I empathize with this cause circumstances often force us to move to a less than ideal location, but with everyone doing RTO again since 2 or 3 years ago, you slashed a huge percentage of the job opportunities out there.
I would say you can take opposite route as well. Become even more of a T-shaped engineer than you were before. For me that meant transitioning to vertical roles (i.e., performance engineering) rather than backend engineering. Sure, an AI can understand every level of the stack but reasoning up and down at every level of abstraction still has a human element to it (at least for now).
>http-request-validator is infinitely superior to “zephyr”
Is it though? How are you going to differentiate between 10 different variations of http-request-validator repos on GitHub? I think both have their downsides, but making the name super generic sounding is arguably worse. What I don't like about names like zephyr is that they're purely marketing-driven; people end up picking a zephyr over a http-request-validator purely because the name is sounds "cool" to them, even though http-request-validator might actually be the better library. And don't even get me started on people naming their projects random Japanese words.. it's like the equivalent of nicknames that Thai people use, which are just random English words like Ice Cream or Thank You.
Maybe the happy medium is, like you said, names that contain a hint as to what they do, like Actix (actor model). But TBH you kind of still have to look it up to know what it does, there's no way you're just going to infer that. Maybe later on it helps you remember what it was for though.
> don't even get me started on people naming their projects random Japanese words
But words help us learn. How many times do you notice a connection between some word from your childhood and an adult concept or place? And they're not random, people choose things because of many hidden reasons, but random is rarely the case.
Many of us love the story behind a word - as shown by many of the comments here reflecting on the cultural history behind our tool names.
IMO you should just transfer internally to a Deep Learning related team. That’s the path I’m taking, and while I wait for my new start date, I’m reading the important research papers etc. It shouldn’t take you as long as you think.
>Any software developer can access GitHub and StackOverflow - can they do it in a single shot as quickly as GPT?
I think the answer to this question is yes? If the developer can find a working example that they can copy paste (which is what GP is saying GPT-4 is essentially doing).
It’s actually just as likely for GPT-4 to have pasted a broken code example than a working one; it doesn’t understand if the code is correct.
>It seems like Asian cultures are much less likely to treat housing as an investment
Isn’t China one of the most prominent examples of using real estate as investment? There’s even whole ghost towns of apartment buildings that are constructed for this purpose.
yea all my Chinese (in China) relatives assume you should only invest in housing. And then when we tell them we have zero investment properties, they get really, really concerned for our future welfare and think that we're not doing very well.
No, domestic savers have capital controls and do not have the means to move money easily outside the country. The stock market also is not reliable in China as an avenue of investment. Government pensions are also small. So that mostly leaves real estate.
Evergrande Group is emblematic of the real estate industry’s trouble there. Property is 15-30% of Chinese GDP and much of it goes towards investment property.
I tend to be biased towards what Jeremy Siek himself markets as "Proven in the classroom" when it comes to book authors in CS. Many book authors lack this experience and simply write for themselves, which is ok, but can result in bad didactics. Good teachers and authors from academia are invaluable.
That's a great point about experience teaching the topic. (I've written a few articles where I certainly wished for that experience.)
I just wish textbooks didn't have their own bad tendencies: they have pablum as an attractor, because on average students just want to get through the class, not doing too much worse than average among the other students. Even without this problem, there's a more basic one: like with enterprise software, the decision to buy the book is not typically up to the user. "Will people actually want to read this on their own time?" is a strong driver of quality, even though it has pitfalls too.
I would advise not looking at libraries as a beginner; because they’re meant to be as generic as possible, they tend to abuse the type system and are overall a lot harder to parse for a beginner. Stick to reading the Rust code for standalone programs.
Yeah, gRPC is mainstream at this point -- much better to generate API clients when you can, instead of hand-rolling your own, especially as the number of engineers and teams in an organization grow.
