First off, brilliantly cogent post. I am getting to the stage where the latest fancy framework doesn't really seem as much of a win but more meta-bullshit to deal with.
> The problem for some people is that these kinds of more generalized roles put you in charge of systems that do not have the sort of clear-cut deterministic behavior you remember from your programming days.
Can you expand a bit on this? What do you mean by "clear-cut deterministic behaviour" ?
In the more generalized roles, you deal with parallel systems made up of unreliable carbon-based computing elements. You can't just feed them electricity and order them to execute programs. You have to charm, cajole, and/or threaten them at the right time in order to get them to produce the desired outputs. This requires some amount of patience and wisdom to do well.
They're also harder to debug because you can't inspect their call stack and they might even block their I/O ports if you send the wrong command, which varies between systems.
Hahaha. I guess I assumed this to be the norm in any system that contains more than one person building a product. :) I was more asking where on earth these deterministic systems existed and where I can get some. :)
> The problem for some people is that these kinds of more generalized roles put you in charge of systems that do not have the sort of clear-cut deterministic behavior you remember from your programming days.
Can you expand a bit on this? What do you mean by "clear-cut deterministic behaviour" ?