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The silent majority in software

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: The silent majority in software

#181

Post by treis »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #48

I think what the author says is true. The mass of digital workers use older, established and unfashionable technology, and are neither vocal nor particularly curious about the work. But there's an implication of moral purity at play. Are those who just quietly "mind their own business" a good, wholesome but misrepresented group? On the contrary, I think that in matters with far reaching consequences, which computing…

It happens at the company level too. You end up with a lot of decisions being made by the minority that (1) feels strongly and (2) is willing to speak up.

It's an interesting dynamic. I've been on both sides in my career. Silent is much easier but doesn't get you recognition & promotions.

Re: The silent majority in software

#182

Post by danielvaughn »

jongjong wrote: post #143
nvarsj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. Also, back end tends to have fewer mega-trends. You usually have the option to stick to your old tools. There are still plenty of C/C++ back end jobs for example. The community keeps branching off. On the front end, the trends tend to be more extreme; people will not take you seriously unless you give up on whatever tools you use and go straight for React or VueJS... Then when TypeScript comes along, everyon…

As someone who really appreciates strong typing, I will die on this hill - I hate Typescript.

Introducing a transpiled typing system on top of a dynamically typed language is a recipe for all sorts of insane complexity, which is what I experience whenever I try to use TS. If you consider all the time and effort it took to introduce types for every NPM project out there, all the development of the language itself, the effort expended by individual devs and teams to learn the syntax...

...might it have been the same amount of effort just to introduce some strong types into Javascript itself? It's not like the language can't adapt, and there are already some strong types when you're working with the graphics APIs.

Re: The silent majority in software

#184

Post by golergka »

bluGill wrote: post #177
quickthrower2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the job where you get to work on compilers. If it is not React it is probably the glorious back end, making some graphql endpoints talk to mongodb or suchlike. Or devops, fight k8s!

There are a few thousand compiler jobs in the world. Maybe in the tens of thousands, i'm not sure. For everyone of them there are thousands (again I don't know how to measure, could be in the ten thousands) of programmers using the compiler.

Feels pretty lined up to the amount of programmers who are skilled in writing compilers.

Re: The silent majority in software

#185

Post by [deleted] »

Transfinity wrote: post #4

> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. Excuse me? The "silent majority" was the set of Americans who were for the war, not (loudly) protesting against it. Nixon was all for continuing the war.

[deleted]

Re: The silent majority in software

#186

Post by golergka »

danielvaughn wrote: post #182
jongjong wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Also, back end tends to have fewer mega-trends. You usually have the option to stick to your old tools. There are still plenty of C/C++ back end jobs for example. The community keeps branching off. On the front end, the trends tend to be more extreme; people will not take you seriously unless you give up on whatever tools you use and go straight for React or VueJS... Then when TypeScript comes along, everyon…

As someone who really appreciates strong typing, I will die on this hill - I hate Typescript. Introducing a transpiled typing system on top of a dynamically typed language is a recipe for all sorts of insane complexity, which is what I experience whenever I try to use TS. If you consider all the time and effort it took to introduce types for every NPM project out there, all the development of the language itself, the…

> ...might it have been the same amount of effort just to introduce some strong types into Javascript itself?

And how would it be different?

I've been using TS since 2016, both for front and back-end, and I can count an amount of times the transpilation abstraction leaked on one hand (and most of these were when I just learning TS and worked on weirdly configured projects). Aside from these, I could just forget about the fact that it's transpiled to JS under the hood.

Re: The silent majority in software

#187

Post by danielvaughn »

golergka wrote: post #186
danielvaughn wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who really appreciates strong typing, I will die on this hill - I hate Typescript. Introducing a transpiled typing system on top of a dynamically typed language is a recipe for all sorts of insane complexity, which is what I experience whenever I try to use TS. If you consider all the time and effort it took to introduce types for every NPM project out there, all the development of the language itself, the…

> ...might it have been the same amount of effort just to introduce some strong types into Javascript itself? And how would it be different? I've been using TS since 2016, both for front and back-end, and I can count an amount of times the transpilation abstraction leaked on one hand (and most of these were when I just learning TS and worked on weirdly configured projects). Aside from these, I could just forget about…

Interesting, maybe it's just been my personal experience. I often work at the native DOM level, where the API is extremely forgiving and dynamic. The type system does not work well there, as I found several instances where the underlying type definition didn't match what the native API actually had available. My only recourse in those moments was to either use `any` or to write my own type definition (which I am not going to do).

Re: The silent majority in software

#188

Post by golergka »

t_mann wrote: post #119
danwee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Contracting for US-based companies.

Re: The silent majority in software

#189

Post by chrischattin »

azemetre wrote: post #176
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…

Would you mind sharing some things that juniors have forced that you think are bad? I’ve recently switched jobs and my team doesn’t write integration tests for our services but rather manually test them with postman. It’s definitely odd and very inefficient.

Not OP, but front end JavaScript frameworks are the first thing that comes to mind as an inefficient antipattern that was forced into the dev mindshare by (effective) mega-cap marketing and jr devs who didn’t know any better.

Re: The silent majority in software

#190

Post by 3pt14159 »

Some things I'm silent about, other things I'm not.

Articles like this often fail to differentiate that there usually isn't one large blob of people that are chatty about all the things all the time. Usually individuals have their own specific issues that they're interested in and passionate about and will default to the consensus or be fine with any option for the rest of it.

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