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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?

#411

Post by eric_cc »

philipov wrote: post #406
eric_cc wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand the bitter hatred toward blockchain at hackernews. Are you guys just mad you knew about bitcoin when it first started but didn't get any? You can't possibly truly believe blockchain solves zero problems can you?

I know blockchain enthusiasts claim that it solves some problems, but in reality it fails to solve them because they are not fundamentally tech problems. You could think of it as a performance art documentary of a group of people learning to recreate the world's financial regulations in a bottle, but the price of admission is a trail of fraud victims. Furthermore, it is wasting the world's energy supplies, and eating…

Blockchain itself solves trust problems. Decentralized database/ledger solves issues where trust matters.

As for bitcoin itself, which I assume the latter part of your comment is talking about:

It’s predictable trustless money. It’s not perfect. But where you totally Lose me is:

> it is wasting the world's energy supplies

This is the latest POLITICAL attack vector. When you parrot messages like this, you expose yourself as a political victim that is not educated about the topic. Literal parrot.

If you have an interest beyond being a political foot soldier, do your own OBJECTIVE research. Learn about bitcoin miners using renewables, how much energy the industry actually uses, the carbon footprint of payment networks and fiat etc.

It’s an effective political attack vector because in all likeliness you won’t do your homework. You’ll read my comment, experience cognitive dissonance, judge me as a bitcoin cultist, and move on with your busy life.

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

#412

Post by philipov »

eric_cc wrote: post #411
philipov wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know blockchain enthusiasts claim that it solves some problems, but in reality it fails to solve them because they are not fundamentally tech problems. You could think of it as a performance art documentary of a group of people learning to recreate the world's financial regulations in a bottle, but the price of admission is a trail of fraud victims. Furthermore, it is wasting the world's energy supplies, and eating…

Blockchain itself solves trust problems. Decentralized database/ledger solves issues where trust matters. As for bitcoin itself, which I assume the latter part of your comment is talking about: It’s predictable trustless money. It’s not perfect. But where you totally Lose me is: > it is wasting the world's energy supplies This is the latest POLITICAL attack vector. When you parrot messages like this, you expose yours…

If you will point me to sources on those numbers you consider reliable, I'll take a look at them.

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

#413

Post by brodouevencode »

dolni wrote: post #169
brodouevencode wrote: post #88

I'll take the devil's advocate: * All these new tools, they give us options, no? Use the right tool for the job, the ability to switch if something becomes old/unmaintained. * Is this actual complexity or perceived complexity given your experience? The node ecosystem looked very complex for me (someone coming from Python) until I actually got into it. Now it seems pretty run-of-the-mill. * Is k8s really all that hard…

> Is k8s really all that hard? Build a container and you don't have to worry about provisioning it and deploying it again. No, the deployment of a container to Kubernetes isn't hard. And it better not be, that's supposed to be the advantage. What's hard is literally everything else about it. And that may be a fine tradeoff if you are at the scale to need it and have a team to manage it. But there are many organizatio…

> What's hard is literally everything else about it.

Absolutely. To me it only makes sense in large orgs that can dedicate resources to managing the platform. But I did bring it up because I, as the user of such a platform, don't have to worry about writing CloudFormation or Terraform because the infrastructure is provided to me. But yes, it's tough otherwise.

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

#415

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#416

Post by AveburySutton »

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…

Hired onto a project as a specialist. Funders had hired a project manager also. Project manager wanted to use technology X ( which has long since faded ) instead of well entrenched and dev-hireable technology Y because technology Y had not yet entered the trough of disillusionment and anyone who could honestly say they had managed a technology X project could 10x their hourly. Money was ignorant about this level of detail. PM won, as they do. Whole thing a money pyre.

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

#417

Post by quanticle »

taylodl wrote: post #404
quanticle wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to your favorite cloud console and provision it.Better yet, use a serverless architecture and don't even worry about servers! Your own data center? Right now there's a 4-6 month wait time for new servers and storage equipment, and an 8-12 month wait time for networking equipment. Not exactly agile, is it? Sure, that all works, as long as you have infinite money. My last job was at a company that was heavily invest…

You must have missed the part where I said But here's one thing I can say about applications that we've moved to the cloud: they cost 30% as much to host in the cloud as they do on-premise, and that's not even accounting for the entirety of all the costs I enumerated above! Every app I've migrated to the cloud so far has resulted in a 70% cost reduction, but I'm also not trying to take my entire application portfolio…

Have you done an audit in the other direction? How many "cloud native" apps do you have, which would realize similar cost reductions from moving to on-prem? The point I was trying to make is that many companies, especially newer startups, don't even discuss on-prem as an option. They build everything cloud-native from day 1, which then leads to them painting themselves into a corner like I described above. They're having to totally redesign and rearchitect their application, not because their business requirements dictate it, but to conform with AWS' limitations.

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

#418

Post by MaxBarraclough »

psyc wrote: post #274

There’s no ‘we’. We don’t coordinate. We don’t design up front. Did Brendan Eich consult ‘us’ before he unilaterally made JavaScript the fucking ‘assembly language of the web’ for the following 25 years? No, he just got it in there, and the whole industry that burgeoned afterwards did whatever they could with what was already there. Who has time (or clout) to design a sane application stack and appropriate tools, whe…

> Who has time (or clout) to design a sane application stack and appropriate tools, when there’s money to be made?

Sun Microsystems had a go, but as you say, unfortunately it wasn't a money-maker.

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

#419

Post by Wilem82 »

javajosh wrote: post #159

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…

> Plus all of these starting points imply the use of new languages, configurations, and programs, in particular, builds.

Oh yeah, true, some people keep saying a language is just a tool trying to convince somebody to use it, but they forget, or omit for some reason, the fact that it's not "just a tool", it's a huge ecosystem that brings additional, enormous mental burden with it - build system(s), libraries popular within that specific ecosystem, language syntax, language quirks, project structure, its own conventions and so forth.

It's much simpler and more efficient (technically and labour market-wise) to write everything in a single language, as much as possible - unless you start going completely against the grain. Like, auxilliary scripts are usually written in cli-centric languages like Bash, as opposed to API-centric like Python, because you get maximum convenience using cli programs and composing them together.

But no, some people casually shoot themselves in the foot by jumping from language to language depending on the task because it's "just a tool". Ripgrep is a just tool. An entire programming language with its ecosystem is not.

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

#420

Post by d--b »

Yes it’s gotten worse.

1. The cloud allowed to increase the available computing power at the expense of simplicity. This brought in the whole devops suite of problems (kubernetes, microservices and what not).

2. The data science hype brought in Python everywhere, which creates contention both culturally and technically.

3. The rise of mobile, means you no longer can escape portability.

4. And then general hype about the last new thing. I don’t that changed fondamentally.

I think things will get better eventually cause 1, 2 and 3 are still relatively new.

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