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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#251

Post by tomnipotent »

rubber_duck wrote: post #236
aphextron wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"If we stand our ground and choose boring technology because we have limited innovation tokens and can't afford to waste them, there's the flight risk of those devs who really want to work with those new technologies." That's fine, let them go. There are plenty of great developers out there who just want to come to work, build the product to spec in some 'boring' reliable tech, and go home. The stack doesn't really…

>There are plenty of great developers out there who just want to come to work, build the product to spec in some 'boring' reliable tech, and go home. No there aren't, in fact there aren't plenty of "great" (or pick any adjective related to competent) devs in general, so if you're a small shop and can't compete on wages, work conditions (tech stack included) is your only competitive edge. Because you know what there i…

> No there aren't

Yes, there are. Such a ridiculous statement to think people can't be great at something just because they don't tick some arbitrary box you came up with for evaluation.

If that's the case, then there are no great 9-5 anything... but the odd thing is, I've met plenty of them.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#252

Post by splintercell »

tomc1985 wrote: post #237
metrokoi wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave? Developers may be the least humble type of engineers. There are many great things that we do, but we need to be taken down a peg every once in a while. Many developers are forced into this mindset out of fear of our marketable skills being made obsolete so I understand why many do this, and it is a compounding problem. Developers seek out jobs with the shiny…

Is that fear real though? I mean there are still job listings for VBA or ColdFusion engineers if that's really your thing. I think our problem (and my our, I mean American) is that we are too obsessed with tech. This is coming from someone who grew up obsessed with computers, and not just writing code. You can tell this is true from looking at our ads, which are always touting the shiniest newest technological marvel…

My father-in-law who is a 58 year old software developer feels stuck at his current job because he has spent so much time on old and archaic technology that he doesn't feel confident enough to be able to go out there and get a new job in case he's laid off.

Personally speaking I spent far too much time working on a certain technology for four years and I felt trapped because getting a new job was difficult in new technologies.

There are clearly some Evergreen Technologies such as C/C++, but there are a lot of Technology switch don't land in that category and they evolved fast (js ecosystem for instance).

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#253

Post by satya71 »

leonardteo wrote: post #184

Getting vulnerable here for a sec and hoping that others can add their thoughts. I struggle with this. As a small-ish, bootstrapped business, the issue I commonly run into is developer retention. If we stand our ground and choose boring technology because we have limited innovation tokens and can't afford to waste them, there's the flight risk of those devs who really want to work with those new technologies. And thi…

I am in the same situation as you. My plan is to build the best personal growth organization that I can. Developers who value that and long-term growth should want to stick around. Developers who want something shiny can look elsewhere.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#254

Post by ng12 »

wpietri wrote: post #142
ryanbrunner wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React itself has been around for 7 years, but the ecosystem around React is still developing. There isn't a straightforward answer that's universally accepted and without warts in terms of how to do server communication, how to manage state, how to smoothly implement routing in a way that avoids most of the navigation hiccups that SPAs run into, how to manage CSS, etc. There's certainly answers which seem promising f…

This resonates for me. I'm mainly a back-end developer, but for a while I've been wanting to improve my front-end skills so I can do basic things myself. React has been the obvious choice for a while. But every time I say, "Ok, let's see what I need to learn to get started," which happens maybe once a year, I end up getting different answers. I would like React to get more boring. Because I'll never focus mainly on t…

If you're just wanting to get your feet wet create-react-app is the right choice. Go strictly by their docs: they do a good job of leading you to third-party solutions when required.

In a way React suffers from it's own popularity. For example Next/Gatsby can be confusing for new developers but they only exist because React is popular enough to have popular meta-frameworks focused on solving specific use cases.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#255

Post by rubber_duck »

tomnipotent wrote: post #251
rubber_duck wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are plenty of great developers out there who just want to come to work, build the product to spec in some 'boring' reliable tech, and go home. No there aren't, in fact there aren't plenty of "great" (or pick any adjective related to competent) devs in general, so if you're a small shop and can't compete on wages, work conditions (tech stack included) is your only competitive edge. Because you know what there i…

> No there aren't Yes, there are. Such a ridiculous statement to think people can't be great at something just because they don't tick some arbitrary box you came up with for evaluation. If that's the case, then there are no great 9-5 anything... but the odd thing is, I've met plenty of them.

You aren't getting what I'm trying to say - the market for competent 9-5 is also missing developers - it's not that there aren't any - it's that demand > supply - which is why OP is worried about his employees leaving - it's not like he can go out there with a job posting and have 5 competent applicants in a week. You will have to pay recruiters serious money and hope to get lucky on competent leads - so "there are plenty" argument is BS.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#256

Post by randombytes6869 »

derrekl wrote: post #157
ProZsolt wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently see it happening with Ruby. I used it as a scripting language for DevOps tooling, CLIs, and for small web apps, but without rails. What I see is Go pushing it out from the DevOps space and Python is more popular as a general-purpose language. Tools that were written in Ruby(eg.: Puppet) are outdated and new tools are written in Go. I still think Ruby is a superior language compared to Python, but because…

This is avoidable by continuing to use Ruby. Just continue to use it and contribute to the community, it's that easy. Ruby still has big businesses using it - Github, Airbnb, Shopify. There is no reason to believe it'll go the way of cold fusion. The language ecosystem is much different than 20 years ago. There are so many languages all thriving. Even Perl is relatively healthy and is a fine choice for doing many thi…

IMO Ruby is already being left behind. HTTP/2 is a good example. Rails doesn't support it, and I can't find anything recent saying support will be added soon. Java is notorious for slow innovation yet language level support for HTTP/2 as added years ago and enabled for basically every popular framework. Same with Python, C#, Go, JS.

HTTP/2 is essential if you want good SEO which makes Rails a non-starter for many projects already

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#257

Post by randombytes6869 »

pdimitar wrote: post #155
the_af wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Java is used to great success in the software industry. It's a good language and platform, fads to the contrary notwithstanding.

When you are actually coding Java -- yes. But as a sibling commenter pointed out, there's a lot of "XML as code" in the Java world. That's really hard to work with.

I haven't used XML in our Java apps in many years. Most of them don't contain a single XML file, unless they use Maven, then they have one.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#258

Post by randombytes6869 »

pdimitar wrote: post #178
the_af wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't dealt with "a lot of XML" in Java for ages. I've been using it in my day job for a decade, and about the only XML I touch is pom.xml (that's the build file for Maven). This is like complaining about stuff in Java 1.4 -- sure, but we haven't been using it for ages. Please don't take it the wrong way, but the days of XML for everything are long gone, and for years in Java it's been XML for nothing as a counte…

Your experience doesn't nullify mine, and vice versa. There's a huge pile of legacy Java applications out there still needing maintenance and occasional new features.

That doesn't make Java a bad choice for building new things

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#259

Post by randombytes6869 »

wpietri wrote: post #144
tarkin2 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Java is pretty boring but I wouldn’t recommend for the majority of cases.

Java is boring in one sense, but it's the wrong kind of exciting in another. I've had to touch it a couple times in the last few years, and there's still a ton of "enterprise" nonsense in the space. Everything feels bloated, confused, unpolished. It's like I'm walking along, step on a trapdoor, and suddenly am sucked down into a tangle of stack traces, class loaders, annotations, and XML configs. For me, part of "bor…

Java is very similar to C++. Its boring in the sense that most things have been around forever and really old code is terrible but you still have to deal with it because backwards compatibility is so good. If you don't consider Java boring I wouldn't consider C/C++ boring either.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#260

Post by tomnipotent »

rubber_duck wrote: post #255
tomnipotent wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No there aren't Yes, there are. Such a ridiculous statement to think people can't be great at something just because they don't tick some arbitrary box you came up with for evaluation. If that's the case, then there are no great 9-5 anything... but the odd thing is, I've met plenty of them.

You aren't getting what I'm trying to say - the market for competent 9-5 is also missing developers - it's not that there aren't any - it's that demand > supply - which is why OP is worried about his employees leaving - it's not like he can go out there with a job posting and have 5 competent applicants in a week. You will have to pay recruiters serious money and hope to get lucky on competent leads - so "there are p…

> so "there are plenty" argument is BS.

Just like your argument, which pulls claims out of thin air. You haven't made any points at all, simply rambled about competence without backing anything up.

I've learned more often than not, that when someone claims "competence" what they're really saying is "I'm not finding the exact skills I'm looking for, which are hyper-contextualized around the problem I'm currently facing, at the exact moment I need them at the cost I think is best. Which will change in six months, at which point a different cohort of people will be labeled incompetent."

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