The best-run company I ever worked with took what I thought was a sensible approach to optimization:

We were working on a complicated production system with hundreds of individual components and intense uptime requirements. The vast majority of the programmers (about 1000) were to focus on writing "robust" code that worked in an "obvious", easy-to-maintain way. The Performance Engineering team would look at system metrics (everything was instrumented) to find the actual performance bottlenecks. Then they would send in a crack team of commando programmers to do trippy, non-obvious optimizations on very small pieces of code.

The idea was, in a complicated system it's very unlikely that your specific piece of code is going to be the limiting factor in overall system performance. So it's better to have less performance-optimal but more robust code in most places; and to use fast but brittle code only where absolutely necessary.

FWIW, the company in question is outlandishly profitable, and their software is widely considered the best in their industry.

Amen.

Imho,

coding : developing software :: typing : writing literature

Buildings large & complex enough to require a structural engineer generally aren't built by carpenters. Afaik (I don't work in construction) for large steel frame or ferroconcrete building there is role equivalent to the master carpenter on a wooden project - a single person who in theory could build the entire building by himself.

The considerably majority - tho by no means all - of the CS majors I have worked with couldn't design a clean, elegant API if their job depended on it. Alas, it never does.

Depends where you are. In my experience, what you say is very true on the East Coast. However in California it's not true at all, and I think out here not having a CS degree might even be a slight advantage.

Can we stop using the pejorative term "coding" as tho it were equivalent to "programming" or "developing software"? Coding is for code monkeys.

It's the vast majority of our first-hand experience. Covers at least five major American cities, both coasts and the Rustbelt.

Yeah - lick that boot!

So the law makes the cops above the law. Sorry bud, legal-formalist arguments don't change the functional reality: the cops are not held to the same standards of conduct they brutally enforce on the people.

Nah dude, that's just a bigmedia bullshit line. In my first-hand experience, and in the experience of many other people with whom I've spoken, the vast majority of police are scum sucking bullies who prefer harassing decent citizens over confronting real criminals. That's my experience as a middle class white guy, and most people say the police abuse is even worse if one is poor and/or brown.

Too bad (TLA-sponsored?) spam has made it impractical for an individual to operate their own mail server.

So what you're saying is, "due process" is utterly and miserably failing at its intended purpose?

It's not really a big deal as a one off thing, because any damned fool who will open his eyes can see no special skills are required to drive passengers in an ordinary car. The function of the professional license in this case is to restrict employment mobility, nothing else.

FWIW, I don't plan on asking my local DMV. There's a 4-hour line to do anything there... and I'm 99% sure after waiting in that line, they'd tell me they don't know or care why a professional license is required. Either that, or they'd tell me there is another 2-hour line to wait in if I want someone to tell me they don't know/care. SF DMV is a texbook example of government inefficiency, sloth, and intransigence.

Depending what you mean by "limo" - is it a regular black Lincoln Town Car, or is it one of those 50ft long behemoths? - some special skill may be required. Certainly I imagine driving a city bus would be rather more challenging than driving an ordinary car.