in fields where
| our ideas are limited by our means to pursue them" - but it's
| written as if it's self-evident. Why would it be like this and
| what is the argument that it is? By what measure is computing
| stagnant today compared to the 60's, for example?
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| Because the largest industries are adtech and a million and one
| companies cranking out useless apps? technological innovation
| in the computing space is been stagnant for 10 years almost.
| what was once AI has just been co-opted by marketing types and
| redefined to mean machine learning, which is glorified brute
| force pattern recognition. we stifled innovation and I've been
| going on a trend of bloated uselessness for quite a while.
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| I worked in bio tech for 4 years. Amazing people and problems.
|
| Worst pay, top heavy salaries.
|
| When a phd makes 80k a year and a "ML/AI" data scientist is lucky
| to make 100k you won't find any progress like software
|
| They need to cut the top heavy executive bloat, respect the mid
| tier with better pay
| sho_hn wrote:
| I'm always curious when I hear HN opine on salary levels. Now I
| understand that in SF / at certain FAANG locations you can
| expect to make far in excess of 80-100k, and that exerts a
| competitive pressure in the job market - while also being
| balanced to some extend by extreme CoL. But I always wonder
| just how small that bubble is and what the trade-offs really
| are. In essentially all of Central Europe except perhaps, say,
| Zurich, 80k-110k is a highly-salaried engineer (and affords an
| upper-middleclass lifestyle with good healthcare, pension, free
| college education, etc.), and I understand also in many areas
| of the US that are just fine to live in.
|
| It just sounds like completely different systems / way to run
| the numbers to me, not at all apples to apples.
| giantg2 wrote:
| $80k-100k would afford a great lifestyle in much of the US,
| geographically speaking. The problem is that those jobs are
| concentrated in areas with a higher COL. We also have to pay
| for things like medical insurance in the US. I know software
| salaries are lower in the EU (in general), I assume it's the
| same for biotech too.
| plandis wrote:
| Even with the higher cost of living in SF/NYC/Seattle, tech
| pay at FAANG is pretty high. Senior software positions are
| pretty much start at $300k/yr across all of those companies.
| Plus these companies generally have excellent healthcare
| plans and good vacation policies.
|
| At those income levels pretty much the only thing you're
| really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I
| suspect that's the same in Zurich.
| nerdponx wrote:
| When the associate data scientists are making $100-150k,
| and the product/graphic designers are lucky to be getting
| $80k, that's pretty fucking top-heavy and absurd.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Sounds like it! :-)
|
| I have a Senior Principal position and make products you've
| probably read about on Ars/Verge type sites recently, at an
| established tech company in Berlin - for about half of
| those 300k. And it's not a bad deal for the region.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| No, even after any attempt to account for healthcare, pension
| and education the US will still look vastly better off.
| Unfortunately we don't have figures on average individual
| consumption but by household Hong Kong consumes about $1,000
| more a year than the US and the next closest is Switzerland,
| consuming about $10,000 a year less.
|
| Generally the US pays better and at the top of any field you
| care to mention except perhaps finance it pays far, far
| better.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > except perhaps finance it pays far, far better.
|
| I hear this a lot, but I've never seen it. I know plenty of
| people in tech making the better part of $1 MM a year at
| FAANG, and a few who even breach that. Most people I know
| in finance never break $500k.
|
| So how much do people make in finance?
| _Wintermute wrote:
| I worked as a post-doc at a pharma company in Europe, our
| research-based department was in need of a software engineer as
| our collection of crappy R/python scripts couldn't actually be
| linked up to any equipment or processes.
|
| HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we
| suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than
| 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a
| 50k limit. I've since left, but I'm pretty sure they've still
| not manage to hire a software engineer.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| This bums me out so much. I would love to work on medical
| research and I love data pipelines, so something like
| bioinformatics R/Python seems ideal to me, but I make
| significantly more than that as the manager of a software
| team in an enterprise environment so it's never going to
| happen unless I somehow get to the point where I don't have
| to care about money.
| [deleted]
| whall6 wrote:
| Ah but this is only true for people who's competitive advantage
| is technology!
|
| For someone who is relatively better at ideating, I would argue
| the opposite is true.
| frazbin wrote:
| > Innovation happens in fields where our ideas are limited by our
| means to pursue them. Software is no longer such a field, our
| brightest minds should be going elsewhere.
|
| As a relative dummy, I guess I'll remain in software.
| JanNash wrote:
| Same.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The sentiment is only half right.
|
| The important part is "and there is promising tech on the
| horizon"
|
| I think trying to get a startup based on space travel at
| relativistic fields would be pretty difficult.
|
| Steve Jobs was a master of this. Seeing promising tech trends
| that were just about ready, and putting them together at just the
| right time to make innovations that were world changing.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Do you want to know the real "problem"?
|
| It takes a long time to develop biotech, test it, approve it,
| market it, and make money. There is also a limited market (ie the
| people sick with that condition, specifically in rich countries).
| The reason tech companies make money, grow/iterate, pay more, is
| because they are in a field that does not require the same
| oversight and moral safety obligations (maybe they should to an
| extent) as well as being marketable to basically everyone in rich
| countries.
| guhcampos wrote:
| Wife is a PhD Animal Geneticist, but works as government
| inspector on slaughterhouses. Makes 3-4 times the money her
| research colleagues do.
|
| I'm not even sure what to think of it, honestly.
| amackera wrote:
| In every way I think about it, this difference in salary seems
| justified. I can't imagine inspecting slaughterhouses is very
| fun or rewarding, but it's super important for society.
| lumost wrote:
| research is a sporadic discipline. A top tier researcher
| working on a choice problem with relatively predictable returns
| ( or at least the perception of predictability ) will make
| substantially more than someone working on a problem of
| debatable business value or with lower odds of success.
|
| In the case of research positions, the funding situation has
| oversaturated the market in most entry level positions -
| turning negotiation and career advancement into a trial by
| fire.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I've always loved science. I wish I could switch to biotech, but
| that would mean basically starting over.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| > Biotechnology sounds to me much like computing in the 60's.
|
| One thing I've always wondered about biotech... I imagine there
| are many non-obvious correlations and interactions in medicine,
| which would be easily detected using nothing more advanced than
| Excel-spreadsheet level data analysis.
|
| Making up an example: people with a certain DNA trait/allele who
| also have a diet with a high amount of XYZ tend to not develop
| disease ABC as frequently as most people. Even if we don't know
| the pharmacological reason _why_ that is, it would still
| massively benefit lots of people, right?
|
| So it always seems to me like tech from 2007 was ready to tackle
| this problem. Dump in a bunch of anonymized data, find
| correlations, repeat.
|
| But I feel like I never hear anything about this type of work. Is
| it happening, but not publicized much? Is it actually not as
| simple as it sounds? Does nature simply not work in this way?
|
| Even if 95% of diseases are just "bad luck", I assume that other
| 5% is made up of environmental factors we don't yet understand,
| but could easily learn using well-known data processing
| techniques?
| ftruzzi wrote:
| I've found myself thinking the same. Maybe researchers don't
| have the data and/or the platform? Not sure who records what
| they eat, and if they do they don't share it?
| Taek wrote:
| Why is there no innovation in healthcare?
|
| Because better technology won't get the entrepreneur a satisfying
| reward.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Very costly and lots of regulations, big consequences for
| failing. If a SaaS product has a bug, worst case scenario,
| someone loses money, if someone messes up in healthcare, a
| person might die.
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| Because you can literally make millions of more guaranteed
| dollars if you just go work at Facebook or Google in easier
| problems serving ads.
| rdtwo wrote:
| No reason to innovate insurance pays the same regardless
| rileymat2 wrote:
| There must be some innovation in healthcare, we were delivered
| a safe effective vaccine to a new virus in about a year.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Lots of innovation but things like clinical trials are very
| expensive. How could we get safe medical progress with less
| expenses?
| [deleted]
| pgt wrote:
| Regulation has a way of keeping out innovative founders who
| would rather add value in newer, unregulated fields.
| kemiller wrote:
| I think he's got it exactly wrong -- the reason we have seen a
| lot of "non-tech tech" companies is that software still
| fundamentally kinda sucks. We have become so used to it we don't
| always notice, but software is a fragile nightmare to work with.
| It's like trying to build skyscrapers with tinkertoys, and it's a
| miracle we can do as much as we do. Software needs a leap; AI/ML
| might be the start of it, not sure yet.
| mLuby wrote:
| Being in a field (or startup) where tech is _not_ the limit is
| super frustrating.
| username90 wrote:
| Some hates being a commodity, others hates not being a
| commodity. Plenty of people love those boring jobs since they
| are easy to perform, you know what you have to do and you know
| you can do it. And since you are just a cog in a big machine
| nobody has their eyes on you since you aren't special in any
| way, if you quit they can go out and hire another one like you
| right now.
| sheer_audacity wrote:
| Sigh.
|
| Speaking as someone who has spent the last six years of their
| career working on advanced physics in various technology sectors
| (including biotech) and then trying to make various 2D-xene
| materials work for semiconductors, I'll tell you one thing:
|
| They pay you shit and if you think you're all treated badly in
| FAANG, hoooboy, at least nobody has nearly caused deaths in the
| lab through negligence!
| zuhayeer wrote:
| Software engineering is becoming a base layer for all fields.
| Meaning there will be a lot more cross disciplinary software
| engineers extending a wide range of companies and industries
| including biotech, agriculture, space, etc.
|
| As such it isn't mutually exclusive to be a software engineer
| while working in a field where tech is the limit. (But even so in
| my opinion, software itself is still just getting its bearings)
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| Every single superficial website or app released today is built
| on layers upon layers of incredible continuous advances in the
| software world. Just in the past decade the fields of cloud
| computing, AI/ML, data warehousing/analytics, distributed
| systems, real-time communication, geo syncing of data and
| computation, mobile/embedded development, chipsets, compilers all
| evolved beyond recognition.
|
| "Ideas" were and still are largely worthless. They are absolutely
| not the bottleneck in software today. There are a billion
| implementation-level problems that are still unsolved, and there
| will always be new ones.
| patcon wrote:
| This also applies so hard to grassroots community organizing.
| They are doing all their scaling purely through manual human
| strategies. Which is great, but even small amounts of tooling can
| help these groups to organize better and avoid burnout -- burnout
| and frustration kills movements, because good-feels and passion
| is pretty much the only thing holding people together (never
| money, like in a regular field)
| conformist wrote:
| This seems to be largely a matter of taste? A field where ideas
| are the limits can be great for somebody who wants their success
| to be driven and measured by ... their ideas?
|
| Sure, it can be frustrating to be banging your head against the
| same wall as everybody else, but there are people that thrive in
| such a setting. The most extreme example might be pure
| mathematicians.
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