Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Architecture astronauts take over

joelonsoftware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 79 posts

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#31

Post by mrtron »

simplegeek wrote: post #29

Ok, but he's not pointed out a solution. I guess MSFT has lost the battle and solution is to admit it and they should work on their strengths. There is a whole lot of potential in there. I mean look at Vista & IE 7 ;( Even though .NET powers some heavy-traffic websites but the framework is still catching up. LINQ is somewhat cool but they're giving out MVC in (ahem) 2000 and 8.

Exactly, what is he really offering at his company to attract the top talent?

I think he is a pretty smart guy with a successful business - but I am not sure the work environment sounds interesting enough for some of the top grads. Who wants to work on the ASP -> PHP compiler they have, or write a bunch of AJAX?

Unless he has some luring new projects in the work like some sort of cloud based synchronization... :)

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#33

Post by slackerIII »

watmough wrote: post #8

That is absolutely vintage Joel. And he's right. Ray Ozzie and the rest of MS should have realized by now that the only thing that really works is building something. Give us something to criticize. Look at YUI. It's not great in places, but at least it works, and it there, and available to play with, and fun, and cross-platform. It's coming to something when the most interesting thing out of MS is probably F#, and P…

It is absolutely vintage joel in that it is a FogCreek recruiting ad. Joel has mastered the art of using fanboyism as marketing. "Oh look -- Microsoft is doing something big! I'm sure it sucks! haha Come work for me"

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#34

Post by sanj »

The term "Killer App" has gotten brutally watered down. And y'all aren't helping.

From Wikipedia:

"a killer app is an application so compelling that someone will buy the hardware or software components necessary to run it"

Sorry, DropBox (while very, very well done) doesn't even come close to cutting it.

It doesn't hold a candle to Visicalc. Or email. Or Photoshop.

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#35

Post by raganwald »

I have become sick and tired of the carping and flaming you see from some folks whenever Joel publishes a rant, accusing him of douchebaggery and all sorts of sin. The usual behaviour is that he has one great insight, a bunch of entertaining ranting, and one egocentric point. And on the basis of this, the whole thing is junk and he is a has-been windbag.

I don't go along with that sort of vilification. If a post has one great insight, something I can learn from, I'm a happy man. I can chuckle at Joel complaining about competing for interns with Google as long as I'mn entertained by his prose and intrigued by his central thesis.

I would have loved this post on that basis.

Except.

WTF is with the dig at playing Ultimate? Joel, you have totally lost it this time. Ultimate is the ultimate nerd sport, and interns who play Ultimate are your best hires ever.

Ultimate involves complex plays involving team co-ordination. A skill that just might come in handy working on a software development team. The flight of the disc is the kind of thing the mathematical mind drools over--gyroscopic procession, ballistics, aerodynamics, everything comes in to play.

Ultimate players are healthy and I'll wager can crank code for long hours compared to those who eschew aerobic sports in favour of foosball.

And for those who are still single... Ultimate is a great place to meet people of every gender and orientation. Which leads to cohabitation, the purchase of homes, large mortgages, and a slavish devotion to working your ass off to earn a fat bonus.

Joel, I wanted to like this post, I really did. But you have got to stop making insanely wrong pronouncements about things that matter most.

Like which games interns ought to play ;-)

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#36

Post by osipov »

joshwa wrote: post #14

To me the real Architecture Astronauts are the Enterprise Architects, who think that documenting in some 6-figure modeling tool how I order paperclips, and defining a paperclip SOA and sending EVERYTHING over a 8-figure ESB they bought from IBM-- now those are some space cadets!

>documenting in some 6-figure modeling tool how I order paperclips

are you suggesting that the execs should go and read the code that some intern wrote in order to figure out how their customers buy paperclips?

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#37

Post by [deleted] »

osipov wrote: post #36
joshwa wrote: post #14

To me the real Architecture Astronauts are the Enterprise Architects, who think that documenting in some 6-figure modeling tool how I order paperclips, and defining a paperclip SOA and sending EVERYTHING over a 8-figure ESB they bought from IBM-- now those are some space cadets!

>documenting in some 6-figure modeling tool how I order paperclips are you suggesting that the execs should go and read the code that some intern wrote in order to figure out how their customers buy paperclips?

[deleted]

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#38

Post by glymor »

dhouston wrote: post #2

we beg to differ that sync/sharing isn't a killer app ;)

I don't believe that you and Microsoft are suggesting the same thing at all.

My guess is you want to give everybody what programmers have been able to do for years with distributed VCS, publicly addressable computers and rsync. And presumably want to do it well enough that even programmers who could get it for free wouldn't be able to fool themselves that paying wasn't worth the convenience.

Now what Microsoft is doing is probably connected with there life-logging stuff. MSR has been going on for a while about how we'll never delete anything and every document and every phone call we make etc will be recorded and searchable. The mesh is presumably the infrastructure that all these Windows Mobile devices would use to make this seamless.

However this is insane, there are already more mobiles in Europe than people, and Microsoft can't even keep XBox Live running. Just have the devices query/talk to each other without getting some central server involved.

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#39

Post by cstejerean »

ks wrote: post #30
mtts wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, or, to put it another way: right now synchronization is yet another way to share files either with someone else or with yourself, and there's already hundreds of methods for doing that, and once everyone starts using web applications exclusively, it'll be a non issue.

Web applications will not solve our synchronization problems Example: You want to send a mail using Yahoo Mail where you attach a document created with Google docs. When you created that document you wanted to use an image from Flickr. That's 3 different services that needs to be synchronized. What happens when you add other web applications. When/if people move to web applications, the synchronization problem moves…

I think you're talking about integration not synchronization.
Post reply on HN