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Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

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Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#421

Post by mbo »

hcrean wrote: post #385
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #52

I generally agree, but two things I'd like to point out. If you're using python for the web you're already part of the complexity problem, atleast from the perspective of someone deploying php 15 years ago. I use python for web development, and I love it, but deploying webpages used to be copy an apache config and ftp/scp your files to some location. Now we need app servers and reverse proxies, and static files are s…

I have just finished three years of beating a department of 50 developers into breaking up a fifteen year old mono-repo. The rewards have been quite considerable. Mono repos come with a particular challenge: If you have five projects {A,B,C,D,E} in the same mono-repo, you definitely do not want to be building B,C,D and E every-time someone commits code to project A! This is unimportant at small scales, but as the tea…

I work for a company with about 1000+ engineers that run a Bazel + Git + GitHub monorepo. As with all workflows it has its painpoints, but I am quite fond of it. It only needs a team of 8 to maintain all the integrations and performance optimisations.

GitHub is taking the problems of monorepo user's seriously (https://github.blog/2021-03-16-improving-large-monorepo-perf...) and have been responsive to the bugs and poor performance that monorepo's typically cause and exercise.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#422

Post by graderjs »

Bancakes wrote: post #314
graderjs wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaw, so cute. My smart piece threatened you and you want to prove you're smarter than me. Nice try but you failed.... I learn all the time, you should try it. XD

I saw your original post and your cringe edited one. I won't even comment.

Oh don't cringe, it was made for you, Haha. I guess you're cringing at your own daftness in the face of my brilliant comment. You were meant to see it. You mean this one? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap

As for you not commenting, it seems that would be a good idea on your part. You keep trying, and keep failing. Do you often do things you say you won't? You lack self discipline? Anyway, thanks for obsessively checking my edits.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#423

Post by turtledove »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #134
Bancakes wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Labor market' is a purely American concept. You shouldn't be switching jobs constantly and relocating. It takes a toll on personal life and makes no sense anyway.

Unless you live in a communist country, you are part of a labor market.

Workers coops are neither labor market nor necessarily communists. If everyone democratically operates the company and shares equally in profits, there's no wage labor being performed.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#424

Post by qwerty456127 »

Browsers are the next Russia - we rely on what they offer because that's the easiest solution nowadays but that all is a huge pile of technical debt waiting to blow up eventually. We should be using a well-engineered cross-platform native UI technology instead.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#425

Post by Bancakes »

graderjs wrote: post #422
Bancakes wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw your original post and your cringe edited one. I won't even comment.

Oh don't cringe, it was made for you, Haha. I guess you're cringing at your own daftness in the face of my brilliant comment. You were meant to see it. You mean this one? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap As for you not commenting, it seems that would be a good idea on your part. You keep trying, and keep failing. Do you often do things you say you won't? You lack self discipline? Anyway, thanks for obsessivel…

Take meds, get vax, and touch grass.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#426

Post by taylodl »

quanticle wrote: post #417
taylodl wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have missed the part where I said But here's one thing I can say about applications that we've moved to the cloud: they cost 30% as much to host in the cloud as they do on-premise, and that's not even accounting for the entirety of all the costs I enumerated above! Every app I've migrated to the cloud so far has resulted in a 70% cost reduction, but I'm also not trying to take my entire application portfolio…

Have you done an audit in the other direction? How many "cloud native" apps do you have, which would realize similar cost reductions from moving to on-prem? The point I was trying to make is that many companies, especially newer startups, don't even discuss on-prem as an option. They build everything cloud-native from day 1, which then leads to them painting themselves into a corner like I described above. They're ha…

It's May 6, 2022. You're launching your startup next month. Are you going to host on-prem? What, with server equipment backlogs now 4-6 months, and that's if you're a large enterprise customer? Network equipment backlogs are now in the 8-12 month range. Not to mention the cost of needing conditioned power, cooling, staff, space, etc. You're going to utilize the cloud. It'd be insane to do otherwise.

You do raise a fair point - what about the applications that are more economical to host on-prem? In my own portfolio I estimate 20% or so of my applications make more sense to host on-prem. What to do about those?

The most practical option is to mandate every application you build in the cloud have a plan for how to run on-prem. Note those that would be very difficult to run on-prem - those are your key cloud dependencies. For example, in my own portfolio I have a couple of applications depending on Lex and therefore would be very difficult to host on-prem.

Pay special attention to your so-called "crown jewels" - your apps that distinguish you from your competitors. If those were dependent on a key technology such as Lex and would be difficult to migrate on-prem then you need to identify other cloud providers you could migrate to. In this particular example I know Microsoft's and Google's clouds both offer similar services.

If you design and build your applications with no thought of the future then you're already in a bad position.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#427

Post by rafiki6 »

This is why, as much as people love to complain about it, the big tech companies might actually be doing hiring right. Hire for the core competence and skills and not for the frameworks/languages. The thing that is missing in the process is the core skills should be tested only once, not every time you interview.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#428

Post by graderjs »

Bancakes wrote: post #425
graderjs wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh don't cringe, it was made for you, Haha. I guess you're cringing at your own daftness in the face of my brilliant comment. You were meant to see it. You mean this one? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap As for you not commenting, it seems that would be a good idea on your part. You keep trying, and keep failing. Do you often do things you say you won't? You lack self discipline? Anyway, thanks for obsessivel…

Take meds, get vax, and touch grass.

Is that what you do? How come it's not working for you?

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#429

Post by quanticle »

taylodl wrote: post #426
quanticle wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you done an audit in the other direction? How many "cloud native" apps do you have, which would realize similar cost reductions from moving to on-prem? The point I was trying to make is that many companies, especially newer startups, don't even discuss on-prem as an option. They build everything cloud-native from day 1, which then leads to them painting themselves into a corner like I described above. They're ha…

It's May 6, 2022. You're launching your startup next month. Are you going to host on-prem? What, with server equipment backlogs now 4-6 months, and that's if you're a large enterprise customer? Network equipment backlogs are now in the 8-12 month range. Not to mention the cost of needing conditioned power, cooling, staff, space, etc. You're going to utilize the cloud. It'd be insane to do otherwise. You do raise a fa…

It's May 6, 2022. You're launching your startup next month. Are you going to host on-prem? What, with server equipment backlogs now 4-6 months, and that's if you're a large enterprise customer?

On-prem or cloud, why would I be waiting until 1 month before launch to provision anything?

You're pretending like on-prem is full of all these physical limitations, but Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, et. al. can just magically make hardware appear out of nowhere. It's the same hardware, subject to the same supply limitations, and I'm going to be paying either way. Either I pay more per hour for my cloud instances, or I pay a bunch up front to provision my on-prem servers.

Cloud makes sense if the load on your service is intermittent or unpredictable enough that you're okay paying AWS's premiums in order to have the ability to scale on demand. But if the load on the services is knowable, then hosting that service on the cloud is paying a 25% markup for no reason whatsoever. AWS is by far the most profitable portion of Amazon's business units. Those profits are coming from somewhere. They're coming from your business.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#430

Post by john567 »

pfraze wrote: post #49

The complexity caused the variety, not the other way around. Networked systems are inherently complex. Most of the technologies you mention are attempts to solve that complexity in some way, and the ones that stuck ended up being ideal for specific use-cases but not others. The industry trends towards the most useful solution, not the simplest one. React isn’t internally simple, but it killed the frontend JS framewor…

And nature is messy. And this is a very natural way for us to do things. And much in the spirit of evolution. And competition in an open market.

It's a healthy thing though some software projects probably should just go and die already.

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