Every time something gets easier when it comes to software development, people just push things further (as they should).

Thats why no matter how many versions of Internet Explorer we stop supporting, web development is still a pain in the ass. The moment people stop doing something hard, they just take all the time they saved, and tackle something else that all of a sudden become worth it (ie: supporting mobile operating systems, optimizing stuff with webgl if its available, whatever, you name it)

Things that went from "No way, we don't have time for this!" become standard, and the cycle continues. Every minute we save because a task is automated or redundant, is a minute someone spends doing something that was once impossible. And if that person works for a competitor, you now have to catch up.

No, its not more common than I'd think. All your examples generally have a lot of people behind them, and only a fraction of those people design the API. You can have a product with 500 developers behind it, and have 1-2 people working on the API design. And thats not counting the countless people who make APIs nilly willy (I don't consider that designing an API in the same way this post isn't a hardcover novel.).

I guess it was a poor choice of wording on my part. You're right, most products involve some form of API. A (very small) subset of that actually has effort put into designing it. And of whats left, only a fraction of the developers involved in the project are actually involved in the API design. A bit how in the movie industry, only a fraction of the people involved are script writers.

Designing public APIs is not a common role. The vast majority of people who do it are not even slightly competent at it. Google? Amazon? Many other big names? All terrible. I can count the amount of good APIs Ive seen on my fingers.

And its not about being a snowflake, on the contrary. Writers, designers, movie directors...they all get rewarded in the same way for taking a random idea and publishing a nice interpretation of that idea. Finding the correct words to put on these ideas, for example, can be seen as a parallel to using appropriate method names (naming things correctly being one of the hardest problems a programmer stumbles on).

So either these things can be copyrighted, or none of them can. I'm personally fine either way, but it has to be consistent.

That will fix high turnover issues. But sooner or later, people will leave. They need change every now and then.

But since an employee that has been around a while is potentially more productive by a factor (because they already have so much domain expertise, which is often several times more important than any technical ability), delaying that by an additional year or two can provide a LOT of value...

ie: on the east coast, numbers I've seen show that the average software engineer will stay somewhere 2 years. Now, numbers out of my ass, but let say if the company's awesome, the same person will stay 4 years. Then if you know that, you can provide proper insensitives after 4 years (maybe a sabbatical, additional vacations, some retention bonus, some RSUs...whatever. Heck, a nice embroidered jacket worked for a lot of people at a company I used to be involved with). Then they stay 5 years instead of 4, and generate potentially millions in additional value.

It still gives you a unique identifier (even if its encrypted, its deterministic enough to be used as an ID even if you can't decrypt it) that lets you uniquely identify a household for a period of time. Combined with other more legit tracking methods, you can do some deliciously evil things with it...

For functional languages, the ideal is a language that supports both procedural and functional construct, so you can use either when it makes sense. Scala, and to a lesser extent C#, fit that bill quite nicely.

Dynamically typed languages are great in cases where you'd be writing all the test cases anyway. UI code is a good example. Its faster to write proper JavaScript unit tests. provided you have the necessary infrastructure, than to manually test click click click. Since you're writing all the tests anyway, then having a dynamic language has very little drawbacks.

Probably for subscription purpose... Depending on how its implemented, its not so much the code itself that can be reused, but the transaction made with it that can be "replayed". By revoking the code, you revoke the ability to replay that transaction.

Subscription services often (usually? I only worked on a few online payment systems, most did it this way but not all) don't store the credit card number itself. They just replay transactions authorization.

When I was looking for a place in Cambridge/Boston, the (few) places with FiOS access (as opposed to being stuck with Comcast) were sure to put it on the fliers or MLS descriptions. So I assume people cared.

Of course, FiOS around here is arguably worse than Comcast, which is saying something, but at least you have options if you live in one of those spots.

Its actually pretty family friendly. Having to do a lot of hours, but picking and choosing on what and when, being able to work from home almost on a whim, with only the occasional production outage (and that's only relevant if you don't have a production team).

I had a discussion about it with my family physician once (they, admittedly get screwed too, but that's the point: everyone thinks everyone else has it better). In the same areas an engineer can ask for 150k+ (can easily go over with bonuses and stuff), the family physician is making 220k~. The later actually ends up working more (much more) hours, at the office, much more on-call, and has very little flexibility, plus they get exposed to all the patients who come for a cold or a flu (flu shot isn't 100%!).

Hour for hour the engineer will have it a lot better. Lawyers on average make a little more (500k is only for the very successful private practices or stars at lawyer firms... engineers with successful startups or superstars can command that much too, bad example and its very uncommon), but again, work a lot more hours doing stuff that a lot more people think is boring (very few people will do lawyer work for free...a lot of software engineers will write open source stuff as a hobby...because its fun).

Companies don't try to "make this strategy work". They have little choice. Any easily solved problem has already been solved, probably with an open source solution out. If you want to provide any kind of value, you need to solve unsolved problems, and that's hard. You can train people to some extent, but if people don't keep up at least somewhat on their own, they'll always be in training, and then won't get anything done. The salaries are already in the top 3%~ range and keep pushing up.

When so many people make so much money, you go back to square 1: Tried buying a house in San Francisco lately? That multi-million dollar cashout from Facebook's IPO doesn't get you as far as you'd like... Go ahead, triple the salary of thousands of engineers. Everything that you want will just triple in price with it.

Do you ask a lawyer to do hackathons

No, but the ones who make as much or more money than a software engineer work batshit hours, even if they have an army of paralegals with them.

Software engineering, at least in the US, pretty much automatically ranks you in the top 3-4%~ in term of income. If you're good, you can get that without any kind of college education, and on payroll (so you don't need your own practice, and will have all the benefits and won't have to argue too much with the bank when getting a mortgage).

The only reason someone can ask for 150k a year with telecommute benefit, full coverage, bonuses, and a 9 to 5 days (and flexible schedule!), as you can get in an afternoon if you are in one of the major tech hubs and at least mediocre, is because people expect you to SOMETIMES to stuff to keep up to date. Otherwise all of the above would just be too good to be true.

Generally the idea is that a broader diversity of backgrounds allows more ideas to pop up, which can mean better software.

In practice, its tricky, because the argument mixes "Both genders are equal! They can do anything the other can!" while at the same time going "One gender can give a different perspective on things because they think differently and approach problems differently!".

A more practical example could be: part of your customer base is female. Having more women on staff could help you get the appropriate perspective to better target them.

The issue with that is: A) companies that have UX departments already have a lot of women in it. B) if the ideas to better target women come from guts feeling and sentences that start with "I think this is better!" instead of analytics data, you're going to make the wrong decision anyway, because the people in the IT department, regardless of gender, will have a different background and a skewed perception relative to the customers, so it won't really help.

My significant other who works at Amazon (a woman software engineer, woo!) had that issue recently. The UX people design a mockup, based on statistics, history, what competitors do, what has been A/B tested, etc. During implementation on the engineering side, one of the PMs (a woman, working with said significant other) goes "No this sucks! Its not intuitive! In Excel things work like this! Lets change everything!", with no backing arguments beyond "she doesn't like it". Then when people explain all the process that lead to that UI, of course: "I'm a woman, i have a different perspective and you refuse to acknowledge it!!".

Which was hilarious said she said that to another woman...

Good thing i wasn't replying to you then :) It makes a lot more sense in the context of the person I actually replied to. I was addressing their points specifically, not the whole of the discussion.

A lot of people in the US will send their kids to private school just because they want them in a school that's allowed to kick people out. If there's a public school that can, like what you mentioned for NYC, then sure, that's fine. But in this society of entitled lawyer-happy parents, an average american public school is very very bleh. It has nothing to do with funding, and everything to do with legal liability and not being able to properly deal with problem kids of parents who aren't willing to raise them properly. You can handle most problem kids if the parents are on board. If they're not, you're screwed.

There's a handful of "conditional" public schools around, usually the kind for gifted kids. Those also can kick people out. Those work fine.

Hmm? Are you insinuating that giving cheap housing in locations that normally even upper middle class people can't afford, sometimes in houses that the same upper middle class would never dream of affording regardless of where they are located, is a bad idea?

How dare you!

Prettier documents, easier to read, easier to grade, less work for the teacher. Making an accurate complex graph on a computer is a HELL OF A LOT easier than making the same one using a pencil with a $4.99 geometry kit bought at CVS on graph paper? Takes freagin forever. Man i loved getting a lower grade because I spent all night doing my 9th grade physics report instead of doing it in an hour because I didn't have a computer at home and if I stayed at the school's computer lab I had no one to pick me up after the school bus was gone!