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Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

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Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#101

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

I believe there's some level of real innovation in all the new trends, but I would say the majority is just recycling of old ideas implemented at a different layer (e.g. CommonLisp/Smalltalk vs. Java vs. Javascript, jails vs. docker, Thin clients vs. SPAs, ...) and hyped by some BigTech™.

The industry seems to be constantly spinning tires, putting a lot of effort in rediscovering mostly the same things every decade, while really hard problems remain unaddressed. That's clear when you see most important algorithms published before the 80's.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#102

Post by garciasn »

i_like_waiting wrote: post #75
theirishgoodbuy wrote: post #34

The way I look at it is: there are more tools in the toolbox than ever before. Which makes our judgement (the thing they really pay us for) even more important. Kubernetes, for example, is a specific solution to a specific problem. The solution is complex but so is the problem. If k8s give you the right trade-offs for your situation, then it’s not busy work. Of course, there are plenty of project where judgement Is t…

Promotion based architecture is self fulfilling prophecy at least in BI/ data world. I see everybody around me moving to cloud, without really good explanation why. Only reasonable thing I can see as an pattern is that cloud experience on top of data things gets paid 30% more. It made me consider cloud a lot. I was considering switching to cloud, just so I can put in my CV "experience with migration to cloud". For ne…

>For next person commenting that it makes sense: it doesn't with 200gb database and super predictable workload, growth and usage.

Depends on the company. I've been working for marketing agencies for the last 15 years and they're generally staffed by, at most, 1 IT person who is in charge of a third-party vendor relationship that offers managed IT services. Those IT resources (internal or vendor) don't specialize in data and often don't know how to deal with it well, predictable workloads or not, and often offer up solutions which are not appropriate (cost or otherwise) whereas there are managed solutions from cloud vendors that do. BigQuery, for example, handles compute and storage for you and rolls it into one reasonable query price. No need to worry about any management of anything there and just sit Data Studio (included) or any other BI tool (Tableau, etc) on top and you're good to go.

I get your skepticism and welcome it, but you're being a little rough. We're cloud native at my current company (I did a partial cloud migration at my last which was completed after I left) and it makes my life leading a Data Engineering and Data Science team MUCH easier without upfront hardware/software costs or long-term contracts, which were STAGGERING and left us with much more difficult to maintain, upgrade, etc hardware that took up most of my job as opposed to almost none of it today.

YMMV.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#103

Post by Bancakes »

ggariepy wrote: post #70
turtledove wrote: post #66

Yes, but not in the way you describe. Software engineers have power right now, we should be unionizing (even if the union is only pushing for things like IP clauses and non competes to be less draconic). Build the union while we are strong so it's there when we are weaker. A union doesn't have to be a huge monstrosity. It can be simple and fight for a few basic standards in the industry.

The purpose of a union is to create a labor cartel which tends to standardize the price of labor above the rate at which the market would likely set it. IP clauses and non-competes are a small part of the issues plaguing our industry. Putting constraints on the labor supply is probably not a good thing; it leads to the market for labor relocating to less union-friendly climes. Ask anyone from Detroit how well that wo…

'Labor market' is a purely American concept. You shouldn't be switching jobs constantly and relocating. It takes a toll on personal life and makes no sense anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#104

Post by throwk8s »

If the solutions are indeed overly complicated, then eventually natural selection will weed them out, assuming that eventually the supply of money funneled into these things becomes limited. There's a precedent for this in the way that mid-2000s startups eschewed the heavyweight J2EE and/or "object request broker" architectures for simpler HTTP calls.

But whether or not they're overly complicated, I think the reason why these things are grating is because they're less fun than coding up solutions to problems 15-20 years ago. Configuring containers is a pure exercise in versioning hell, and with the emergence of devops, it's impossible for developers to avoid.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#105

Post by Bancakes »

graderjs wrote: post #28

It's another way to favor incumbents with huge resources: it's an anti-competitive psyop to raise barriers to entry and stymie startups in endless shiny thing chasing, because the incumbents are scared of the disruption, so those big players that move a bit slower, seek ways to slow down the scrappy players that can move fast, while those "fast movers" get drunk on the koolaid of buzzwords manufactured on blogs from…

Did you learn the word 'incumbent' yesterday?

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#106

Post by pc86 »

mattmanser wrote: post #67
bko wrote: post #6

I don't disagree with you and your examples are definitely over-engineering / busy work. In my experience a lot of it is driven by the desire for young engineers to learn a new language. If someone paid me to move something to Rust, I would do it. I heard good things about Rust and I would love to get paid to learn it. But has being a software engineer become easier or harder over the last 30, 20, 10, 5 years? I wasn…

No, it definitely has got worse, I've been doing this 15 years, the sweet spot was the Rails revolution. Before that a lot of frameworks were a bit too much magic, and not enough understanding of how browsers, http and html worked. Simple MVC stacks went to all languages, jQuery front-ends doing enough but not a lot. JavaScript enhanced easy to reason about server-side stacks. You used to spend a couple of days a yea…

Serious question - if it was so much better then, why are approximately zero new companies building a Laravel/Rails/whatever app and using jQuery for the front end? If it's that much of an advantage I would expect at least someone who is trying that (because surely some are) to succeed with their lean, mean tech stack. Why wouldn't you have just written the project in that standard MVC stack instead of a modern one?

You won't get any objection from me on the debugging point, it's much harder, especially when you're crossing environment - e.g. running the front end locally but maybe hitting a remote dev or QA backend. I will point out though that there are logging tools that support the pretty standard practice of having correlation/transaction/trace IDs on your requests, such that you put in a GUID from an error and it shows you the entire request and anything that request spawned.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#107

Post by biorach »

mattmanser wrote: post #67
bko wrote: post #6

I don't disagree with you and your examples are definitely over-engineering / busy work. In my experience a lot of it is driven by the desire for young engineers to learn a new language. If someone paid me to move something to Rust, I would do it. I heard good things about Rust and I would love to get paid to learn it. But has being a software engineer become easier or harder over the last 30, 20, 10, 5 years? I wasn…

No, it definitely has got worse, I've been doing this 15 years, the sweet spot was the Rails revolution. Before that a lot of frameworks were a bit too much magic, and not enough understanding of how browsers, http and html worked. Simple MVC stacks went to all languages, jQuery front-ends doing enough but not a lot. JavaScript enhanced easy to reason about server-side stacks. You used to spend a couple of days a yea…

People still do deploy production ready systems using RoR, Django/Python or whatever "sweet spot" framework you want to mention. Some run quite successful businesses.

You can't generalise from your experience over the last few months.

> Programming used to be about writing code to solve business problems. The shift to DevOps has been a massive productivity drain and most stacks are now incredibly brittle.

Some businesses _have_ to "shift to DevOps" in order to operate at the scale and resilience required.

Some businesses have unnecessarily migrated to over engineered infrastructure because monkey see monkey do.

Saying "everything is ruined" completely misses the dynamic.

As an earlier poster explained there are a lot more tools in the box now. Making the right choice requires experience, a good understanding of the problem to be solved and discipline in implementation.

Get it wrong one way and you end up with an over-engineered mess that takes forever to get work done with.

Get it wrong another way and you end up overwhelmed by traffic, unable to scale in response and forever fighting fires.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#108

Post by reaperducer »

i_like_waiting wrote: post #75
theirishgoodbuy wrote: post #34

The way I look at it is: there are more tools in the toolbox than ever before. Which makes our judgement (the thing they really pay us for) even more important. Kubernetes, for example, is a specific solution to a specific problem. The solution is complex but so is the problem. If k8s give you the right trade-offs for your situation, then it’s not busy work. Of course, there are plenty of project where judgement Is t…

Promotion based architecture is self fulfilling prophecy at least in BI/ data world. I see everybody around me moving to cloud, without really good explanation why. Only reasonable thing I can see as an pattern is that cloud experience on top of data things gets paid 30% more. It made me consider cloud a lot. I was considering switching to cloud, just so I can put in my CV "experience with migration to cloud". For ne…

I see everybody around me moving to cloud, without really good explanation why.

People just buy into the "cloud" marketing. They don't have the ability to think and reason, and so don't understand that "cloud" just means "renting someone else's computer."

I built a complex in-house medical system. Quick, reliable, and liked by the users.

I was in the middle of adding a major new feature when all of the management in the IT department quit. The new people immediately decided that the whole thing had to be "in the cloud." I was removed from the project, and they hired three people full-time to rebuild it.

That was three years ago. The new system is still not online. The users are still using my old system, and the feature I was working on never got added because my presence and input was not welcome because I "don't understand the cloud." So I got moved to other projects.

People talk about "the cloud" with the same fervor and language as members of a cult. And you will be an outcast if you dare challenge their way of thinking.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#109

Post by jokethrowaway »

You're mixing up a lot of things. Overall, things are often born out of a need. The problem start when it's not a business need but a career advancement (or other political) need. Think about React. We'd be probably better off as an industry if that wasn't so popular. I hope someone at FB got their promotion for building that massively complicated framework - and I hope they learned what KISS means after they read the codebase of Preact, which achieved the same API with a fraction of the code.

Using Go or Rust instead of Python is not inherently more complicated, it's just a different language.

NoSQL is not complicated but it's fairly useless for most of its users (despite being so popular). At the same time, it has its uses for companies that need massive scale (think Google, not your average startup).

Kubernetes is fairly complicated but it can be the easiest option (even if it's not the most resource efficient) to do something because of the ready made tools available for it.

Don't worry anyway, we haven't screwed up ourselves, we just created tons of artificial work we can spend our employers' money on and that we can use to inflate our cvs and possibly land some more money in the next role.

When you build your own company, be conscious of this, and just use jQuery and PHP like Pieter Levels does.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#110

Post by elzbardico »

turtledove wrote: post #66

Yes, but not in the way you describe. Software engineers have power right now, we should be unionizing (even if the union is only pushing for things like IP clauses and non competes to be less draconic). Build the union while we are strong so it's there when we are weaker. A union doesn't have to be a huge monstrosity. It can be simple and fight for a few basic standards in the industry.

Too late for that now. With Remote Working becoming mainstream, you'll need to coordinate workers globally to create a union.
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