Terrifyingly complicated and buzzword packed. I really don't know what to make of any of this or what it does, and I work with AI applications in my day job.
I'm guessing the $300 of Google Cloud credit offered in this webpage wouldn't go very far using any of this stuff?
> should you invest a given hour into understanding the lowest code layer of framework X, or talk to people in the business domain?
I think talking to people in business domain is the most important thing you can do in SWE or IT in general. The business is the entire reason you write every line of code, the more you understand, the better you will be at your job.
I do find drilling down into lower layers of your software stack helpful, and can make you a better programmer, but in a much more specific way.
> Pick up yet another tech stack or simply get faster at the one you have that is "good enough"?
Both of these are programming skills and less important, IMO. Trends and technologies come and go; if they're useful/sticky enough, you'll end up having to learn them in the course of your job anyway. Tech that's so good/sticky it sticks around (e.g. react) you'll naturally end up working with a lot and will learn it as you go.
It's definitely good to have a solid understanding of the core of things though. So for react, really make sure you understand how useState, useEffect work inside and out. For Java it'll be other things.
What's most interesting to me about your point compared to parent comment's is that you're saying "statically, over all time, the most valuable thing to do among all your choices is to understand the business," whereas the parent is saying "dynamically, in this moment, what is most valuable thing to do in this iteration of my actions?"
I think your question is most interesting in terms of long term skill mix or "skill portfolio" a.k.a the career viewpoint, while the parent's is more interesting on a day-to-day basis as you navigate the state space of bringing a project to completion. On a given day, understanding the business may not be the most valuable thing to do, but to your point over the course of a job or career it probably is.
(For example, I can say that I already have sufficient business context to do my programming task for tomorrow. Asking more questions about the business would be wasteful: I need to go update the batch job to achieve the business outcome.)
EDIT: I might go one step further and say the most valuable skill is not understanding the business but understanding how to match and adapt technologies to the business (assuming you want a career as a programmer). Ultimately the business drives income, but presumably you have a job because their business requires technology. So the most valuable skill is, as efficiently as possible, making the technology do what the business needs. That's more of a balance / fit between the two than just "understanding the business."
I’ve heard from people in hiring that often 490/500 of those candidates will be from India and often aren’t actually eligible for the job. Just apply, it’s partly a numbers game.
The best way is via a referral though; if you know someone that works at a company you want to work for, you can skip a lot of the BS and often they can get a nice bonus, too.
I'm glad you had a relatively good experience but for many mid "average" software engineers, this is absolutely the case.
And by "average" I mean:
- did not go to prestigious college
- do not have 8 years of specialized experience
- have not worked at faang level company
- struggle to do multiple leetcode hards in an interview
- are not cheating with ai tools and/or straight up lying about experience
i can, with full confidence, tell you that the reports of these developers sending out hundreds (if not thousands) of applications without any progress is absolutely the norm at this moment.
You don't need to believe me, just look at the data. There's been hundreds of thousands of software developers laid off in the past years and not enough job openings to make up for it.
Hacker News monthly threads. Frequencies of Remote jobs in there rises and falls, some months have more than others. But a lot (almost all) of my income over the last few years has been from HN or references thereof
Although I use tailwind on all my projects and not once have I thought "oh boy, development is so slow because of tailwind, I sure wish it was implemented in a compiled language!"
I think it's more like "having less moving parts". In which they kinda-sorta-succeeded, except that the choice of bun seems misguided for something where you want broad adoption. And Tailwind is, by now, a product that is clearly clamoring for broad adoption (and achieving it).
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