American politicians, deliberately or out of incompetence, use the crisis of the moment and conveniently forego this topic.

I’m convinced the next US administration HAS to do something about this. I don’t see a way that doesn’t involve both spending cuts and raising taxes.

I don’t like discussing politics on HN, but I think this should be deeply concerning for anyone interested in start ups, technology, or innovation. All of our innovation is enabled by having a somewhat functioning democracy, courts, cops, civic culture, where people have the opportunity to critically think about hard problems and innovate, because they’re not worried so much about near term survival.

Grab the popcorn for ten years until US divorces. States don't get along anymore, and Feds are out of control.

Democracy - when do I get to vote on the current two war fronts?

Courts - long history of corruption, particularly against minorities. No lawyer in local courts and you lose. Feds have ridiculous rate of plea bargains.

Cops - and govts have broad immunity against lawsuits to hold them accountable. Defund the FBI was relevant for the last five decades, and they keep spying on Americans because we allow it.

Culture - free to choose what you ingest.

In fact, we had military and private contractors commit war crimes, and even the ethical folks did things that contributed to millions getting displaced.

We redefined how we classify male civilians. If you’re a male and end up being in the wrong place, you’re just another casualty and classified as a militant.

Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush clan did some truly horrific things. Kidnapping people with any kind of trial. Dropping bombs in Western Pakistan on weddings because there’s some suspected leader of an organization we don’t like, even if they simply aren’t terrorists but don’t want America in the region.

Saying it “doesn’t work” is a stretch, no?

The large tech companies all give similar technical interviews for software engineers. Today, most people hired through this process are probably “good enough”.

And by what metric do I mean good enough? These companies are mostly demonstrating some acceptable level of growth. At the end of the day, that’s all their shareholders care about.

We won’t have meaningful change unless there’s an incentive. You think something is broken, but the key decision makers don’t agree.

Source: 10+ years in big tech

For what it’s worth, I learned to code in grade school.

I wasn’t terrible at my job, and left in that principal role.

Not sure how conclusive my anecdote is, but I 100% do not believe there’s a strong relationship with starting to code earlier in life and being a better coder, engineer, or general employee than someone who started in college or even much later in life.

I think it’s even simpler than this white/black belt metaphor.

Driving your career forward requires delegation, scaling yourself through others. Doing this effectively requires having strong opinions. The author is referring to these opinions as elitism, which is jarring to me. It could be elitism or simple pragmatism.

Quite a few posts here are referring to code quality. People often forget that programmers aren’t paid to write the prettiest code or have the most beautiful abstractions. VALUE is what we want to produce.

I once found myself insulting a monolithic code base only to later realize that mess of a code base has shipped in over 10 million devices and a product rated over 4.5 stars on Bestbuy, Amazon, and many more retailers. It’s entire ecosystem had directly and indirectly generated billions of dollars in sales.

Meanwhile, my own teams’ clean code with well thought abstractions hadn’t generated any revenue at all. In fact, this other “piece of shit” that came before paid for all our compensation.

Everything was directly meaningful to me, insofar as it provided someone value, gave me money for sustenance, and/or was something I was personally extremely interested in.

Meaningful is a relative concept, and I sincerely hope people in this thread don’t fall in a trap of comparing what they’re doing so what others are or are not doing.

But, on point: "Meaningful is a relative concept, and I sincerely hope people in this thread don’t fall in a trap of comparing what they’re doing so what others are or are not doing."

I almost did. I've been feeling like I need to keep on grinding and moving on to more and more lustrous work, for some reason. Perhaps its to feel like I'm not "falling behind" in the "pack?" Perhaps I simply have too much time to ruminate, and not enough other tasks and hobbies to "round out" my life. Nonetheless, I've caught myself. Thank you.

With age, I'm adopting your point of view: work is simply to live. If it's work you're interested in and has tolerable-to-good coworkers, all the better. If not, well that leaves me to find "meaning" elsewhere/some other source of the "everything is on track" emotion.

I think we're all insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Our work simply makes no difference in the world, and serves only to keep the commerce machine churning -- till we die. In a previous time this notion would've been harrowing, but now it has no weight. That's simply life.

A good friend, through years of soul-searching, has taken to "altruism" via local non-profits and just being a good person to those within his personal sphere. Something about it rings of depth and goodness, in comparison to the usual and shallow bombast that rings empty from all those spouting about "revolutionizing," "changing the status quo," and "making the world a better place."

I feel the latter is simply done for the self, while the former is truly a self-sacrificing act. Perhaps being a decent human being towards those around you is the most meaningful thing you can ever do. It certainly doesn't have the manic high of "I'm doing something important, something impactful, and something BIG!" It's a mellow and tranquil feeling -- one too weak to get high off of. So why does he go through with it? I think its because he's purposefully developed a moral fiber. It's not grand, nor does it excite, but it's coming to be one of the only aspects I truly respect in others.

Achievement, accomplishment, importance, prestige, and so on, is all just grift in the end. A massaging of reality to make others perceive you in a different light so your ego/self-worth/emotional need is satisfied. Whereas a detached decency towards one's fellow man is not so.

American politicians will drag their heels at times to address issues impacting Americans, but criticizing Israel shows them immediately speak up.

I think that’s dangerous, and we have to overturn that. And the idea of any particular race being “Gods chosen people” is unacceptably racist. An Israeli person is no better than a person of any other nationality. They are not above criticism. And if your religion says it is, we need to work to completely remove any influence your religion has on our government. Racism is racism, period.

To be fair - the Unix market is different than iOS apps. And on Windows, anyone could run whatever program… which caused a lot of problems and financial loss. And just because Windows or Unix used those models, why are they the one and only acceptable model?

The only developers on the iPhoneOS platform at that point worked for Apple, or jailbroke and used reverse engineered APIs, or built web applications.

You seem to be implying that there was some happy era of open native iPhone application development before Apple ruined it all with the App Store, but that’s simply not true.

The major point is that just because Apple is now able to abuse their control over the ios platform (and now mac too), developers (and consumers) should not be willing to submit to such exploitation.

A smart phone is a general purpose computer, with built-in telephony. We use it like any other computer to do multiple tasks. Developers and consumers have always been free to develop or install on computers in the last few decades before Apple, after its popularity with the ios platform, decided to abuse its control and removed this option after finding a business model to further exploit developers and its consumers.

To be clear - just because some exploitive business practice has gained ground, doesn't mean we developers and consumers have to continue to accept it as some kind of new normal practice. If you don't think the current practice is abusive and exploitive to developers and consumers, then please present your argument for the same as that is what we are discussing here.

iPhone development was never open; Apple did not “remove this option”. No Android phone was available to the public before the App Store launched. Apple were by no means the first to act as gatekeepers for a platform; this is something that has been commonplace for decades. This is not a business practice that has “gained ground”; it is something that has been with us for a very long time before the App Store existed. The App Store is a continuation of a theme that has existed and thrived for decades.

If you want to argue that it’s no good – that’s fine, make that argument. But don’t rest it on a foundation of “everything was open and good before Apple created the App Store” because it’s simply factually untrue.

I started learning Rust and C++ at the same time, coming from a world of Java, Python, and Ruby.

If I need to solve a problem in C++, I would much rather write Rust because the compiler actively screams at you when you do bad things.

And in my opinion, the challenging part is learning what those bad things are. In other languages, the compiler doesn’t care. You immediately see your program crash or things fail in subtle, hard to reproduce ways later in production. Rust changes that model.

I disagree with you on the documentation. I think the Rust documentation is superb. I have yet to see any language give nearly as meaningful information when your code fails to compile. Secondly, Rust front loads and throws issues immediately in your face, as opposed to having you discover problems in your code at runtime. I don’t think that makes Rust difficult - it’s forcing you to think about your choices. And particularly it’s making you think about concepts that perhaps you completely overlooked in other languages - thinking about stack vs heap allocation, moving semantics, shared ownership, etc.

If you want to quickly prototype something, Rust isn’t the best language IMO. But if I have a choice between C++ and Rust, I’d go with Rust anyday. If I was starting a new project from scratch and it was more of a web service, I might go with another language over Rust only because I’m more of an expert in Java, Python, etc. and it’s easier to hire developers for those languages than Rust.

But I’m biased. Rust has a special place in my heart. It’s the first language I’ve learned in many years where I felt some sense of accomplishment and did not at all feel like “Oh great, another tool that fundamentally doesn’t add value.”

For my use cases involving Java and iOS interoperability in a multi threaded environment, nothing else came even close.