I no longer build software • Hacker News Board

Re: I no longer build software

#681

Post by Sharlin » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #648

altdatathrow wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people around these parts who have arrived at the conclusion that the only way to build software today is using all those services and more (I mean, where's kubernetes in that stack?). They will aggressively defend their role which is no longer about creating software but instead entirely about weaving together a myriad of components.

Kubernetes is amazing when engineers need it. Kubernetes sucks when managers need it.

Never underestimate the number of engineers that convince themselves they need something because it is trendy and sounds cool.

Re: I no longer build software

#682

Post by crawlcrawler » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

throwaways885 wrote: post #603

aarongough wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I agree with this. A great quote I saw a while ago: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” –Jeff Hammerbacher Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way involved getting people to click on ads. Either directly making a product where ad click rate is a measured metric, or products that helped people make products where clicking on ads was a metric.…

Ads are only the way of making money, or are you saying it only matters what the end result is? It's possible to sell ads and also do good with the work.

Businesses have a tendency to optimize for making money so if the only way for them to do so is by having people click on ads, guess what they'll eventually become great at.

Re: I no longer build software

#683

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

bsg75 wrote: post #632

notacoward wrote: post #125

Totally on board with not building software any more. In fact, at 55 this is my last week of it. For real. Basically, everything sucks more about building software nowadays more than I remember it sucking before, from the mere mechanics of navigating through an obscenely large pseudo-object-oriented codebase to the WRONG constructs/idioms people use to build distributed systems to the way software is packaged and dep…

What are you moving on to ? And can I come along (52) ?

[deleted]

Re: I no longer build software

#684

Post by tombert » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #454

stan_rogers wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of that VR and AR stuff, which while being eminently more suitable for people with real accessibility issues (either due to physical disabilities or environmental constraints), is locked up behind almost entirely unaccessible interfaces in a gamers' world. Why? Because you can sell more that way. The technology and the people who can build it certainly exist; the desire to do something useful with it rather than…

Frustrating in the short term, sure; but it might be the optimal strategy for getting VR out to precisely those people, in the long term. Selling more VR headsets means more revenue plowed into R&D, more consumer demand for sanding off sharp edges, and a larger industry-wide push toward gradual commodification of the technology. The cheaper, more reliable, and easier-to-build VR is, the more likely you’ll see stodgy…

I agree, I've always gotten frustrated when people say "but it's mostly used for games so it's not useful", acting like games don't have huge R&D potential.

Games give a relatively straightforward "pass-fail" criteria to test out new tech. Instead of a nebulous "does this tech directly help people", it's much easier (and more objective) to say "can I get this graphics API to push N fps to make the gameplay more pleasant?". Virtually any time I learn a new programming language or toolkit, the one of the first projects I do to get my grips with it is usually a simple 2D platformer just to stress out edge cases. Is this 'useful'? Not immediately, but it is useful for me to have learned how to code well enough to make a game perform well.

It's not like these optimizations and tools can't be useful for other things after they're developed for games; Unity was primarily made for games but I have friends who use it for developing "useful" iPhone apps now.

If the technology for VR gets good enough (and cheap enough) to get into the hands of the average gamer, I cannot see how that won't be a net win for people with disabilities in the long-run.

Re: I no longer build software

#685

Post by kennu » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #666

kennu wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing with legos is delivering value. Reinventing the same wheel over and over again is not.

Agreed but that is not what is happening though ; people do both; they use legos and reinvent the wheel. Making everything, imho, worse. The authentication thingy you got as lego block did not quite fit and now you are using more code than the module has in it to add what you need for it to do, making the original module probably impossible to upgrade without a lot of work and creating a problem for maintenance. Now…

I have different experiences. My "lego blocks" are AWS services. Each service is a black box that maintains its API backwards compatible forever. My custom stuff is built around the API and keeps working forever. ( * ) In my view AWS has been very successful in maintaining this backwards compatible model even when they often add new features to services.

There are sometimes edge cases that are not possible to implement, but they are rarer and rarer as the service portfolio grows. In those cases the only option is to write your own container and deal with the usual package-level dependency issues in whatever programming language you use.

( * ) The only thing that doesn't work forever is Node.js, which is deprecated every few years and needs to be upgraded to a new major version. I'm looking forward to the possibility of WebAssembly/Deno replacing Node.js as an "evergreen" application platform.

Re: I no longer build software

#686

Post by tluyben2 » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

therealdrag0 wrote: post #656

tluyben2 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention that those CRUD apps have been done, exactly the same, 10000s of times before and 10000s of people are doing the same work you are doing now at this moment. Everyone thinks they are productive but value is being burned all day, every day in most companies all over the world. The level of reuse is depressing and people, especially here, firmly believe we need to use the latest frontend and backend crap…

> Not to mention that those CRUD apps have been done, exactly the same, 10000s of times before and 10000s of people are doing the same work you are doing now at this moment. And yet now OP is making wood furniture, which has been made before the same thousands of times. Some people need originality some don't. Some just like the work for its-own sake. For those who need originality they should find a job working on s…

Sure that is true, but then again I have written many of employee directories, cms’s, erps, social networks, running apps, banking fronts and backends, insurance fronts and backends which were all exactly the same except forced in a different tech because of the taste du-jour. We wrote a massive insurance monolith system in c# and my new client wants it microservice and in TS/node. We will be doing exactly the same as 2 years ago and make a boatload of money while we have a working and tested solution. Almost all of this is CRUD with some calc sheets in excel which we did in the 80s, 90s, 00s and again now. The functionality is completely the same; even the screens have the same ux; ui is a bit updated. But the MS foxpro version was fine almost 30 years ago. Not my money though so what can I do.

Not sure how it fits wood furniture; you cannot copy a chair in a nanosecond; you can software. I am not saying there is no space or need for bespoke and unique software but if you are doing LoB apps for/in a big corp, as many of us do daily, chances are there is a) a perfectly fine version already running in your corp somewhere and b) a completely identical product in all the companies around the block.

Re: I no longer build software

#687

Post by bmurphy1976 » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #63

jb1991 wrote: post #20

Amen. Modern software development is frankly kinda sucky. The old days pre-2000 were arguably a lot more enjoyable. Today it's just digital plumbing and dealing with all sorts of issues that are not creative. The sheer complexity is frankly absurd as well. I've thought about moving on from software many times, and I know many who have. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's best way to spend your short l…

I think a lot of the pre-2000 programming was a bit more enjoyable because most of us were not programming for the web and actually using platforms that were designed for application development. The web is a very poor fit for what most people want designed.

Pre-2000 you actually had a hope of understanding everything your computer software was doing. These days there's no hope, everything is too complicated for the best of minds. You'll only ever know a small portion of it. Maybe that doesn't bother some people, but it's a big demotivator for me. I miss being able to truly understand my computer.

Now I feel like I'm always spinning my wheels. Even worse, I'm more capable of learning and understanding than ever, but the amount I need to know is increasing faster than my abilities to learn it.

Re: I no longer build software

#688

Post by vikramkr » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

nescioquid wrote: post #604

vikramkr wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s. A lot of those ideas are "thing that exists, but more magic." We have helicopters, but it turns out zoom calls work just as good to meet people, without the air traffic control nightmare. We have the internet at our fingers, an advance so monumental that its nearl…

> its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s That wasn't really the claim. The idea is that the ends of technology have been chosen by corporations, rather than what would have been most generally useful to humankind. Hardly an earth-shattering observation.

Sure, but those examples that you gave seriously undercut that. Antigravity, teleportation, those would be wildly profitable. And we've got an entire anti-aging industry investing billions into immortality drugs. In fact, the investments into immortality drugs right now is a perfect example of your statement that the ends of technology are chosen by corporations instead of what is most useful to mankind. Curing neglected tropical diseases and investing in equitable healthcare availability is what would have one of the (if not the) biggest impacts on humankind's health. Right now, what is most generally useful to humankind isn't science fantasy, we've got a few rungs to go up the hierarchy of needs before we get there. In fact, something like flying cars would absolutely be a net negative - more pollution, a new type of congestion, more types of accidents, all to solve a problem that would be solved better by functioning public transit. And in terms of usefulness to humankind - since when are innovations that are profitable orthogonal to human benefit? There are cases where its either or, but does it really make sense to go and tell someone with a disease that the treatment for the disease can't help them because it was developed by profit motives? Setting aside questions of logistics/funding models/regulations (since if we started bringing in those real world aspects then all of those sci-fi technologies fall apart) - looking purely at the technology, commercial motives developed things that are a net good for the world. There is overlap, and an overly cynical view ends up making no sense. We have it so much better than people did 100 years ago because of technology.

Re: I no longer build software

#689

Post by adventured » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #626

aarongough wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I agree with this. A great quote I saw a while ago: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” –Jeff Hammerbacher Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way involved getting people to click on ads. Either directly making a product where ad click rate is a measured metric, or products that helped people make products where clicking on ads was a metric.…

>Unfortunately I agree with this. A great quote I saw a while ago: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” –Jeff Hammerbacher They're not really though. Ads may be the revenue stream but it's not like the top engineers at Google were on ads. They were building the search engine.

It's an amusing quote in the sense that it gets used by two people on opposite sides of it, and they're both wrong.

People that hate ads love that quote because they like using it to lambast the tech industry (in general, and advertising in particular), even though only a small percentage of engineers or other tech industry employees work on ads.

People in the ad space love that premise. You know what's worse than that premise? Admitting to themselves that they're not the best minds of their generation and they're still stuck doing work trying to figure out how to optimize ad clicking - the worst combination. At least they get to pretend they're the best minds of their generation, if they buy into the quote, that's a consolation prize.

The best minds are largely not working in advertising (maybe a small share of them are). They're figuring out how to leverage CRISPR to cure and prevent disease, or trying to figure out a therapy for Alzheimer's disease, or working on immunotherapy. They're the kind of minds that were working at Pharmasset figuring out how to save tens of millions of lives by curing hepatitis C. They're designing and building the next generation of semiconductors at ARM, Apple, TSMC, Samsung or Nvidia, pushing against the boundaries of what's physically possible. They're working on electric cars at Tesla or VW. They're trying to solve our battery problems. They're launching rockets at SpaceX or Rocket Lab. They're designing the next airplanes for Airbus. They're at NASA, ESA, JAXA, CNSA, heading to the Moon and Mars, or working on James Webb, figuring out if Venus contains life, and so on. They're designing the next generation of nuclear reactors, ITER or maybe working at LHC. They're working at Illumina, Boston Dynamics, Intuitive Surgical. They're in national and university labs all over the world, trying to solve very hard problems on a daily basis. They're even working on hypersonic weapons, military drones and designing nukes. And that's not meant to exclude the rest of this giant world, as the world is filled with examples.

Re: I no longer build software

#690

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

reggieband wrote: post #667

TeMPOraL wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ~23 years behind GP, and I feel the same way as them already. Goes to say, this may be a matter of personality. There were few and brief moments in my career as a software developer when I was truly happy at my work. Most of those involved implementing an architecture or algorithm I figured out from scratch, or took from scientific literature - either as prototype or directly in the product. Sometimes as "hold my…

> I've learned a coping strategy: just forget the project scope and focus on your little plot of land. I get what your are saying and you are getting a lot of positive reinforcement about this. I would suggest to you a caveat. I've worked in some orgs where this mentality becomes entrenched. In these new-fangled tech startups with people changing roles and even companies every two years this probably happens less. Bu…

Thanks for the warning.

Honestly, I've used an unfortunate turn of phrase in my original comment. "Your little plot of land" indeed implies a fixed, entrenched moat. What I meant was something different - the area of code I'm currently working on. That may be a different place with every new task. My coping mechanism isn't building little kingdoms - just focusing on the code a given task involves while purposefully forgetting about the global context of the application, in order to not think about how minuscule and irrelevant the task is to the exciting things the company is doing. That context is usually not useful when doing the changes I've already planned beforehand, and it is emotionally distracting.