A person’s greatest need is to be needed.
To the text/limber
Editor/Longo
How are programmers “needed”?
I have been thinking about this question since I saw the Shanghai 2018 College Entrance Examination essay question just released. The three words “needed” hurt me, who is busy in the front-line machine learning research. “What about this?” I am in need and I am needed.
The world is punishing those who don’t change. You will find that one day suddenly a young man will teach you how to work in your field — gray hair is worse torment than a child.
No man is an island. One man will be needed, and so will a group of men. We have two parallel needs: those unrelated to ability, and those related to ability itself. The last time you called your parents, you asked a lot of questions. It was a blessing to be needed. This requires no competence. But beyond that need there is a world that needs you, a world that needs your abilities.
Be needed by little white
To a lot of big guy, just entered the line xiaobai may be your burden, and you are not only a craft master to xiaobai. Because they want to learn from you and they want to figure things out. Small white need you can carry, if small white people qualification is not poor, they will soon become your help, do not say alone always deal with some small things and then from small things they call the shots.
Little white people need not only your ability, but also hope to meet a great teacher, all aspects are their goal. When my friend interned at Ogilvy, her teacher was a calm, elegant person who dressed with great taste. She said to me, “See him? I want to be like him in the future. After all, I was doing Research during my internship, not everyday. Once, when I was working on a project with my boss, I read dozens of papers and gave several models — but none of them worked. And the boss took over my model, hubbub told me a bunch of, while saying, while writing the model, and then a prototype of the model quickly appeared in front of us, ten days and half a month can not solve the thing, solved in ten minutes.
Working with the big boys is the most impactful and learning time. Talking with the big guy for a night paper, the future direction and algorithm, engineering perception is about like eating a big textbook – feel oneself study when open hang, then silently to write wheels. Sometimes I don’t understand why some Master write code and read papers so painful. On second thought, it is not because I have a good teacher who teaches with heart.
Strength is your capital. You can choose to be domineering and perfunctory. You can also be a Mentor who says “I want to be like him”.
Needed by the industry
When you are the boss, besides carrying the little guy, you have the job itself. You are the promoter of the industry. The problem that xiao Bai discovers is knowledge problem more, it is a matter of a few words. When problems don’t come up, you have to find them. An analyst has to find problems in what seems to be harmony, and the problem is certainly not to find fault. It’s more about insight into the task at hand, and being proactive in identifying problems and solving them.
This is true in every field and every place, being the first to see that it is not the same or that it should not be the same and offering a possibility. Now neural network and Data Driven have been spread all over the world, and the basic algorithm of neural network [back propagation] has given enough beautiful solution. Hinton wants to change his life and make everyone question the rationality of [back propagation]. Back propagation is still everywhere, but with a start, everything will be different.
Last year a friend asked Design guru Donald Norman about Generative Design.
Put sensors on the Design target, run tests, and tweak the resulting parameters (energy consumption, lighting area, resistance, etc.) to generate a Design that feels realistic and beautiful.
Donald Norman expressed puzzlement over the impact of AI on design. I was really upset. It was Norman! The world was suddenly different. Suddenly the master became a studious pupil. When we shouted 666 to the master, we would sigh that Lian Po was old. Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish is better.
Today after 00 on the examination room of the college entrance examination, the high school student who has been in contact with big data and artificial intelligence during middle school is coming, holding the calculation diagram to ask the voice of “how can I optimize the seniors” is getting younger and younger, obviously in the same industry or even the same direction, but began to understand the questions asked by the younger generation.
Needed by the world
For example, I am most familiar with the field of Deep Learning. The popularity of Deep Learning is inseparable from Tensorflow and Keras frameworks. I don’t think it’s too much to call [the first Deep Learning framework for Young People to play with]. If you can organize some commonly used things into tools, the impact on the whole field is very big, of course, you can choose not open source, choose to do a good tool framework, and then give the company, no doubt, accelerate the new speed.
At the same time, the upgrade of the framework also forced the evolution of peers, the better the framework is doing, the speed of iteration will be faster and faster, and soon it will be an epochal. I once talked to Teacher Yangqing, one of the main contributors to PyTorch, and asked him how he felt about making PyTorch. — “The feeling of changing the world.” PyTorch has certainly changed the world to some degree, and I’m sure Keras’ writer feels the same way.
Recently, the authors of Node have opened a new pit and switched to Go as the base layer, and we believe that the courage of “chopping back” will bring us new surprises. Of course, there are people like this:
Deno’s goal is not to be compatible with Node, but compatible with browsers. Ry probably wants to embrace the browser ecosystem, which is a big leap forward. Although Deno is only a few days old, it is still a Domo. But remember that when Node.js came out, it exploded like a nuclear bomb.
While I’ve heard that some people want Node.js for full stack, which basically means that a node.js package covers the front and back ends, I still think node.js killing the back end is a bit ridiculous. But one thing has reached a consensus – from the front end can completely control the whole UI layer, and between the front and back side only need to interact through data, the data processing to the back end, the model makes the two parties are independent of each other, each can fast iterative development, and as long as the data interface is constant, the back-end love in what language in what language, The front and back ends don’t affect each other at all.
Being needed is a need in itself. It takes a lot of things to do. When you’re needed, that’s when your value hits the ground. A generation will have the same applause, but the world is getting faster and faster, did not catch you and the world have a generation gap.