this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
24 points (66.7% liked)

Asklemmy

43821 readers
884 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] PetDinosaurs@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm deliberately avoiding identifying my industry, but this exists in every industry.

I can be flippant and say "we're not making a web shopping cart here" to my people, but the top engineers making Amazon's shopping cart must deal with a lot of complicated problems.

Do I even need to list things? Think of something that's difficult. Nuclear bombs, medical devices, jet engines, skyscrapers, semiconductors, guided missiles. I could go on and on, but I'd still have to explain to you about the more mundane things like operations research.

[โ€“] agent_flounder@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

In case it helps to illustrate the point, those aren't the most complicated things; those are areas in which a few very complicated, difficult problems exist. For example, semiconductors is a very massive field.

Designing the next utilitarian op amp is not something everyone can do but it's not that difficult of a problem, necessarily.

Designing the next cutting edge CPU (for Intel or AMD or Apple or whatever) on the other hand is (I imagine) a handful of very difficult problems (most of which I have only the vaguest idea of) like optimizing pipeline and predictive execution or how to get to the next level chip design & fabrication process (which itself has a bunch of different issues, from what I gather).

That's where I would expect the 10x or whatever to work. At the cutting edge of engineering and science where the hardest problems are.