I think spreadsheets have been severely undervalued by software engineers and they're generally under-researched. It's definitely possible to use them in more non-obvious and interesting ways. E.g., see AmbSheets [1]
I have a feeling that the same idea absolutely does apply to code. Writing code is much closer to writing prose than it may seem. And the act of writing code also makes you think as you write. Even if you're writing boilerplate. Because how else would you uncover subtle opportunities to reduce the boilerplate and introduce new, better abstractions?
> only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later
Not really. There aren’t as many fundamentally new ideas in modern tech as it may seem.
Web servers have existed for more than 30 years and haven’t changed that much since then. Or e.g., React + Redux is pretty much the same thing as WinProc from WinAPI - invented some time in ~1990. Before Docker, there were Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails. TCP/IP is 50 years old. And many, many other things we perceive as new.
Moreover, I think it’s worth looking back and learning some of the “old tech” for inspiration; there’s a wealth of deep and prescient ideas there. We still don’t have a full modern equivalent of Macromedia Flash, for example.
I agree with you, but it's very hard to argue the same in an interview, even with other engineers (that's if you get the interview).
There are companies that are willing to consider general aptitude and transferable skills when hiring, but a vast majority compares candidates using checklists of technologies
I strongly recommend to check all other papers and articles on https://okmij.org/ftp/, every single one of them is brilliant and insightful. I love the pedagogy, the writing style and clarity. Oleg Kiselyov is one of the best technical writers I've discovered recently.
I'm a systems engineer with 8+ years of experience in Rust. Solving problems in low-level programming, design and implementation of compilers and programming languages.
> Has google completely stopped working for anyone else?
Yes. However, I found that https://scholar.google.com still works perfectly well. It feels just as the old Google without all the crap they've been adding in the last years.
Very small team, only still exists because they are a rounding error to the CFO on the balance sheet, but otherwise they could go at any time.
Oddly their biggest strength is being irrelevant to the decision makers, if the bean counters noticed the few million they are losing on running Scholar there will be ads + Gemini all over it.
In my experience as a published academic author all the LLM will make up all kinds of plausible papers I “wrote” that don’t exist, academic positions I’ve never held, and the like.
Even if you give it a paper directly I’d not believe it to be reliable. Maybe it could help search for papers, but that’s it.
Technologies: Rust, compiler engineering (LLVM, interpreters, query languages, code generators, dev tools, programming languages), Linux kernel (eBPF, io_uring, low-level networking)
Résumé/CV: systems engineer with 8+ years of experience in Rust. Solving problems in low-level programming, design and implementation of compilers and programming languages, software optimisation.
[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/notebook/
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