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The Developer's Dystopian Future

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Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#101

Post by danielweber »

AznHisoka wrote: post #28
personZ wrote: post #11

Honest, legitimate post that I very much enjoyed. However I do think posts like this feed in ageism. I say this because it posits that the change is that the author is older and has more things to do, therefore they've fallen out with technology. The take-away invariably being that people who are older and have more things to do have fallen out with technology, whereas the young are still with it, whatever it is. Let…

Is it ageism? Or is it just experience? If you've been in the industry for 10+ years, there's a certain cynicism that occurs, when you're learning a new framework/language every 2 years that's just an incremental improvement on another language. Just because a boss tells you to. "Oh learn this, it's gonna be the next big thing. It's gonna propel your career. Oh, you're done with that? Now, learn this new thing for yo…

It's very hard to care a lot about the new technology that is just the same as the old technology you used 10 years ago.

It's a giant zero-sum game to expect everyone to pour time into running in place to not fall behind, and we're not getting any better.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#102

Post by bill_from_tampa »

In 1973, when I was working at a summer job as an assembly language programmer for a university medical research computer center, I asked the section supervisor about the career path for programmers. I was told: there are no old programmers, after 15-20 years or so you will go into management or leave the profession.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#103

Post by eru »

noname123 wrote: post #95
personZ wrote: post #11

Honest, legitimate post that I very much enjoyed. However I do think posts like this feed in ageism. I say this because it posits that the change is that the author is older and has more things to do, therefore they've fallen out with technology. The take-away invariably being that people who are older and have more things to do have fallen out with technology, whereas the young are still with it, whatever it is. Let…

I'm 27, used to be in tech like the biggest nerd of them all. But not anymore, frankly I'm tired of all of the changes that happened in the industry - it's not that I'm tired of learning but it's that the changes lack substance. Learning a new framework that does the same thing like layout or user design; it's not like learning music and digging into a deeper discipline like moving from acoustic strumming to jazz imp…

> Learning a new framework that does the same thing like layout or user design; it's not like learning music and digging into a deeper discipline like moving from acoustic strumming to jazz improvisation, it's just learning new keywords to do the same crap because the old keywords have been remapped.

Perhaps you should look into Haskell, Clojure or Erlang for a change?

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#104

Post by notastartup »

I'm 27 and I've been thinking about the problems described in the article. All the new learning becomes bullshit when you work on your own project. I can see that it's a huge annoyance when it's required to earn a salary. For example, we are a TDD shop for a rapidly changing software, learn or know TDD or gtfo. Even though, you know TDD is solely practiced by the sadomasochistic crowd stuck in an acid trip, you have no choice.

What if you just focused on creating your own software and your own projects? For me, when I focus on my own development projects, all of the angst and worry described in the article goes away because I stick to the tried and tested tools instead of jumping on trendy frameworks or javascript-not-just-on-browser type of crowd. I just use the best tool that I am familiar with.

It really doesn't help your career when you've written a desktop app using Java Swing on your own project or when you've spent a long time working on a SaaS using LAMP, or if you haven't implemented it with AQMPMONGODBMETEORJSANGULARJSAGILENODEJS, or for jobs that list 10 years of AngularJS experience.

Ultimately, aren't we, as holders of highly intellectual skillset, should be masters of our own destiny, instead of worrying solely on the career aspect of it? Why not say, fuck this job, I'm gonna build something and sell it? This is the way I see it.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#105

Post by sien »

mtct wrote: post #37
thegeomaster wrote: post #25

I'm not even legally an adult, and I feel like things are moving too fast for me. At 17 years. I guess I shouldn't feel like that, but I can't help it. I started with VB6 as a kid, 6 years ago. I moved onto C++, then learned about 3D graphics and game engines, then learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, gotten into web development, learned Photoshop, some basic design, working with Linux, PHP, a little of C#. Recently tinker…

Stop follow hacker news and you will rapidly recover from this illness. Source: Me, someone that see COBOL all day and still live happily after that.

Exactly.

I work in a similar place. IMS and COBOL is all over the place.

Delphi is too. I maintain mostly C code written 20 years ago.

It pays better than any job I've had previously with up to date technology stacks.

A bunch of mates are Coldfusion coders. Now they are in demand because all these odd places have legacy CF code they have to deal with.

In 10 years time all over the place will be piles of Angular, Node & whatnot to maintain.

The pile just keeps getting bigger.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#106

Post by hbt »

It's not so much change as it is exploration. You can either wait for the best player to come out or start betting.

In the 70s, the exploration was with different hardware architectures and then we settled with general purpose computer chips.

In the 90s, it was operating systems, protocols and standards. Eventually commercial interests (mainly Microsoft) lost and we settled for open stuff they couldn't control.

Same story with cloud computing, a technology that didn't really exist 10 years ago and is still being developed. Eventually we will settle for aws or openStack and common processes will be developed that companies like linode, amazon, google etc. can all share and use and the software will be open source because there will be no major differences between all of them.

Every technology experiences a phase of exploration where people contribute left and right and eventually we settle for a handful of major players. Remember the MVC frameworks competition in Ruby/Python/PHP less than 8 years ago?

Just bet carefully

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#107

Post by nickbauman »

I love my work, still writing software over 40. I am intolerant of technologies that are poor reinventions of octagonal wheels. Now they're triangular wheels: they move even less well as the crappy octagonal ones that were going to cure cancer back then (when we were writing it in Java). Now the triangular ones are shockingly more complex and offer even less (and they're written in Scala, no less)

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#108

Post by monksy »

rayiner wrote: post #41
thegeomaster wrote: post #25

I'm not even legally an adult, and I feel like things are moving too fast for me. At 17 years. I guess I shouldn't feel like that, but I can't help it. I started with VB6 as a kid, 6 years ago. I moved onto C++, then learned about 3D graphics and game engines, then learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, gotten into web development, learned Photoshop, some basic design, working with Linux, PHP, a little of C#. Recently tinker…

Relax. One of the lovely things about being older is having the confidence to be able to be able to point out that the latest fad is just a warmed-over rehash of something old. It's important to keep up with the new things, but the fact of the matter is that there is very little in the world of software development that's actually new. Swift? Please. If you know ML (1970's), Smalltalk (1980), and Objective-C (1983),…

Just wait till you look for a new job, and it happens to be at a startup. The more mature companies tend to be a little slower at adopting new technologies.

In my situation I've been in the Enterprise/automation world. Which is a little bit behind. [Ok a lot.. but you work with what you can and what works within the requirements] ... you'll get the "you're not the right skillset" when the new organization is using *js, nosql dbs, and the FB APIs etc. That's rather odd when you've been developing for more than 10 years and have shown that you can learn new technologies.

I'm completely in agreement with you, however when it comes to a new position employers "don't want to risk you not knowing jquery 12"

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#109

Post by MoOmer »

venomsnake wrote: post #58
thegeomaster wrote: post #25

I'm not even legally an adult, and I feel like things are moving too fast for me. At 17 years. I guess I shouldn't feel like that, but I can't help it. I started with VB6 as a kid, 6 years ago. I moved onto C++, then learned about 3D graphics and game engines, then learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, gotten into web development, learned Photoshop, some basic design, working with Linux, PHP, a little of C#. Recently tinker…

Relax. A lot of those technologies will be dead. And you should be intimidated by angular and ember. They have the smell of Enterprise Java for me. Learn paradigms and principles. If you know what to do, you will be able to find the tools to do it. Its a bit like cooking - the cookbooks for the peasants give recipes. The ones for the chefs give mechanics and techniques. So learn pointers, functional programming, asyn…

AngularJS and Ember can be intimidating if you've never:

A) Built an API B) Used an MVC Framework (front or back end)

This can be easily overcome by following either a book like "AngularJS in Action" or spending some time using a framework on a small scale project.

At the end of the day, I've found that when using Angular, my code is much easier to read, maintain, and reason about. I used it for one project about a year ago, and just started another project with it last week - which was easy since I'd spent some time with it previously.

Never feel that you should be intimidated by a technology; but definitely be able to reason about its use cases and the value it may add to your toolbox.

I stuck with Angular because I tend to write larger applications, and Angular had shining recommendations from those using it in similar contexts.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#110

Post by blazespin »

I find as I get older the urgency to do something technically relevant and interesting increases because time is running out. When I was a kid, I would focus on technical tasks that were not core because I had all the time in the world. Fortunately, now that I'm older, my ability to judge what is relevant and interesting has got much better.
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