Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

You are simply pricing in external variables to your compensation, which is part of how markets work.

Still, part of the industry is moving towards simple solutions.

A refreshing experience was a mobile app Apple device, with Swift and Swift UI. It was a real joy, works as expected, produces concise code, small files, live preview and reasonably fast build time. Sure, it's closed environment, but last time I felt so productive doing UI dates back to Visual Basic.

Counter-example: a simple web app, nothing fancy, and my node_modules filled with around 500MB of files, hundreds of declarations of injected things everywhere.

But nobody forces us to use Kubernetes, nobody forces us to climb the Rust learning curve, nobody forces us to use this multi-platform framework that solves all the problems of the universe.

I try to stick to standard solutions, oft proposed by the vendor: Kotlin on Android, Swift on Apple, c# on Windows. Server code: stick to Java, or try the simple Golang (another refreshing language).

Also, I try to stay late to adopt tech, just starting to be confident in Docker and will see in a few years if Kubernetes could be useful.

But, an architect needs complex solutions to justify its job, a team lead needs as many dev as possible to tell at the next family dinner, and the new dev wants to try this new fancy tech to put on his resume. So they are all fine with that. Just don't tell the company ownership.

Software Engineers are generally intelligent people.

Intelligent animals need stimulation or they get bored and depressed.

I think collectively, "let's move to Rust" is at least partially because we're not challenged enough by writing the same CRUD app for the 20th time in the same language we've been using for the last 5-10 years, and we want to leave our mark in a new ecosystem by implementing whatever is missing.

Some people want to optimise for "fun/exciting/different" while others seem to be aiming for "known/just works, incidentally boring".

We probably need to find the right middle; how do we keep it fun and challenging while keeping it simple and maintainable.

You are experiencing what I call "The Bisquick Problem". Bisquick is basically flour with some other stuff, like salt, premixed into it, and sold in a box in the USA. So instead of just buying flour and salt, you buy them together, which makes some things easier (like making pancakes), but it complicates literally everything else. You can't use it as flour, or as salt.

With software, the problem is even greater. You can use react, for example, but you will probably start with create-react-app, which adds a lot of things. Or you could start with Next.js, which adds a lot of things. You could use Java, but you will probably start with Spring Boot, or Dropwizard, which adds a LOT of things. Plus all of these starting points imply the use of new languages, configurations, and programs, in particular, builds.

In my view, all of these "Bisquicks" represent experiments-in-progress, with the ultimate goal of the systematic characterization of "software application", in general. In other words, they are systems of alchemy, pushing toward being a system of chemistry, which we don't have yet. So it is bound to be a confusing time, just as it was surely confusing to play with chemicals before Lavoisier systematized the practice.