Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?

#31

Post by geeky4qwerty » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

m3047 wrote: post #28

Please explain what "Boomers ruin everything" has to do with the rest of your question. I can imagine that at the beginnings of Bronze Age collapse, immediately following generations deemed the waxings of their elders as merely the anodyne of old age (nostalgia), not real, not lived. After a century or three: not imagined, language and knowledge lost. The pressure of survival becomes more pressing. True knowledge of…

I was being tongue-in-cheek, the "blame boomers" trope is pretty well worn and I was merely making fun of that.

Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?

#32

Post by dang » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

geeky4qwerty wrote: post #30

dang wrote: post #14

> TL;DR - Boomers ruin everything. None of this here, please. If anything ruins everything, it's flamebait, and generational flamebait is particularly avoidable. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My apologies I was not meaning to be flamebaity and actually put that "boomers ruin everything" in as a joke.

Appreciated!

Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?

#33

Post by m3047 » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 10:23 PM UTC

geeky4qwerty wrote: post #31

m3047 wrote: post #28

Please explain what "Boomers ruin everything" has to do with the rest of your question. I can imagine that at the beginnings of Bronze Age collapse, immediately following generations deemed the waxings of their elders as merely the anodyne of old age (nostalgia), not real, not lived. After a century or three: not imagined, language and knowledge lost. The pressure of survival becomes more pressing. True knowledge of…

I was being tongue-in-cheek, the "blame boomers" trope is pretty well worn and I was merely making fun of that.

Ok. Personally I'm tired of voicing unpopular opinions to people who don't want to hear them. (Guess my age.)

Not everything is in teh cloudz or likely to be in the cloud. The "cloud" is not everywhere (look at some datacenter maps; according to The Register 70% of W EU cloud spend goes to US companies https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/29/aws_microsoft_google_...). There is a real (careful with that word; as in "real estate") notion of sovereignity.

Did you read _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_? What is Defcon / Blackhat? What has the latest "wave (from the coast) that floats all boats" turned out to be? What has it wrought?

When did the meaning of "security" morph from "carefree" to "hypervigilance"? How did it happen? Why did it happen? https://kellyshortridge.com/blog/posts/what-do-we-mean-when-...

Three arrows from the quiver; I have more.

As another commenter observes, you're seldom more than two seconds from disaster when driving a car. It remains to be seen whether the road ends, or rather that people have confused "carefree" with "careless".

Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?

#34

Post by midoridensha » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 6:35 AM UTC

mmastrac wrote: post #9

I'm feeling something similar. I've been on sabbatical on and off for a few years, dipping my toes into the market to see what things are like professionally and it's been eye-openingly terrible. "Title inflation" has made the "senior" level a virtually worthless designation, and it appears like even "staff" engineers are going that way. There's no thought put into long-term stability or serviceability of software. I…

>There's no thought put into long-term stability or serviceability of software.

Why should there be? How does this improve short-term profits? Customers are happy to pay for buggy software that gets replaced with something even worse in a few years, so why worry about making quality code?

>but if the software isn't performing its basic needs, what are you even shipping?

Something that makes lots of profit, despite being of terrible quality.

Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?

#35

Post by b20000 » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

shmatt wrote: post #12

b20000 wrote: post #4

leetcode hiring processes and management style of the past 20 years have dismissed the importance of experience and wisdom, so yes, there is a high probability that we will see the effects of that in the coming years.

I feel like the LeetCode companies are currently the loudest about preaching to employees about having dead weight / needing more PIPs / a lot of people don't need to be here. And yet they're still heavily dependent on that, as if they think its the best way to figure out who will push the needle

passing leetcode interviews does not guarantee the creation of actually usable code or the creation of the right solution for the problems at hand