[HN Gopher] Be in a field where tech is the limit ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-07 23:00 UTC)