Reflections of an “Old” Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#301

Post by grogenaut » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 8:49 PM UTC

Yhippa wrote: post #87

grogenaut wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

posts like this are why I love HN. Intercooler looks cool and simple, and simple enough I can just re-write it. Angular is big enough that my eyes glaze over thinking about reading into it.

This is the first time I've heard of it and it's elegant enough that I want to start working with it. Here's the flipside. This is way easier for me to grok than Angular but which one has way more of a presence at companies and job reqs out there? I'd probably get screened out of a lot of resume filters.

I'm a pretty senior backend guy so I'm not worried about my resume. This helps me whip up quick tooling for ops and to understand discussions and nuances from the JS devs I work with.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Post by thesmallestcat » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 8:52 PM UTC

jhall1468 wrote: post #214

Chris2048 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much are the big 4 paying those of us that don't have hard jobs? Expect the gravy train to end eventually. I feel the web-dev scene is already too competitive.

Good engineers will always be paid extremely well, regardless of what their domain is. Web dev is competitive at the low end of the market, but certainly not so at the high end.

This is sort of naive. Two truths: (1) Companies have a hard time finding people with decent CS knowledge, and (2) you can get to the top (or near it) of the web dev field with little to no CS knowledge. This is why you hear the chorus of "I've never ever needed to use/think about $CS_TOPIC" when this discussion comes up. The upper end of web development is hyper-competitive and trend-driven because CS knowledge is an insufficiently differentiating factor for productivity and work quality, which means that anybody with good intuition and memory can reach the top quickly.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Post by thesmallestcat » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 9:03 PM UTC

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #126

thesmallestcat wrote: post #2

Hm. The author works for a web/mobile development agency and uses React Native and GWT as examples of the new and the old, respectively. I hope it isn't news to anybody here that this sort of work is a race to the bottom and has such turnover precisely because it's mostly being done by junior developers. Linux systems programming arcana, for instance, doesn't disintegrate so quickly as the ten years the author cites.…

But one of the downsides of doing Linux systems programming is that it is much more niche and really restricts your options for employers as well as where to live.

Is that meaningful? Even if they're hiring, it's not like I'm going to get a good senior web dev job (pay, challenges, respect, oppportunity..) in Boise or Nashville or wherever. Yes there are jobs, but unless you're going to work remotely, almost all of the good ones are clustered in a handful of metro areas anyway.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#304

Post by thesmallestcat » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 9:04 PM UTC

acaciapalm wrote: post #66

EpicEng wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no quest…

Oh don't even get me started on front end development. A few times I've actually had the opportunity to make some really brilliant JavaScript optimizations only to have any performance gain made totally irrelevant by business loading up the page with a ton of totally non-performant ads.

This hits home way too hard.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Post by jimbokun » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 9:13 PM UTC

AIMunchkin wrote: post #247

Animats wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New stuff: Machine learning that works. Rust's borrow checker. 3D SLAM that works. Voice input that works. Lots of image processing stuff. Machines with large numbers of non-shared-memory CPUs that are actually useful. Doing non-graphics things in GPUs. The webcrap world is mostly churn, not improvement. Each "framework" puts developers on a treadmill keeping up with the changes. This provides steady employment for m…

Old timer rant: IMO Machine learning mostly doesn't work (yet) with a couple exceptions where tremendous amounts of energy and talent have made that happen. For example, image processing with conv nets is really cool, but the data sets have been "dogs all the way down" until very recently. And for the past few years, just getting new data and tuning AlexNet on a bunch more categories was an instant $30-$50M acqui-hir…

"The web: getting crappier and slower by the day. IMO because the frameworks are increasingly abstracting the underlying dataflow which just gets more and more inefficient. Also, down with autoplay anything. Just make it stop."

One of my favorite features now on my iPhone is "Reader View". Have a new iPhone 7, which is very fast, but some pages still take too long to load, and when it finally does, the content I want to read is obscured with something I have to click to go away, and then a good percentage of the screen is still taken up by headers and footers that don't go away. The Reader View loads faster, and generally has much better font and layout for actually reading the content I'm interested in.

All of which is to say, the sole purpose of what a lot of web developers are working on today seems to serve no purpose other than to annoy people.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Post by Mystrl » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

gt2 wrote: post #143

paganel wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding. And yet "open mail in new tab" in Gmail has been dead for at least a couple of years now. In fact, I'd say that "open link in new tab" is dead on most of the new web "applications", I'm actually surprised when it works. The same goes for the "go back with backspace" thingie, which Google just killed for no good reason. Copy-paste is also starting to become a nuisan…

'Back with backspace' was changed to CMD+left-arrow assumedly because a simple backspace can change the page unexpectedly for someone who thinks they are in a text field.

I've lost so many posts from hitting backspace without realizing I didn't have the input box focused I'm more than happy with this trade off.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Post by eikenberry » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 9:50 PM UTC

> To me, it seems a bit like JSPs of 15 years ago, with all the logic in the presentation code, > but I'm "old", so I assume I just don't "get it".

He seems to ignore that his experience just paid off. It is not that his knowledge of JSP is out of date and not useful, it is that back in the day he learned the anti-pattern and can apply that now. Programming has the same long term advantages as any profession. Most of what I know after 20-some years is not any specific tech, but ways of doing things, recognizing good and bad habits, patterns, etc. The specific techs come and go, but the real knowledge transcends them all and builds on itself. His 3 stages graph shouldn't logarithmic but exponential.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#308

Post by catnaroek » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 10:25 PM UTC

catnaroek wrote: post #115

mafribe wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. ML originally had Lisp-like macros, not sure about hygiene. Note also that one doesn't always want hygiene in meta-programming, although it is nice to have the option of hygienic macro expansion. I explicitly restricted the comparison to languages for sequential computing. There has been a lot of novely in concurrent programming. Arrays and hash tables are data-structures that you can implement as librar…

> I explicitly restricted the comparison to languages for sequential computing. There has been a lot of novely in concurrent programming. Oops, yes, my bad! > Arrays and hash tables are data-structures that you can implement as libraries in ML, so I'd say that's not a language issue. Yes, but the point is that nowadays we have languages in which it's “convenient” to design entire large applications around nothing but…

Oops, arrays and hash tables.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Post by khedoros1 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 10:59 PM UTC

monksy wrote: post #291

nostrademons wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually a fair number of new features in the web today that you couldn't do in 2006 - offline access, push notifications, real-time communications (without a hack that breaks on most firewalls), smooth transitions, background computation, the history API, OS clipboard support, accelerometer access, geolocation access, multi-touch, etc. Few websites use them effectively yet, at least in a way that benefits th…

Most programs that existed before (lets be real.. programs were replaced with web apps now) defaulted to being offline only, or would sync. I miss those days.

> I miss those days.

Ditto. I like having a copy of a program that no one but me has access to modify, and I like that I don't have to rely on my ISP to use my computer. If I like a program, I don't want it to change until I choose to change it. I don't want to be A/B tested, marketed to, etc. I'd rather buy a license and be happy =)

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#310

Post by noname123 » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 11:15 PM UTC

xaa wrote: post #286

noname123 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I'd love to hear some people's journeys to advance their career and move from web development into more specialization. Off the top of my head, there are three types of specialization, for money, for domain knowledge and for technical skills. For Money: Not necessarily any more satisfying or churn-proof than web development; But definitely more lucrative. Salesforce/SAP/Oracle consultant, mobile app developer, S…

Well, I learned to code in order to do bioinformatics. I didn't start out as a programmer looking to specialize. I agree that it seems that programming + X is often a much more powerful combination than programming or X alone. But I would say to anyone starting out that it is better to head towards, and get the formal qualifications for X, and learn programming on the side (or if in college, get the major in X and a…

Thanks xaa for your thoughtful comments. I've taken a few MOOC on Bioinformatics. Biology certain seems much harder to get feedback esp. if you work in the wet lab, but I'm curious however about what particulars in Bioinformatics in your opinion is harder to learn (assuming that a computer person has taken Biology 101, aware of DNA to RNA, transcription, translation, mutations, variants, alleles, genotypes, haplotypes, basic cell biology; and maybe let's say even a step up, familiar with basic's of processing NGS files, processing assembly, variant calling, RNA-Seq and ChIPSeq differential analysis).

Is it the statistics (finding the right statistics inference test and knowing what are the pitfalls of your models)? Or is it understanding the underpinnings of the biology behind a particular pathway you're studying? (e.g., knowing how to perform or iterate on the wet lab experiments of doing in-vivo or in-vitro experiments). Thanks again for your comments.