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Analysts Tout 'State of The Developer' Survey By Awarding RPG Characters (amazon.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the 20-sided-dice dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Analysts at VisionMobile have begun conducting this year's "State of the Developer" Survey -- their perennial assessment of salaries, skills, and tools -- but this time with a twist. "Based on your responses, you'll find out what kind of character you'd be in a fantasy world: A mage? A fighter? A dragon slayer?" according to a blog post publicizing the event by Amazon's manager of developer marketing. "As in previous years, you'll also receive your personal Developer Scorecard showing how you compare to other developers in your country, a free copy of the final State of the Developer Nation report, and a chance to win some cool prizes."
The survey presents a map of seven "kingdoms" -- IoT, Mobile, Desktop, Backend, Web, Machine learning, and AR/VR -- and invites developers to complete their "quest," awarding virtual badges and real-world prizes, which include an Oculus Rift headset, a Surface Pro 3, an Apple Watch, and a Pixel Phone. Along your "journey," a developer owl even dispatches encouraging geeky jokes. (Like "Whenever I see a door that says 'push', I always pull first, to avoid conflicts.")

25 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. A mage? A fighter? A H-1B holder? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Sorry mage, the H-1B doesn't do nearly as much DPS as you, but he'll do it for dirt cheap, and we don't have to pay him benefits.

    1. Re:A mage? A fighter? A H-1B holder? by golgotha007 · · Score: 1

      >>Sorry mage, the H-1B doesn't do nearly as much DPS as you, but he'll do it for dirt cheap, and we don't have to pay him benefits.

      As long as they don't have to design anything, you should be good to go.

    2. Re:A mage? A fighter? A H-1B holder? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      Sorry mage, the H-1B doesn't do nearly as much DPS as you, but he'll do it for dirt cheap, and we don't have to pay him benefits.

      Yeah, but just wait until you hit that DPS check in the Agile raid...

  2. Where's the Mainland? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

    This is a cute, quaint little 'island' for developers in a tiny niche of the world but there is a lot missing.

    Where is the automotive and aerospace coders & developers that use model based design?. How about the EE coders that write the control algorithms for the power grid?

    This island should be renamed "Island of coders that code stuff for lay people". I've been programming and coding for the last decade and don't fit anywhere on this Island.

    1. Re:Where's the Mainland? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Right now I'm in the Kingdom of the Unemployed, with all the other peasants over 40. I wish they would at least let me into the Kingdom of the H1B instead.

    2. Re:Where's the Mainland? by johannesg · · Score: 1

      How about the EE coders that write the control algorithms for the power grid?

      Let's hope those "EE coders" are actually software engineers. Those "EE coders" were responsible for some of the most monstrous unmaintainable crap I've seen over the years. I'm sure they're great at their own job(*), but when they try to do mine... (shudder)

      Among the horrors were the notion that polling something at a rate of ~10KHz (as opposed to having a working interrupt system) would be a fine solution for a desktop app (it wasn't, and it didn't even fully catch the hardware bug they were trying to overcome), and a multitude of time delay loops (just empty for loops that take "just long enough" - on x86, where both compilers and CPU manufacturers conspire to make that cathegorically not true).

      (*) ...although there is a troubling tendency to think that any hardware problem can be solved in software, aka "let's throw our broken hardware over the wall and make it somebody else's problem". Power supply broken? Why, just fix that in software...

    3. Re:Where's the Mainland? by NotSoHeavyD3 · · Score: 1

      Among the horrors were the notion that polling something at a rate of ~10KHz (as opposed to having a working interrupt system) would be a fine solution for a desktop app

      Holy crap, you had an engineer do that to you too? I had some form of engineer (can't quite find out if it was an aerospace or mechanical engineer though, brags a lot.) who refuses to use anything but polling. Hell, they used a bool as their form of thread synchronization in C++. (Oh, that's why the app crashed every so often.)

      --
      Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
    4. Re:Where's the Mainland? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      model based design

      Is there any program design that isn't model-based? We've been reducing reality to models for basically all programs (except for the purely mathematical ones, but there's often floating point involved there) since the very beginning. "There are two genders/sexes". "The day has 86400 seconds". "People have a first name and a surname". Etc. etc.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    5. Re:Where's the Mainland? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      This is roughly how the new Orion spacecraft's avionics is being produced, apparently. ;)

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    6. Re:Where's the Mainland? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Their 'coding puzzle' for Java centers on the difference between == and equals().

      I suppose that's roughly like the difference between #'EQL and #'EQUALP? Having said that, the "coding puzzle" designation might be appropriate - this knowledge may indeed be a part of the kind of low-level activity of a programmer designated by the C-word in question. It's admittedly a little bit weird to ask for, like quizzing writer candidates as to how many letters there are in the English alphabet.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    7. Re:Where's the Mainland? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

      And most cars on the road. And most heavy equipment. I'm reading these comments about "how it is" is hilarious.

    8. Re:Where's the Mainland? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

      because that's a job for people in low-cost countries, turning their pictures into something executable.

      Um, No. Simulink does the C/C++ for you and does it better than 99% of the human coders out there.

      If you are still outsourcing Simulink -> C to a human you're wasting money and adding bugs.

    9. Re:Where's the Mainland? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

      Is there any program design that isn't model-based?

      Simulink is the only one that I know of that does full code generation from models.

    10. Re:Where's the Mainland? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      All programming involves models because physical universe doesn't fit into computers. All data representations of the outside world have to be reduced into models. Therefore, all programming starts with models and is based on those models.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    11. Re:Where's the Mainland? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Um, No. Simulink does the C/C++ for you [umich.edu] and does it better than 99% of the human coders out there.

      It shouldn't be surprising that high-level language compilers are better than 99% of human programmers thinking "I can do better than a program that can consider thousands of times as many factors as I can in only a fraction of the time".

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    12. Re:Where's the Mainland? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

      You're using a different definition of Model.

    13. Re:Where's the Mainland? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      I'm using the definition of model that says that model is a description of something (an object or a whole system of objects) that preserves the important features or properties of said thing and omits the unimportant ones.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  3. Show Me the Money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    What is it about non-developers that makes them think that we're all a bunch of teenage geeks who will happily accept this crap instead of what everyone else, including management, expects when ratings are good. How about a flipping cash bonus or a raise? Screw your damned RPG characters. Show me the money.

    1. Re: Show Me the Money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You're fired for not being a team player.

      Ackmed, you're hired at a dollar an hour.

  4. Survey Says: Survey Is Too Long by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I bailed after a couple of minutes, maybe 8 questions in. If you want me to respond to a detailed survey about software development, you'll need to offer a substantially larger incentive.

  5. I do embedded software by Snotnose · · Score: 1

    and Linux device drivers. It was fun going through this quiz, when few of the choices represented my reasons, and knowing the quiz wasn't aimed at me.

    Best question? Rank the top 5 things most important to you. Only 4 of the listed things meant jack shit to me. I'm writing a device driver before the device is publicly announced, I don't care about social media support, it doesn't exist. I'm lucky if 1/3 of my documentation is in english, I'm happy if I can figure out what a register does and what it's values mean. A snippet of C code surrounded by Japanese/Korean/Chinese symbols is a godsend, C is always in english. Sucks when the C code references a hard coded address without mentioning the register name, but I can usually decipher the code to figure out which register they're referencing.

    Second most important? Tech support that speaks both english and whatever, so I can ask "um, what register are they talking about on page 23?" and, 2-3 days later, find out it's 0x242.

    1. Re:I do embedded software by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1

      I always tell the new Engineers they don't really know CANape until they've read it in the original German.

      Trying to create a Python CFFI driver is a nightmare the only thing I have to go on is the .h file they include with an install. And one document. The only hit for multiple different function names.

      I have no idea who this sort of stuff is marketed towards but it's definitely not anything I've done in the last decade or so of industry.

  6. No thanks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Tried doing the survey. It was very-very long.

    By stage 2 I realized, because they said there would be prizes, that all that work would be meaningless because they would want me to give out personal details which I wouldn't do. So my answers would be ignored.

    No thanks!

  7. Spell of Emmigration by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 2

    What is this H-1B you speak of? Do you come from the land recently taken over by the Orange Goblin and his evil minions? If so I suggest a spell of emigration but aim it north, not east lest you end up in a land rule by a wicked witch who is intent on summoning a demon called Brexit.

  8. Whuh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Okay, I was willing to overlook the crappy fantasy RPG metaphor, and the unfunny owl, and gave it a go. It was pretty long, and I don't really get what it was trying to achieve, especially as some of the questions seemed pretty useless. It presented a lot of tech I've not used or even heard of; I answered that we don't use cloud services, but then it asked me about cloud services we use; the data science part of the whole "data science / machine learning" section seemed to be ignored as it was all about machine learning, despite the fact I do some data sciencey things but nothing I would classify as machine learning; and WTF was up with the questions about the reason for doing something in your organisation, but not giving an option along the lines of oh, I dunno, maybe delivering a fscking product for the customer?

    When I saw the list of sponsors, all I can say is that the survey seems aimed at promoting some of their corporate backers, and boy are they going to be disappointed when they see my survey answers.