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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?

#231

Post by ilamont »

> management loves [overly complex solutions], because it creates "work" for the sake of it, but it doesn't add any real business value.

Don't managers understand that development is a constrained resource? They have to choose which projects move forward, where people are assigned, and increasingly, which outsourced service to use because they don't have enough in-house resources to turn to.

My cynical view of the move to complexity is management (or their C-level superiors) are often sold on new platforms or "standards" that require it.

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

#233

Post by mcluck »

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…

> The worse part has been debugging, which you touch upon. Native calls, simple call stacks, easy error logging. All gone.

> Moving everything into hard to debug http calls has been a disastrous productivity sink.

There are a lot of good things coming out of the latest big experiments but this has been a major blow. I have worked on software where the intended debugging approach was to write some code, manually push it out to a shared dev environment, read CloudWatch logs for debugging. It is by far the worst way to debug code that I have ever seen. Things that would take me minutes to debug in a normal setup can take hours or days. Projects like LocalStack aim to improve this a little bit but it's completely counter to the ethos of many "cloud-first" developers.

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

#234

Post by whimsicalism »

philipov wrote: post #55
viraptor wrote: post #11

If you believe that's all there is to those ideas, maybe you need to step away and think about them for a while. Sure, there's going to be some resume padding happening in larger orgs. But all those ideas solve real problems too. I think you're just in a very negative space if you start with "Distributed systems" as something overly complicated. At some scale getting a bigger machine either doesn't make financial sen…

> But all those ideas solve real problems too. All of them, except for blockchain. That one can go die on the trash heap of history.

Access to the dollar is a real problem. Stablecoins help resolve that.

I am not a crypto stan but it has at least one usage.

e: Sorry, forgot it was verboten to say anything contrary to the "crypto has no uses whatsoever" line.

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

#235

Post by dijit »

chad_strategic wrote: post #227

I believe this issue was discussed about 7 years ago. I believe this article still holds true. https://pingineering.tumblr.com/post/116038532184/learn-to-s... (let me know if someone has a better link.)

I’m deeply saddened that they chose MySQL as their hill to die on. I understand why, but boring technology doesn’t have to corrupt your data silently by default.

As for better links, I’m sure the concept of “choose boring technology” evangelises and explains the broader point that your article makes: https://boringtechnology.club/

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

#236

Post by goodpoint »

tomc1985 wrote: post #181
i_like_waiting wrote: post #75

Earlier 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's a finance angle behind cloud stuff too that's irrestible for the bean counters: cloud stuff is operations expense, on-prem is a capital expense. Unfortunately these folks are heavily incentivized to favor OpEx I'm not a bean counter, all I know is those guys at my last job would rattle off about it like zombies. IIRC its a tax thing

Wrong. People has been leasing on-prem hardware for decades before the cloud existed.

Depending on taxation rules you might want to buy or lease.

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

#237

Post by AlwaysRock »

Sounds to me like you've worked at trendy tech companies and want to keep working at trendy tech companies. That means you're going to have to work with trendy technology.

A massive amount of companies, maybe even the majority, don't do this. They use what works and upgrade when needed, not when its cool to use the new thing. They just don't tend to pay like trendy companies and don't look as good on a resume as trendy companies.

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

#238

Post by tootie »

No. It's fine. Idk how long you've been in the industry but the Bad Idea Graveyard is already a mile high. It's great to see innovation and competition and it necessarily will include some duds or some things that inexplicably succeed. I've seen a lot of orgs experiment and then back off a lot of these kinds of things. Sometimes they end up getting strong adoption. There's plenty of smart ways to manage it. The industry keeps growing and evolving like crazy and the overall trajectory has been nothing but positive.

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

#239

Post by francisofascii »

xpe wrote: post #9
baremetal wrote: post #2

The pendulum always swings back the other way. Perhaps after a downturn, things will revert to the mean.

To what degree is this valid logic? Under what contexts does “reversion to the mean” apply? Over what time frame? The “mean” implies one dimension. What quantity are you referring to?

> What quantity are you referring to

How about global IT spending (measured in trillions). Or perhaps spending in "new technologies." If there is a downturn, there would probably be a reduction in IT spending, and so many of these overly complex application solutions could get cut, delayed, complexity downgraded, etc.

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

#240

Post by yoyonamite »

pc86 wrote: post #106
mattmanser wrote: post #67

Earlier 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…

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?…

The majority are simply going to follow popular opinion regardless of the merits, and developer efficiency is often not that important. I also think the efficiency gains are bigger for smaller and inexperienced teams.

Also, people are getting used to app-like experiences and designers are designing for it. Building an app-like experience is more natural as a Single Page Application, which basically means taking on the modern frontend stack. There are places that push against this, but to do so requires buy-in to the engineering side over product and design. Even then, the engineering side has to be knowledgeable enough to not follow popular opinion and come to the determination that Laravel/Rails/Django is actually the right tool, which isn't always the case.

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