Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

> where is our software industry heading?

It was never our industry. There was a brief window ~2008-2010 where software engineers had a lot of power within their orgs, but at the end of the day we were always the laborers, never the owners of this industry.

Capitalist loathe a monopoly on skill, it gives labor a dangerous amount of leverage.

The people who own our industry, mostly venture capitalists and other investors are interested in capturing value at all costs and limited this power that engineers had.

This was the drive behind "MVP" and "ship it!" cultures that are partially responsible for this mess. But complexity is also valued by management because it reduces the ability of an individual engineer to have an impact, thereby reducing their monopoly on skill. In addition we've seen an industry pop up which focuses exclusively on rushing in new, minimally skilled, looking to make a quick buck devs. These are people only know how to fiddle knobs in a big complex machine.

This is also why the hiring process is even more awful today than it was a decade ago. A decade ago anyone who was passionate about programming and had a github repo willed with cool projects could get hired. This has been transformed into a machine that seeks to make sure every engineer is the same, trained only to pass a series of algorithmic puzzles from leetcode and hacker rank. These are even different than what they emulate: the old google challenges where hard but given by devs who knew what they were doing. Half of the algorithm puzzles I've been given in recent years are clearly by devs who only understand what the answer is, but don't really have any deeper insight into the problem.

> are we doomed forever?

Only until this latest wave of tech (it's not really a bubble) crashes. Once demand for software skill plummets then it will likely be like the dotcom burst valley of 2004-2010. The only people doing software where people who cared about it, and because salaries crashed many good engineers found other niches they could apply their skills in. That's when you saw some really interesting problem solving going on in the field.

I personally feel like it was somehow worse in the days of enterprise Java BS. Check out the daily WTF and it doesn't really seem to have substantially changed over the decades: some folks in the industry will have great success with some technique that happens to work for their particular case, others will repeat, some successfully, some not, a myth grows from the successes that people do hear about, there's intense FOMO (what is _your_ micro service strategy), and at the end of it there's "cargo cult technical strategy" from people with little understanding of the circumstances in which something is applicable but try to get to success by applying successful people's techniques regardless of circumstances.

The fact that a FAANG spent hundreds of man years on their bespoke solution, already implies that theirs is not a solution for small problems. Small problem solvers should not look at FAANG for solutions, but at other small businesses.

More often than not, small problems require small solutions...

Given what you explained, it seems to me that the cloud was an excuse given by the new overlords to just get you out off the way. Cloud is fashionable now, but any excuse would work for them. This seems to be a power grab.

God I am sick of these apologetics every time someone expresses skepticism.

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

To nitpick this specifically, over my 12-year career toiling over this stuff there has never been a scenario where this has required a radical rework to solve. Boring-ass B2B shit rarely requires that level of engineering and, at least in my case, the workloads were fairly predictable and increased in a linear fashion. The one time I did accidentally end of DDoSing ourselves, I temporarily stood up nginx instead of our aging Apache install and was able to serve enough requests to fix the problem. (We then transitioned our app to run in nginx)

It was one fire, and it took a little bit of brainpower to fix. Then the DO droplets were humming along perfectly, and last I heard they continue to do so to this day.

The operational aspects of this double-digit-millions-per-year business ran on a postgres database that compressed to 6gb.

The next business I worked for did billions per year in business value and, until HQ mandated migrating everything to GCP, was humming along perfectly fine on Heroku for a monthly spend well under five digits. Ironically, I think they initially wanted us to be on-prem but couldn't support our stack and would have left all of that to our devops guys. GCP was the compromise (oof!).