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The silent majority in software

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: The silent majority in software

#331

Post by wellokthen2 »

tdeck wrote: post #317
ThinkBeat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The insane race to adopt any fad to be cool, is a mindset I find far worse morally than using tried and true tools. It enhances risk. The latest tool language and/or framework is uncharted territory A tried-and-true solution has had a lot of bugs and issues documented and some of them solved. It also mean the team must take a break from development to learn whatever the new thing is. Some will need more time than oth…

This is a false dichotomy though. Your comment makes it sound like the only options are to keep using the same tech stack for 30 years or to "race" to adopt the "newest fad". What about switching from a moribund 30 year old technology to a mature 5-10 year old technology every now and then, based on an assessment of the very real drawbacks of living in the past. Security is one of the biggest problems with outdated s…

Protip: you're much better off writing something in straight C than in [latest fad language du jour]

Re: The silent majority in software

#333

Post by cutler »

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.

$80,000 is hardly the measure of a true professional these days surely?

Re: The silent majority in software

#334

Post by cutler »

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.

Do you see much evidence of Kotlin eating Java's lunch as some have predicted?

Re: The silent majority in software

#335

Post by wnolens »

overgard wrote: post #291
wnolens wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did a personal web project and chose TypeScript to see what the rage was about. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to design types. At some points I couldn't figure it out, or I ran into some limitation of the language to express what I need. So my code has a bunch of exclamation points everywhere to assert that a null ain't coming. It feels dirty. Just too hard to use for me.

A few things you might consider... Are you using "?" optional fields in your classes/interfaces a lot? If so, do you need to? Unless it's truly optional, you're basically making the type system less useful if you put that all over the place. If you have a lot of sparse objects, it's probably an indicator of a data type doing too much. You might be much better off splitting it into smaller interfaces and using union t…

Thanks. It's definitely not obvious to me coming from Java/c++/python.

I think I went into the deep end with some non trivial generic functions. It's been a few months, but I remember ditching interfaces for classes so I could do some run time type checking.

I wouldn't have fallen into these traps with something like Java.

Re: The silent majority in software

#336

Post by xuhu »

Jensson wrote: post #327
orangepurple wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Downvoting disagreeable people will eventually completely silence them with that logic. One has to be generally agreeable to maintain positive karma. Not sure if the side effect is worth it. There are a lot of amusing assholes out there with unpopular opinions. Opinions that are highly relevant to the topic at hand can be polarizing, but these will likely result in the poster having negative karma long term. p…

That isn't true, I am very disagreeable and argumentative and post before I think, and still maintain positive karma without any issues. Edit: It works since to downvote you need 500 karma, but everyone can upvote, so getting many upvotes is a lot easier than getting many downvotes.

But, do they carry equal weight ?

Re: The silent majority in software

#337

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

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).

>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

Do you have more details about the country and industry? As this is way way above the Java dev salaries in Austria and they'd kill for this kind of money without grinding leetcode. Nobody pays Java devs that kind of money here.

Positions like these don't grow on trees and since you say there's no leetcode, Linkedin or big-tech involved, I'm guessing there's other forms of gatekeeping for such a lucrative and easy gig, like having the right industry connections or knowing the right people in order to hear about the openings I would assume, as if they were to advertise this salary on Linkedin or other places they would be drowning in quality applicants, for even less money than that.

Re: The silent majority in software

#338

Post by wnolens »

rektide wrote: post #245
wnolens wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did a personal web project and chose TypeScript to see what the rage was about. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to design types. At some points I couldn't figure it out, or I ran into some limitation of the language to express what I need. So my code has a bunch of exclamation points everywhere to assert that a null ain't coming. It feels dirty. Just too hard to use for me.

It's just so awesome that a thread on "Silent Majority" has the typical loud protests against JavaScript, against the web, against React, against TypeScript. The irony is loud to me. It's not even that there's only happy heads-down programmers off HN who support these mainstream techs. Even in the active userbase here, I'd wager there are tons of people who have an adequate or better experience with typescript or rea…

HN can be conversational, not always a well researched debate. Most of us are over-involved with these debates with coworkers at our day jobs, where we HAVE to spend the energy having productive disagreements.

I appreciate the high quality HN posts, but sometimes just like at a water cooler a bunch of us just wanna say, "agh I'm so sick of object oriented" and it doesn't mean "all object oriented programming is of no use".

Re: The silent majority in software

#339

Post by wnolens »

vbezhenar wrote: post #289
wnolens wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did a personal web project and chose TypeScript to see what the rage was about. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to design types. At some points I couldn't figure it out, or I ran into some limitation of the language to express what I need. So my code has a bunch of exclamation points everywhere to assert that a null ain't coming. It feels dirty. Just too hard to use for me.

What's so hard about designing types? I'm Java developer and when I need to use TS, I just write Java with it. Works fine. The only times I encounter weird types is when for some reason I need to read type definitions for some weird JS library. But that's relatively rare.

Good for you.

Re: The silent majority in software

#340

Post by wnolens »

mikewhy wrote: post #250
wnolens wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did a personal web project and chose TypeScript to see what the rage was about. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to design types. At some points I couldn't figure it out, or I ran into some limitation of the language to express what I need. So my code has a bunch of exclamation points everywhere to assert that a null ain't coming. It feels dirty. Just too hard to use for me.

Threads like these are why I don't pay attention to HN anymore.

I'm sorry I didn't sufficiently entertain you.
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