Going out of your way to use functional languages at work seems a bit like deliberately using a fountain pen and purposefully writing all business communication in a handwritten beautiful cursive style - it's kind of a cute affectation rather than actually of benefit

I have never seen a group of people so frantically doing nothing of any value.

In regards your comment about the Canadian idea of 'Professional Engineers' we have the same thing in the UK but it's called 'chartered engineers' and there are (more in theory than in practice) requirements around ethical and legal issues. This isn't really used in the same way I think it's used in Canada. I have worked with CEng people and I was going to go through the process (you need two sponsors you work with and you need a STEM degree that is recognised and you need 6 years of relevant experience). It's not an easy thing to get but it's not a guarantee someone is a genius or totally reliable but I haven't really seen anyone with that behaving in a way that is completely unreliable.

I wonder if it might be something to do with 'start up culture' where you've got very small teams and they're often young. You can't really tell kids to 'do a degree, get 6 years experience, qualify...then make your 'uber for milkshakes'' (or whatever they are planning to do). If you've got really young applicants you can't really expect that.

to be clear, CEng doesn't even require an exam, although everyone who would be in a position to become CEng has already done a lot of exams.

Perhaps the Leetcode thing must exist if people just refuse to qualify and want to get busy quickly. I think that is totally fine if you're making 'Uber for milkshakes' or similar but if someone is doing something that requires some responsibility then probably better to have people be vetted by accepted peers.

I studied CS at UCL years ago but worked mostly in teams with electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineers and on projects relating to various things in relation to various different industries as different as pharmaceutical and ship building. During that time I got qualified as a CAD engineer among other things I was required to by my employer(s).

Now, when I look at software jobs and the way software developers are being interviewed...I just can't. You would never ask eg a mechanical engineer in an interview 'so, you say you know SolidWorks? Ok, design me a sphere with a chamfered cylinder extruded from the centre of the top. It should be chamfered at a 46 degree angle to a plane passing through the centre of the sphere. Also, sweep a five pointed star around the sphere at the point that is midway above the plane and the top of the sphere'.

This is effectively what Leetcode tests etc are asking. It is a waste of everyone's time because they will either do it and think 'ok, that was weird' or they will refuse and think the company is insane.

There should just be accepted certifications for software development AND THEY SHOULD BE HARD. They should be very much failable and you should expect good people still to fail once or twice (like engineering or medical exams). Then just ignore the Leetcode stuff. It serves no-one.

Then all it really comes down to is frameworks etc and if someone is familiar with that particular framework or not. Just let people qualify out of this stupid algorithmic vetting process because it's utterly daft in the context of most jobs.

There are plenty of reasons that a department within a company will prefer spreadsheets. Software is not the answer to everything and also this is the same problem you get when Microsoft introduces those pesky 'Power App' developers etc or previously the Sharepoint 'web parts' etc....essentially someone who kind of feels they are the 'owner' of some information then decides to formalise the process in their own little way.

Now you have a person wasting a bit of time making their little tool but you've also got people complaining that someone's now essentially taken control of it etc. At a former employer our procurement team used spreadsheets to track basically everything but importantly everything on our PCBs - every single component and their suppliers and prices etc (various factories around China usually). This would have been a horrible thing to try and formalise in a web app just because of how often they were all changing their own conventions etc (often suppliers changing what information they gave to them, too). It would have been a wild goose chase to formalise it and more than the trouble it would be worth.

I think this is actually quite interesting when Unity itself has recently posted a tutorial on using its AI tools for the AI generation of a Nintendo character called Ness (main character in an old Snes game called Earthbound if you're not familiar)...seems a bit of a double standard if the complaint IS in fact in relation to trademark infringements.

I saw a podcast where the main guy behind Claude Code, Boris, just casually explained that at Anthropic where there are some software developers using sometimes multiple 6 figure values in dollars PER MONTH on their tokens for running their swarms of Claude agents...that might make you some kind of productivity guru but try going to your CFO and asking for these kinds of figures from each software developer PER MONTH...they will spit coffee out in your face and burst out laughing.

It would be the equivalent of saying 'yeah we want a new CAD and design management package that we basically prompt and it does everything for us'

'How much is it?'

'Well, upwards of 7 figures per year, per design engineer, and we have about 400 design engineers'.

'You want half a billion pounds, per year, so you can all play with your imaginary friends? No...piss off and get back to work'

The reason is as you have described. We are getting close to where the numbers of people with practical experience working in, managing, and designing things like the work processes and factory layouts in industries that build physical products are disappearing. We're losing a lot of capable practical engineers with hands on experience. We can keep the universities going teaching the physical subjects but those lecturers wouldn't know even where to begin on designing and building efficient factories unfortunately.

We'd probably end up having to get Chinese and Taiwanese businesses to outsource their 'experts' back to us in order to actually do this and pay them a fortune - basically the reverse of what was happening in the manufacturing sector in the 80s and 90s!

In the UK we even have protected and quite difficult to achieve things like 'chartered engineer' which similar to 'chartered accountant' etc originates from royal charter but it carries with it ethical and legal implications etc. You need a STEM degree and 6 years relevant professional experience before you can even consider applying lol. I am not chartered but have worked with many CEng engineers.

It is easily the weirdest thing about HN that Americans seem to equate writing code/handling infrastructure to designing eg Superyachts or Peristaltic pumps - 2 things I've done as an 'engineer'!

How many times have you had a coworker/boss/user ask for something totally nonsensical, impossible, or maybe even illegal? These people when they get unleashed on these agents and on large business problems are going to be a menace. They will create walls and heaps and mountains of working but totally stupid code as the AI attempts to work with their malformed attempts at a 'thought' and this will pollute github and the codebase for training...eventually it will outnumber serious, professionally written projects and you will reach an inflection point at which AI coding agents 'peak' and they begin to deteriorate.

Either that or you need to somehow ensure you are not training on AI written code but that too will cause a PR problem for the firms as it becomes obvious that AI cannot in fact replace developers?

For example, I have worked with SAP a lot...the largest ERP system in the world by some margin and I have used it's internally built tools that extend a small amount of developer functionality to the 'IT department developer' that gives a user with knowledge or .NET and SQL the chance to make little validations or do some bespoke data visualisations pretty quickly. This was trivially easy and pretty sure AI tools will make a developer redundant in this context because the documentation is good and there's a lot of it.

Contrast eg hooking up a system like SAP to an unusual non-standard Ecommerce offering and you have a far more complex problem (that interestingly doesn't require huge amounts of code but does in fact take a long time because of lack of documentation and a certain amount of understanding required). I would also point to programming games, which I enjoy...compare using Unity with some C# scripts for making games, to building your own engine (which will pretty much become redundant soon anyway if it already isn't). AI is very good on the Unity stuff but I suspect would struggle with it's own engine for a specific game.

There'll be another overhyped buzzword in a few years and we will all be expected to get excited about it and I just can't anymore. Realistically the actual business value of software has barely changed in about 20 years except for niche things in finance and R&D engineering (and I know because i've worked in R&D engineering with embedded guys).

I am just not interested in learning to deploy largely pointless AI chatbots or learn yet another web framework to make largely the same ERP or PLM etc related stuff I've done before in the 'framework d'hier'

i'm enjoying making games on the side and I'd like to monetize one soon, but I look at 'tech' careers and I just rapidly lose the will to live now. 30 minutes on linkedin is enough to make most people feel nauseous and need to lie down.

For example I think a lot of 'good' climbers with several multi pitch climbs behind them could do this building fairly comfortably with ropes and really the only thing interesting about this is he did it without safety equipment which is frankly just a bit daft.

(I have climbed pretty extensively in the UK and also in Yangshuo China). I was kind of 'intermediate/good' at one point.

This is kind of how it translates in English:

'Light light moon green grass mountain snow sun together'

For an entire book. It's totally nonsensical but the writing in Chinese at that time was just a bit like that. Classical Chinese sort of seems to have been written more like the way rappers put together their battling rhymes sometimes - you aren't meant to understand it

Being a proud Cornish surfer and one of his earlier fans this saddens me. We were his first fans!

There used to be raves in Cornwall like the one in cult UK surfing classic 'Blue Juice'. They were 'lush' (i've noticed Aphex regularly says 'lush' too so is clearly from a surfer-adjacent group of friends and maybe he's just p1ssing about).