You have a pretty negative take. There are fewer software engineers with the skills you mention. But it's kind of the wrong question. Without these skills, individuals are still capable of offering tremendous value to tech companies. I work at a solid company with a great team. Those with solid CS fundamentals have certainly been profoundly helpful when designing systems that need to be performant and reliable. But other, passionate engineers with liberal arts backgrounds have added insane value to the product as well. It's about curiosity, intelligence, and thinking about what's needed to get the job done.
Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
11–20 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#12Backend code has moved a little. Java's popularity might even be waning.
I don't know about anyone else, but must of my time is spent wrangling enormous scripts in tools like CloudFormation to deploy relatively small amounts of code.
What's happened with JavaScript on the frontend is nuts though. I can't follow what those guys are up to anymore and can only assume they have a better understanding of caching, algorithms, etc with the explosion of code there compared with the days before even jQuery.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#13It hasn't gone down, it has expanded and as a result diluted the general base of knowledge. At the same time, that isn't as much of a problem as you'd think as most 'SWE' isn't really that, isn't more of a cookie cutter basic CRUD/Feed/CMS setting where real in-depth knowledge isn't required to make a product work 'good enough' and keep a job.
There are still plenty of people that actually do know the theory and actually do work on low-level stuff, but at the same time the reality is that the olden days of engineering aren't coming back; they are what is currently often referred to as the '10x engineer' type of work. It doesn't scale, it doesn't work well with others and it doesn't return on investment all that well.
Unless you need someone who works on hardware, kernels, compilers, runtimes or severely constrained constructions (query planners, memory managers, transaction engines etc.) it really doesn't matter as much as it used to.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
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Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#15You have a pretty negative take. There are fewer software engineers with the skills you mention. But it's kind of the wrong question. Without these skills, individuals are still capable of offering tremendous value to tech companies. I work at a solid company with a great team. Those with solid CS fundamentals have certainly been profoundly helpful when designing systems that need to be performant and reliable. But o…
Could not agree more. For a product company, having software engineers with diverse backgrounds can be a lot more valuable than having only super strong CS theorists (but you should have them of course). As long as the engineers are intelligent, passionate and productive, diverse backgrounds can only be a good thing.
Now this is probably different for research oriented careers, but most of us are building products for customers in some form or another.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#16I honestly can't remember a time in my career when I've looked at a codebase and thought to myself "what this dev really needs is a more thorough understanding of CPU pipelines and virtual memory". Ed Yourdon once wrote something like "No project was ever cancelled because the developer couldn't address the serial bus". I'm much more concerned with bootcamp graduates not understanding good class design or appropriate unit testing than I am about any lack in low level mechanics.
I don't know if SWE is getting better or worse, but I do think that most SWE operates on a much higher level of abstraction than it used to, and I think that's good thing.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#17No, I don't think the quality has gone down. I think this outlook is a way of gatekeeping engineers who don't have a formal CS background. I happen to be one of them.
Most people who go to a bootcamp (I did not, but have hired a developer who did) do not end up working in a role that requires understanding of the 5 topics above you mentioned, with the exception of cache and maybe algorithms. It's just not what most bootcamps are targeted for.
I have seen a lot of terrible code from both sides, and don't believe the quality of the code to be a function of the developer's level of formal education.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#181. Yeah, people seem to be copy-pasting incoherent difficult-to-read stuff everywhere.
2. No seriously though - what you've written touches on CS and completely ignores designing programs. You can be great at CS and still write crappy programs.
3. Though it's unlikely to have an industry-specific crash, recessions are inevitable and then people (competent or not) lose their jobs.
4. I guess my whole point is - even if these thing were true, so what? Each individual person has the choice to go into whichever field they like. Each person is also free to spend as much time and effort as they want on improving their CS and software-engineering skills. This knowledge isn't somehow exclusive to degree holders - there are so many free resources on CS and SWE. And as I mentioned, the degree doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to create good software.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
#19Has quality gone down? No. What you're talking about with people not knowing these various things and going to bootcamps, those are all developers. Developers are not engineers, no matter how many times HR mixes up the terms.
It's like asking if the quality of mechanical engineers has gone down because mechanics don't know x, y, and z.
Re: Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?
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