• PetDinosaurs@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.one
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      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.