The biggest uptick in demand for software devs by bosses is for... *rubs eyes* blockchain engineers?!? The largest swelling of demand in software development occurred in the role of blockchain engineer, or so says recruitment biz Hired. Arguably the most overhyped technology in the past ten years, blockchain nonetheless appears to appeal to companies, at least to the extent enthusiasm can be generalized from Hired's survey of …
"I need to find one of those companies that has money to burn on useless tech and convince them that my new securchain technology will put them two steps ahead of the competition."
Good luck - my super-securechain is provably twice as good as I ROR the output on little endian architectures. Future versions will be 4x/8x/16x's as good AND support big endian architectures.
I believe my enhancements will scale even further in the future if the company has sufficient capital to allow me to develop my ideas further..
Or worse, one of the 24% who should have been one of the 20% who just kept quiet and avoid displaying their ignorance.
Fortunately, this was collected electronically so when it finally excapes to the internet, the 24% can be....ummmm....properly dealt with. Humanely. Well as humanely as they deserve.
At least there is method behind the madness with Perl, the only thing it's guilty of is straying a little too far away from C syntax which for some people is an insurmountable problem. Sticking two keywords together in JavaScript or PHP is like playing Wheel of Fortune, but the familiar squiggles and braces lull you into a false sense of security.
"Ever try APL?"
APL is my favourite language for beating data into useful shapes.
One of my favourite escapades was analyzing performance data. I had what was essentially an over-determined set of linear equations.
I calculated a least squares fit for a polynomial of any desired degree, calculated the interpolating polynomial for that fit, graphed it and printed it.
It was a quick hack... five minutes to code, test, and refine, and totalled 2 lines of APL, for a not particularly
length optimized version.
Another short fun task was being handed a program that one of our customers found too costly in machine resources to run. It had been written in APL by a programmer thinking in COBOL That one took an hour to sort through and convert to APL programming style, which cut the run time to one tenth of one percent of the previous version.
My favourite Perl game, since I write a reasonable amount of it, is writing clear, well-structured programs, and then chuckling quietly when people tell me Perl programs are incomprehensible as a whole. (See also Bash scripts, but not, apparently, Python, even if the specific code you're looking at seems to be spaghetti with branches that end in exceptions it's not possible that this is actually the case.)
Perl is no better or worse than the majority of other languages for readability. The onus is on the programmer to structure their code well, use meaningful variable names, add comments where appropriate, etc. What Perl does offer that some other languages don't is the ability to write correct but very unreadable code. Whether or not to use the facilities and throw confusion upon the poor sap that follows in their wake to maintain their code, is a matter for a programmer's conscience.
Sadly, for some programmers I've encountered, the opportunity to sadistically use such features and demonstrate that they are in some way superior seems to be a matter of misguided personal pride.
"Sadly, for some programmers I've encountered, the opportunity to sadistically use such features and demonstrate that they are in some way superior seems to be a matter of misguided personal pride."
Until they make the mistake of staying in one job long enough to find themselves maintaining their own code.
There's some fun to be had in writing clever condensed stuff, see code golf. The more seductive route though is writing something and thinking, "actually I could get rid of that if..." and, before you know it, in the name of tidying you've reduced everything to a single code-executing regex. The trick to staying on the light side is keeping an eye on whether things are getting clearer or just smaller.
That's a weird conclusion, IMHO. Perl is a very usable language for the things that Perl was designed to do. I don't consider myself a Perl programmer but I do write scripts in that language and its pretty easy to work with -- its flexible, its efficient and the code can be made readable, it does the job. The only complaint I have with it is that the notational short cuts are really only for the pros; if you don't do Perl all the time and you want to be able to maintain your scripts then its better to avoid them, no matter how elegant they may seem to be.
possibly engineer just means "does stuff with"
In a lot of territories that is the case I fear. I know some countries (Germany comes to mind) treat the term with a little more reverence - there "Engineer" (written as "Ing") is used as title in the way that "Dr" or "Rev" would be.
Over here, the number of people who style themselves as engineers could, by a similar logic, also style themselves as "Dr" because they're regular viewers of Holby City and own a first aid kit.
Search Engineers make search boxes work. In a lot of cases this is trivial, but if you've got a lot of data and/or don't want to just use google's code, you do want a specialist to come in and optimise things to fit your environment (especially if there's legacy data involved that you can't just jam indexes into, or security levels where some results mustn't show up at all for the wrong people).
That guy should be fired then. I get more false positives than good links when I search for stuff. Usually I'm looking for information on car stuff, but 90 percent of the hits are trying to sell stuff similar to what I'm searching for, but doesn't seem to find actual information.
Next thing you know there'll be people proclaiming that they prefer vi over emacs, if you can imagine such a thing. Total insanity. If you're hard core old school, you have (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) in your emacs init.el file, putting spaces where spaces belong like a real programmer, and everyone else can go back to bleating about how they preserved 437 precious bytes of disk space by using tabs. You say you wanna use tabs when entering source code but have them converted to spaces when you save? Sure, but if you have to do it that way, your editor already sucks.
Companies, he said, appear to be keen to build blockchains but there isn't enough blockchain talent to meet demand.
Mystery solved. Manglement will never get disillusioned about anything until they've tried and failed* and they cen't even recruit the staff to try.
* To be followed by wise-sounding comments about how it's better to have tried and failed than never wasted the company's money tried.
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