All this thrashing & change is normal. There are many reasons, but here are a few:
- Trend-following (Mgmt. FOMO) is real
- Resume-driven development is real
- Sometimes the 'new' stuff is better
Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
141–150 of 430 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#142I think the problem is that the majority of architects copy/paste solution for big companies problems (Google twitter ...)but 99.99% of business have not those problems, and when you tell a manager that this is used in google and it will cost the company 0$(open source) ,he will say ok do it
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#143I was thinking about this yesterday as it relates to infrastructure and hosting systems, then I stumbled-via a semirelated article-the phrase "cloud repatriation".
https://deft.com/blog/cloud-repatriation-isnt-a-retreat-but-...
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question - if it was so much better then, why are approximately zero new companies building a Laravel/Rails/whatever app and using jQuery for the front end? If it's that much of an advantage I would expect at least someone who is trying that (because surely some are) to succeed with their lean, mean tech stack. Why wouldn't you have just written the project in that standard MVC stack instead of a modern one?…
Indie makers famously do just that. Pieter Levels is making millions with PHP and jQuery. I consult primarily in node and react with all sorts of transpilers mess and shitty packers. The stuff of nightmares - we waste so much time making things work - but simplifying the stack will never get traction among the not-anymore-technical principal engineers or even amongst the other developers who need a fancy cv for their…
> Pieter Levels is making millions with PHP and jQuery
no, the reason Pieter Levels makes millions is not PHP and jQuery, but because he's also a brilliant sales/marketing/business person
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#145[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it definitely has got worse, I've been doing this 15 years, the sweet spot was the Rails revolution. Before that a lot of frameworks were a bit too much magic, and not enough understanding of how browsers, http and html worked. Simple MVC stacks went to all languages, jQuery front-ends doing enough but not a lot. JavaScript enhanced easy to reason about server-side stacks. You used to spend a couple of days a yea…
Serious question - if it was so much better then, why are approximately zero new companies building a Laravel/Rails/whatever app and using jQuery for the front end? If it's that much of an advantage I would expect at least someone who is trying that (because surely some are) to succeed with their lean, mean tech stack. Why wouldn't you have just written the project in that standard MVC stack instead of a modern one?…
Yea people absolutely still build companies with these tools. If you just want to start a Saas company as a side project you would do yourself a disservice if you didn't use something like Rails, Django or Laravel.
The problem is in larger companies, developers stopped caring about just solving the business problems and moved on to solving non existent technical issues to build resumes to go the next job to get more salary. They go to company to company like a parasitic infection leaving them to rot by introducing Kubernetes React, Go microservices with Rust cli tools.
Also it might be an issue of not being fulfilled in life outside of work.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#147> Someone else talks about that we need to [...] X [...] because that's where the leaders of the industry are moving to
This is the definition of cargo cult, and companies in our industry have a higher than average tendency to behave this way.
Most technology, principles, methodologies, programming patterns, project management patterns etc etc, are subjective, as in they work well for certain projects... not all. Even the massive over complexity we see, for example in containers, are sometimes worth it, they have their place. The issues come when people start behaving as you have found by copying what others are doing because they make the over simplistic relationship between their chosen tools and their success as a business.
Either convince your peers, or even superiors that mimicry is a poor basis for technological choices (best argued by doing the analysis yourself and pointing out the real world applicability), or find a different company that understands this (they do exist).
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#148If you believe that's all there is to those ideas, maybe you need to step away and think about them for a while. Sure, there's going to be some resume padding happening in larger orgs. But all those ideas solve real problems too. I think you're just in a very negative space if you start with "Distributed systems" as something overly complicated. At some scale getting a bigger machine either doesn't make financial sen…
What’s crazy is the scale a modern computer can operate at. There _are_ problems that need more scale than that but they are the minority. Meanwhile it’s out of fashion to spend time improving application performance and instead people go horizontal early, with devastating complexity issues.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#149We lean into complexity because it's easier. Simple solutions are actually much more difficult to create.
Software engineers are lazy, don't want responsibility, just want to have fun and be creative. That's not a recipe for good engineering. The industry will continue to chase its tail as long as we don't treat it like a real engineering discipline.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#150Agreed. You should know that in the past when OOP was not common, we had to work a little harder doing things like managing our own memory or building a LAMP server to publish our web pages. There was a thriving market for language and UI add ons. The result was that each company had their own internal dev tools and recruiting people outside of the company who had experience with those tools was nearly impossible. Al…
OOP to me would be classified as the industry blindly moving towards unnecessary complexity. It is indeed the definitive example of how the industry over-engineers things. While still prevalent today, there's a huge sentiment against this paradigm. Modern languages and frameworks such as React, Golang and Rust show how the tide is turning against this.
Three object oriented languages prove how there's sentiment against OOP?
Or are you saying that Rust/Golang/React are simplistic in a world of over complexity. React I would generally agree with, the other two not really.