5 Jul
2024
5 Jul
'24
1:13 p.m.
The flip side is when you're asked to do something you're not competent
at. At Intel, I was once tasked in reviewing the license for something
we wanted to use. I Am Not A Lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. I did my
best, but got fussed at by a higher-up for it not being good enough.
I'm sorry, but that bullsh*t --- Intel has lawyers out the wazoo, and
that's who should have been involved in reviewing that license.
Would you take your car to TV repair shop to get fixed? Same thing.
Arnold
Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
A better analogy might be to compare early employees
(especially
engineers) to stem cells. They are the type of people that can (& are
willing to) do pretty much anything but over time end up specializing
in a few things. I have done things like look at office spaces, set up
furniture, order machines & office supplies, select ISP, wired up the
place, and many sysadmin things, dealt with janitorial services, selecting
insurance, payroll services, debugged issues not related to engineering,
many interviews (tech and otherwise), dealt with vendors & headhunters,
set up guidelines, software systems, documentation, etc. etc. As times
goes on you let go and get out of people's way and focus on where you're
most effective (or where there is temporarily no one else).
On Jul 4, 2024, at 7:24 PM, Adam Thornton
<athornton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Two replies to things Larry said:
ARM or one of the smaller RISC-V flavor-sets (RISC-V is super-modular) would be a
perfectly reasonable architecture to learn these days. After the PDP-11 but before ARM
I'd'a suggested 68000. Definitely NOT x86 and its betentacled descendants.
Even so, you'd still want to treat it (if you're learning "how do computers
work?") as if it were not superscalar, even though it obviously is. Which I guess is
pushing me into "please let me just pretend it's a PDP-11 and keep all the scary
pipelining and speculative execution and all the things that are hard to reason about
below the layer where I need to care" territory.
And yeah, if you need me to sweep the floors, I'll sweep the floors, but if I'm
needed to sweep the floors often, there's a management problem here, in that you can
hire people who are much better at sweeping floors than I am for much less money than you
hired me to do software engineering for.
Adam