must-read book Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

On Sun, 11 Feb 2018 08:54:08 -0800, John Larkin wrote: [...]

Trouble sleeping, John? ;)

This just looks like yet another inadequate, underachieving female bitching about how men have held her back from her (as she sees it) magnificent destiny. Far too much of this sort of nonsense being given undue credence these days IYAM. She needs to get back in the kitchen.

"... which has spread into..."??? Wasn't Intel, formed of the Traitorous Eight, ground zero for this mentality? So it's been there all along.

Try getting on Hacker News and noting that the present SiVa boom is completely dependent on low interest rates and limited employment for young males a few times. They don't wanna hear that...

If you have not, see "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", a BBC essay-film-series by Adam Curtis. It's free on YouTube, when last I checked.

He generalizes ( probably to excess ) the SiVa mentality to much of the more pernicious ideas in the culture. It's a(n information-) noisy, messy film but it contains a pretty good idea or two.

Curtis is a bit of a crackpot/crank but he's easy to disagree with for some reason. Disagreement won't be all that significant. I hear in him Adam Smith saying: "The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it"

When I showed the fillum to the Fambly Biologist, who had become extremely dissatisfied[1] with biology in grad school, she gave it four thumbs up and said it's largely true w.r.t biology.

If they gave an Olympics in sleeping, I'd win the Gold. I do a lot of my best work while I'm asleep. Excellent engineering at zero apparent effort.

Sounds like you don't like women who are right.

Yes, from the beginning. My experience with non-USA semiconductor people is that they have inherited the vulture culture.

The aerospace people, by contrast, are gentlemen.

Most qualities that make a "good programmer" in 2018 have little to do with how ingenious or clever you can make the stuff you type into the box; compilers are very good at this point, CPU horsepower is plentiful and premature optimization is the root of all evil. It's not easy to write high-performance code but it takes concerted effort to write truly poor performing code in most languages.

The most valuable skills probably have to do with a) is your software based on solid design principles b) how well you can justify that design/explain your reasoning to others and c) how easily someone can come in fresh and read your documentation and understand the principles of the design. Which if you have no interest in people and little experience interacting with them socially is going to be a tough row to hoe.

There will always be a place for the seriously schizoid hotshots, e.g. physics code for games needs to eek out every bit of performance. A physics engine coder might be insulted if you sullied his labor with anything as mundane as _gameplay_.

Also the problem with being totally disinterested in people is that you usually end up thinking you're a lot better than you actually are, without any metric to judge your performance how can you semi-objectively judge.

Software used to be fun and novel but then a lot of the industry got lame and cynical, like hey let's build a grocery store list app for a phone with Bluetooth integration, sell that shit for $2.99 on the app store and hope to get bought out by the Big G for $50 mil in 14 months.

I think a lotta women bailed out on that scene because "on average" they don't value the bignum bills as highly vs. not getting your soul crushed to get 'em. Who can blame 'em, I don't. Seems like most of the "angel" VC funders in the Valley aren't even tech educated people anymore they're like MBAs and pundits and famous bloggers and various Wall Street investment bank weenies after some fast bucks

Got a feeling this guy has been microwaving his own Hungry Man dinners for a looooooong time lol

Sounds like you don't like women who are right.

Au contraire! I have the greatest respect for women who excel in any technical field - because they're so rare!

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My company's management and QC is all women, as are half of my engineers. It just happened that way, and it works fine.

eople

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In other news, we can now start flushing people down the toilet, most of th em seem to originate there anyway.

I'm reading "Coders at Work", which is a bunch of interviews with famous programmers. What's impressive is how ad-hoc they are, with no obvious systematic approaches, sometimes bottom-up, sometimes top-down; they just sort of do it. Many of them have no formal, or informal, training in CS or EE or anything. I doubt that many know what a state machine is.

I've known a few extremely good female programmers. The best three or four PCB layout people that I've worked with were women. Anybody who thinks women don't have visual-spatial skills should try knitting.

Not so much.

Loran got their asses chewed to the tune of over $450M for stealing proprietary IP from ViaSat when they built and packaged their satellite for launch.

Now that they have paid, we are likely to contnue to see elements of the IP they stole incorporated into their future endeavors.

It was, after all... top technology and still is. Truly state of the art.

I guess, however, that one could still argue that they are 'gentlemen' as they paid up on the findings.

I doubt, however, that the relationship between them and ViaSat remains in place any longer.

From the NYT review:

Most people who have done something noteworthy enough to be interviewed probably didn't have a lot of examples to work from.

Top-down/bottom up is a legit thing to mix up, tho. Start with the risk items.

Unsurprising. Software people are very often blind to determinism in general.

FSM are not a widely understood technique in software. God only knows why. Even the people who know about them often think they are always equivalent to regular expressions.

"Famous programmers" are also usually good self-promoters and one might argue have a vested interest in keeping up the appearance of being completely self-taught wunderkinds who make magic happen without hardly trying.

I'd take a big grain of salt with any statements guys like that make about how they actually go about their work in practice, it may or may not have any congruence to reality. Saying "Yeah I learned most of what I know from consistently applying techniques from texts X, Y, and Z and I've learned from experience what particular design patterns apply to what problems and then I try those first" doesn't make a very good story.

You can buy excellent books about software design from a non-ad hoc perspective but they're mostly not written by famous coders.

I'll confirm that from personal experience. They may dimly remember FSMs as being "something to do with compilers".

Sigh.

I know a fair number of degreed coders under the age of 30, even, and I'd say close to none of them don't know what a FSM is.

They have their uses in specific domains, but also major downsides, the big ones are that they're not Turing-complete and don't really allow you to work with "high level" patterns or meta-programming, they scale poorly (number of required states balloons geometrically with linearly increasing problem complexity), they're difficult to synchronize in multi-threaded environments (how do I guarantee FSM #1 and FSM #2 which need to access the same resource without deadlocking will be in the appropriate states to do so, simultaneously?)

I was surprised when I first came across such ignorance, since before that all programmers I worked with knew FSMs and used them where appropriate.

System design :)

But ignorance is more widespread than FSMs. I was unpleasantly surprised at how many youngsters couldn't give a /simple/ pseudocode explanation of what happens at assembly level when invoking a procedure with arguments. They had never looked to see how the magic worked.

I've used and even written multitasking RTOS's, but we don't use multitasking in our (non-Linux) products. A main state-machine loop and some interrupt handlers is all we need.

My embedded programmer guy is great (and he's an EE) but he is reluctant to make things go fast. We have a power sinewave generator that uses software DDS on an LPC1768 (small ARM) and I want him to run the IRQ/DDS at 200 KHz, which seems modest to me. We'll add a scope test point to the existing code and see how long it actually runs.

Most programmers have no idea, not within 50:1, how long it takes a block of code to run.

I've done test point analysis of Linux systems too, to see how big of time slices the OS steals from apps. Measuring that is about the only way to estimate.

The Code Red Eclipse tools for the LPC17xx have a fairly nifty profiling view.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Ditto, but nowadays I like to stay away from interrupts (and caches) if I can, so as to preserve hard realtime properties. (See my other posts about the many-multicore XMOS xCORE processors and xC/Occam)

Well, it is better to get it right but slow, rather than fast but wrong.

With the XMOS toolchain you don't have to measure: the IDE examines the optimised object code, and states exactly how long each path takes down to a 10ns resolution. The "dedicate a core to each peripheral" approach means that "interrupt" latency (really wakeup latency) is 1 clock cycle (10ns).

With caches, interrupts, and NUMA memory, are you /really/ surprised; I'd just say that was good judgement :)

Agreed. And that's unsatisfactory in my eyes, since you are unlikely to observe the worst case - and therefore have to /guess/ how much of a frig factor to add.

But I don't want linux near my peripherals; linux is for USB/ethernet/monitors etc. My peripherals deserve an RTOS or FSM, and messaging to/from linux :)

OTT? You betcha!