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The Cost of Developers

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Re: The Cost of Developers

#231

Post by scarface74 »

pjmlp wrote: post #228
scarface74 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any numbers to back that up? The best I can find are the Stack Overflow developer survey for what developers are actually doing.... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/ Windows software development jobs have been in decline for years... https://www.itwriting.com/blog/9121-stackoverflow-developer-...

The head hunters that fill my inbox. I guess with 2 021 worldwide currently open positions on LinkedIn, there is something for many of us to be busy for many years. Classic music also has been on the decline for centuries, yet composers still sell albums.

Unless "your inbox" is publicly accessible, I don't think that counts as a citation.

Working on technologies that are declining is not where most developers want to be....

Re: The Cost of Developers

#232

Post by Xaena »

mercutio2 wrote: post #225
Xaena wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to hear about the slow behavior you're seeing. There are some tips and tricks for improving that.

Generally speaking, I have found Atlassian’s tools don’t scale well to megacorp usage. When there are thousands to tens of thousands of users connecting at peak times, stuff just gets extremely slow. Noticeably slower than when we all put up our own team-level Phabricator instances, although I’m obviously not adjusting for Phabricator downtime when inevitably the unofficial team sysadmin went on vacation and the serv…

From a speed standpoint, I'll say the obvious thing, "it's architecture dependent".

For thousands to tens of thousands of users, most folks need data center with 1+n nodes (w/ larger diminishing returns at 8 nodes). There's a few tips and tricks with that, like pointing CI/CD tools to a smart mirror instead of the primary instance and only mirroring specific build projects. Putting smart mirrors in the same physical location as a primary instance could also help reduce the impact of CPU-intensive requests like git fetch or clone.

Another common issue is apps/plugins. Bitbucket 5.9 added a way to get app diagnostics so infra folks can see if there's a long-running process or other weirdness. Vanilla Bitbucket needs about a 1gb heap (java) and with apps, you want around 4gb (give or take).

If you want a longer read to share, this still has some good info despite being 2~ years old: https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/12/how-we-built-bi...

Re: The Cost of Developers

#233

Post by scarface74 »

endorphone wrote: post #210
scarface74 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that AOL was able to buy Time Warner with inflated stock. If you have inflated currency (I.e. stock), why not use it to buy some real assets?

Whether a share price is inflated or not is always a point of contention -- if it's so obvious we can all buy our put options and retire on our riches. However Microsoft could literally have sold $7.5B worth of new shares and given that money to charity (which, in turn, would have been a nice tax benefit). That money is very real, and there is nothing free about it.

Whether a share price is inflated or not is always a point of contention -- if it's so obvious we can all buy our put options and retire on our riches.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

Re: The Cost of Developers

#234

Post by pjmlp »

scarface74 wrote: post #231
pjmlp wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The head hunters that fill my inbox. I guess with 2 021 worldwide currently open positions on LinkedIn, there is something for many of us to be busy for many years. Classic music also has been on the decline for centuries, yet composers still sell albums.

Unless "your inbox" is publicly accessible, I don't think that counts as a citation. Working on technologies that are declining is not where most developers want to be....

It counts as much as you throwing numbers around, regardless how much you apparently hate Windows development.

Windows owns the desktop, laptops and tablets here in Europe.

Is it declining? Sure it is, consumers are no longer replacing their computers every two years, likewise with mobile phones and tablets.

Here the market speaks pre-paid, most consumers only replace their devices when they can no longer use them.

Devices around 100 euros are still being sold with Android 5.1 on them, maybe I should say Android is also declining, as it isn't profitable to spend development effort in new versions, given the adoption rate.

Android tablets are being replaced by Windows tablets across all major consumer chainstores.

All flagship Asus and Samsung tablets are Windows 10 now, that sounds pretty much desktop Windows to me.

I have seen countless technologies come and go.

Some want to be rich selling hit-Summer tunes, while others manage a comfortable life composing classic, jazz, medieval music.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#235

Post by scarface74 »

pjmlp wrote: post #234
scarface74 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless "your inbox" is publicly accessible, I don't think that counts as a citation. Working on technologies that are declining is not where most developers want to be....

It counts as much as you throwing numbers around, regardless how much you apparently hate Windows development. Windows owns the desktop, laptops and tablets here in Europe. Is it declining? Sure it is, consumers are no longer replacing their computers every two years, likewise with mobile phones and tablets. Here the market speaks pre-paid, most consumers only replace their devices when they can no longer use them. D…

It counts as much as you throwing numbers around, regardless how much you apparently hate Windows development.

The numbers I'm "throwing around" are from reputable publicly accessible sites - unless you don't think Stack Overflow is reputable. As far as the trend being away from Windows development - I posted a quote from the CEO of Microsoft in this very thread saying as much.

I don't "hate" Windows development. I would hate being stuck on unpopular, less marketable technologies. My area of expertise is still Windows back end development and ASP.Net MVC and .Net Core with a side of AWS netops, devops, and development.

Visual Studio Team Services is a joy to use for CI/CD.

I'm not disputing that Windows "owns the desktop" but the desktop market for developers is minuscule compared to web and mobile. All the money is going away from the desktop. How much money does the average consumer spend on desktop applications outside of Microsoft and Adobe? How much of B2B software as a service revenue is being spent on desktop applications compared to web applications and mobile? What are most people doing on their tablets if not MS Office and spending time on the web? Even if you're a developer, there is little money to be made creating development tools. My entire development tool chain consists of Fred Software besides the $11 a month a pay JetBrains.

Is it declining? Sure it is, consumers are no longer replacing their computers every two years, likewise with mobile phones and tablets.

We were talking about Software sells not hardware sells why are you conflating the two? As a developers selling software, The important metric is the installed based not the replacement rate. And you keep talking about the popularity of Windows desktops, but that doesn't matter as a software developer if no one is buying desktop software - except for MS Office. People are still mostly using thier desktop computers for office productivity and to go to websites.

I have seen countless technologies come and go

So have I, I got my start programming in 65C02 assembly language on an Apple //e. But I've never been one to mourn a technology that was passed its prime. That's the reason I've been moving away from the Microsoft stack toward cloud, web, and eventually mobile.

As far as where the money is for development....

Everyone including Microsoft sees the writing on the wall.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/selling-software-where-have-al...

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/22/mobile-game-revenue-to-pass-...

Re: The Cost of Developers

#236

Post by isostatic »

chillacy wrote: post #177
isostatic wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest problem I have with a mac is the " mark. On a PC (GB keyboard) it's shift-2, on a mac shift-2 is @, and " is shift-'

You can customize your key mappings. I found a dvorak keyboard with esperanto key bindings on the internet. If that exists, I'm sure anything else can be done (assuming you touch type).

Sure, but if you work from machine to machine to machine customisation is fairly terrible.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#237

Post by evilmushroom »

dagaci wrote: post #93
evilmushroom wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have literally had a mobile team threaten to quit if we adopted Xamarin after they built a small app in it lol.

Xamarin can be pretty tough if you don't have a good appreciation of Xcode, iOS and UWP development and tooling, and underlying differences.

Oh, they understood it, top tier mobile devs, they just thought it was trash. Drastically preferred to do native. I went to bat for them, and we shipped a beautiful app on time.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#238

Post by jillesvangurp »

jasode wrote: post #167
jillesvangurp wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are extrapolating an opinion that I don't have. I don't consider the founders, investors, or MS evil. The only mildly controversial thing here is that a big corporation like Microsoft with a long history of hostility towards anything OSS ended up buying the goto gathering place for the OSS community. I don't think that ever was a dream scenario for any of the early founders or early adopters of that company. It w…

> I don't consider the founders, investors, or MS evil. Fair point if I overstated your perspective on VCs. I don't know if English is your primary language but if you didn't know, the phrase "sold out" is virtually always used in a derogatory manner. When one writes " sold out to " , the is the proverbial bad guy. It's also parsed as an insult to both and . E.g. "It's a shame that guitarist sold out to BadMusic Reco…

I'm not native indeed but fluent enough to deal with the subtleties. I like to use strong language when making points in public fora. It's a style that is admittedly a bit over dramatic but tends to provoke people a bit more into engaging.

From my dealings with VCs my understanding is that they are mainly incentivized by investing and less by the success of those investments because the timelines are half a decade or more and they reap their rewards long before that happens. Basically the job of a VC is to spend money in some fund. It's a very competitive market to be in. Acquisitions are the tool of choice to make sure under-performing investments are not a total loss. A lot of acquisitions and acquihires are effectively investors consolidating their losses. It's common for them to have stakes in both the acquiring and acquired company. In this case, that's probably not what happened of course. But still, the investors are probably quite happy with this outcome.

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