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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?

#341

Post by jupp0r »

I think you are mostly wrong about this.

Newer programming languages (the ones from 10 years ago like Go and Rust) are much better than the ones from 30 years ago like Java and Ruby. This doesn’t mean that they should be used for everything but especially the simplicity of Go is always putting a smile on my face whenever I can use it. Compare that to Gradle Maven Spring Boot whatever Java stack - there goes your unnecessary complexity.

What you also have to understand is that many of the things you complain about are solving non-technical problems. Monorepos are great at breaking up silos between teams and enabling vertical development of features across the stack in an organization. They come with added complexity in terms of tooling and automation needed. It’s a trade of that might look bad if you only take the tech aspects of it into account.

Kubernetes in the cloud and its sister systems may look more complicated to you as a developer, but if you compare it to managing a physical data center including all the staff needed to operate and maintain it, it’s really much more simple especially when dealing with hardware failures, dynamic scaling etc.

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

#342

Post by rollcat »

jread wrote: post #287
rollcat wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're using python for the web you're already part of the complexity problem, atleast from the perspective of someone deploying php 15 years ago. The problem with deploying PHP is that it immediately gives you something for very little effort, but the effort scales incredibly disproportionately once you outgrow your need for the bare functioning minimum. I personally prefer the "modern" approach of dropping a s…

When did you last use PHP? It's not the PHP of 15 years ago. It scales fine when properly written and deployed.

I didn't mean scalability in terms of performance, but scalability in terms of maintenance effort. It's easy to SCP some files in, but the moment you want atomic deployments, it gets unnecessarily interesting.

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

#343

Post by joeld42 »

I feel like this is the natural cycle of abstraction. Things get more and more abstracted and virtualized as they become easier to build and manage, but then the cost of all those abstractions begins to add up, and a movement of ultra-simple, specific performant solutions springs up, outcompetes all the bloated abstractions but suffers inflexibility, then begins to get abstracted and the cycle repeats.

I don't think this is a bad thing at all. Every time we learn things, every iteration software improves. The pendulum swings back and forth -- mainframe to PC to server-side to browser based apps to whatever's next, and every one of those offers benefits to what came before.

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

#344

Post by Volrath89 »

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.

It’s a good store of value. Like gold used to be. As a currency I’m not sure it will ever work.

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

#345

Post by Volrath89 »

joeld42 wrote: post #343

I feel like this is the natural cycle of abstraction. Things get more and more abstracted and virtualized as they become easier to build and manage, but then the cost of all those abstractions begins to add up, and a movement of ultra-simple, specific performant solutions springs up, outcompetes all the bloated abstractions but suffers inflexibility, then begins to get abstracted and the cycle repeats. I don't think…

It’s more a cyclic thing than a pendulum.

We are back to mainframes with the insanity of serverless, lamba functions, etc.

Now your code runs on the mainframe again. Debugging is super hard. And of course aws happily takes your money for the time you spend on their “mainframe”.

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

#346

Post by zeroc8 »

dham wrote: post #146
pc86 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Yea people absolutely still build companies with these tools. If you just want to start a Saas company as a side project you would do yourself a disservice if you didn't use something like Rails, Django or Laravel. The problem is in larger companies, developers stopped caring about just solving the business problems and moved on to solving non existent technical issues to build resumes to go the next job to get more…

APIs plus frontend can be simple too and I find SPAs better from a UX perspective.

The real biggie when switching to microservices is that you suddenly have to reinvent all the goodies a relational database gives you for free.

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

#347

Post by jannes »

jscheel wrote: post #207
tomc1985 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Opex is fully deductible each year the expense occurs, wheras capex requires amortized depreciation over the life of the purchased item. Makes it harder to calculate taxes.

Should we call it Amortisation as a Service (AaaS) then?

Is that really the only benefit?

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

#348

Post by anm89 »

I think it's the polar opposite. We've created a problem for businesses and a great sitution (high pay, high job security) for developers.

The developers don't really lose in this situation unless they are owning the businesses.

I'm not saying this is a good thing. Just assessing the reality.

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

#349

Post by reaperducer »

theirishgoodbuy wrote: post #276
reaperducer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At the risk of sounding cultish: I would argue “the cloud” is a bit more than just renting someone else’s computer. Hosting companies existed long before the “cloud”. The difference is the abstraction layer. I would define “the cloud” as a layer that abstracts away the physical infrastructure. (Which works until it doesn’t but that’s a longer comment.) You can even apply “the cloud” to your very own fleet of computer…

You can even apply “the cloud” to your very own fleet of computers with the right software.

If it's on-prem, it's not a cloud, it's a fog.

At least, that's what I've been calling some of my deployments.

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

#350

Post by jscheel »

jannes wrote: post #347
jscheel wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opex is fully deductible each year the expense occurs, wheras capex requires amortized depreciation over the life of the purchased item. Makes it harder to calculate taxes.

Should we call it Amortisation as a Service (AaaS) then? Is that really the only benefit?

I mean, I'm not a bean counter. I'm just guessing that's why they like it.
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