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Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

#51

Post by cyphar »

sidcool wrote: post #20
jey wrote: post #15

Yes, go for it, but definitely make sure you actually build something cool during your Masters degree if you want it to improve your career opportunities afterwards. The credential by itself won't mean much, but if you list some interesting project(s) that demonstrate your new skill it'll help with future job searches. > Java, Scala, Ruby, Python, Angular. You should also learn C. (Isn't that a pretty important part…

Thanks! I am learning Rust nowadays. It's promising to replace C/C++. I just don't know it enough to list it yet.

Most core system software is still written in C though, and I think it's not reasonable to assume we are going to rewrite more than 40 years of computer history in Rust in any reasonable amount of time.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

#52

Post by theoh »

Nydhal wrote: post #36
ozfive wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtual desktops will open up opportunities of virtual phone operating systems. If you leave your phone at home by accident pick up a "shell" at the grocery store and sign into your account. When your done with your errands drop it off at the last place you were at, or some other concept. Truly portable number.

Until no one actually owns phones and all you have are shared shells that can be picked up anywhere.

Unfortunately, as with the idea of batteries for electric cars that can be swapped out at the charging station, there is an incentive to hold onto better units, and quickly return inferior units to the pool. It's a case of Gresham's Law.

So the utopia of interchangeable shared units of anything will only be viable if those units are completely indistinguishable. If there's any kind of distribution of quality, the incentives will cause the economy of the system to devolve into hoarding of the better units. One way to work around this is to mandate regular exchange, but that really gets you into the territory of communism. Not necessarily a bad thing in theory or in some vastly different future, but a big change.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

#53

Post by ThalesX »

zerr wrote: post #45
honestlyidk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well thats because you are not a full stack engineer. If you were you would understand. Its pretty simple. You have backend , you have front end , you have database. Full stack enginner has experience and implements features across all these technologies. A bit of dev ops environment knowledge is probably also good because you have to worry about the connection between all these environments in order for you to do yo…

> Full stack enginner has experience and implements features across all these technologies. I guess most of the 90s and early 00s web devs were full stack then, including setting up the servers ("dev ops" I guess).

Well you had a tightly knit package back then, I'd argue that increased complexity in the front end was what lead to the 'full stack' developer.

As the previous poster mentioned, it's quite simple, if you can implement a feature vertically (and I'm thinking at least a 3-tier system should be considered), you could consider yourself to be a full stack developer. I've met plenty of developers in my career who refused to work outside their tier.

The fact that sales people and recruiters are making full stacks up to be some sort of mythical horses with a single horn on their head is a different story...

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

#54

Post by theoh »

honestlyidk wrote: post #33
ozfive wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtual desktops will open up opportunities of virtual phone operating systems. If you leave your phone at home by accident pick up a "shell" at the grocery store and sign into your account. When your done with your errands drop it off at the last place you were at, or some other concept. Truly portable number.

no one really wants this. This is not a game changer in purchasing any kind of device.

Remote desktop access might be a niche feature, but people do use it (VNC, RDP, X11, etc.) to deal with problems that would be seriously inconvenient to solve otherwise. The biggest barrier to the adoption of remote desktop access apps is probably the fact that the average user can't readily conceptualise what's going on.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

#55

Post by matt_oriordan »

Being part of a team who is designing and running a globally distributed system has been the best 5 years of my 20 year tech career. Things go wrong sure, and it’s hard, but is crazy rewarding and intellectually challenging in all the right ways. I never quite got that when I was a full stack web dev.

I wrote a post on what a distributed system engineer is, at least from our perspective at Ably Realtime. See https://blog.ably.io/what-is-a-distributed-systems-engineer-... if you’re interested in what it’s like.

Matt, tech co-founder Ably, www.ably.io

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

#56

Post by gaius »

WalterSear wrote: post #43
weliketocode wrote: post #21

Are you specifically targeting better career opportunities? Now is as good a time as ever to be a seasoned Full Stack engineer. Pursuing an MS and shifting specialties seems very expensive. Despite all the support other commenters are giving, I believe you should be very hesitant about making such a career shift.

Fwiw, my experience has been that many of the job openings spurring the growth in advertising for Full Stack engineers are actually glorified Front End roles, with very little work at the interface or on the back end. I suspect that, due to bias against Front End developers (and javascript :) ), hiring managers are have trouble justifying senior front end developer positions and so are resorting to overqualifying the…

growth in advertising for Full Stack engineers are actually glorified Front End roles

Right. People think I’m a hater because I say “full stack engineer” is just title-inflation for webdev, but I’m just telling it how the entire rest of the world sees it.

Throughout most of the history of the web, the same people wrote the CGI scripts, and any SQL in them, as wrote the HTML; working this way is perfectly normal for a webdev for like the last 20 years. I guess we were all “full stack engineers” back then, just we didn’t have a grandiose title.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

#57

Post by dmourati »

winrid wrote: post #25
dmourati wrote: post #22

I don't believe Full Stack is a real thing. I also believe you have probably been doing distributed systems even if you think you haven't.

What do you mean regarding the full stack comment?

I mean people who claim full stack really aren't. It's a misnomer.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

#58

Post by ccajas »

xiphias2 wrote: post #24

I vote yes for distributed systems, no for the Masters' Degree. If you already know how to code, it's easy to get into other fields and train yourself, thereby not losing money. You can also write open source code if you don't think you could find the appropriate job instantly.

How much is it autodidact friendly compared to Full Stack engineering? What would a "hello world" or "first learning project" of distributed systems even look like? I can only think in terms of learning via building a concrete project eg. a to-do app built on whatever tools you want to learn.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

#60

Post by sidcool »

ArtWomb wrote: post #16

Yes, most certainly. Best way is to look at cloud technologies used today: AwS, Google Cloud, Azure. Cloudflare's tech blog is also very good. One growth area is cloud gaming. And I think "virtual desktops" in general may finally gain some consumer traction and scale pretty soon. Naturally this leads to an interest in Decentralized Applications as it represents an opportunity to re-build the Web. Some resources to ge…

I am not much into Decentralization as much as Distributed. Thanks for the links!
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