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The silent majority in software

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: The silent majority in software

#111

Post by msla »

mkl95 wrote: post #53

> But let’s be straight, that’s like 1% of all of the developers out there — the rest of them are just lurking and coding with their language of choice and being content with it. Be it Fortran, COBOL, Perl, or PHP. Assuming all developers who are using something like COBOL or Perl are content with it is hilarious. It doesn't really get much worse than something like COBOL or Perl in terms of ergonomics and ease of us…

I like Perl for small codebases heavily focused on manipulating text. It has first-class support for regular expressions, which means you can make them more readable in addition to doing more things with them more conveniently, and it largely stays out of my way.

COBOL, on the other hand, is a domain-specific language for a domain most people here have no experience with: Software involving fixed-format input and fixed-point numerical calculations. It would be amazing if some language integrated a clear way to describe modern, recursively-defined input formats with the same degree of language support COBOL has for its data definition language. Go is still too verbose, sadly.

Fortran suffers from FORTRAN, by which I mean if you mention Fortran to people they think of 1960s-era mainframe software with no string support, column-oriented fixed formatting, and GOTO use by people who'd never even heard of Dijkstra. Modern Fortran is not like that; sadly, much like Lisp, they never changed the name, so old ideas linger. (This is also true of Cobol.)

Re: The silent majority in software

#112

Post by never_inline »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #18

The disgusting natures of UNIX, UTF-8, and the general culture here whose members don't understand that touching a computer (poorly) doesn't entitle them to dominion over the non computer-touchers is generally controversial on orange Reddit.

No post body was provided.

Re: The silent majority in software

#113

Post by orwin »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #76
cookieswumchorr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a professional community has the right to a place to communicate among themselves, about things they like and understand. This has nothing to do with dominion

I'll elaborate. Firstly, this may be a community of "professionals", but that term means something very different for programmers. No "professional" here is an engineer, as an example, because real engineers would be imprisoned and stripped of title for what the typical programmer does. The dominion to which I refer is the fact that many of these "professionals" work for large advertising corporations who encourage t…

Why is this linked to the nature of UTF-8 and Unix? And since you're explaining your thoughts, are those nature the same or is each one a different facet of the programmer culture?

And lastly: do you honestly think most production or data engineers should be imprisoned or stripped of their titles?

Re: The silent majority in software

#114

Post by EdwardDiego »

eternityforest wrote: post #96
silisili wrote: post #6

> Usually, the comments on HN/Reddit are polarised by a single group of people who have the same opinion, Can't speak for Reddit, but that's not at all the case here. For example, I often speak of my hatred of microservices here. I'll get some upvotes and agreement, some people telling me it's a dumb opinion, and some people telling me we're doing it wrong and explain their right way. Believe it or not, I learn a lot…

I don't think microservices are silent majority. They seem like more of a blogger architect who likes to tinker with stuff thing. I would expect the true silent majority just uses monoliths. If it works and doesn't make people complain every day when they work on it, why use a microservice? That's more work. Everyone likes to think of microservices as a modern high tech thing, but to me it seems like old fashioned un…

I've joined a company with a silent majority monolith, and joined at the inflection point where they realise their monolith is strangling them...

If your dev guide in the wiki says "to run unit tests, use docker-compose exec monolith test some.package.test_class", you're in danger.

This company needs to start breaking the monolith down into, well maybe not microservices, but at least smaller monoliths, if they want to achieve what they want to achieve.

Re: The silent majority in software

#115

Post by orwin »

dan-robertson wrote: post #68
silh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

140k a year in most of the countries in the EU would mean you are working in trading/banking or some Big Tech, which means they probably had to do go some of the leetcoding to end up there.

They may be contractors rather than employees.

Contractor do pass f** leetcode tests to enter the banking sector, as well as weird interview about DevOps and agile. The comp is the best though, easily 2x what you do in more 'interesting' avenues. And the code is changing from 95% Java to python/TS/go + 50% Java (gotta keep those Jenkins and airflow going).

Re: The silent majority in software

#116

Post by Gordonjcp »

evan_ wrote: post #8

> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war. This is a shocking misunderstanding of history. The “silent majority” Nixon spoke of were folks opposed to anti-war protests . Nixon intentionally prolonged…

> If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts.

Well naturally. He's a right-wing politician. See also Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Benito Mussolini, and any of the rest.

Re: The silent majority in software

#117

Post by Dudeman112 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #105
evan_ wrote: post #8

> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war. This is a shocking misunderstanding of history. The “silent majority” Nixon spoke of were folks opposed to anti-war protests . Nixon intentionally prolonged…

> folks opposed to anti-war protests That's a very specific wording; were these people also pro-war, or did they just not like the protests themselves? I think that's an important distinction to make. In my country we've had farmer's protests (environmental legislation has caused the government to target some farmers, things like forced buy-outs. It's all on paper and wouldn't affect that many people or the food supp…

>That affects people directly, the upsdie-down flags and slogans on fields along the roadside don't

Those also don't achieve anything. The only form of protesting that the population at large accepts are either illegal or useless

Re: The silent majority in software

#118

Post by goodpoint »

jongjong wrote: post #52

I used to be part of the silent majority of software developers but that changed after I became disillusioned about the direction of the industry. Nowadays, I'm basically forced to use certain inefficient tools in order to get a job because a bunch of highly vocal junior devs who got their way. It's a bit like in politics; when times are good for the majority, most normal people aren't interested in politics; they ha…

Same here. Many popular and needlessly complex tools, especially around devops... used only because they are popular.

Even worse, people don't even bother to look at other options even if it's just to learn from them.

Compare the new hip thing with a different one and people get defensive.

Re: The silent majority in software

#119

Post by t_mann »

danwee wrote: post #50
oars wrote: post #25

There are thousands of Java developers in the US who make $80,000 a year and live a fantastic life. No leetcode, no Bay Area, no FAANG. Just people writing the code responsible for our banking, travel, supermarkets and many other systems which underpin our society.

I know many developers (over 35 years old) in Europe doing the same (they earn above the average european salary, so like 140K EUR/year or so): Java, no HN, no Linkedin, no FAANG, no leetcode, no switching jobs every 2 years. They have families, they are normal people. If you ask them about monads, they would have no idea (like me) what are you talking about. That's the path I'm heading to (hopefully).

140k EUR for a dev role? Normally I'd say you're delusional, but since you say you actually know people who consider that normal, may I ask which country(ies) you're talking about (since it's apparently not Switzerland or Norway, where I might have believed it)?

I still have a strong suspicion that either your friends gave you wildly inflated numbers, or you happen to know some serious outliers. Check this out for a reality check - the highest-paying Eurozone country is Germany, with an average dev salary of about 60k, and 76k for seniors: https://blog.helloastra.com/2021/10/18/the-average-software-...

Re: The silent majority in software

#120

Post by goodpoint »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #56
sofixa wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Apple, or libertarians, or Rust, or any other similar darling. Or suggesting that absolute free speech comes with issues when coupled with the global reach and pseudo anonymity of the Internet.

Or saying anything negative about any country ("nationalistic flamebait," anyone?)

Especially if the "any" country is US.
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