its the things I hear from real software developers that concern me:

• You will spend your entire career chasing trends.
• The market is volatile. People are constantly getting abruptly laid off. SD has never been very stable, so you should plan on getting a new job every few years.
• Software companies are constantly looking for ways to make SD easier. As a result, your value will decrease over time, in preference for bootcampers and 2 year degree graduates.
• Nobody listens to developers. Your manager’s beliefs about SD come entirely from consultants, magazines, and Elon Musk tweets.
• Nobody cares about quality software. If you take the time to make your code efficient and lightweight, all your manager sees is you taking longer to make something than your peers. After all, we can just raise hardware requirements if the software is slow.

the more i learn about software development, the more i feel I’ve dodged a bullet by changing my major to electrical engineering.

You know, I’ve always loved C and doing my own memory management. I love learning optimization techniques and applying them.

But you know what? Everybody around me keeps saying I’m being silly. They keep telling me I won’t find any jobs like that. They say I should just swallow my juvenile preferences and go with what’s popular, chasing trends for the entire rest of my career.

I don’t think you can blame people for trending away from quality software. Its clearly against the grain.

You know, when I typically ask a question on SO, its because I want to learn how that thing works, or how to write it myself. I usually say as much, but the SO folks are too focused on the ends, they completely neglect the means. Chances are I’m already aware of that no-code solution, but that’s not what I’m asking for.

SO in a nutshell:

“I need to do X”

“Have you tried Y?”

“No, because I don’t need Y, I need X.”

“Well you can do Z if you can’t do Y.”

“OK, sure. But how do I do X?”

“Why do you need to do X?”

(Explains why in my hyper-specific situation, I need to do X, and Y and Z won’t work)

This question has been marked as a duplicate of “How to do Y”

If I could, I’d compile all my software from source. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of open source developers don’t like writing software in C, which means the burden of sorting through dependancy-hell has been deferred to my shoulders instead.

i read a blog post by a former MS employee who shed some light on the situation. apparently the windows dev team is entirely made up of junior developers. As soon as anybody gets any experience, either MS tries to promote them to management, or they leave to find a better job.

what that means is there is nobody at MS who has deep knowledge of the Windows kernel. So instead of re-writting, re-factoring or making additions, all they know how to do is add things on top of the existing OS.

windows 11 isn’ all bad. It made my mother ask me to install linux on her computer.

at least then you’re dealing with the laws of nature instead of man-made BS. if you’re like me and have 0 tolerance for BS, it’s an absolute win.

come into the light, my child. become an electrical engineer.

alright, if python is a regular screwdriver, what is C? a single iron filing?

are you sure python is a screwdriver? Its not the all new AI-driven Smart screwdriver that requires an account, wifi connection, and for you to input the name of your project before you can use it?

that may be true for CS and software development, but I think that has ended up being more harmful for other fields like electrical engineering. Kind of like how non STEM majors are too afraid to try engineering or sciences, because they all think calculus is this big scary incomprehensible thing that only einstein-level geniuses can learn. I’m seeing that same kind of fear preventing students from going into engineering because they don’t want to learn anything besides python.

there are unofficial dotnet compilers on linux, but I honestly c is just better.

buy yourself a copy of K&R 2e (The C programming language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie). Its not only a good c book, but a great beginner programming book in general. If you’re a learn by doing guy, it has a lot of exercises you do.

i normally don’t learn by reading textsbooks myself, but this book proved an exception. its inexpensive too.

Sure python may be easier to learn, but it makes learning actual programming more difficult. Ever since the CS department switched to python, my workload as a computer systems TA has doubled.

you’re not using debian? that must mean you hate freedom.

My advice is to get a hobby. Self-hosting, or home automation to name a few examples. When you have a specific goal for something you want to do, it’s a lot easier to learn.

Green Is My Pepper

an alternate timeline, where Linus didn’t make Linux open source, got rich off of it, and sold it to IBM.

sorry, i consider myself more of a Unix nerd than a GNU nerd.