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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#341

Post by afiori »

treeman79 wrote: post #331
postfacto wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the downvotes? This comment’s dead accurate.

Pure Capitalism punishes wasteful spending. Assume company A sells a widget for 10 silver Then company B comes along and sells same widget for 3 silver. Company A will either learn to be more efficient and sell at 2-3 silver, or go out of business.

This is quite a simplistic view of capitalism. Consider the Moloch effect[1] where rational choices in environments with hard coordination problems can lead to degenerating incentives.

Capitalism is not the same as free market; capitalism is rather a system where your economic power is mainly determinated by the amount of capital you have (money, investments, means of productions...) rather than class, bloodline, titles, popularity, or legislative regulations[2].

Capitalism is linked to free market in that they work well together: free markets want enterpreneuers to be compete for efficient capital gains and people with capital like how their economical power is only bounded by their capital (with the potential of an exponential growth). Apart from this ether can exist without the other.

This is how supporters would like them to work together, but there can be a lot of bugs and traps on the way.

[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[2]: This last one would be the characteristic of planned markets

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#342

Post by thewarrior »

treeman79 wrote: post #331
postfacto wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the downvotes? This comment’s dead accurate.

Pure Capitalism punishes wasteful spending. Assume company A sells a widget for 10 silver Then company B comes along and sells same widget for 3 silver. Company A will either learn to be more efficient and sell at 2-3 silver, or go out of business.

Perfect competition only happens in text books. In the real world monopolies, oligopolies, regulatory capture, control over social connections and capital, markets with asymmetric information (VCs vs public, employees vs companies), management consecrating itself into a class with its own interests , mean that companies can go on for 10-15 years before they are punished.

By the time the market wakes up you’ve switched 3 times and after 10 times you’re retired in the suburbs with a nice BMW. Who cares then.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#343

Post by legulere »

trestenhortz wrote: post #3

Generalizations like “choose boring technology” are just unhelpful slogans. Truth is you should choose technology given consideration of its pros and cons, not on the basis of some slogan. There are very good reasons to use mature technologies and very good reasons to use current technologies and very good reasons to use absolute cutting edge technologies. When someone comes at your approach wielding a slogan, be ske…

It is a general rule that you can fall back to. Like all general rules there are exceptions, but those exceptions have to be explained. If you do not use boring technology, you will pay a price, so you really need to think if the price is worth it.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#344

Post by collyw »

whimsicalism wrote: post #135
collyw wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language for one. There are decent choices of language for backend work. Why anyone would choose JavaScript is beyond me.

Oh, but Python is an ideal backend language? Give me a break.

Not ideal but a lot more pleasant to work with than JS

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#346

Post by ZephyrBlu »

zingar wrote: post #316
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you classify as the basics of programming. for loops and if statements?

My current employers hire +- 1/100 applicants. The vast majority fall off before even getting to a coding test. Of the last 20, most are not fluent with conditional logic and iteration, or cannot use a dictionary in an algorithm. In the most recent interview, an "experienced" React developer could not set properties on a JS object.

Why do you think this occurs? It doesn't make sense that people apply for a programming job without being able to do any programming...

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#347

Post by jjeaff »

blacktriangle wrote: post #334
jjeaff wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had it be an issue with investors during the due diligence phase. We were very far along in the fund raising process when we got to the technical due diligence. They brought in an expert advisor to discuss our tech stack and he seemed very concerned that we were building on a php/mysql stack. They pretty much ghosted us soon after that meeting. Though they did not specify that as the reason, it seems most like…

That...is honestly shocking. Yes the programmer in me cringes at the though of going anywhere near php/mysql, but the business side of me looks at this stack as pragmatic, well documented, well understood, and easy to hire for. On the other side I'm evaluating CL for my next endeavor since I personally find it to be my most productive language, but realistically I'll settle for Clojure and even then I'm worried if th…

He was an ex-googler, so I'm sure only some combination of c, go, and java would have sufficed.

Php 7.2+ is great for a lot of saas products and is super fast now. and mysql 8 is rock solid and battle tested in a lot of production systems.

Starting over, I would consider PostgreSQL because it has some nifty features. But now that mysql has added json support, I am less inclined and I see a lot of complaints about performance and scaling that I don't think is as much of an issue with mysql. There isn't a whole lot more out there for relational databases (that doesn't cost a ton). And not using a relational database for most saas systems is just crazy talk.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#348

Post by 8note »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #254
vp8989 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The very best developers are capable, and avoid complexity. The next best developers are capable, and love complexity. The worst developers are not capable." It's not always in one's control to avoid complexity. The simplest solution to a problem in a lot of cases may be 2-3x the lift (simplicity tends to require more work, complexity is easy) and thus blocked by the business. A holistically simpler solution may be…

It seems like a lot of people are too lazy to simplify things though. You see this a lot with writing as well. It's very easy to ramble on, it's very hard to concisely convey your point.

Simplifying usually requires other people to do work.

That's much harder than doing less simple work on your own team

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#349

Post by pjmlp »

koonsolo wrote: post #260
ryandrake wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what your company is, but it may not have a reputation for paying well. I've worked both at well-paying FAANG companies and lots of BasicAverageTech companies, and the candidate flow is night and day different. There is no shortage of people that "know the basics." In fact, there is no shortage of really strong candidates. They are out there, looking around to job hop like everyone else. It's just that t…

This is europe, and as far as I can tell all companies here have that problem. On the other hand, great for us who can code :D.

Since 2014 I only apply for jobs where at least 80% remote is part of the deal, I don't care about the money that much.

So if that isn't part of the deal, I don't even bother.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#350

Post by pjmlp »

BigJono wrote: post #184
austincheney wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been writing it full time about 13 years. I love writing in this language, and TypeScript even more. I am just frustrated by what appears to be some combination of insecurity, false expertise, and a vehement lack of passion in the work force. If I want to be happy I should move on to a different technology stack, but I really enjoy making products in this language.

It's funny, I have about 13 years experience, have been senior in both enterprise, start-ups and everything in-between, and have basically the exact same view about front end dev as your original post. Except I fucking hate using Typescript, and totally wasn't expecting to see you mention you like it, given all the other stuff. IME all the same people that overengineer everything with god awful dependencies are the s…

I love Anders work, but TypeScript seems to have gone too far in type system experiment.

Configuring the compiler is now as complicated as selecting the right set of GHC compiler pragmas to successfully compile the code, and they are anyway type annotations that have zero impact in code performance, just a friendly than using JsDoc.

I look forward to when browsers just adopt WebIDL and be done with it.

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