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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?

#371

Post by viraptor »

kasey_junk wrote: post #148
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…

What’s crazy is the scale a modern computer can operate at. There _are_ problems that need more scale than that but they are the minority. Meanwhile it’s out of fashion to spend time improving application performance and instead people go horizontal early, with devastating complexity issues.

That's why I mentioned "doesn't make financial sense" too. If you can throw another $X/mth box at it, or have engineers spend weeks improving the system's performance for the same effect... there's a point where scaling out makes way more sense. Whether that leads to complexity issues is really case-by-case.

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

#372

Post by sergiotapia »

You as a developer have the power to say no.

So many engineers have no backbone - use your leverage. You are the one writing code, not some PM.

There are sane escape hatches today that will give your team productivity multipliers and allow you to blitz past these "resume driven development" companies.

Render.com, traditional server-side rendered frameworks, etc.

Advocate for yourself and your team. You will be surprised how much leverage and control you have.

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

#373

Post by arinlen »

i_like_waiting wrote: post #75
theirishgoodbuy wrote: post #34

The way I look at it is: there are more tools in the toolbox than ever before. Which makes our judgement (the thing they really pay us for) even more important. Kubernetes, for example, is a specific solution to a specific problem. The solution is complex but so is the problem. If k8s give you the right trade-offs for your situation, then it’s not busy work. Of course, there are plenty of project where judgement Is t…

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…

>>I see everybody around me moving to cloud, without really good explanation why.

In that case you certainly aren't looking very hard for that explanation.

The rationale of moving to "the cloud" is crisp and very well-defined, to the point where even AWS makes it their point to explain in very clear terms in their Architecting With AWS courses.

Basically it's all about being able to scale without bothering with procurement, not having to manage everything down to power bills and rentals, turning big capex into small opex, and being able to deploy globally and reliably with a click of a button.

That, however, comes at a steep cost. The more serverless you get, the higher the price tag.

Also, beyond a certain scale you're better off going back to managing your own infrastructure.

> 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.

People with cloud experience are paid more because they can deliver more value. A random guy with, say, experience in EC2 and CloudFormation and CloudWatch, can single-handedly put together a robust fault-tolerant webservice that's deployed globally and automatically scales to meet any demand fluctuation.

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

#374

Post by TheCoelacanth »

i_like_waiting wrote: post #302
dtech wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit dismissive to just focus on scaling as a cloud advantage. You also have lower maintenance, easier redundancy, lower chance of outages, easier backup and more such non-functionals. A 200GB DB costs about $50/month on AWS (other providers are less), that's not an interesting amount of money for most businesses.

Thats way off. With 64gb ram we have around $50 month on hetzner yes. But from asking around the other BU with very similar size and usage to ours, somehow they are paying around $2600-5000/ month on azure

Are they using Oracle or MSSQL where you're paying insane software licensing costs?

With Postgres[1], you would need to be using an absolute beast of a server to be paying that much, even if you're paying the 2x premium to go month-to-month, and a low-powered machine could be around $50/month for a 200GB DB.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/postgresql...

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

#375

Post by hardee »

rollcat wrote: post #342
jread wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Atomic deployments with PHP is basically as simple as "git pull" in a temporary working directory and copying it to a release directory..

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

#376

Post by arinlen »

ungamedplayer wrote: post #363
taylodl wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has given you a good explanation for why to move to the cloud? Let me fix that for you! :) I work for a Fortune 200 company who has their own data centers and has for decades. We just completed the construction of two new data centers about four years ago at a cost of $110 million dollars. Those new data centers are now at 70% of their capacity for power requirements . You should take a look at the specs on In…

Open source clearly does not mean packaging your own software. This casts a shadow of doubt on the rest of your valid points.

> Open source clearly does not mean packaging your own software.

The packaging argument was made in the context of complying with software licenses. Responsible companies which perform due diligence on the software they run have to track the provenance of all software that ships as part of their dependency closure. If you want to ensure you're not vulnerable to lawsuits then you can't simply apt-get stuff from a PPA. You need to build it yourself, and track exactly what goes into that build.

Meanwhile, if you opt to run managed service from a cloud provider, you don't have to bother with that because that's not your problem (or liability) anymore.

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

#377

Post by arinlen »

i_like_waiting wrote: post #302
dtech wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit dismissive to just focus on scaling as a cloud advantage. You also have lower maintenance, easier redundancy, lower chance of outages, easier backup and more such non-functionals. A 200GB DB costs about $50/month on AWS (other providers are less), that's not an interesting amount of money for most businesses.

Thats way off. With 64gb ram we have around $50 month on hetzner yes. But from asking around the other BU with very similar size and usage to ours, somehow they are paying around $2600-5000/ month on azure

> With 64gb ram we have around $50 month on hetzner yes.

A single box on Hetzner is by far not comparable to, say, using a managed service as AWS RDS. It's not even apples to oranges, and more of apples to freshly-squeezed orange juice served by a buttler. Think about it: do you get any form of fault tolerance with your single box?

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

#378

Post by arinlen »

reaperducer wrote: post #108
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…

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…

> 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."

It sounds you're trying to dismiss and downplay solutions to problems you're oblivious to.

Even if you want to simplisticly frame "the cloud" as "renting someone else's computer", keep in mind that:

* It's not one computer but as many as you'd like, and get them at the click of a button,

* These are computers which are managed 24/7 by a team of highly trained specialists,

* These computers can be located anywhere in the world and simultaneously in multiple regions,

* These computers are designed to be fault-tolerant and handle (and survive) way more stuff that can conceivably be thrown at them.

> People talk about "the cloud" with the same fervor and language as members of a cult.

I'm sorry to say but you sound like you're militantly opposed to a solution to problems you either don't understand or refuse to understand.

"The cloud", even when following the simplistic and clueless belief that it's just "renting someone else's computer", solves whole classes of technical and business problema that your box under your desk cannot solve.

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

#379

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

ALL systems and processes (not just IT) tend towards complexity well past the sweet spot ( up until the sweet spot they were beneficial.)

So to answer your question - most of the industry will not move to simpler solutions. It goes without saying that a small fraction of the industry does require those complex systems, but they are relatively rare.

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

#380

Post by arinlen »

avgDev wrote: post #292
kevinmhickey wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call it Resume Driven Development

I worked with someone who did this. I'm glad he has moved on. He would not do basic tasks correctly. Had an attention span of a toddler. He was DBA and couldn't google simple problems. I asked him to do something he would say give me 20 minutes. 2 weeks later he would say "IT CANT BE DONE". Then, I would do it myself in a few minutes after googling the error. Instead of applying knowledge, he would bring up all these…

> I worked with someone who did this.

Nothing in your comment points to resume-driven development. You even failed to mention any project or design decision. You just decided to get angry at a coworker because of something.

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