"You did awesome, but don't let it go to your head."
"Research shows" (I read long ago) that the happiest men are those take their wives' advice — that's certainly been true for my own N=1, for coming up on four decades now. I'd imagine we could replace "wives" with "spouses" and get comparable results.
Haven’t you just risked an infinite loop in your code?
But.. I met someone at the gym who's been struggling with an esoteric problem on an ancient piece of software for over a decade, and they approached me to ask if I could solve it. I said "maybe", sat on it for a few days, and then replicated the issue on my machine and solved their problem in about an hour. I asked for $50 and they gave me double, which was wildly more rewarding than being paid $100k to write react all year, not that that salary is on the table any longer.
Is the job market so bad right now? I‘m in a privileged position (and not in the US), so have no clue of the state of things.
But in business, you need to charge an honest / fair amount. (sure, sometimes that 1 hour bug fix had $100K of 'value', but we could argue about honest / fair).
You mention being an employee at $100K a year. Double that, gives you a contractor rate of $100 an hour. That is the floor of what you should be asking floor; as in the absolute lowest. Another $50 or $100 an hour is still fair and honest in todays economy.
Salary is driven by market conditions and nothing else. It is not an approximation of merit or even delivered value.
Proving it’s not a one time thing is what pushes you in the salary and seniority ranking.
And this is what saves the day.
Code is a liability.
Maximising the fraction of the product built by people who don't know what they're doing would however explain the emergent properties of modern software.
A good junior will write a hundred lines of code in a day. A good senior will delete a hundred because they realize the user dictated a solution instead of detailing their problem, asked them, and figured out that they can solve that problem by changing a config variable somewhere.
The most devastating value destruction (aside from the rare intern deleting the prod db) that I’ve seen consistently is with senior/rockstars who introduce new tech, takes credit, moves on. There’s a reason for the term resume driven development. Think about what a negative force multiplier can do for an org.
Maybe it varies per company.
But that’s the entire point you’re missing. The pay is not proportional to contribution or technical skill. It’s proportional to market forces and negotiation skill.
Negative force multipliers are easily remedied: just make sure you have an even number of them.
We had a guy who would argue about everything that knew the CTO so we had to tolerate him.
Then we hired a second one and they just argued with each other all the time and the rest of the team could finally make progress.
It was awesome.
In the former case, we basically had to demand management raise his salary to the low end of his market value, over the cause of six months, until they finally gave in. It was just so disgusting to us we couldn't let it go.
The reason comes down to a skill bias - it's a different skill set to navigate other people into getting yourself a good salary, versus navigating the ins and outs of coding. The skills don't overlap, so time spent on one detracts from another.
In the end he finally got the message we kept ramming in to his head, applied to work at a brand-name tech company, and instantly more than doubled his salary. He could've done so years earlier.
This stuff is the norm. I've been a manager having eyes on salaries while also having eyes on people's performance (although unfortunately not much of a lever on the former), and rest assured it is often a very jarring experience. Like "that person should be let go immediately / that person should job hop immediately".
So it's not true, then?
The GP claims this is universally true. All I need to do is post a counterexample, and I did. Yes, there are shitty companies that try to keep salaries as low as possible, not realizing that that will lose them their best people. Don't work for those!
This particular case sounds like someone got incorrectly hired as a junior. Maybe they didn't have enough "real world" corporate experience and that is why they weren't offered a senior position?
Junior/senior isn't necessarily about skill level; I'm sure many can find a senior with 1YOE ten times over. It's about trust both in technical and sociopolitical navigation through the job. That's only really gained with time and experience (and yes, isn't perfect. Hence, the aforementioned 1x10 senior. Still "trusted" more than a 1 year junior).
Understanding the business processes of your industry, how to solicit feedback from and interact with end users, how to explain things to management/sell on ideas.
If you put a junior dev in front of a panel of executives and ask them to explain requirements for a project odds are quite high they will info dump tech mumbo-jumbo. A senior should be able to explain risks, benefits, timelines, and impacted areas of the business in a manner that non technical people can easily grok.
I'm mid-level engineer. Honestly, several staff+ engineers may not be spitting tech mumbo-jumbo, but they do dump all other kind of BS. Political BS, "tactical tornados"[1]. May not necessarily mean they were good at engineering, but just good with people skills. Obviously, not everyone is like that, but I would say many are.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394287#:~:text=The%20....
Eg, for positive integers, x % 16 == x & 15. That should be trivially cheap.
Higher level change-the-algorithm aspirations haven't really been met by sufficiently smart compilers yet, with the possible exception of scalar evolution turning loops into direct calculation of the result. E.g. I don't know of any that would turn bubble sort into a more reasonable sort routine.
And more generally, with older architectures, integer division was much slower than integer multiplication, so compilers would generally transform this into a multiplication plus some shifts [0]. For context in that timeframe, MUL on Sandy Bridge introduces 3-4 cycles worth of latency (depending on the exact variant), compared to DIV introducing 20+ (per Agner Fog's excellent instruction tables [1]). So even computing x - y * (x / y) with the clever math to replace x/y would be much faster than just x%y. (It's somewhat closer today, but integer division is still fairly slow.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131177 (the linked article 404s now, but it's archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20110222015211/https://ridiculou...)
[1] page 220 of https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf
That only works when y is constant. Otherwise, you need to work out what to replace x/y with… which ultimately takes longer than just using the DIV instruction.
Excellent point! That said, that was the case in this particular example.
> This 16-bit modulo was just a final check that the correct number of bytes or bits were being sent (expecting remainder zero), so the denominator was going to be the same every time.
(Libraries like libdivide allow you to memoize the magic numbers for frequently-used denominators, and if on x86 you have floating point operations with more precision than you need for integer division, you can potentially use the FPU instead of the ALU: https://lemire.me/blog/2017/11/16/fast-exact-integer-divisio...)
> Knowing very little about USB audio processing, but having cut my teeth in college on 8-bit 8051 processors, I knew what kind of functions tended to be slow. I did a Ctrl+F for “%” and found a 16-bit modulo right in the audio processing code.
That feeling of saving days of work because you remember a clue from previous experience is so good.