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Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
111–120 of 430 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I recently worked on a project with 2 devs that took 3 months with a modern stack. The prototype in a standard MVC stack I'd made to demo to the client took 2 days. Can you expand on the modern stack and that standard stack? Is the "standard stack" you propose easier to work with now than it was 15 years ago? I guess the "standard stack" is just out of fashion? My preferred stack (aws serverless BE, nextjs front en…
Is being in one language really that much of a benefit? I've worked on several large production apps with node backends and I'd rather use almost any other backend language.
And I take issue with saying you "have to know" GraphQL, that's a pretty specialized tool for pretty specific problems. Most things are not graph structures.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There are non-IT perspectives on this as well. My company offers two deployment scenarios: host it yourself and cloud hosted (SaaS). Many of our customers choose the latter because their internal IT systems require more process, and they just want to get something up and running.
Just to add, at my last company it could take up to 6 months to get a VM provisioned on prem. We could provision what we needed in Azure on demand.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#114I think the author is suffering from common problem these days... "I see one thing is broken, therefore it's all broken." Instead of taking this approach try to think how you can improve things instead of seeing what is wrong - see what can be fixed.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#115In an inflationary environment, this is fine. Just wait when we have interest rates at 12%.
This comment is irrelevant to the point of being a non-sequitur
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#116Yes, these things are done for IMPACT, personal impact to get that raise/promotion. Most of it totally unnecessary for the 99.999% cases.
Same with leetcode questions.
You start with leetcode at the gate and then continue with micro-fe refactor to get a raise.
Industry is infested with people who hate programming but love status.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#117I think the market is always right. As complexity increases in areas as you describe, it will create opportunities for solutions that simplify things.
IMO, it's one of the reasons that Phoenix LiveView is so appealing for people because it removes so much complexity from building otherwise complex tooling.
I actually just had to come face to face with this because I've been developing a lesson plan to teach my son to program...and after looking at everything I settled on Linux command line + HTML/CSS + SQL. Then the decision came down to which language to teach and I narrowed the field to Ruby, PHP and Elixir.
Ended up settling on Elixir simply because of the functional style and total capabilities without having to introduces tons of additional technologies.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#118I think things are more complex - overly complex. This is partly driven by rates and CV embellishing - its great for the individual to implement some new technology for their CV and for the better money. The complexity begets more complexity, and the cycle goes on...
I think the industry is waiting for AI to come through. They want the business analysts to be able to write their specs in English, and have the AI do the coding. In such a scenario lots of developers will lose out - some will still be needed - but from a business perspective, this will be even better than outsourcing.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#119I think the tools may have become too good.
There are so many different ways to build web services and the hardware (CPU/GPU/RAM/network bandwidth) and the software (OS/Nginx/Python/PHP etc.) have become so good that at the end of the day, they all work, more or less, which means that such complexity can always be justified.
I feel like software written for embedded systems to work with physical world suffers less of these issues because the environment is just less forgiving.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#120Yes, 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…
> The purpose of a union is to create a labor cartel
No, that is not the "purpose of a union"
Some unions, especially in the USA, have functioned in such a way, but this is far from universal.