Choose Boring Technology • Hacker News Board

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#241

Post by ForHackernews » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

cutler wrote: post #234

ForHackernews wrote: post #4

It seems like a lot of this is just the tension between what management wants to be focusing on (big picture product or business-level questions) vs what it makes sense for individual engineers to be focusing their efforts on. As an individual contributor, it's vitally important to keep up with new technologies in order to remain employable. Maybe that isn't in fact the best strategy for your current job, but it's cr…

If it's vitally important to keep up with new technologies in order to remain employable why are the 7 most employable programming languages (C,C++,Java,PHP,JS,Ruby,Python) at least 25 years old? The job market says the opposite - that new programming languages hardly get a look-in.

Programming languages alone aren't the only things you have to know in order to be a professional developer. It's also important to keep up with the ecosystem around that language, and industry-wide trends in application design, testing and deployment/ops.

Good luck getting a Javascript job if all you know is jQuery, and you've never touched Webpack/React/whatever else JS devs need these days. Maybe JS is an extreme case, but some version of that same phenomenon exists for all the languages you mentioned.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#242

Post by core-questions » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #168

fogetti wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that those people who chose shiny new technology only see the benefit, while all the others in the company will rot in hell because of the stupid choice of a junior engineer (who jumped ships 3 times meanwhile). I don't see how does that benefit the company? The whole point of the article is that you should make wise technology decisions which benefits the whole organization.

> The problem is that those people who chose shiny new technology only see the benefit, while all the others in the company will rot in hell because of the stupid choice of a junior engineer (who jumped ships 3 times meanwhile). I don't see how does that benefit the company? The whole point of the article is that you should make wise technology decisions which benefits the whole organization. Sure, if your interests…

> Sure, if your interests are closely aligned with the company. But as you noted, the junior engineer jumped ships 3 times already, probably with significant salary increase each time, and in part due to a CV that includes the use of exciting modern tech, which shows he's eager to learn and is passionate etc. Why would he care how the old company is doing?

Sounds to me like this is an endorsement of hiring less-shiny candidates who have been at their previous employers for longer rather than the shiny candidate who keeps jumping ship every time.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#243

Post by amelius » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

oftenwrong wrote: post #58

Always glad to see this making the rounds, as it has been influential for me, especially the perspective of "Happiness comes from shipping stuff". I often think about this part, in particular: >Then we walked away. We didn’t do anything related to activity feeds for years after that. We barely even thought about it. >Then one day I said, “hey, I wonder how activity feeds is doing.” And I looked at it and was surprise…

> Happiness comes from shipping stuff

But Buddha says that the road is more important than the destination ...

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#244

Post by sthomas1618 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

sethc2 wrote: post #107

If you work on a Node backend with Javascript, Where does the idea of switching to Typescript fall into this discussion? Is it a boring technology, or a shiny new technology? It is still using the same tech in Node, which you already know the benefits and pitfalls for, but it isn't like there is no overhead to start consuming Typescript if you haven't used it before. My hope is for those who agree with the author's p…

Per the presentation, you would need to weigh the benefits/costs. Since TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, I would argue the cost of adding is very low. The benefits will be naturally high due to type definitions reducing bugs and cognitive overhead.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#245

Post by rexpop » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #243

oftenwrong wrote: post #58

Always glad to see this making the rounds, as it has been influential for me, especially the perspective of "Happiness comes from shipping stuff". I often think about this part, in particular: >Then we walked away. We didn’t do anything related to activity feeds for years after that. We barely even thought about it. >Then one day I said, “hey, I wonder how activity feeds is doing.” And I looked at it and was surprise…

> Happiness comes from shipping stuff But Buddha says that the road is more important than the destination ...

Does he?

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#246

Post by mcguire » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

I am in complete agreement with this. (Sing it, brother!)

But,

"My friend Andrew wears the same brand of black shirt every day. He thinks that if he conserves the brainpower it would take to pick something to wear, he’ll bank it and be able to use it later for something else. [...] I like to think about it like this. Let’s say that we all get a limited number of innovation tokens to spend. [...] These represent our limited capacity to do something creative, or weird, or hard. We really don’t have that many of these to allocate. Early on in a company’s life, we get like maybe three. Not too many more than that."

I don't buy this. If you try to save up your brainpower, innovation tokens, intellectual capital, or whatever, what you'll find when you come to try to use it is that you don't have it. Sort of like if you try to save up your upper body strength for a couple of years before you try to climb El Capitan. But I am just saying that is a poor example.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#247

Post by celticmusic » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #192

oftenwrong wrote: post #58

Always glad to see this making the rounds, as it has been influential for me, especially the perspective of "Happiness comes from shipping stuff". I often think about this part, in particular: >Then we walked away. We didn’t do anything related to activity feeds for years after that. We barely even thought about it. >Then one day I said, “hey, I wonder how activity feeds is doing.” And I looked at it and was surprise…

The code that I've shipped that, 10 years later still runs at previous organizations with no support needed is really something I'm very proud of when I look back. At once point we actually wrote an AJAX site that worked in IE6, Firefox and Safari (pre-Chrome), before Prototype, jQuery or JSON was even a thing...and it still worked perfectly 10 years later. All hand coded JS and backend PHP + Java. It's one of the re…

I built a custom ticketing system for a hosting company, and maintained it over 6 years before ultimately moving on.

After the first 6 months in production it basically sat there for 4 years with no bugs, no dropped tickets/emails, and so forth. One of the things I was proudest of is that no one ever EVER went into work hoping the ticketing system would be up.

They eventually started asking for changes due to growing as a company, but I love it when my work is so stable people don't even stop to consider that it might not be available that day. During all that time, it was only ever down or malfunctioning when the infrastructure had problems (something I had no control over and a major reason why I eventually moved on).

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#248

Post by dancek » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:43 PM UTC

matwood wrote: post #42

murgindrag wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In personal life, I do the something similar, actually. I have a state-of-the-art digital camera circa 2012, a state-of-the-art camcorder circa 2011, and similar. I'm always around five years behind the tech curve. The cost is often 1/2 to 1/10th, and I'm not sure I lose anything by being five years behind in terms of happiness or much of anything else. As with anything, there are exceptions. My phone needs security…

> I have a state-of-the-art digital camera circa 2012 This is a good strategy for anything with a high/quick depreciation curve. My DSLR body is pretty old now, but still works great (a D7100). The tech in bodies changes quickly so even waiting just a short period of time can save significant money. Spend money on lenses instead which hold their value and typically can be used across many bodies. Cars are similar. My…

Agreed on camera bodies and lenses, but in my view a 2011 car is still quite new. I guess this depends on the country, taxation etc.

IMHO it makes sense to buy a used car at about 300 thousand kilometers. At that point it's cheap, it's already had a bunch of expensive parts replaced, and if it's survived this long it has a high chance of going another hundred thousand (given proper service, obviously).

Of course another point of view is that getting a car serviced is stressful, so it's best to buy new. But then it's even less stressful to mostly ride a bike and use a taxi or rental car when needed.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#249

Post by lordleft » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

"The long and short of it is that you have to talk to each other.

Technology has global effects on your company, it isn’t something that should be left to individual engineers. You have to figure out a way to make adding technology a conversation.

This might be underwhelming if you were expecting a big insightful secret here, but trust me, this is beyond many technology organizations."

Well said. Also, clutch french revolution references.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#250

Post by nine_k » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

(1) Discussion from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291215

(2) «You can't pay people enough to carefully debug boring boilerplate code. I've tried.» (Yaron Minsky; via [1]).

"Boring" is a wrong word, I think. Choose hassle-free technology that is known to work without surprises. Don't chose simplistic technology that produces busywork, even if it's rock-solid and bullet-proof. Choose a reliable technology that operates on the right level of abstraction, or closest to it.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9161366#9161917