Your comment suggests that you were fortunate enough not to experience frequent moves and social issues during your childhood.
At the same time, you seem to lack empathy towards others' pain. I am sorry for people around you.
For people in reasonable but not stellar circumstances, the "don't blame others, own your life" advice is probably appropriate. For others, that advice amounts to insidious gaslighting.
I am still in my 20's and recently switched team. Switching team made me think a lot about what I want to do in my life, and I still haven't been able to figure it out. I was feeling anxious and worried as I felt I am old enough that I should know what I want to do.
Reading some of comments in this thread made me realize that many people don't figure out what they want to do, even until 40's, so I feel better that I am not alone in this. I thank you all for sharing your perspectives with career. I will bookmark this page and read this whenever I feel lost with direction of my career.
I also would love to see more safe ways to ride bikes, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
"Dump legistration" is the way it is as increasing the power and speed limits with inadequate infrastructure can significantly increase risk for pedestrians and bike riders, likely more than risk posed by cars.
Most places already have adequate infrastructure for cars to be safe enough.
Infrastructure changes such as adding more ebike only lanes need to come first, and this will cost a lot and even infeasible without first reducing the number of car lanes. This will result in conflict of interest between car owners and people who want to introduce such infrastructure changes.
Conflict of interest can only be resolved by politics, and it will take a long time for politics to work out as changing people's perception generally takes a long time.
This is accurate. I really don’t see this sort of legislation taking off. Too many special interests would be against any sort of encroachment on the car infrastructure we have. AARP would definitely fight this, and so would the oil lobby. That by itself makes it an unlikely proposition in my view.
I think this article touches a topic that exists under many names in different circumstances: micro vs macro, depth vs breadth, specialist vs generalist, etc.
This topic surfaces in various situations and with different granularities in life. Some examples:
- should I just do B.S. in CS, or should I also do PhD to go deeper?
- should I just focus on my interest in CS (study CS and develop career), or also spend some time to expand my interests in other areas of life (friends, fashion, tv shows/movies, video games, languages, poker, dancing, drinking, politics, history, etc)
- should I continue focusing on one component of the company I am currently in, or should I try to understand everything?
- should I continue seeking more success in life at the cost of some sacrifices, or should I eventually stop and focus on being a good father?
- should I mostly explore and be happy with myself (introvert)? should I also explore and find joys with others (extrovert)?
These are some of questions I had to answer for myself. When I was younger, my answers used to be very polarized to one side. As I gain more life experiences, I realized that the answers for these kind of questions usually lie somewhere in between. It's important to explore where one's fine balances between extremes lie. I am happy that I found a set of balances that seem to work for me.
Yes, I think it's possible that you learn faster at startup. But it is ridiculous to say that you "learned more in the first month at the startup than the full 3 years at the large tech company."
This just makes me think that either you are exaggerating a lot, or you were highly unproductive at the big company than most people.
In either cases, I end up not being able to take your comment seriously.
I believe him as someone who has worked both ends in many places over the years.
At a big company you are given a slice and you really have to push to get anything more. I've had the experience where no work is assigned because approving anything takes time and once the work comes it is extremely easy to finish immediately because you have sat through weeks of meetings reexplaining everything to different groups get approval to change a form.
At one startup by the end of the day I was already learning four different languages/tools.
Now I imagine places like fangs would be amazing places to learn. If you ever work in healthcare most of your day will be explaining why this is a small change / very safe and you learn very little.
1 month vs 3 years might be inflated a bit for learning, but then again it might fit.
At a startup you might get core technologies going in a month, while at a big tech company the timescale might be closer to years.
I worked at a startup and the focus was on the work. I got to make decisions on what to work with, what technologies to adopt, and then I had to get them running. I worked on core technologies.
At a large company you rarely get to do this. You usually have large systems in production, have very large teams, and get to work on an established code base adding a feature or fixing something.
An interesting exercise at a large company might be to look at the version control checkins from the beginnging. The features at the beginning of the log probably went in a lot faster from fewer contributors.
Depends on the company. "Big company" isn't one company, or one position. I absolutely believe it. At the big company I worked for, it took weeks just to get all your accounts enabled. Releases were planned months in advance. At every startup I worked at, I personally deployed our software more in the first week than the big company's ops team deployed our software in all the years I was there. You learn a lot from that. Not so much from waiting for the ops team to find time in their schedule for you.
It is crazy to see they are still using python 2. Seeing how slow the conversions to python 3 have been, was creating python 3 a good decision for python community? Can it be argued that developing python 2 further in a backward compatible way would have been better for the community? I know that evaluating this kind of thing is hard as metrics are bound to be subjective and speculative. But I am curious if there was any serious attempt to figure it out.
> was creating python 3 a good decision for python community? ... I know that evaluating this kind of thing is hard
I don't think there is any question here: Python 3 is a complete disaster. Years and years of engineering effort wasted on changing string libraries. Sadly, the Python leadership refuses to acknowledge the failing, perhaps because such an acknowledgement would challenge their omnipotence ... it would, and it should.
Samsung is responsible for a large portion of GDP in Korea. Arguably, Samsung has contributed a lot to Korea's "Miracle on the Han River".
With Korea's current progressive "Moon's" government, Korea is going through a lot of changes (higher minimum wage, a lot of focus on gender equality, stronger labor union, shorter work hours, stronger punishment for corruptions within companies, etc), and traditional "chaebol" companies are having trouble adapting to some of these changes. There are also a lot of eyeballs on past and current shady behaviors by "chaebol" companies.
As one of the biggest "chaebol" companies, Samsung is also being affected by the changes, and this article shows one of them.
One question I have is how beneficial these changes would be for GDP of Korea. On paper, these changes sound nice as they would benefit employees and make things "fair". But changing things dramatically can have side effects (ex. higher minimum wage led to many small shops closing). More regulations might limit Samsung's ability to compete internationally, which is bad as Samsung (and Korea in general) rely heavily on export-based economy.
> One question I have is how beneficial these changes would be for GDP of Korea. On paper, these changes sound nice as they would benefit employees and make things "fair". But changing things dramatically can have side effects (ex. higher minimum wage led to many small shops closing). More regulations might limit Samsung's ability to compete internationally, which is bad as Samsung (and Korea in general) rely heavily on export-based economy.
Does GDP matter if a large segment of the population is miserable? Samsung's ability to compete internationally is important but I'd rank that as a second to the health and happiness of it's populace.
> higher minimum wage led to many small shops closing
I don't quite buy this -- higher minimum wages might indeed increase costs for small shops, but this is a shallow assessment:
- A clearer definition of "small shop" is needed -- most really small shops are run by the owner/owner's family, no? If this is not the case, then I'd argue that businesses that are dependent on not paying workers a living wage should not exist (if Korea's people wish it so).
- Higher wages usually means more money spent on goods for all but the upper echelon of the population who may or may not be more interested in amassing wealth for whatever reason
The only major conservative / anti-progressive argument on this topic I'd give credence to is that corporate power and influence and the resulting abuse of workers is a necessary evil to compete globally. That if you made your nation unto an island with 20 hour work weeks, 2 months paid vacation, a 20 dollar minimum wage (or UBI), public housing, public transit, etc that your economy would rot as capital went places where more exploitation means more profit overall.
Not to say that is an inevitability or even a correct interpretation, but it does lean heavily on the argument that a healthy, educated, rational, and free populace can compete with the export yields of wage slaves overdosing on drugs even if they aren't compelled to do work nobody wants to do for a price nobody wants to take. The question is if people wanting things enough to drive an economy over them needing things.
Historically almost all wealth was built on exploitations - of land, of resources, and of people. What if preventing the exploitation and suffering of your fellows causes everyone to suffer in the long term from economic stagnation? Its a dystopic way to look at the world but given the major economic powerhouses of this and recent eras I just don't see the evidence that its entirely wrong.
Given how obvious and clear these examples are and should be for literally everyone, it is really mystifying to me why the anti-person rhetoric is so prevalent here (among an ostensibly pretty well-educated populace). Do you have thoughts on why that is?
As an American with a hardcore capitalist entrepreneurial father and now living in Switzerland, I chalk it up to some Americans simply not being able to imagine a society that doesn't enshrine "If I don't exploit, someone else will" race-to-the-bottom mentality, or if they could imagine such a society then they deem it "suboptimal" and therefore "wrong".
Edit to add: there's a generational mindset too. Older generations have the advantage of living longer and seeing massive technological change, and have an entrenched mindset of "if I work like a dog and live like shit now, everything deferred will be incredibly rewarded later". Whereas the "proverbial millennial" has not seen as much change and thinks such a mindset is an unbalanced extreme crock of shit, and therefore makes demands of the now, to live a generally fulfilling life; to which older generations think is ungrateful, soft, and demanding, that "because my life was shit, everyone else's should be too, it's only fair". But they'll still tell you they want to leave the world a better place for their kids, which is doublethink. (I'm speaking in very very broad terms)
White collar employees in Germany and Scandinavia are much poorer than their equivalents in Canada and the US. Sure, they get maternity leave and 8 weeks of vacation and whatever but they'll never be able to retire at 35 like an American developer.
It is not worth losing over half my income to get these "worker protections" and "social benefits" and it's no wonder that tons of Europeans come to the US to work and very few Americans go to work in Europe.
Yes, being forced by low wages and high taxes to work until I hit 65 and the government graciously allows me to retire is a shitty life that I am not jealous of.
I don't care how much vacation and benefits Europeans get.
> The only major conservative / anti-progressive argument on this topic I'd give credence to is that corporate power and influence and the resulting abuse of workers is a necessary evil to compete globally.
What is the point of competing if not for the benefit of the people? Is competing globally an end unto itself? That sounds neo-liberal, not conservative.
I think it's entirely possible for a country with such policies to compete globally, but it requires a smaller cut for capital owners, whether via taxes or direct ownership changes. That leaves behind a potential source of new revenue for capital holders if the country's policies can be changed. So the question is: can policy change be forced for less money than what can be gained by opening up the market? Would forcing a regime change by military or intelligence intervention turn a profit?
Or, from the perspective of a country trying to enact utopian policies: how can they make external intervention more expensive than it's worth?
> The only major conservative / anti-progressive argument on this topic I'd give credence to is that corporate power and influence and the resulting abuse of workers is a necessary evil to compete globally
I disagree -- France does well in terms of GDP per hour worked[0], and is in relative terms a worker's paradise.
On a more subjective note, I think this analysis misses the fact that automation is about to absolutely destroy the working class (if it's not already). The world's need for brute force blue-collar workers is shrinking and enabling people who might have done that work to aim for higher pursuits (which generally people only feel able to do when times are good) should be the goal of an economy with long term aspirations. There's a reason countries start with the economic zone model, but then seek to upskill their populace -- humans, no matter how little you pay them, cannot compete with efficient robots.
> Not to say that is an inevitability or even a correct interpretation, but it does lean heavily on the argument that a healthy, educated, rational, and free populace can compete with the export yields of wage slaves overdosing on drugs even if they aren't compelled to do work nobody wants to do for a price nobody wants to take. The question is if people wanting things enough to drive an economy over them needing things.
That argument doesn't seem to take into account that exports are varied and valued spectacularly diversely. Entertainment is one of America's largest exports and it is very much not a strictly productive endeavor to be entertained (of course you can argue that entertainment is required for productive work so people don't break down). Healthy, educated, rational, and free populaces are most of the time not competing with t-shirt producing sweat shops -- they are more often designing the t-shirts the sweat shops are making.
In addition to this, functioning purely free-market economies basically don't exist anywhere. The idea of a sanction against countries that exploit their workers would be unheard for a strictly economics-focused mindset but is very much possible today.
> Historically almost all wealth was built on exploitations - of land, of resources, and of people. What if preventing the exploitation and suffering of your fellows causes everyone to suffer in the long term from economic stagnation? Its a dystopic way to look at the world but given the major economic powerhouses of this and recent eras I just don't see the evidence that its entirely wrong.
This is true, but it's a spectrum -- in my opinion, aggressive exploitation simply speeds up growth, it is not necessarily a gating factor. I agree in that I think it's not necessarily wrong but still, if it's a spectrum then why don't we turn the dial back a little bit? There are externalized costs that we're ignoring by normalizing exploitation.
Also this constant worry of "economic stagnation" -- this is missing the forest for the trees again, it's worrying about GDP over the wellness of the people of a nation.
The official hours worked figures in France are severely underestimated IMO. For all my career everybody I know worked more than the supposed 35, 39 or 40 hours your contract specifies.
All timesheet software I've seen asks you to input your time in fractions of the official work day, not real hours.
My guess is only workers who really are paid hourly and thus have to badge in and out have their work hours counted correctly.
Don't forget various bureaucrats mainly employed by state. Those are often folks who go to massive strikes that cripple economy since they are losing many of those cozy benefits they take for granted, while taking everybody including foreign tourists as hostages.
I can tell you from personal experience those are hardly breaking a sweat, and few colleagues who actually live there sometimes end up in proper Catch-22-esque situations with things like taxes or driving license changes. good stories to laugh at but proper nightmare to actually go through.
Another topic might be that nobody wants to hire french manual workers, for things like home renovation, unless you have no other option. Little work, long breaks, often way too narrow specialization and often very high prices makes even french people looking for folks from places like Portugal or even Romania. And the costs themselves are only small part of the reasons.
But same colleagues tell me that in software companies people do often work hard. Long are gone generous 2-hour lunch breaks. Seems like a great divide depending how safe ones work feel.
> Does GDP matter if a large segment of the population is miserable? Samsung's ability to compete internationally is important but I'd rank that as a second to the health and happiness of it's populace.
GDP is what enables society to provide health and happiness to its populace. The problem with Bangladesh, for example, is not income distribution. It's top-line GDP. In Korea, according to the OECD, average household disposable income is $21,000 per year, versus $45,000 per year for the United States: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states. Korea isn't so rich that more even distribution of income without top line GDP growth would be a panacea. (And it's also worth pointing out that measures to distribute income more evenly will generally reduce GDP.)
There's no such thing as a "living wage". It's a political talking point and you can set the line wherever you want.
Higher min. wage increases costs and disproportionately affects smaller companies, leading to closures in every region, country, state and city where it happens. This is also why giant corporations like Walmart even support it since it clears out small local store competition.
> There's no such thing as a "living wage". It's a political talking point and you can set the line wherever you want.
This doesn't mean it doesn't exist -- it's just a social construct, and a useful one depending on where your priorities lie. The salient point is that some societies value this concept and draw the line somewhere. If you believe governmental regulation exists to protect the people (at least a little bit), putting a lower bound on what companies are allowed to pay employees in your country/governed region is important.
> Higher min. wage increases costs and disproportionately affects smaller companies, leading to closures in every region, country, state and city where it happens. This is also why giant corporations like Walmart even support it since it clears out small local store competition.
this is basically the same point rehashed -- I can't say that I added too many facts, but simply implying that min. wage increases hurt small business without discussing the increase in goods purchased is a shallow assessment. When workers who are likely to spend money receive more money in terms of wages, they spend these wages -- this should mean smaller companies will see higher sales as well as big companies.
And again, what the economy is doing aside, if you cannot afford to pay a wage that enables your employees to comfortably live, you likely should not exist, find another business. Businesses that attempt to operate in this space are externalizing their costs to society at large -- people who work at these companies depend on social programs that are paid for the society at large.
It's not a construct because it's not a real number. There's no objective definition or accepted test. It's made up by whoever is talking about it.
> "if you cannot afford to pay a wage that enables your employees to comfortably live, you likely should not exist, find another business"
What's "comfortable"? Is this the magic and subjective livable wage again? Who are you to tell everyone else what they should be comfortable with?
Regulation isn't that simple. Not everyone agrees that the government controlling pay is "protecting the people" and many would rather have the freedom to make their own choices. It's purely academic thinking that simply raising wages fixes everything. It often does little but raise costs while also removing opportunities. How many goods are purchased when income goes to zero? How many social programs will they need then?
It's easy to say that businesses should close because of your moral attitude about a subjective number, but do you realize it affects the very people you claim to be protecting? Have you ever worked a min wage job or talked to people who do? Affordability and cost of living have nothing to do with wages and are rarely ever fixed with a min wage.
I always found this such a weak argument. A small store deals with inflation all the time - for the rent it pays for the shop, the products it buys and services it employs. Surely wages as well then? If, even with increased consumer spending being the result of increased minimum wages the small store cannot turn a profit anymore then it means that their business model is simply no longer up to date with modern times.
Where's all this increased consumer spending coming from? This isn't guaranteed and rarely happens, and definitely doesn't go straight back to those businesses.
Employees are the biggest cost, and wages when multiplied by benefits and taxes can have an outsized impact over fixed costs like rent. Sure a business might not fire everyone, but it might start removing some shifts or move some employees to part-time instead. These little changes add up.
The greater point is that it's easy to say "the business model is no longer up to date" when it doesn't affect you. It's much different when your wages go to 0 instead because of other people who think they know better than you about what you need.
That's a good point... Making changes quickly and dramatically does have some effects that might be negative. However, it's usually very difficult for such changes to happen slowly and progressively.
Those kind of changes tend to come when a large percent of the population is fed up with the way things are and start to agitate for changes. At that point, it's unlikely to happen progressively... So it's a bit of a catch 22, as long as the people who benefit from the current state of society are in power (or control those who are in power), change are unlikely to come progressively since it would be disadvantageous to them but, once they lose the reigns (as they inevitably do), change happen so fast that it's both potentially bad for the society at large and worse for the ones who used to be at the top.
I'm not sure there are many examples of enlightened robber barons who allowed progressive changes that were counter to their interests but improved society as a whole.
>I'm not sure there are many examples of enlightened robber barons who allowed progressive changes that were counter to their interests but improved society as a whole.
Bill Gates' charitable work comes to mind. I wouldn't call him really a robber baron as the term implies wealth gained unfairly or from others involuntarily. The Fed is printing almost another half trillion in cash to inject, subsidize Wall St., for example. I also don't know if the term applies fairly to Samsung, as while the Korean history of chaebol companies was fueled by crony capitalism, their wealth does primarily come from their export-driven business where they compete globally. It's not like a JP Morgan (the person) or JP Morgan (the Wall St bank today) who really rely on borderline slavery from captive labor markets, or welfare from taxpayers.
Well many people think Microsoft's behavior was monopolistic, so yes, unfair, and exploiting monopolies is a robber baron motif. They're also known for exploiting their workers but I don't think Bill did that (so far as I know he didn't actively suppress wages like Jobs). In any case he was much maligned at a certain point in history and his charitable work is a little too over-publicized and under-delivering for me to take seriously.
Even if Bill is sincere, gp made the claim that robber barons don't work against their own interest, and I don't see where in the Gates example a man is working against himself.
> > I'm not sure there are many examples of enlightened robber barons who allowed progressive changes that were counter to their interests but improved society as a whole.
> Bill Gates' charitable work comes to mind. I wouldn't call him really a robber baron as the term implies wealth gained unfairly or from others involuntarily.
And yet, even Elizabeth Warren crippled social democratic policies are going too far. Paying taxes should be the litmus test for Bill Gates (and other billionaires), not throwing some scraps into unspecified charity.
Bill Gates is just a smarter Rockefeller that saw the writing on the wall and cashed out early. Call it an "ex-robber baron".
This is just a statement of opinions without any reasoning or substantiation.
I get it that social media is extremely biased to the left and people agree with this kind of thing, but it's disconcerting that people cannot respond to the discussion which follows from first principles and logical reasoning. For example, by responding to the reasoning I gave. Not just saying "I disagree, and Elizabeth Warren isn't even socialist enough for me." It's so unconvincing.
The quality of your argument is low, I suppose that is why you didn't get your expected kind of answer. You just posted opinions, and none of them are facts.
* Bill Gates like philanthropy: Taxes always would be way higher than the sum of all philanthropy. All of philanthropy in the US was $400 billion last year. Trump's tax cut for the rich was $1.5 trillion. Only the last tax cut.
* Taxes are spent democratically, which, in a Democracy, is always preferable to a single rich person following his/her personal agenda, because that, by definition, is not democratic.
* JP Morgan et al. are indeed getting welfare from taxpayers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...
If the person fixing your toilet pays more in taxes than a person like Bill Gates, what else would you call that but welfare for the rich?
That was no insult. "You are dumb for disagreeing with me" would be an insult, and if I posted that you would have every right to feel insulted. But I didn't.
But the quality of your argument was low: You just put chained unsubstantiated opinions together, the majority of which are objectively wrong.
You write that "The Fed is printing almost another half trillion in cash to inject, subsidize Wall St." which a) isn't how QE works, and b) The rate of growth of e.g. S&P500 is the same as before QE started.
You write that "social media is extremely biased to the left" which is an alt right conspiracy with oodles of studies showing that this is wrong.
The philanthropy vs. taxation debate is decades old and the results are clear. You are of course free to reopen it with new arguments, but chose to omit those.
Saying the quality of your argumentation is not up to the standard of the person in question is not a personal insult. People can make mistakes and you can too. Pointing them out is not an insult, it is an opportunity for you to improve.
I didn't say it was a personal insult. I said it was an insult. And by the way, insulting without giving a reason why is exactly what my comment said it was: not an argument, just an insult. I can't believe I'm actually writing this to someone who ostensibly is an adult.
Traditional "chaebol" companies are having trouble adapting to some of these changes.
It shocked a lot of people, inside and outside South Korea, when Hanjin Shipping was allowed to go bust. Not resold, reorganized, but immediate bankruptcy and liquidation. Management was expecting a bailout right up to the end. Ships were stuck all over the planet, and empty blue Hanjin containers piled up in ports.
That's when the chaebol realized the rules have changed.
Much of Samsung's production happens outside SK so I don't think the influence of SK labor policies on Samsung is not as significant as one might think.
If anything, such labor policies as well as this kind of prosecution and sentencing for those powerful people would help the long term health of the country and even Samsung itself.
Having a liveable minimum wage works fine in many, many countries. Every time there is talk of raising the minimum wage in a country where it is expected to exploit workers and sleep well at night there are all these big scare stories about "small business" which will suffer and all the "jobs" that will leave. I personally think those people are missing the point and are also for some reason negligent in looking at other regimes that have such policies, where they work fine.
> To boost community funding, we'll match contributions up to $5,000 during a developer’s first year in GitHub Sponsors with the GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund.
How will GitHub deal with bad actors who might create a project and donate $5,000 to himself to get free money?
The document says that the accounts may have been accessed using id/password combinations obtained from other sources. But doesn't TurboTax have two-factor authentication?
If so, how is this possible?
If not, what would an extremely important service like TurboTax not have two factor authentication?
Because it decreases conversion, and because people only use it one month of the year, and because people will desperately call up about needing to log in to file but they changed their phone number yada yada.
It seems to me that robotics is getting more important as more companies are trying to use it (Tesla's smart factory, Amazon's robots in warehouses, space X, driveless cars, drones, etc)
Traditionally, programming has been something that one can self-study and work on personal project to build something meaningful.
But programming with robotics seems to make it hard for individuals to use for personal projects because expensive hardware creates barrier for beginners to enter.
Of course, one can use 3D simulator as a mean to build a personal project but I heard that what you create in 3D simulator often doesn't work in practice.
Then, my question is that what would be the best way to enter field of Robotics and prepare for future where robotics programming becomes very important for someone with only programming background? For example, should I buy industrial robot arms and build personal project of automating simple tasks with computer vision, machine control, and machine learning?
Good question! The great news is that the maker movement has meant lots of the parts you'd use in robotics are now accessible and cheap! For example, you can buy Dynamixel AX-12 robot servos and build your own robot arm for ~$400-$1000. This gives you servos that have accurate positioning and feedback, unlike the super-budget arms that you can get for $100ish.
You can buy robot platforms and sensors from companies like DFRobot, Adafruit, Sparkfun, etc. Hobby 2-D lidar? $300-400. Plenty for personal projects & learning.
> should I buy industrial robot arms and build personal project of automating simple tasks with computer vision, machine control, and machine learning?
It sounds to me that you're interested in the software side of the space. My personal recommendation is if say you're interested in reinforcement learning to learn the algorithms in simulation like Mujoco and Unity. Sure, algorithms that work in sim don't move nicely to the real world, but you don't need your thing to work in real world to learn how it works. And if you _wanted_ to try it in the real world, you could go and learn the hardwarey things. Similarly, if you're interested in supervised learning or vision, you don't need to build robots.
Planning and control you can probably do a lot in sim too but those things have a lot of theory behind them that might be nice to learn in the classroom setting. If I were trying to be a planning & control engineer I'd probably look into a coursera course or something. Thing to remember about RL for control & planning right now is that it doesn't quite work yet.
There's quite a few degree programs nowadays where you get access to not only the theoretical foundations but also the possibility to work on projects on actual industry hardware, as well as improving that hardware if that's more your vibe.
I feel like the DIY route wouldn't really transfer all that well into industry applications. If you're not in the research arm of a company those robots are more work horses that come with their own stack and ways to put them to use.
Robotics programming is not something that will suddenly be relevant for the general programmer. It's more likely to stay relevant for people with engineering backgrounds (since that's their primary application) or people that dedicated a few years on learning the intersectional topics.
Other than that, if your interest is just in "machine with actuators" kind of robotics it's pretty much more approachable than ever. You can get quasi professional sensors and actuators relatively cheaply, entry level microprocessor development and single board computers have become super easy and capable enough for complex signal processing, the mechanical parts can (mostly) be substituted by a bit of off the shelf parts and 3D printing.
What you should do heavily depends on your goal. Do you want to get into robotics to tinker, to work with them or to professionally develop them? The first one is pretty approachable, the latter are rather dedicated functions that have their own learning curve and education requirements just like any non-trivial job.
Take a look at the Robot Operating System[1] and their tutorials[2]. Keep in mind though that very slowly ROS is transitioning to ROS2 which fixes some major problems caused by ageing. Most notably the switch from ROS messages to the Data Distribution Service (DDS) which is very popular in robotics.
ROS has a large amount of packages available for popular robots and integrates well with many simulation environments also. This will save you a massive amount of time learning and from being overwhelmed with the massive amount of things that go into even making a simple robot work. Download a bunch of packages and focus on just the part/parts you are learning right now. You will also see lots of great examples of how robotics software is written. Whether it is DDS, ROS messages, or LCM it is generally structured into a collections of nodes that interact with each other.
As far as hardware, even having personal projects with a simple line following robot should be enough to get a foot in the door. Where I worked previously preferred to hire people who were software engineers first, or at least keep the team balanced and I learned on the job. Simulation to real training has had some recent breakthroughs also, see "Learning Dexterity" by OpenAI[3] so it is increasingly possible to do effective work in simulation.
OK, so I am a ROS fan and have worked on several ROS-based projects both for hobby and for hire. Be aware that ROS has a non-trivial learning curve. I guess I would say that if you are learning robotics, ROS is where you want to end up, but not necessarily where you want to start.
But when starting with ROS, be aware that: 1) ROS 2 is still under heavy development. We have not yet reached the promised land, no commercial ROS companies that I know (and I know a bunch) have switched over yet. 2) While there is a lot of documentation and tutorials for ROS to be found, it is very easy to get tangled up in documentation for the wrong release. Sounds basic, I know, but really, if you are working with Melodic and snag into a tutorial for Jade, errrf, it can be frustrating for a beginner until you realize your PEBKAC.
So for ROS, definitely start with the simulator, and work through the tutorials. Melodic is the current long-term-support release of ROS. After doing the turtlebot tutorials from ROS.org, you can get other simulated robots, like the Fetch model for a mobile manipulator, or for arms the Moveit! ROS package has a nice tutorial based around a simulated Puma.
But I don't think you need to start with ROS. A lot can be learned by starting with something much simpler. Get your hands dirty and build something simple, anything really. Something I have seen many times at the Homebrew Robotics club is some smart guy from Facebook or Google or similar with an MSCS will walk in and tell us all about the great robot he plans to build. The 12 year old kids with two or three Arduino-and-popsickle-stick robots under their belt are thinking (usually not saying) "Talk is cheap, show us a working robot." Robots are humbling.
So for parts, in addition to SparkFun and Adafruit for various motor controller and other widgets, also look at Pololu.com for robot parts. Their Romi chassis has a lot going for it as a beginner kit. A good challenge might be to add some sensors and see if you can get one to simply explore the top of a table without falling off. Not as easy as it sounds. Brings new meaning to the phrase "corner cases".
Books: An oldie but goodie that gives serious beginners a good overview is "Behavior Based Robotics" by Ron Arkin. A little more intense: "Probabilistic Robotics", Thrun/Burgard/Fox.
And my favorite piece of advice to all robot beginners: Your first robot should have low enough mass that a missing semicolon does not put a hole the the wallboard of your living room. (I recently worked on a 1000lb mobile robot with 1000lb payload capacity. Several of us spent a loooong time designing/tweaking the E-Stop circuit. Make your newbie mistakes on something smaller :)
I've noticed the same thing and have been actively working over the past 5 years trying to make introductory robotics approachable.
I've been a software developer for a long time, but robotics always felt like a mystery to me until I had someone show me the basics. I recently started a small company trying to teach the basics of robotics. The biggest challenge is that robotics have a real price attached that normal software development doesn't have associated.
With Javascript, I just need a text editor and a browser, but with Robotics I have to make the leap and purchase a kit and trust that the kit will do enough to teach me what I need to know to get started.
We designed and built a low-cost kit and have been using it in middle-schools throughout the southeast teaching kids the introduction, and so far that's been working really well.
