Being old as dirt, my observation is that potential tech revolutions take ten years after the initial exuberance to be realized broadly, or three to five years to fizzle. Of those that fizzle, some were bad ideas and some were good ideas replaced by better ideas. FWIW
Well, during the initial "tech" (broadly interpreted to mean computational processes that somehow involve the internet) revolutions, there were not 100M, nor even 1M users to be gained.
And what is a "user" when it comes to ChatGPT and it's ilk? How does that compare with the definition of a user of, say, the web? Or of SMS ?
With most other technologies before this there was the issue with rollout of physical infrastructure. And that is still true somewhat. All the big AI players want more AI processors and would take possession of as many as they could get.
Buy the other side of physical infrastructure is already here. The internet, cellphones, and computers already exist in mass and can be utilized by AI now. We didn't need to build new highways for this. No new towers. No wires put in the ground. Those fields already exist and are ready for planting.
Wikipedia is authored and curated by people who, by and large, know what they're talking about. When they make things up, it's verified and corrected by other people, usually within the decade.
This is amazing. Great format. It would be cool to link original recordings too, but merely nice-to-have, not essential. I love being able to listen to the solos unaccompanied.
He wrote the lyrics for that entire album (Vocalese) and sings on it too -- one of the solos on "Airegin", and a scat solo somewhere else (maybe the Night in Tunisia thing, been a while since I listened).
He also wrote the lyrics for their versions of "Birdland" and "Four Brothers", and maybe four of the tracks on Swing, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not thinking of.
I was wrong about "Another Night in Tunisia" -- the solo Jon sings starting around 1:40 actually has lyrics. I think the melody scatting for most of the rest of the song is actually Bobby McFerrin.
Oh, there we go, the scat solo starting at 2:30 in "Ray's Rockhouse" is Jon.
Weirdly enough, if I cam to believe Discogs got the liner notes faithfully, they're not crediting Jon with singing a solo on "Airegin". I'm still 99% certain Jon sings the last solo in that song. (Interestingly, singing lyrics over his own scat solo from the original Lambert, Hendricks & Ross recording of "Airegin".) For sure it sounds like him, no one other than Manhattan Transfer is credited with vocals on that track, and when they recorded it live they don't even attempt to sing it, replacing it with a sax solo.
"Sing Joy Spring", lyrics by Jon Hendricks. Jon wrote lyrics to dozens (hundreds?) of jazz solos. Was one hell of a singer, too -- check him out singing John Coltrane's solo on "Freddie Freeloader" [1]
Right, excuses carry no weight. Got it. Agreed! But fuck football coaches and sports analogies for business. Sports is a zero-sum game. Business sometimes is,sometimes isn’t. Depends on agility, creativity, and the market you’re in. If your boss quotes football coaches just quit on the spot (unless of course you are in sales).
I think this depends if you view a game or league purely as a compition (per definition if one team wins, another one has to lose), or as a "brand": very exciting games can increase the popularity of a league/sport, increasing revenue/attention even for the losing team.
I think most sports fans only look at the first part.
Teams A and B play each other, and everything gained by A is lost by B and vice versa. A zero-sum game. But somehow we have a fan X. But why are they interested? It seems like some extra value is created by the interaction of A and B (entertainment). This means it’s not a zero-sum game.
It’s not some games that increase the popularity of a sport. It’s all games. A lot more people show up to a stadium on game day than an off day.
Not to mention dysfunctional teams do not shut down at some performance threshold, there are no referees (or there are many), and I don't know about you, but I don't shower with my coworkers.
I suspect your example is only meaningful to people who already share your view. Knowing nothing about the NFL I barely know what you're talking about here and have no idea what point it's supposed to be making.
Basically: A player on the losing team made a good play.
I don't think it's a particularly good example; despite the fact that his team lost, that play significantly improved his team's chance for a win. If he doesn't make that play, then players on the other team would have better numbers.
Competitive sports are zero-sum only if you ignore all the things that competitive sports are about. Winners and losers are a side effect of the competition not the essence of it.
I’m not the person you’re responding to but I’ll give it a go.
The progress angle:
When two competitors clash they motivate each other to advance the state of human potential.
Today’s elite high school track athlete would have set world records decades ago.
The narrative angle:
When there is a clash of wills, narratives and stories emerge. When Michael Jordan had the flu and led a comeback in the NBA finals, he helped write a compelling story about fighting through adversity. Google “flu game”.
Sometimes it’s a little of both:
When Steph Curry overcame a series of chronic ankle injuries through a specialized regiment of training, he wrote a story into the culture about problem solving, and helped advance the state of sports medicine.
What's there to research? I'm familiar with football and familiar enough with the idea that new players made "winning" plays in the process of losing the game and ending their season. When you post three times and still have most respondents scratching their heads about your point, maybe it's your communication that's the problem.
Democracy is ostensibly majority rule (don't nitpick).
The majority of people are poor.
Therefore, democracy is the rule of the poor (Aristotle).
We do not live in a democracy.
I think you're missing what the parent is saying: since the majority are poor, they plainly don't rule (since then they wouldn't remain poor). If democracy is defined as "majority rule," and we plainly see that the majority in the US do NOT rule, then the US is not a democracy.
See Gramsci's work on hegemony. Or (slightly easier) Tressel's "Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" which makes exactly the point about how the poor become convinced that it's better to give more things to the rich.
If Party D promises free money to the poor and Party R does not, do you expect no poor people to vote for Party R? What if Party R has other things about it which appeal to the poor?
The poor have the opportunity to vote, and rule indirectly, and yet for many reasons often vote against their own best economic interests. Some of those reasons are good, and some are not.
"For example, in 2005, 63.7% of those living in poverty had cable or satellite television. In some cases the report even said that people currently living in poverty were actually better off than middle class people of the recent past. For example, in 2005, 78.3% of households living in poverty had air conditioning, whereas in 1970, 36.0% of all households had air conditioning." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#O...
So in 35 years, 78% of the poor had something that only 36% of households had previously.
I don't know, some of these things can be attributed to the falling cost of technology and culture. Air conditioners are seen as necessary, instead of a luxury. It may never have even occurred to some people that they should prioritize affording money for one. Poor people could probably afford smartphones too when they first came out, but they only became common when everyone had one, and costs came down. Personally, I don't think quality of life is measured by air conditioning and cable TV either.
Yes - real cost (cost in hours worked) of necessities, and even former luxuries, has declined dramatically, and standard of living for the poor has increased dramatically. That's the point.
If you go to Mexico, you'll see people living in much hotter conditions without air conditioning (but they still have satellite TV).
Cable TV and air conditioning show the shifting standard of living that represents "poor" in the united states, and illustrate that a large percentage of "poor" definitely have the necessities (shelter in particular), as opposed to the "absolute poverty" who lack basic necessities of food/shelter/access to health care.
Quality of life is a different question, and very difficult to measure.
Most poor people have better amenities and work conditions. Probably even in the areas you mentioned. Basically, this is similar to the whole question of whether you'd be better off as a king in the middle ages, or an average joe now; or the idea that relatively speaking everything is better than ever.
Sometimes what you need is change. I am sixty-five years old. I was a programmer for fifteen years, started a consulting company, then a software business. Was acqui-hired. Became VP Product Dev over 27 locations, 1200 developers, hundreds of products, then semi-retired for four years and worked on digital audio production. Got bored, did another startup, wrote code. Sold it and became CTO of a product division. Later worked for an investment group, became CTO for one of their acquisitions for almost ten years. Six years ago went back to technical work on my "reverse career plan" (junior programmer by the time I'm 75 ;-) ). Wrote js/react analytic front-end apps, Python back-end analytics, got into machine learning, co-authored a book about it, got some big data consulting gigs, learned Hadoop/Spark. Currently hands-on dev for Spark and ML apps.
For me, changes were the key. Burnout melts away. But you can burn out in any role. If you have the skills to do tech work, try to keep them alive. Coming back to hands on tech work is incredibly refreshing. So is leaving it behind for awhile when you've reached the burn-out point.
Thank you for this wisdom. I am a little more than half your age (37), and I have had a similar path so far, started as IT jack of all trades, then neck deep in web dev and coding, databases, executive management, product management/development, customer solutions and then, to my surprise, back to web dev and coding.
I did this to get back to being hands on, and as a gateway job, and enjoyed it, but am also now starting to tire of that again.
I can see myself going through a similar cycle that you did. The only thing I find difficult is explaining it to recruiters when applying to jobs - they always ask, “why would you bounce around in such a way”!
It looks like perhaps you were able to avoid that problem by starting your own businesses and then getting acquihired, writing your book, and other pursuits which moved you back to a “traditional job”?
By the way, I love “junior programmer by 75”. I feel the same way, and not entirely that it’s a bad thing. Just reality, there is so much to know and learn.
What's up with the phrase, "Still programming?" Would anyone think it odd for a 60-year-old physician to still be doctoring, or a 60-year-old lawyer to still practice law. Or for that matter for a 60-year-old artist or craftsperson to "still" pursue their craft.
Corporate culture embraces the notion of management as a profession. I think programming would benefit greatly from more of a tradecraft model, where leadership is provided by the master practitioner rather than the professional manager. In the alternate universe that's how we do it. The bottom line productivity boost is awesome. I don't know if it scales, but I don't care to scale.
-- 63-year-old full-stack web and machine learning programmer...living the dream
What's up is the rampant ageism in the industry - the perception that you are washed up as a "dinosaur" developer after a certain age, maybe 40 or so, and belong in management.
We "dinosaurs" - we happy few - are living evidence to the contrary.
-- 58 year old broad-spectrum software guy, hard at work and loving it
There is a reason graybeards are valuable. It's not that they're over 50 or 60. It's experience. A full-stack developer with 20 years' worth of experience will not make certain kinds of mistakes.
I'm in the awkward position of having only gotten a CS degree and taken programming seriously after 30, so I suppose I'm the worst of both worlds. Of course, I also started going gray at 30, so...
I just graduated with a CS degree at 36; have an offer and will start soon. The age aspect is scary, but I've honestly found it less of an issue than I thought. The most difficult part is pushing past the part of me that says I'm too old to be starting now.
I'm currently working as a developer and aiming to go back to school within the next year or two for physics, after some catch-up math courses.
Good for you for even setting out. It's intimidating, if not down-right frightening to start all over again at something.
But hell, the unconventional is increasingly becoming the conventional. Some of the best advice I ever received was from a doctor I had when I was young. He was an old Jamaican man who went from the slums of Kingston to Chemical Engineering in the US to a practicing MD (physician, general practitioner) in a small town in Canada. He just said (kind of what you'd expect from a Jamaican man): not to worry about anything.
Just do things, make messes, clean them up, do more things. You just might do some good in the process.
I graduated CS at the age of 27 and thought I'd be at a disadvantage starting out in the industry due to it. If anything the couple more years seems to have helped me out quite a bit as I found it made me more relatable to the more senior technical people and management.
In the modern dev shops now the soft skills you've developed in the additional years you've had before getting into development will give you quite an advantage since 99% of places aren't just heads down coding anymore.
Where I've found I have a disadvantage is in my non-work commitments and free time outside of work. The younger guys can spend their evenings and weekends working on side projects, going to hackathons or just learning something new, whereas I come home to the family and try to spend quality time with them, do my share of the work in the upkeep of the house, yard, etc.
We only get one shot at life so you're never too old for anything in terms of what you want to spend 40+ hours a week doing to finance your life.
After 30 is totally fine. I know several programmers who either switched to programming around 30, or had a long break from programming. Sure, you may be a junior developer while younger people may already be senior, but there's time to catch up, and with a bit of maturity, you may have a far better attitude than young cowboys who think they know everything.
In enterprise adults are often more useful because understanding, dilevery in schedule and the ability to do what you are told is immensely more valuable than doing things in a fiery passionate way on some new tech.
On top of that, while you might learn slower, you probably attended more classes and played less video games during them than 90% of the twenty year olds.
By default, most programmers from two decades ago ARE full stack developers.
Back then, there was no separation of front end, back end or database - it was all melded into one, so if I wanted to write an app, I would have to learn the language, figure out how to display the data and collect user input from the screen, write the data tables and the code to update it etc. etc.
There was no question of learning SQL or raw file system I/O to manipulate data - there was no ORM or framework to fall back on. Until Windows came along, there was no standard on UI or UX principles. It was all 'build it as you go'.
Some of those older habits die hard. Though I use ORMs almost all the time now, I still find myself experimenting with queries in raw SQL before translating them to my ORM of choice. I still have a hard time separating my front end code, or the design elements thereof, for someone else to do, because I am so used to doing it myself.
Somehow, I still feel the need for ownership of all aspects of my application stack, and will often spend an inordinate amount of time learning about something that I am not familiar with. As I said before, Old habits die hard.
So, while I don't often refer to myself as a 'full stack developer', I do routinely say that I 'do it all, including making the coffee and sweeping the floor in the server room'.
Yes! Thank you. I never know what to call myself. I just signed a comment as "broad-spectrum software developer", but your description is more accurate.
We catch the things that fall between the cracks; we are the glue that binds together the things that fall apart; we are the toolmakers, the automaters, the pinch-hitter sysadmins; we are problem solvers, the ones that do whatever it takes - and if we don't know how, we learn.
Exactly right. Back in the day you had to know a lot more to get stuff done. You didn't have databases as a service with built in public APIs, authentication, etc.
Younger devs have it made in that regard. And the amount of tutorials and quality are amazing these days. They do have a lot more technologies to learn though.
Full stack is just new age lingo, and sure why not. We say AI (shudder) these days instead of ML, we say devops instead of sysadmin, we say cloud instead of vps/hosting.
Times change and so does language, true to any old fart out there, and the old farts to be.
Apparently the new hotness is AI. The last five years have seen titles with similar(ish) roles evolve from Data Scientist -> ML Engineer -> AI Engineer
I studied AI back in the 1990s, but these days it seems to be called ML everywhere. To me, ML sounds like the new hot name (of course it existed back then, but it was less commonly used).
No, no, that's just today speak for "systems developer". Really, someone who can dev/debug run-times for any languages, write C10K networking code, write good Haskell code, do wonders with average SQL RDBMSes, suffer through JS, and put together a complete solution.
I actually like the term "full stack developer". I take it to mean: can handle anything from assembly to HLL and everything in between.
I always took "full stack" to imply web stack, like MEAN or LAMP. Maybe I'm misusing it, but I tend to call myself a full stack developer and I don't know a lot about assembly or low-level languages like C.
It's such an insufficient title when your product is a robot and the database is closer to the top of the stack than bottom. I gave up on titles a few years ago when I began to realise that so much of it feels fitting of the dot com era but not today.
It's a thing, isn't it? I mean, as words and phrases go, it at least means something, like not just front-end, back-end, or client-side view-model reducer mapping specialist. AI is much close to fully content-free.
I've jokingly referred to myself as "full stack from transistors upwards" - I've done (professionally) a little bit of everything all the way from chip design to web server administration.
no, it only seems that way because the powerful silicon valley and finance giants are the only ones with access to the top-tier young talent. the rest of the young people out there are inexperienced and not that smart, and definitely aren't worth a six figure salary.
so everyone else just hires older people, but it isn't sexy and marketable to the impressionable technology crowd.
You also can't get away with demanding the same work conditions or work/life balance from an older person than you can from a 21 year old CS graduate who's very eager to impress and has little other commitments to attend to.
I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week. You build it, you support it so keep your phone and laptop by you at all times outside of work" shtick that a lot of tech companies beat the young guy devs with.
> I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week.
Yes, because we've fallen for that bullshit before, killed ourselves to meet the deadline, and found that the asshole manager made it artificially short to "motivate" us, and the other teams aren't even finished yet :)
I've read his Mythical Man Month book, including parts of the anniversary / silver jubilee edition, but it's been a while. A couple of questions:
- Was the toolsmith idea about some people in the team building tools, that others in the team use for the project? - and if so, what was the benefit cited - specialization?
- What was the second system effect about? I know I can google, but interested to read your take on it first.
"Was the toolsmith idea about some people in the team building tools, that others in the team use for the project? - and if so, what was the benefit cited - specialization?"
Yep. The benefit is efficiency. However, modern SCRUM advocates simply advocate grinding away at stories.
"What was the second system effect about?"
The glittering new rewrite of an existing system is usually overengineered and worse. Seen it several times.
Interesting about the 2nd point, thanks. Might make for interesting reading if there are any articles about that. Intuitively, I would have thought that a second system (rewrite of the first) may be better due to lessons learned.
>Intuitively, I would have thought that a second system (rewrite of the first) may be better due to lessons learned.
And at least in one case, it was: in a C database middleware product that I worked on, as the team leader. It did work earlier but had big issues of bugs, slowness, memory leaks, and maintainability. There were many reasons for that, including complete freshers put to work in it (a mistake). After me and a small new team took over, we improved it a lot and fixed all those issues. It went on to become a much more successful product, deployed somewhat widely within the company, for client projects ...
> Or for that matter for a 60-year-old artist or craftsperson to "still" pursue their craft.
I still find it rare for 50 or 60-something designers to still be actively hands-on designing purely as a designer. At a certain point, a lot of the ones I know of migrate into creative direction and ideation, delegating the hands-on work to younger designers. It actually scares me a tad because I like being hands-on and generally dislike focusing my time on managerial activities, but it's always going to be hard to just limit oneself in that role as the younger generation will always be a little bit faster and more talented.
Faster? Probably. Faster at making mistakes, certainly. More talented? Absolutely not. That's the myopia of SV's cult of youth.
We're all running the same hardware, and there is very little that does not get better with experience.
If you want an analogy in a different field, consider Dale Chihuly. From his wiki page:
>In 1976, while Chihuly was in England, he was involved in a head-on car accident during which he flew through the windshield.[6] His face was severely cut by glass and he was blinded in his left eye. After recovering, he continued to blow glass until he dislocated his right shoulder in a 1979 bodysurfing accident. No longer able to hold the glass blowing pipe, he hired others to do the work. Chihuly explained the change in a 2006 interview, saying "Once I stepped back, I liked the view," and pointed out that it allowed him to see the work from more perspectives and enabled him to anticipate problems faster. Chihuly describes his role as "more choreographer than dancer, more supervisor than participant, more director than actor."
There is no inherent reason a more managerial position involves less creativity. It can frequently enable more.
Honestly, I'd rather be led by a "dinosaur" programmer than some marketing or MBA geek any day. At least then I know that my boss would go to bat for me when it's clear something is achievable within the capacities of the team or department. I've worked for too many clowns that think computers are magic boxes where you just whisper a few words into then you get a fully fleshed out platform out of it. Seriously, it should be a legal requirement that you have at least a year of experience in the profession you'll be acting as manager in.
The management track seems unsustainable anyway if the projected career path is seen as Developer -> Manager with no alternative, unless you just keep adding layers of management.
Totally agree. I'm a partner in a small business and I don't have to do any programming but I enjoy it so I dedicate at least 50%. I also run some accounts myself and provide strategy and leadership in addition to the sr. programming. I manage my team too.
There is a notion that the next step should be to not do any programming and be a manager. All that does is ensure you have extra layers. I have respect as a manager because I'm still current and more skilled technically than my team. If I leave my craft my skills will decline and I wont be able to help my team accelerate in skillset. You're a better manager if you're also a subject matter expert.
You should move out of low value programming but I don't think giving it up is good.
