Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#191

Post by runawaybottle » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #64

mauvehaus wrote: post #37

Confession: as a recovering programmer who made a career change to non-programming, it took at most 30 minutes to say "fuck it" and go with Squarespace. I've never been on the web side of things, but I knew enough HTML in the early aughts to put up a basic informational website. After digging in to some sites I admired, I decided that it was too much distraction from my actual work to roll my own. Granted some of thi…

FWIW, services like Squarespace are devouring the VPS and small-site design industry. Rolling your own services, managing them with cPanel, and paying local kids to build and design it is a quaint throwback.

It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away.

That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big data together or generating reports, will we need a typical backend engineer ever again? How complex are schemas ever going to get that a UI can’t do it (and generate the corresponding api)?

It happened to the first version of the frontend developer and I think backend is next. Then frontend again at some point, and Data people have another thing coming when the backend folks need to find another job when theirs goes away.

If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#192

Post by runawaybottle » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 2:12 AM UTC

thirdlamp wrote: post #134

midrus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but the problem, the big problem, is that you're looked down if you propose to use simpler tools. It is horribly difficult to not use these advanced tools for simpler problems. At work my team does just f**ng CRUD forms, and for doing this we have the most overcomplicated stack I've seen in my life. Go backend with React, Redux, Rxjs,custom.webpack craziness, and 32 tons of internal weird libraries…

Without knowing your situation, that sounds like job security to me. "If we go the simple route I'm obsolete"

It’s not job security. It’s insecurity and peer pressure and identity validation usually with a sprinkling of adhd medication (surprise, we all know what that kind of code looks like) powering people through intense coding sessions where they over engineer things obsessively.

I’m getting pretty sick of it myself.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#193

Post by dleslie » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 2:16 AM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #191

dleslie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, services like Squarespace are devouring the VPS and small-site design industry. Rolling your own services, managing them with cPanel, and paying local kids to build and design it is a quaint throwback.

It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away. That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big da…

App Development is the next to go; there's already a handful of competitive tools that will build an App, complete with cloud services, without any need for writing code.

And yah, there's only so many ways to write CRUD, auth, profile, and presence; backend is already commodified as B2B products.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#194

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 2:23 AM UTC

midrus wrote: post #126

kgin wrote: post #72

The simple page you could make 20 years ago is the simple page you can make today. With a few minor tweaks, it will work as well as it did 20 years ago. If you want to make a complex web app today, that's easier than it was 20 years ago. The tools are infinitely better. If for some reason you decide to use the tools meant for complex web apps to make your simple page, you're going to feel like everything has gone hor…

I agree with you, but the problem, the big problem, is that you're looked down if you propose to use simpler tools. It is horribly difficult to not use these advanced tools for simpler problems. At work my team does just f**ng CRUD forms, and for doing this we have the most overcomplicated stack I've seen in my life. Go backend with React, Redux, Rxjs,custom.webpack craziness, and 32 tons of internal weird libraries…

Rails FTW. I’ve kept checking on other tools, but there’s no stack out there that is even on the same order of magnitude of productivity as Rails for doing simple LOB CRUD apps. Which, it turns out, is a LOT of apps. I think the problem is that there’s a common type of person drawn to programming which HATES being “told what to do” with Rails’ convention-over-configuration approach. Whatever. While they’re still writing wonderfully-typed class files in two different applications on the front and back ends, I’m done with my app, and writing the next one.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#195

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 2:28 AM UTC

bestinterest wrote: post #25

smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

I wish wish wish I could move over to Linux but its font rendering situation is terrible [1] I've tried Manjaro and Ubuntu to no avail. I have no idea what causes it or if people on Linux are not as sensitive to it or its a specific hardware setup which causes terrible fonts but once you read Windows fonts stuff looks so much better to me. Apparently its a hot debated topic but its so obvious to some it seems. [1] ht…

I’ve changed entire distros, back in the day, based on font rendering. However, you’re on crack if you think Windows fonts are great. MacOS makes everything else look like children’s scrawl. I’ve been running on Macs for about 6 years now (with a PC connected to the same external monitor) and I still sometimes just stop and admire how nice the fonts are.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#196

Post by runawaybottle » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

papertokyo wrote: post #5

Frank is right, of course. Staying up to date with the tooling, best practices, and user expectations of the web requires an unreasonable amount of attention if making websites is only a small part of your service offering. One reason I prefer frontend libraries like Vue and Svelte is they feel closer to the grain of the web (HTMLesque templates with JS and CSS sprinkled in), and provide a reasonable level of abstrac…

Let’s not just pick on frontend. Has anyone seen what it takes to run something on AWS? Devops is nearing similar levels of insanity, and often for applications that won’t even have 50 users (seriously, all these companies that advertise for AWS experience for a tool that is going to be fucking internal with less than 50 users).

It all builds up in me to be honest. You get the frontend complicated, then the deploy/infra gets complicated for the needless cloud dependency, and then the backend people don’t want to get left out of the party so they manage to rewrite their shitty php app in Go.

It’s like a shitty third world country. Not only do the roads suck, but there’s no water or electricity half the time, and you need to bribe everyone to get something. Instead of it becoming a wasteland, the population somehow still increases (more people actually entering tech). Now you really can’t change anything because there’s too many people.

How the wicked live.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#197

Post by nitrogen » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #84

nitrogen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rare to see people go the other way I suspect this is literally true, but only because we don't see them. I've heard second-hand the story of a top developer at a famous unicorn who just couldn't keep up with all the stimulants everyone was using to code more and burned out, bought a cabin in the woods, and became a hermit.

> all the stimulants everyone was using to code more That's interesting. Do you mean Adderall/Ritalin? That stuff has a relatively fixed useful half-life. It doesn't work for as long as people might think. It also doesn't actually make thinking clearer. It makes people feel as if they are thinking more clearly. I don't feel like looking for it, but this has been studied and reported, somewhere. If you are referring t…

Never tried any of them myself and don't know which they were referring to, but the other replies are probably in the right direction.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#198

Post by mauvehaus » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 2:50 AM UTC

volkk wrote: post #46

mauvehaus wrote: post #37

Confession: as a recovering programmer who made a career change to non-programming, it took at most 30 minutes to say "fuck it" and go with Squarespace. I've never been on the web side of things, but I knew enough HTML in the early aughts to put up a basic informational website. After digging in to some sites I admired, I decided that it was too much distraction from my actual work to roll my own. Granted some of thi…

what kind of work did you get into after programming out of curiosity? rare to see people go the other way

OP: I build furniture now, but I still lurk here because the news is interesting. Sometimes there's even overlap :-)

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#199

Post by ReactiveJelly » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 3:03 AM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #191

dleslie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, services like Squarespace are devouring the VPS and small-site design industry. Rolling your own services, managing them with cPanel, and paying local kids to build and design it is a quaint throwback.

It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away. That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big da…

I'm not a web developer, but at work I run a couple small app servers for internal tools.

They have business logic specific to our product, and owned by the company, so although I'm doing a lot of pointless "plug together HTML" work for my learning, I'm also doing stuff that, AFAICT, has to be original code written by me.

Did I manage to successfully duck out the entire web trend already? When I was a kid, the web barely worked. When I was in college, web apps were a strange novelty Google was working on. When I started my career as a developer, I heard murmurs that web was the only kind of developer left. 10 years on, I'm still working steady and still not a web / mobile dev. I learned a little TS and started using Rust for backends, and that's about it. I knew SQL from college. The web trend came and went and I only learned how HTTP works in the last 5 years. Doesn't seem like the hardest thing in the world.

Is it just a combo of luck and privilege that I missed it?

> If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down.

Probably. At first it was funny - Software was a coal vein that just kept going deeper and deeper the more we dug, and high-level languages kept lowering the barriers to entry, making more programmers who each made more money.

Some day the vein's either got to run out, or widen so much that everyone is a programmer getting paid nothing. Since I have enough money to save, I'm hoping to retire before the sigmoid inflects fully.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#200

Post by coldtea » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 3:06 AM UTC

kgin wrote: post #72

The simple page you could make 20 years ago is the simple page you can make today. With a few minor tweaks, it will work as well as it did 20 years ago. If you want to make a complex web app today, that's easier than it was 20 years ago. The tools are infinitely better. If for some reason you decide to use the tools meant for complex web apps to make your simple page, you're going to feel like everything has gone hor…

>The simple page you could make 20 years ago is the simple page you can make today. With a few minor tweaks, it will work as well as it did 20 years ago.

Which doesn't address the concerns of the author though, because the key is not that you can make the same page in 2021 (sure you can), but that nobody will pay your for making it in 2021.

Whereas if you knew how to make a pair of shoes in 1999, or to use a CS example, how to write good C in 1999, people would still pay you for the same knowledge...

>If for some reason you decide to use the tools meant for complex web apps to make your simple page, you're going to feel like everything has gone horribly wrong. But why are you doing that?

That's not the author's concern. His concern is that the fundamental technologies and best practices get thrown out every 5-8 years, and people in web frontend have to relearn tons of stuff and throw out hard-earned knowledge, plus add all kinds of stuff that was never a thing to stay afloat the current practices...

One could chalk it up to "well, of course you need to read to stay ahead", but the complain goes beyond that, to the volatility of front-end concepts and practices that makes this far more demanding that most areas of development (see also the related "js fatigue").