[danjoc]

>the entire scientific Python stack was essentially relying upon on the “free time” work of only about 30 people—and no one had funding!

30 people? I remember a time when a certain fruit company would enter a field, literally hire all 30 of those guys, and put them behind closed doors. Then in 2 years they'd dominate the field for the next decade.

Are these guys turning down offers? Or is the fruit company that poorly managed now?

[webmaven]

The fruit company (and really all of AFGAM and much of the rest of the industry) is biased toward hiring recent grads or folks who have a clear record of steadily increasing responsibility, which disadvantages those who have followed a more... eclectic path, as well as those who have had major dislocations of some sort derail their career.

And almost by definition, "those 30 guys" building and maintaining a library with their volunteer labor in some "field" (that didn't exist as such until relatively recently) mostly won't have standard-looking career paths.

Sometimes there is a critical mass of those folks concentrated in a company, prompting an acquihire.

[santaclaus]

They seem more likely than others -- see the recent Homebrew author grousing about getting rejected by Google, only to land at Apple, for instance.

[flyovercow]

He left apple. He didn't fit in. There's an interview about it on a podcast

[kapv89]

link please!

[flyovercow]

Podcast is called The Changelog, the episode is abiut the guy who runs Homebrew project

[ngoldbaum]

There isn't much money in writing libraries like NumPy. Why would a company hire a bunch of expensive devs to write some software to compete with Matlab? The market just isn't big enough to justify the cost.

[santaclaus]

Google hires devs to develop similar libraries... to power their machine learning efforts. There is tons of numerical work in finance, too. I don't think the money is to be made by selling copies of a Matlab-like piece of software, but in the application of the tools.

[shoyer]

This is spot on. There are plenty of jobs applying open source technologies, but far fewer building those libraries themselves.

(I'm NumPy dev who works at Google on machine learning.)

[eximius]

Really? This is somewhat surprising to me. How has Grumpy impacted your work / numerical computing in Python at Google?

[shoyer]

I haven't used Grumpy at all, and unless it starts supporting C extension modules like NumPy I doubt I ever will. Google's numerical computing / machine learning stack (e.g., TensorFlow) is based on Python/C++.

[kevin_thibedeau]

But you have to run through their interview gauntlet.

[dagw]

Even if you get head hunted?

[kevin_thibedeau]

Ken Thompson didn't (still doesn't ?) have commit access because he hasn't been vetted by Google as a competent C programmer. I don't think Google is going to relax its hiring policies no matter who you are.

[mianos]

And their decimation.

[danjoc]

It's not about money. Apple has $200B just sitting in a bank doing nothing. It's about supply and owning the entire market. What happens when the entire market stagnates because those devs are writing great stuff for Apple exclusively?

Apple also used to buy the entire world supply of sapphire for phones and the entire world supply of flash memory for music players. Literally, nobody else could compete, because Apple contracted it in bulk, first.

Those days seem long gone now. Today Apple takes 5 years to update their Pro desktop, while at the same time, making fun of people for using 5 year old computers.

[breatheoften]

I wonder too -- Apple should be hiring _somebody_ to build a modern nd-array for swift -- and evolve playgrounds into the ultimate scientific computing environment.

The tools for scientific computing are amazingly scattered - seems like a big company with a modern platform strategy could make a huge impact ...

[mschaef]

I don't know who you're talking about, but Orange Micro went out of business in 2004. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Micro )

[JPKab]

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but he means Apple.

[mschaef]

It was more an attempt at light humor than sarcasm. :-)

(Not to mention I thought it was hard to imagine anybody around here being unaware of the most capitalized company in the world. Aside from maybe Saudi Aramco.)

[danjoc]

I think he knows. Mike has a 5 digit /. ID :)

[mschaef]

Heh... I knew my Slashdot ID was pretty low (~32K), but had no idea I'd been around here that long. Now I feel old. :-)

Speaking of old, I used Reddit as my main news source for a while, and I remember /r/programming having a post celebrating 65,536 users. Now it's over 10 times that, and there are more than three subreddits.