5 Jul
2024
5 Jul
'24
2:42 a.m.
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