1) don’t listen to strangers in internet.
2) don’t stop working. work part time on something you enjoy; no more grinding.
3) start running and complete a marathon on every continent.
Unlike human, computer is exceptionally good at remembering stuff. No need for plant recognition when you can brute force remember where you planted each individual seed.
> I also don't understand why the candidate with 10 years of industry experience decided to move forward with interviewing after being told it was for an SDE1 position.
| given the fact that I wasn’t too efficient with Java (it was not the primary tool in my past experience)
Maybe because his 10 years didn’t give him the relevant knowledge? Also, his attitudes sends a clear ”I’m a junior” message, so SDE1 might have been right call.
For one, you accepted a junior position. Then you seemed to expect to be treated as a senior.
Then you seemed to be surprised by the issues, again showing you lacked the experience of a senior. I feel you got good guidance but it feels it was not well received.
The away team experience also felt a bit juniory. Your requests we not priotorized high enough but you didn’t find the tools or means to go around it. Understanding their needs and life in general would be an indication of seniority.
Finally, I think it takes at least a year to see how you are able to cope and progress. It takes time and effort to make any changes in a huge corporation.
In the end, I think that you would not have enjoyed yourself working in that environment so you made the right call. It takes certain character traits to be able to enjoy navigating and gaming such corporate culture.
Source: ex enterpreneur with two decades of experience, atm employed in a >100k employee corporation and loving it.
In my experience junior people need to be told what the problem is and directed what to do. Seniors tend to bring up the problems along with potential options.
Actually the cable will extend well beoynd that point. 36Mm is the altitide where the elevator would be travelig at orbital speed. Jump out any lower and you will drop back to earth. Unless you jump very hard (using rockets or something).
Estimating distances robustly is very important for navigation. LIDAR is accurate at relevant distances and most importantly very robust against environmental effects. Without LIDAR you can use stereoscopic vision (like human with two eyes) but that is very demanding, not that accurate, and very error prone. Sure, human can do it somewhat well, but eye and brain are extremely complex things to implement (and it still takes years to learn to understand what you see).
Personally, I’d refuse to implement self-driving vehicle without at least a ”backup LIDAR” to check vision system results. Otherwise you are forced to assume stuff like ”things at stand still are either above the road, beside it, or just shadows”, causing crashes when there is suddenly a stopped car in front of you. (If you didn’t do that assumption, you would be dodging shadows and other clutter..)
[source: I’ve been researching vision algorithms in a related field.]
>> Without LIDAR you can use stereoscopic vision (like human with two eyes) but that is very demanding, not that accurate, and very error prone.
Because that isn't how people judge distances, at least not distances beyond a few feet in front of their faces. Plenty of people with only one eye do very well. It is a difficult problem because we use a variety of techniques and 'hardware' when estimating distances and speeds. Car companies are trying to do with one tool (ie lidar) something we do with many.
Yep, we do huge amount of assumptions to derive ”model of a world” from quite limited amount of data. And we do lots of mistakes without ever realising it. Fortunately, most of those mistakes are irrelevant, and safety margins let us correct most of the relevant mistakes. Rest become accidents.
I guess the same logic applies directly to self-driving cars as well..
> Without LIDAR you can use stereoscopic vision (like human with two eyes)
At any but very close distance, don't humans mostly use a combination of lighting cues, a priori knowledge of actual size vs. apparent size, motion parallax, and other flat-image cues instead of stereoscopy?
You can use stereoscopic using the full width of the car as the baseline instead of eye distance. Humans have a pupillary distance of about 60mm which is good for about 10 meters (possibly much more: https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191614). A Model 3 is over 6 feet in width, so the pupillary distance is thus 30 times that of humans, and so should be good to about 300 meters, which is comparable to high end LIDARs (although the stereoscopic approach won't be as precise at those distances).
Anyway, if LIDAR becomes small and cheap, Tesla can just strap it on.
That is until it rains and LIDAR falls flat on its face. LIDAR Is Great for training in perfect rainless conditions. For everything else we’ll have to use other tech, very likely camera based. Which is what tesla is doing.
Lemme use an analogy: Why is building a house not accessible to all?
Surely house building could be more like building with legos.
Building a proper house is so much more that just piling rocks mixed with mortar. You have to take into account the ground composition, moisture, light, ventilation, red tape, usability, safety, etc. In other words: it takes a huge set of skill. You can use advanced tools, like a tractor shovel for digging the base but that requires even more skill.
We just have to accept that doing complex stuff requires lots of training to do it properly. The more advanced tools you use, the more specific training you need but the more complex stuff you can build in shorter time.
As for programming. Abstract thinking and clear, explicit communication of ideas is not trivial to automate. This is problem even between two persons (just think about trying to decipher what your sales person or customer actually wants), let alone between a human and a machine. It’s a form of art, not some mechanical process you automate using an array of boxes.
Not all programming is akin to building a house. Some of it is similar to hanging a shelf in the kitchen. Why should it take an architect to drill the holes and fasten the wall plugs to hang a spice rack?
Sure it might need some training, but it should be the kind that can be explained in a DIY TV show.
Why should it take an architect to drill the holes and fasten the wall plugs to hang a spice rack?
But the person hanging the shelf should have enough of a grasp of mechanics so it doesn't fall down. They should know enough basic physics and chemistry so they don't install something prone to corroding. If they encounter asbestos or old lead paint while installing, they should know enough to know what to do about that, and what not to do.
Most of the work in programming is in describing (in very strict and pendantic terms) how different systems interact with each other and how the data flows from one end to another. The actual work of moving the data and doing all the calculations is handled by machines. In that sense, the work done in programming is designing and integrating systems, not the execution of it. In your analogy, installing a shelf would be more like installing Photoshop (which we can presumably agree is actually simpler than installing a shelf). Most people do not design their own shelf, select the most appropriate fasteners, source raw materials and send it to manufacturing to be mass-produced. A shelf is also a relatively simple piece of furniture. What about a desk-drawer or a closet? Sure, you can buy the raw materials and power tools at any hardware store, but is it trivial for anyone to actually design and build usable (and desirable) furniture from pieces of plywood?
True that, but those do-it-yourself people use different tools and methods compared to professional architects and builders. So maybe the original article should be read as ”why there are not more dedicated, simple tools for non-educated do-it-yourself tinkerers”. A sensible question as such, but I don’t buy the conclusion that we should blame the nerds / academia.
If some business owner finds a way to monetize such tools, nerds will be happy to implement. Just as those do-it-yourself fix-your-home books and tools have been monetized and implemented.
Up until the 19th century, construction was an extremely bespoke process. There was no standardization on tools and materials which made everything much more difficult. It was always hard, but it's much, much easier now -- and maybe there's a way it can be even easier still with 3D printing techniques.
Saying, we can't make it simpler is a cop-out. It used to be simpler. The question isn't whether we can do better (we know we can) but how to find the will, effort and funding to accomplish it.
I’m actually saying that we have made it simpler (compare implementing full-stack web service using punch cards vs modern languages and frameworks), but at the same time it requires more education to use the new tools and methods (one machine code manual vs all the cources and documentation those languages, algorithms, and frameworks require).
> As for programming. Abstract thinking and clear, explicit communication of ideas is not trivial to automate.
There are many more people capable of abstract and clear thinking than there are programmers. IMO we should be giving them the tools necessary for them to not build programs, but to solve problems in their field with computers.
Sure there are, but not all athletic people end up playing hockey. I don’t see how that invalidates the point that people without those qualities can not become programmers, no matter the tools available.
edit: to add, those people already have the tools they need to automate the things they want. They just lack the will to learn to use the tools.
edit2: to continue the analogy. I can drill a hole to a wall but if I need to dig a big hole, I can either learn to drive a tractor shovel or hire a professional to do it. But I’m not complaining why tractors are so hard to drive..
plain and simple: formal education gives a shitload of knowledge you rarely get otherwise (because students devote lot of time getting familiar with that knowledge in an environment that supports learning). a good dev with proper education is better than a equally capable person without the education. that said, BS degree is bs if you ask me.
