A lot of noise but fundamentally it’s all the same.
Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
21–30 of 243 posts
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#22Interviewing is a nightmare.
Always has been.
I had a go at my manager recently for letting people do technical tests then telling them they didn't have enough experience after. He could have worked that out before wasting their time.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#23Nothing - oh I forgot there is 8 new Javscript framwork this week. It's been a couple of weeks since I checked but there must be a new language or 2 out there.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#24The most interesting developments have been in infrastructure.
AWS has started to take on third-party, open source components e.g. Cassandra, ElasticSearch, MongoDB as they run out of things to build. Expect them to continue further up the stack possibly into applications.
Kubernetes has really taken off with every cloud provider having a solid implementation. And it's getting massive adoption within the enterprise as companies look to reign in their cloud cost, simplify their infrastructure and have better DevOps. It also allows them to standardise the NFRs across multiple applications e.g. metrics, logging, security, routing which is more important than ever.
Data Science has seen massive adoption in the last few years within the enterprise space as companies go after the low hanging fruit. Also seeing lots of traditional Data/Reporting Analysts been cross skilled in Data Science and vice versa. It's definitely here to stay for the long term just without the hype.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#25SPA:s are now being overused for no particular reason, particularly by junior talents, who by now have been taught this is the one and only way to build Professional™ web sites. The Javascript frontend scene almost literally exploded, in various ways. Webasm got some serious traction. Old serious people like this, becuase it may eventually allow them to avoid the increasingly crazy javascript scene. Computer vision (…
I am a Python / Django guy given the choice. Python may be a slow language, but I haven't seen many places where python is the cause of the bottleneck. Rewrite stuff so that the database is doing the heavy lifting, and add the appropriate indexes and you shouldn't have any problems.
SPA's are a pain in the arse. Usually close to twice the amount of code to avoid page refreshes. Usually the apps are way slower than a page refresh as well - with lots of JSON calls to get data that would be in one server side page load.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#26Java's market share is declining fast. Ruby and Clojure are dead, literally for Clojure, most libs are from >7 years ago. Javascript(and TS) and Python are the tools of the trade to achieve most common things. Devs are starting to realize how they got fooled by Rust's marketing/hype train for general purpose programming/exploration/prototyping and productivity because it's too restrictive and its compile times are at…
Should clarify that first statement. Java market share is declining but the JVM is still as good as ever. Instead everyone is moving to Kotlin and Scala.
What do you base that on? I still see a lot of Java jobs advertised (never seen a Kotlin job and not too many for Scala). It seems to be entrenched in the corporate world in a way that it isn't going away soon.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#27Kubernetes has become important Experiments with new "open source" licenses are unknown Low code has entered the hype frey
We moved from one big box to Kubernetes. Now we have a load of kubernetes related problems to fix.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#28In the JVM space there are now new web frameworks that specialize in Microservices. The advantages they offer are very low memory usage, better performance, fast startup time and finally the ability to generate a native executable via GraalVM [0].
[0] A lot of JEE Frameworks heavily rely on reflection and other dynamic features that cannot be used in a native image.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#29Java's market share is declining fast. Ruby and Clojure are dead, literally for Clojure, most libs are from >7 years ago. Javascript(and TS) and Python are the tools of the trade to achieve most common things. Devs are starting to realize how they got fooled by Rust's marketing/hype train for general purpose programming/exploration/prototyping and productivity because it's too restrictive and its compile times are at…
This seems like an answer from someone who filters the industry through Hacker News.
Java's market share is still huge. Clojure never really had a big market share and Ruby is still very popular.
Re: Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since?
#30Perf is becoming more important than it had been. Rust is still around and growing. WASM is becoming mainstream. You see some people migrating away from things that require garbage collection. Edge is becoming real, with Cloudflare and Fastly doing edge functions/workers, and AWS having come out with outposts, local zones, and wavelength (deploy AWS VMs to Verizon 5G hubs).
AWS is still eating the world, Azure is doing well and growing faster in enterprise markets but devs still hate it, GCP seems mainly startup and ML loads and they have an ultimatum to become top 2 or bust by 2022.
Open source is a little under fire. AWS made a closed source MongoDB clone. I feel like things have moved a bit away from DIY toward settling on whatever the big three provide.
JS framework overload has settled down and it's pretty much React and Vue. NoSQL has too, there's still mostly the same players as in 2017 but I'm seeing far fewer new entrants. In general I'd say things have slowed down as a whole, and the level of innovation isn't what it was a couple years ago. Shiny new object fatigue has set in a bit and people just want to make things work.
Docker in production is very real (our team uses docker in production only, not dev), and k8s has the mindshare.
ML is still fairly hot, but various experts saying we're starting to hit a wall wrt ML capabilities, and others saying plow forward and see.