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The silent majority in software

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: The silent majority in software

#221

Post by yamtaddle »

cubancigar11 wrote: post #72
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…

Because they have no love for the job. They are doing it for something else and so are only interested in working on things that have a visible and clear return. These people are also good at politics. There is a reason bill gates is rich and rms isn't.

There's nothing—nothing—I would love to do 40ish hours per week, every single week, 48-50ish weeks per year. Nothing.

A full-time programming job fills up maybe 200% of the time I want to spend on that in a year.

Re: The silent majority in software

#222

Post by jollybean »

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…

I consider JS an anti-pattern and won't allow more then 50 lines to be anywhere near me without TypeScript. The issues raised are innumerable.

TS is really flexible and you can do some crazy gymnastics with it - I don't favour that. Just keep it very simple and don't go crazy with the generics.

I've never had a problem at all, I've never had to dig into what was transpiled.

Re: The silent majority in software

#223

Post by marcosdumay »

jollybean wrote: post #220
ksec wrote: post #218

>While browsing HackerNews, I sometimes get the feeling that every developer out there is working for FAANG Bubbles on HN; Entry level Web Developers are getting $200K per year working in FAANG or Big Tech. Non-FANNG are getting $150K anyway. Ruby may be dead, but PHP is even more dead. Java may rule the enterprise, but you should not mention Java. No one uses Oracle or MySQL, why would you want that? Postgres is the…

You generally don't need to use Oracle though ...

How else can you spend thousands of dollars an year to get an horrible programmer experience at the expense of performance and data safety?

Plenty of people are stuck with Oracle, but starting with it nowadays is something else.

Re: The silent majority in software

#224

Post by overgard »

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…

To me, TypeScripts "complexity" is just from documenting the weird things JS libraries do. If it encourages less weirdness Im happy

Re: The silent majority in software

#225

Post by eh2beifhe »

Lapsa wrote: post #47

with all the banning, down-voting and cancel culture in general - it's just not worth it. why should I even care if the receiving part isn't listening, got different agenda (yet another celebrity cult buildup || greed)? heck... the youth doesn't even know how to swear anymore. n word this, r word that - as if Lord Voldemort's gonna pop in. internet has created an illusion that teachers have become obsolete, even at w…

What is your point? Are you saying you can't advocate for different tech stacks without using the n word?

Re: The silent majority in software

#226

Post by fezfight »

shadowgovt wrote: post #213
fezfight wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the point I'm trying to make. At the end of the incredibly complex and long modern road, you end up looking at text, images, etc, in a browser.

At the end of an incredibly complex and long modern road, I end up looking at text and images in any application, but I wouldn't wish upon the developers of, say, IntelliJ that they render the user interface by making their own JNI calls directly to "draw a rectangle" APIs...

I agree that would be ridiculous, but I'm talking about people using some huge front end library, react, k8s, etc, to make a form. With a logo. Obviously do whatever you want, but it's a lot.

Re: The silent majority in software

#227

Post by evan_ »

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’s the thing- the war was widely unpopular, but there was a growing reactionary sentiment against the protests, so Nixon gave a speech where he basically said “if you aren’t with me on the war then you’re a dirty hippie” and people feel for it.

Re: The silent majority in software

#228

Post by eh2beifhe »

kkfx wrote: post #74

Well... Silent majority also means the mass of people who do not contribute to the society except for they use as meat-based weapons in politics, religion... Yes they have a value, for some it's the same value of a flock of cows: munging meat, milk etc. For some a hope or absence thereof for the humanity. IN history unfortunately the former tend to win all the time...

So how does this apply to software then? Why are silent people in the software industry "meat based weapons" and what for?

Re: The silent majority in software

#229

Post by marcosdumay »

packetlost wrote: post #215
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…

The silent majority are mostly corporate devs building internal tooling. Microservices are a fantastic method for building distributed, horizontally scaling, dynamic services in a way that's sane. But the overwhelming vast majority of services would be perfectly ok with a simple monolith that occasionally gets a VM spec bump.

> horizontally scaling

I have never seen services (of any size) succeed in a place that wasn't using them to do vertical partitioning of a system.

I imagine you are probably talking about horizontally scaling each of those vertical partitions, but the phrasing is really confusing.

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