Not sure. Apart from the obvious that those you mention will often look at your CV / education first, not “talent”, we’re also talking about a field that’s not exactly earning minimum wage. Plenty will choose a more interesting job over more money. Banking rarely offers the most interesting job, of course the main reason they’ll pay a lot more.
I’d say as a general rule the most money/career motivated people work for banks, not the best or most talented. (Not mutually exclusive groups of course)
That of course doesn’t mean that the Naim job is necessarily that interesting, unless you’re an audiophile perhaps.
Yeah, from my experience software development attracts a very diverse set of people. There’ll be a set who gravitate to the city, and a set who like something a bit different. And many subsets of those two groups I’m sure Naim has a good bunch, and would attract more
After my D Phil at Oxford I went into telecoms, which is quite different to functional programming in that it is event driven. We designed using what is called Finite State Machines pictorially represented with State Transition Diagrams. The underlying recoverable multiprocessor operating system was quite complex. We went to great lengths to test the FSM for proper handling of resources and conditions. The end result was that the telecom aspects written in an interpretative language was robust while the underlying machine was less so. However, the later was generic with country specific call processing.
In the early 1980s I moved on to data communications. Protocol specifications are also very state oriented and modular to the protocol layer. Without carefully considered design of the various virtual machines it is very easy to have a buggy implementation. Designers should design and coders should code from detailed design documents. Sometimes system engineers are needed who consider what to do in hardware and what in software.
Later I worked in medical systems where parallel processors each performing a simple synchronous operation controlled by microcode were needed particularly for tomographic image construction and manipulation. Creating pipelines for data is very demanding. DSP and DACs use similar methods.
Just hacking code off the cuff is a recipe for disaster. It takes a certain kind of mind to conceive the necessary abstract machines that make implementation and upgrades straightforward. I’ve never felt comfortable with comments on this forum about streamer problems, but tuning the code for SQ is unfamiliar to me!
Most folk would need a PHD just to be up to speed with all the acronyms involved.
Those so used to writing code have forgotten how to use a spoken language without it. Perhaps ?
I could never do a job that wasn’t a passion or at least a hobby, and never have. I lacked financial stability for years but didn’t care because i loved what i did. And now i have both, which is obviously even better.
Either way, there are plenty of enthousiastic young developers around who aren’t in it for the money. If i were Naim that would be my target group, not the ones worried about their mortgages.
Funny, at my only professional job as a programmer (before I figured out that I want to do other things) I worked on developing a digital telephony and data switch for high-availability scenarios (command and control centers, this kind of thing). It was a time-triggered distributed OS, in-house development, chosen by the management precisely to avoid being event triggered, and my main job was the state machine of the call handler The time triggering was a nightmare if you needed zero call failures as you needed to be done when your time slice was up. I quit and never looked back. Heard years later that they had made it work, but I never would have survived this long.
Not sure how that’s the “big league”, from a developers pov at least. Can’t imagine it’s the most interesting job out there. Could it be that they left for a more creative/interesting job?
Perhaps prospective candidates did some research on the forum and came across the magical situation where a new coding caused a difference in sound quality that many thought it a great improvement while others thought it horrendously unlistenable.
No, most of the self trained tend to burn out and leave IT altogether; fly solo or take “time out”. I think Comptia and others have done research in this when people started to challenge the value of formal training.
Interesting. Before my long stint in fintech, I had designed and implemented a protocol for controlling high latency IVRs where the telco would do voice analysis in one country and trigger IVR events to the call carried in another. Since then, it found it’s way into loads of application. Everything other than IVR.
My experience of how tech companies (I’ve worked for) handle talent, is they put their more formally trained and maybe less creative staff onto maintaining code or building out roadmap features; and the more creative lone guns on building version 1.0 of the next big thing - writing that “off the cuff” code that some are terrified of. I can think of some well known ubiquitous technologies that were cooked up by one person locked away from the rest of the staff tinkering.
Like Tim Berners Lee and WWW! These people see the abstractions very clearly, and systems work because of the single mindedness. It’s not really off the cuff. I happened to know him quite well before he went to CERN.
I’m sure Naim has a good bunch, and would attract more
