The Developer's Dystopian Future • Hacker News Board

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#151

Post by pling » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 7:06 AM UTC

daemin wrote: post #116

AznHisoka wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So your boss is basically telling you to learn all of these things so that you will remain a cog in the machine. Like running really fast trying to move ahead, but really you're just on the treadmill and staying in the same place.

That's a great way of putting it. It's exactly where I feel I an now.

I wish I did C more often. Most of that knowledge has longevity.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#152

Post by sriku » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 7:11 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #112

sriku wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Sane advice. I'm 39, and I'm rather stunned to see 27yr olds calling themselves "old" and disillusioned with tech and what not ... let alone 17! If you like to build things, hone your system level thinking .. which lasts longer than Angular/Backbon…

I'm in my 50s, and I'm having a ton of fun with this new stuff. After burning out at a startup that did everything in 68000 assembler (nice architecture...) in my 20s I'm getting back to dev work now and finding I still have aptitude and curiosity. There is a lot happening. But the change has barely has started yet. I can see hints of new shapes coming over the horizon, and anyone who thinks they're going to be needi…

The ability to think clearly and critically is certainly something I don't expect to be obsoleted in a decade. I do expect what I think about and think with to change though. Maintaining a curiosity about new ideas and how they relate to the old ones is a healthy trait to have that will help one survive such change.

Wolfram Language certainly looks like an interesting and somewhat new take on building systems using advanced computation. For those who're continuously curious about genuinely new ideas (not just rehashes) it will not be "nothing anyone has seen before" when it (whatever it is) finally happens. To them, it will be more like "hey, it's cool that this idea I've been dabbling with for the past 5 years is pretty powerful and feasible to use today, yippie!"

Minor ex: I had two Haskell "aha" moments - one around 1997 and one around 2000. The former was exposure to Haskore which offered a neat design that clearly illustrated the "separation of concerns" design principle. The second one was when I implemented an algorithm in Haskell in 4 hours and it worked like a charm and was more general than some C code for the same problem that I was hacking on for almost 2 weeks prior to that and which continued to be buggy. The language made a difference to how I thought about the problem, taking away many of the low level concerns. Back then, for the cases the C code worked, the Haskell code ran 60x slower. Today, Haskell is blazing fast compared to those years and pretty viable for just about anything. Yippie!

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#153

Post by Fr0styMatt » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 7:18 AM UTC

As many have said here, focus on what you're actually building. That means at some point you have to put aside the fear that the framework you've chosen "isn't good enough" and just build something with it. With any framework, there are going to be some things that fit well and more often than not some things that don't - I think it's rare that any one framework perfectly fits any one project, which is probably why so many frameworks are in existence in the first place.

So my ideal philosophy is to pick a technical stack and try something with it. Until you're building something with a stack, you're just messing around.

Now -- the harder to solve (and more infuriating problem) I see is a recruitment culture that seems to favor buzzword bingo. Why don't job ads just ask for "a developer who is comfortable having to work with or pick up the following frameworks quickly" instead of "MUST have at least 3-5 years experience in such-and-such. "

Don't even get me started on 'language quizzes'. Oh man I hate those. Learning language and framework minutae off by heart is pointless. In production code, it's rare to use ALL the features of a given language. So you have to be inquisitive, but at the same time turning down candidates because they know .NET 3.0 but not the minutae of .NET 4.5 is just lazy; unless the codebase actually uses the new feature (and then you have Google anyway).

(on that note, one of the best job ads I ever saw was for a games company where their only requirement was "show us a complete game you've built". Now THAT is sane and says to me that these guys/gals know how development works in the real world. Unfortunately I didn't have a complete game to send them, oh well. )

WRT to learning new things, I'm sort of going through that now. I'm "de-specializing" myself a bit by learning HTML, CSS and JS. I always pegged myself as 'not a web dev guy' but unfortunately the country I live in doesn't have the healthiest games industry. I had to drop the 'not that kind of developer' attitude and just go into it with as much of a blank slate as possible. It's been interesting so far, with the hardest mental roadblock I've had to overcome is thinking that "web pages are just documents" from my late-90s/early-2000s exposure to basic HTML/CSS.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#154

Post by dools » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 7:21 AM UTC

mahyarm wrote: post #70

dools wrote: post #39

I think the place you can deliver the most value is strategy and leadership. There is a tremendous dearth of good communicators in this space. I barely code anymore - the labour overseas is so cheap I can't justify spending 8 hours trying to figure out some bug ... But I've found joy in managing teams and coming up with plans and strategies and helping clients get results and things like that. In fact it's far more e…

How do you deal with bad coding practices? Such as over complicated & verbose code and copy paste everywhere leading to an unmaintainable mess?

Short answer: testing.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#155

Post by retroencabulato » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 7:23 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #103

noname123 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I love HN. In response to a complaint about learning new frameworks, you suggest three other alternatives.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#156

Post by RachelF » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 8:22 AM UTC

EEGuy wrote: post #69

I've found enduring value in these things: * Understanding binary vs decimal math, deeply. Implementing decimal math out of integers nothing else is available. * Understanding locking strategies and the need for shared data protection. Build and break and rebuild things until you can intuit then prove deadlock, lock failure or long waits when you suspect their effects. * Getting good at debugging. Don't point the fin…

All the old stuff will need maintenance for decades to come.

Code always lives longer than we think and a lot of the stuff that was created in the last 15 years will outlive half its programmers.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#157

Post by xorcist » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 8:30 AM UTC

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…

They may come and go in the small bubble of blogs you read, but the real world works very differently.

Heck, I work with Perl on a regular basis. Not for some amateur web pages but for real, important, back end stuff. What matters is that the code is solid, not how many new blogs are started on the subject.

Remember that the ones who get things done in the world does not blog about it. No blogs chronicled how they chose dynamic frameworks for the first version of Google. Because they didn't. They whipped out their editor and compiler and went to work.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#158

Post by eru » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 8:37 AM UTC

chrisdew wrote: post #149

eru wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of noname123's post they bring interesting learning to the table: they are not more of the same with renamed keywords. To quote, > [...] 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. Haskell _is_ digging deeper into the disciplin…

How do you Haskell on embedded systems? Are you talking about baremetal with 1-32K SRAM?

No, not nearly that baremetal. I was talking about control processes running in dom0 of xen. They are embedded in the sense that there are `no user serviceable parts'.

(I just looked up embedded software on Wikipedia; it seems like the traditional use of the term is very different to how I used it here. Please pardon the confusion.)

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#159

Post by CmonDev » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 8:45 AM UTC

retroencabulato wrote: post #155

eru wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I love HN. In response to a complaint about learning new frameworks, you suggest three other alternatives.

All but one are profoundly old, yet making a come back.

Re: The Developer's Dystopian Future

#160

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 8:46 AM UTC

retroencabulato wrote: post #155

eru wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I love HN. In response to a complaint about learning new frameworks, you suggest three other alternatives.

[deleted]