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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#171

Post by thewarrior »

tpetry wrote: post #5

The problem with the non-boring technology club is that programmers see what problem FAANG companies are solving and wanting to be on the edge on new technology too. But they don‘t have the same problems. Another problem is they want to show what they can do. If they tell in an interview they are working with rails/django and a postgresql database they fear they look incompetent using those old technologies. So they…

It’s because job hopping programmers are compensated for how rare their skill is in the market and not how much value they add to the business. It’s another flaw in capitalism.

Reward employees a direct and substantial cut of the profits and incentivize to them to stay 5-10 years and these behaviors should disappear.

The loss of job security, frequent job hopping has created more incentives to optimize for the next job switch and not value add.

The explosion of startups also contributes to this. They often have to attract employees by offering the promise of autonomy. Most startup employees know they aren’t getting rich. So they milk the startup for maximum resume points and move on.

The VCs unload these bloated companies into inflated stock markets and the cycle continues.

DHH runs really small companies and pays his employees really well and doesn’t work them too hard. Employees have no real reason to leave. They see a direct link between the low overhead and their job security and work life balance. Aligning incentives fixes this.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#172

Post by carapace »

"Boring" in the sense used here really means something like "reliable" or "low-maintenance". Think of the old Maytag Repairman ads: he's just sitting there waiting for a call that never comes because Maytag washing machines are so reliable, get it?

Interestingly, this kind of boring can be measured. On the other hand, the kinds of things that one finds fun is idiosyncratic and subjective. I think it's an important distinction: we can argue about "boringness" with data, but a discussion of "exciting" software is much more like a discussion of personal tastes.

Take Elm for example, it's a highly reliable system for building front-end web apps, so in that sense it's very boring (in a good way!) but whether or not you find it exotic or exciting has a lot to do with your personal experience with Functional languages and such. To some people Elm seems like a toy, while to others it's a strange new world.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#173

Post by 1337shadow »

criddell wrote: post #130
Mikushi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last line of defense against a rogue engineering team is managers who have studied this stuff. If your engineering team is the one pushing in that direction I'd reckon the company was in a bad spot to begin with to have hired that team because it strongly indicates that the management layer (head of tech/CTO) has no technical clue. Hire strong Lead Developers with a proven track record of delivering value to co…

And what about the front end? What's the best, most boring choice there? I was on a project for a bit using React and although it felt like an obvious way to write things, I can't help but feel you can't create something that will last for a decade with it.

Unless you're trying to make a really rich SPA, it could be something of: unpoly, htmx.org, barbajs, knockoutjs, turbolinks/stimulusjs... Anything that lets you enjoy server side rendering, whatever your framework autogenerates for you (ie. forms) is better to "just have" than "have to implement", instead of having 2 projects (one API, one frontend), or even no frontend framework at all (ie. mvp.css and plain HTML), you can do a whole lot of relevant projects with that already.

Webcomponents in plain JS are also great to not have to deal with JS class/HTML Element binding and lifecycle yourself.

Why not add a bit of Flutter or React for a few features, but for most pages it's going to be an expensive overkill.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#174

Post by bitwize »

mrtksn wrote: post #72
reader_mode wrote: post #71

> My friend Andrew wears the same brand of black shirt every day. He thinks that if he conserves the brainpower it would take to pick something to wear, he’ll bank it and be able to use it later for something else. >I don’t know if this makes sense for fashion or what have you, but I really think there is something to this. Johny Bravo was conserving his brainpower all along ! I kind of like this idea, will probably…

If I remember correctly, that’s supposed to be the reason why Steve Jobs used to wear the same outfit all the time.

Barack Obama had multiple copies of the same suit hanging in his closet. It was like Smurfette's closet. When the time came to make an appearance or do something presidential, he'd pick out a fresh suit and know exactly how he'd look in it.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#175

Post by stepbeek »

cutler wrote: post #115
gurkendoktor wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Java community has some great developers, but also a lot of Serious Software Engineers who will sabotage everything with extra complexity, and then everyone who learned Java in school and never felt like looking at another language (not even Kotlin). Java is definitely "boring technology", but hiring random Java developers will probably sink a company faster than doing the same for Go.

Although still new I'm wondering whether Kotlin could be admitted to the boring technology category given that it was built to dovetail with Java and has first class Spring support?

I’ve found kotlin to be wonderfully boring. There are definitely some sharp knives that get abused though. I’ve met a few people who want to throw OO in the bin and treat kotlin as pure FP to their detriment.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#176

Post by BigJono »

criddell wrote: post #130
Mikushi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last line of defense against a rogue engineering team is managers who have studied this stuff. If your engineering team is the one pushing in that direction I'd reckon the company was in a bad spot to begin with to have hired that team because it strongly indicates that the management layer (head of tech/CTO) has no technical clue. Hire strong Lead Developers with a proven track record of delivering value to co…

And what about the front end? What's the best, most boring choice there? I was on a project for a bit using React and although it felt like an obvious way to write things, I can't help but feel you can't create something that will last for a decade with it.

You absolutely can. React is the gold standard right now. It's already been king for 6 years and it's not going anywhere. The hype for angular died down. The hype for vue has started to die down. This little bit of hype svelte has at the moment will die down.

React does have a ton of problems but they all come from the next level of dependencies down. Shit like Gatsby and Nextjs won't pass the test of time. Neither will redux (it's already pointless) and all the convoluted bullshit like redux-saga. If you learn to build stuff using just react and other basic dependencies (like express on the back end), you'll be in a good position going forward. None of that stuff is going anywhere.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#177

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

_qulr wrote: post #165
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. It was the next comment I made (so I removed that smartass line). I apologize. They have had a Swift roadmap forever. I think it's now kept on swift.org. I'll see if I can find it. I think it's a fairly sparse one. I really only cared about the evolution through ABI Stable. All I needed to hear, was that was a goal. You are right. They tend to eschew roadmaps, but they did a "hard-sell" with Swift. T…

> I really only cared about the evolution through ABI Stable. Ok, but that came later and wasn't present in 2014. > they did a "hard-sell" with Swift I agree with that. :-) > "Full System API" is the native frameworks; UIKit, AppKit, WatchKit, etc., as well as things like WebKit and MapKit. Swift did of course have bridging to Objective-C and the preexisting Objective-C API. I find it strange to equate language bridg…

That's a good point. I never thought of that. It was actually an old bridge. I remember when they tried to make Java a "full citizen" language. Boy, that flopped...

SwiftUI shows promise, but it is still quite nascent.

Pretty much every bit of code I write is "pure" Swift linkage. I like things like Swift's enums too much to give them up. They make APIs really fun.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#178

Post by stepbeek »

mrweasel wrote: post #87
phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a "bad hire", and yet once hired they don't spend a second making sure engineers aren't completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy's backend in Scala and Mong…

That's definitely part of it. I also think developer sometimes aren't sufficiently critical when picking technologies and solutions. They fall into the trap of looking at how bigger companies operate, without considering if they actually have the same requirement, budget or even problem. For example, you need a search feature. ElasticSearch is big in search, there's lots of article about people implementing ElasticSe…

Great point. I’m working with a client right now where 90% of the operational pain and low impact dev could be resolved by admitting that the project does not need to resemble a FAANG system.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#179

Post by thewarrior »

Nextgrid wrote: post #63
phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a "bad hire", and yet once hired they don't spend a second making sure engineers aren't completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy's backend in Scala and Mong…

In the case of a lot of tech companies, the entire market is broken and leads to weird incentives rarely seen in any other industry: companies that aren’t profitable, don’t have a real product people pay for, don’t have a clear, plausible path to profitability and yet somehow stay in business because investors are happy to burn money. This completely reverses the typical market dynamics. The company is more focused o…

Job hopping programmers are compensated for how rare their skill is and not how much value they add to the business. It’s another flaw in capitalism.

Reward employees a direct and substantial cut of the profits and incentivize to them to stay 5-10 years and these behaviors should disappear.

The loss of job security, frequent job hopping has created more incentives to optimize for the next job switch and not value add.

The explosion of startups also contributes to this. They often have to attract employees by offering the promise of new tech. New tech can propagate these days same way how Bitcoin prices rise. Our industry is in a financial bubble which has created a complexity bubble. The financial bubble collapsing will pop the complexity bubble leading to huge surge in boring / low overhead stable tech.

Not to mention how ageism plays into this. People will hire someone who spent the past 5 years switching between 5 different JavaScript frameworks over someone who spent five years writing Java at some boring company.

Most startup employees know they aren’t getting rich. They go on to milk the startup for maximum resume points and move on.

The VCs unload these bloated companies into inflated stock markets and the cycle continues. Some small progress at the cost of tens of billions and lots of running in the same place.

Our industry is like some eccentric Howard Hughes drowning in so much money that all we do is come up with ever more esoteric contraptions to escape from reality.

DHH starts really small companies and pays his employees really well and doesn’t work them too hard. Employees have no real reason to leave. They see a direct link between the low overhead and their job security and work life balance. Since the team is smaller the work is less alienating / hyper specialized leading to a deeper connection with the company and its customers. Aligning incentives fixes a lot of problems.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#180

Post by stepbeek »

nizmow wrote: post #31
tpetry wrote: post #5

The problem with the non-boring technology club is that programmers see what problem FAANG companies are solving and wanting to be on the edge on new technology too. But they don‘t have the same problems. Another problem is they want to show what they can do. If they tell in an interview they are working with rails/django and a postgresql database they fear they look incompetent using those old technologies. So they…

Typically though, FAANGs still solve their problems with boring technologies.

I was very disappointed when I joined Amazon to learn we were using plain old Java with servlets (this was 2015, I think kotlin is more common now). Since leaving I’m in awe of how sensible the technical decision making that led to that was.
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