Reflections of an “Old” Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#41

Post by GuiA » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:20 AM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #19

Zyst wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twentysomething year old here, so you know, not like you don't have a point but: >the other reason is because it's easy/boring as hell I legitimately think front end development is not only very fun, it can have some really challenging aspects. I wouldn't think there's any programming challenge that is inherently easier because it's on web as opposed to something else. Of course I bet there are domain-specific tasks…

Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no quest…

Honestly when I see what my friends who design airplanes and particle accelerators are doing, I feel like we're all kind of fucking around in software engineering, frontend or not.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#42

Post by JSDave » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:24 AM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #19

Zyst wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twentysomething year old here, so you know, not like you don't have a point but: >the other reason is because it's easy/boring as hell I legitimately think front end development is not only very fun, it can have some really challenging aspects. I wouldn't think there's any programming challenge that is inherently easier because it's on web as opposed to something else. Of course I bet there are domain-specific tasks…

Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no quest…

Ok, then backend folks just do API integrations and database guys just make tables, no real technical challenges anywhere. Anybody getting stuff done is pasting together libraries.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#43

Post by DenisM » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:25 AM UTC

dsjoerg wrote: post #17

thesmallestcat wrote: post #2

Hm. The author works for a web/mobile development agency and uses React Native and GWT as examples of the new and the old, respectively. I hope it isn't news to anybody here that this sort of work is a race to the bottom and has such turnover precisely because it's mostly being done by junior developers. Linux systems programming arcana, for instance, doesn't disintegrate so quickly as the ten years the author cites.…

When it's easy / boring as hell why not make the computer do it?

Yes, lets just make a framework to put an end to... well... all that mess of frameworks... ugh... :)

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#44

Post by vacri » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:25 AM UTC

> The doctor at 40 doesn't seem to be worried about discovering that all his knowledge of the vascular system is about to evaporate in favor of some new organizing theory. The same goes for the lawyer, the plumber, the accountant, or the english teacher.

And the same is true of programming. There are still variables, arrays, syntax errors, IDEs and so forth - the underlying algorithms don't change that much. Lawyers and accountants have to keep up to date to keep their credentials, and doctors almost always do (but not actually always - just like some programmers don't update their skills). Fads come and go in teaching as well.

I know less about plumbers, but there are few white-collar professionals where you don't have to keep on top of things throughout your career. From architects to engineers to social workers to pilots to biologists to meteorologists to managers, things change in your profession and you need to adapt. It's just that usually those changes don't have the ridiculous levels of hype and fanfare that they have in our bubble (management being an exception here as well, lest I draw the wrath of a six-sigma black belt!)

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#45

Post by kafkaesq » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:30 AM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #33

kafkaesq wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foundational knowledge does not decay. True in a certain intellectual sense. And in practical senses, also. But unfortunately, the hiring market doesn't filter for "foundational knowledge"; in realistic terms, it largely hires for what might best be termed "keyword compliance" -- that is, baseline exposure to stuff that barely existed, or if it did, barely ticked most people's radar screens more than 5 years ago. And…

Are you saying that there aren't any jobs using long-term established stable ecosystems in the hiring market? No J2EE CRUD apps, no standard LAMP websites, no .NET stack-based jobs?

I wouldn't say there aren't "any" such jobs. And there are a lot of languages I never look at ads for, so I can't say I have any sense of what their market is like. And of course there are whole domains (like C++) where the ecosystem is just intrinsically older.

But by and large (and this gets back to the original article), once your core "keyword set" has gotten long enough in the tooth (which I'm pegging at an age of 5 year or so), the number of ballpark-open offerings (as in: you have enough XYZ that they're consider talking to you) does seem to drop quite precipitously. And the more "skinny pants" your domain is (like web stuff), the more this rule seems to hold.

So the JS ecosystem would seem to be a bellweather example -- nearly every role seems to require either AngularJS or React (5 and 3 years out, respectively), or something similarly recent; pretty much no one is interested in jQuery or any of the older frameworks, these days (except, as the other commenter stated, for small maintenance projects).

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#46

Post by EpicEng » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:37 AM UTC

Please. Reduction to absurdity isn't a valid argument. Are those folks working at large scales? Are they tuning DB's for applications which have to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions per second? I don't imagine you actually know what you're talking about here.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#47

Post by EpicEng » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:38 AM UTC

sotojuan wrote: post #32

EpicEng wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no quest…

There's engineering challenges in frontend but they only apply to Facebook-tier scale. There's also cooler stuff like data visualization, advanced animations/design and WebGL but those seem to be done by designers. For most of us, it truly is gluing X framework to Y backend over and over again.

Sure, but even then I wonder how much of that complexity (the scaling bit) is actually implemented by the front end devs. I would assume that it's handled on the back end, but of course a UI like FB, used by 1.7 billion people, can't be an easy thing to design.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#48

Post by combatentropy » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:38 AM UTC

glandium wrote: post #14

dkarapetyan wrote: post #7

This statement is false > Half of what a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years. and the rest of the article seems to be based on it so it negates much of what is said. Foundational knowledge does not decay. Knowing how to estimate the scalability of a given design never gets old. Knowing fundamental concurrency concepts never gets old. Knowing the fundamentals of logic programming and how backtracking works ne…

How exactly are you contradicting that sentence you're quoting? In fact, it seems to me you're confirming it. He didn't say that everything a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years, but that half will. You're only enumerating the half that won't.

I agree with the grandparent, that the writer overstated how much in ten years will be useless. It was almost 20 years ago that I first learned HTML, and since then neither it nor hardly anything else I have learned has decayed: CSS, native JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Bash. But I guess it depends on what you try learning.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#49

Post by EpicEng » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:39 AM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #41

EpicEng wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no quest…

Honestly when I see what my friends who design airplanes and particle accelerators are doing, I feel like we're all kind of fucking around in software engineering, frontend or not.

I agree, most are.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#50

Post by markbnj » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:43 AM UTC

As a working developer and SRE at 55 years of age I can't help being just a little amused at the author. I guess you really _are_ as old as you feel. The points about the competence cycle over the span of a career are dead on, of course.