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The silent majority in software

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: The silent majority in software

#151

Post by roenxi »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #100
mcv wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He very nearly signed a Basic Income law. I originally read that the Democrats voted against it because it was too low, but more recently read that someone convinced Nixon that a Basic Income would have terrible consequences based on some faulty historical information about the Speenhamland system, which turned Nixon against BI. But it was close; he could have made history in a much more positive way than what we cur…

The seventies were an odd time - the generation who had come of age during WWII were in power. And WWII had the strangest historical anomoly - wealth was most evenly distributed post WWII than at any time prior. And it was working. It seemed a great idea to experiment with other ways to keep wealth fairly distributed. What a shame power and wealth found it's way back to the few. We will have to fix that. preferably w…

Everyone was equal because they bombed most of the existing capital until there were only smoking craters left and set the poor to killing each other. It should be a great example of why inequality is a good thing - everyone wants to solve inequality by raising the poor up to be billionaires, but the only way we actually know how is to destroy all the capital that the billionaires own so we all have access to nothing.

Someone else being well off doesn't have to make life worse for anyone. People need to live with that truth.

Re: The silent majority in software

#152

Post by actually_a_dog »

goodpoint wrote: post #120
actually_a_dog wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Especially if the "any" country is US.

I could show you multiple examples for many countries. Just search google for "dang nationalistic site:news.ycombinator.com" for some great ones. Admittedly, a lot of them are over the line, but it really is as if you can't mention any country in any kind of remotely critical way, yet they won't just publish that in the guidelines for some reason.

Re: The silent majority in software

#153

Post by roenxi »

anothernewdude wrote: post #93
coldtea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Actually Nixon did several things "a non-evil person would do", Nixon as evil is a carricature. Like giving back Native American lands, or green-lighting the first major environmental protection legislation, or to get talking with China. And of course the Vietnam war itself was esca…

> to get talking with China. What a waste of time that was.

It was one of the early events in the greatest material bettering of human existence in the history of history.

You have high standards.

Re: The silent majority in software

#154

Post by dan_mctree »

donatj wrote: post #59

> Sometimes I’ve seen Pull Requests from empty accounts with a brief explanation of what was implemented. They just submit bug fixes, no drama. Over half my coworkers including some very talented developers have no public repos. As someone with almost 200 that always blows my mind. How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest questi…

I spend significant time outside work on programming, and have no real usable public repos. The public repo route only works if what you want to build is something that's shareable. I build random experimental image processing software or physics simulations that are held together with hardcoded ducktape. There's nothing there that's usable for anyone else so I don't share it

Re: The silent majority in software

#155

Post by snovv_crash »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #114
eternityforest wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

That's a deployment and dependencies issue, not a monolith issue.

The microservices equivalent needs Kubernetes to run your tests.

Re: The silent majority in software

#156

Post by tempodox »

goodpoint wrote: post #118
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.

Agreed, fashion-driven development is shockingly pervasive.

Re: The silent majority in software

#158

Post by oaiey »

jongjong wrote: post #146
Existenceblinks wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. This is happening, look around job board. A lot of job description look really dumb, tech stack doesn't make sense for their business at all.

It's so frustrating to find a nice job advert, then you read through the (very specific) list of requirements and you're thinking to yourself "JavaScript: Check, Node.js: Check, Postgres: Check, Docker: Check, REST: Check, WebSockets: Check, Redis: Check, RabbitMQ: Check, Distributed systems: Check, nginx: Check, Kubernetes: Check, GraphQL: DAMN IT! This was almost a match..."

You hire smart people not perfect matches.

Re: The silent majority in software

#159

Post by brynjolf »

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 also think HN usually come from the same background with predominantly comments from California USA or USA in general.

Compare any topic relating to capatilism, the plights of the low income classes or politics in general. I often amuse myself comparing the takes between the two sites relating it those topics.

Also HN is more clinical, it discussed the death of Swedish reporter like it was a cold case ready to be ripped through.

And also more easily distracted by seemingly innocent open questions like in politics for example "Why is it X job to care about this?" since you can't dismiss it with a short meme it creates discussion that the OP only wanted to distract from the original article.

Apart from that HN discourse is 100% better than reddit and I agree with you in some terms.

Re: The silent majority in software

#160

Post by cageface »

nvarsj wrote: post #124
donatj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am regularly up at night in a cold sweat worrying about how if I suddenly needed to find a new job I’d have to learn some sort of front end JavaScript framework.

Honestly that's why I swapped from front-end at the beginning of my career. Back end and infra moves much slower, jobs tend to be more secure and specialized, and pay seems higher overall. Learning Java back in the 00s was one of my best career moves.

Back end seems to be changing quite quickly too. Docker, k8s, serverless, a million different specialized cloud services, all kinds of non-sql DBs etc. I'm sure you can find a job doing backend that doesn't involve following these trends but you can also still find plenty of front end jobs using jQuery.
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