Hermit Programmers Are Dead • Hacker News Board

Re: Hermit Programmers Are Dead

#91

Post by IlliOnato » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #29

In the old days, a server was fast enough to do everything, you bought it, installed the parts, and ran it for years, sometimes more than a decade, before being turned off. You didn't need to configure infrastructure, because you had already built it, once, and it just worked. It was a much simpler way of doing things because the number of users was known, and you didn't need to scale past that. Also, your users were…

> Programming was a matter of finding the right libraries, and doing plumbing, back then, as it is now.

It seems by "programming" you mean setting up a website or a webapp. You know, maybe this is what most of the programmers do, but the whole programming area is much, much more vast.

Very little of what I have been doing in 25 years of software development, or what my colleagues are doing, could be described this way.

Yes, there is some plumbing in networking, GUI, or say UTF-8 handling. But I would guess 95% of our code is original and complex logic.

Re: Hermit Programmers Are Dead

#92

Post by werdnapk » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

Offtopic: For some reason I find the articles font hard to read. It's readable, but makes my eyes a little "buggy".

Re: Hermit Programmers Are Dead

#93

Post by henning » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:18 PM UTC

It is very fitting that this article that can predict the future also has a JSON error displaying at the footer:

> An error occurred: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data.

That to me is the near future of software: people thinking software is somehow solved or easier while failing to execute well on basic things like displaying a static HTML document.

Re: Hermit Programmers Are Dead

#94

Post by Veen » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:21 PM UTC

kuratkull wrote: post #61

Throughout reading this I had a creeping thought: "this person has no idea what they are talking about".

The writer is an academic, a PhD student, so they likely have little industry experience. Presumably extremely smart and capable in their domain, but not well informed about the industry beyond what they have read in history books about old-timey programmers.

Re: Hermit Programmers Are Dead

#95

Post by ok123456 » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:22 PM UTC

The author created a 1970s bofh straw man to tare it down. Testing, documentation, and larger scale design (patterns or whatever you want to call it) are things that are so pervasive now that even a lone practitioner is expected to do them in some form.

Re: Hermit Programmers Are Dead

#96

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:24 PM UTC

lanstin wrote: post #80

This seems about ten years out of date. Current cloud deployment software is now so powerful that a lone developer can write and deploy entire systems: front end, middle tier micro services, data stores, private network, firewalls, all of it, boom. And it’ll be containers every where so dev and prod will be more in sync than ever. And communication skills where highly useful in the mid 90s as much as they will always…

[deleted]

Re: Hermit Programmers Are Dead

#97

Post by giglamesh » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

Veen wrote: post #94

kuratkull wrote: post #61

Throughout reading this I had a creeping thought: "this person has no idea what they are talking about".

The writer is an academic, a PhD student, so they likely have little industry experience. Presumably extremely smart and capable in their domain, but not well informed about the industry beyond what they have read in history books about old-timey programmers.

Also pretty clearly not a native english speaker/writer (I'm hoping based on how substandard their english skills are). It may not be entirely fair, but the poor writing pre-disposes me to not give much merit to their arguments.

Re: Hermit Programmers Are Dead

#98

Post by wayoutthere » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

I mean, they were never really that great. People tolerated them when we didn’t have good ways of managing technology, but the archetype of the hermit programmer has been confined to academia for decades. Development practices have focused on collaboration, pair programming and code reviews for a long time now.

Concur with the large number of commenters saying this guy seems to have limited experience with which to judge the scale of the problem.

Re: Hermit Programmers Are Dead

#99

Post by chmsky00 » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

qazpot wrote: post #24

In summary, hermit programmers who only write code for themselves are dead because: As they don’t plan, you never know when (or if) they are going to finish a task. As they don’t document, their code is not reusable because nobody knows how it works. As they don’t test, chances are the code they write is full of bugs. As they don’t refactor, the software cannot evolve. As they don’t handle infrastructure, their code…

The whole undocumented code being useless is weird to me.

I can determine the intended logic regardless of class or function names, and parameters labels.

I’ve repurposed a lot of code that was labeled as being for one thing but the logic worked fine for another so I just changed the names.

There are a lot of educated bad programmers out there who think their academic view make them good programmers.

Re: Hermit Programmers Are Dead

#100

Post by slightwinder » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

lanstin wrote: post #80

This seems about ten years out of date. Current cloud deployment software is now so powerful that a lone developer can write and deploy entire systems: front end, middle tier micro services, data stores, private network, firewalls, all of it, boom. And it’ll be containers every where so dev and prod will be more in sync than ever. And communication skills where highly useful in the mid 90s as much as they will always…

> Current cloud deployment software is now so powerful that a lone developer can write and deploy entire systems:

When was this ever different? Single developers always could barf out whole systems. And going by my experience, the relative quality of fullstack-devs today is not better than it was in the past, they just have now more gears moving.

> And the salaries for developers are so much higher now than before.

Are they? Salaries are always going up, so going just by the numbers of course is it higher. But did salary in IT really grew stronger than in other jobs over the last decades?