Seems to work well for SAP. I also have a suspicion that for example Java is so complicated because it was created by a consulting company - complex tech means high paid consultants.
What do you mean by Sun having been a consulting company?
Learning (needlessly) hard technology
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: Learning (needlessly) hard technology
#12Good ol' accidental complexity and essential complexity. There's a nontrivial amount of technologies that are complex and otherwise byzantine for no reason. Given the lack of alternatives, knowing the arcane tech inside and out can provide for a sustained stream of money, but that's hardly ethical.
It's not always "no reason."
Back the 1990s, GNU autoconf looked like a miracle to me, and in fact, back then you got better results compiling from source than you got using what passed for a package manager.
These days people complain that autoconf is too complicated, being a bunch of shell scripts on top of shell scripts compiled with M4.
Then there is SAP, which stands alone in its ability to destroy value. SAP started out as a mainframe application, got ported to Unix in the 1990s (not many succeeded at that) and now they want you to run it on an in memory database for which you can't afford the hardware, never mind the software.
Re: Learning (needlessly) hard technology
#13Seems to work well for SAP. I also have a suspicion that for example Java is so complicated because it was created by a consulting company - complex tech means high paid consultants.
I don't think Java the language is particularly complicated - it has a much simpler core than C++, which it sort of superseded in a lot of areas. People went a little nuts with the XML and ObjectBuilderFactoryFactory nonsense and all of the "enterprise" stuff, but you could create similar levels of insanity in any programming language, if the fad storm hits.
Re: Learning (needlessly) hard technology
#14I immediately thought about Oracle, then IBM, then SAP ... it seems his friend didn't think about this first !
Re: Learning (needlessly) hard technology
#15Seems to work well for SAP. I also have a suspicion that for example Java is so complicated because it was created by a consulting company - complex tech means high paid consultants.
I don't see how Java is more complicated than any other programming language. It certainly is not one of the more difficult ones. Assembly is complicated. C is arguably complicated. Java being complicated? I disagree.
Assembly and C are dead simple compared to Java. The C reference manual is about 200 pages, if I dropped the Java reference manual(s) from a building it would create a sizeable crater.
Assembler is simple like lego is simple: the basics are tremendously easy to understand but the distance between the basic elements and the problems you're trying to solve is very large.
The more 'batteries included' something is the more time you'll spend learning about the eco-system and less about the language per-se.
Re: Learning (needlessly) hard technology
#16It's unethical to inflict "needlessly hard" technologies on a client who isn't using them already. But an enormous fraction of the world's valuable, productive software is both needlessly complex and built using (arguably) obsolete tools and frameworks.
The are good career reasons to think long and hard before specializing in this stuff. After all, once you go too far down the rabbit hole, you may not be able to climb back out, and nobody wants to be a 35-year-old developer with a completely obsolete skill set.
But if you're a 55-year-old consultant, you may be planning to retire long before the systems you're working on disappear. In this case, I can't see anything wrong with specializing in ugly, valuable dinosaurs that nobody else wants to get near. Under the right circumstances, I've heard of this work paying $350/hour and up.
Re: Learning (needlessly) hard technology
#17Seems to work well for SAP. I also have a suspicion that for example Java is so complicated because it was created by a consulting company - complex tech means high paid consultants.
What do you mean by Sun having been a consulting company?
I am no expert on Sun, but I think consulting was a huge part of their business? I know they were also well known for their servers.
Re: Learning (needlessly) hard technology
#18I have heard from a colleague that he has a friend who is an exceptional SharePoint expert and loathes it because of its complexity. Multiple times he flew to client locations around the US and changed a single line of code and got paid $$$ it.
Re: Learning (needlessly) hard technology
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by Sun having been a consulting company?
I am no expert on Sun, but I think consulting was a huge part of their business? I know they were also well known for their servers.
They only got into consulting at the end as their business was dying and they were trying to copy IBM. In 1997 they were a server and workstation company (selling hardware and software as an integrated package).
Re: Learning (needlessly) hard technology
#20I immediately thought about Oracle, then IBM, then SAP ... it seems his friend didn't think about this first !
Some people thrive doing consulting for things like that because they're satisfaction is largely driven by how much they're taking home.