Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IT Runs on Java 8

veekaybee.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 556 posts

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#61

Post by draw_down »

Sure, it's true that you can get work by learning "unsexy" stuff. If you want literally just a job, any job, knock yourself out I guess.

Better questions to ask: Is it good work? Will you find it fulfilling? Will they treat you well or will they treat you like a cost center? Sure, 80% of places don't use whatever newfangled tech you care to name, but that's not the whole picture.

80% of places are probably places you don't want to work, so what good is it to say "80% of places "? You don't care about the majority of places, you care about the ones you would actually want to work at. What do people in those places do?

The point I'm driving at is not exactly that you should learn new stuff to work in a good place. Rather, the more options you have, the better chance you have at getting into a line of work you actually want to be in. And sure, it is possible that you will end up using Java in that line of work.

There are reasons people use newer tech. And not all of those reasons have to do with being addled by ADHD and obsessed with shiny things. I get tired of that implication.

Remember that Java 8 (or whatever tech you care to name) was once upon a time the new shiny stuff.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#62

Post by usermac »

That was an enjoyable read. Just funny. Alright, I might not be a "dark" employee but we do run our shop on... FileMaker! Since 1993 as best I can tell.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#63

Post by nunobrito »

vbezhenar wrote: post #30
Sharlin wrote: post #21

I mean, Java 8, that's great! From an enterprise point of view it was released basically yesterday. I'm sure a large minority of systems still runs on Java 5 or 6.

There's very little reason not to upgrade to Java 8. Generally things just work. With Java 11 generally things just break, so it's completely another matter. I think that Java 8/11 will repeat Python 2/3 story.

We are moving to Java 8.

There is a special place in my heart to hate the new shiny lambdas. Makes code too difficult for reading, nowhere compatible when needing to use Java 7 every now and then.

With the article would just disagree on Sharepoint, would say Confluence has finally replaced that one.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#64

Post by geofft »

mzkply wrote: post #44

The HN front page is similar to any community. For example, a car site's homepage will be listing the latest supercars, expensive turbos, rims, whatever... while most readers are driving a $30,000 Civic. The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems, and that's what gets talked about, regardless of what the mass is doing.

> The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems

I don't think that's true—there is a subset of the best and brightest who work on greenfield projects very decoupled from existing customer bases, and they get to blog / present / post a lot about what they're doing. There are quite a few "best and brightest" people who are in large companies or slow-moving industries. They're often constrained to existing tooling, because moving to fancy new tooling is a huge risk and time sink for limited reward. They might be using cool personal tools—fancy editors and keyboards and window managers—but the stack they work on is generally "legacy".

And usually the problem of "How do we make this work slightly better for millions of end users" ends up being a bigger problem than "How do we do something really cool as a demo."

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#65

Post by wglb »

Sharlin wrote: post #25
villgax wrote: post #10

Dunno what hole she is in but Excel, Sharepoint are all things that new age companies don't work on & rather is the tool of choice for all things by legacy ones still chugging along.

"Legacy ones" as in almost all companies. The fact is that the economy, in large part, runs on Excel.

And in addition, Visual Basic.

Oh, don't forget COBOL.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#66

Post by matrix »

I think the author might not realize the substantial difference between working in a tech company (the HN audience) and in supporting roles in non-tech businesses. I have worked in both worlds, and it really just comes down to choosing the right tools for the job. In tech you're supposed to be on the cutting edge. That's part of what makes it fun and rewarding.

However, if anybody feels lesser for working in non-tech they're probably thinking the wrong way about the value they're creating. It can be immensely rewarding to build something unsexy and relatively simple that moves the needle by millions or even billions of dollars.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#67

Post by z3phyr »

I would argue that Hacker News is actually not about the latest in cutting edge technology.

Rather, it derives more from the spirit of hacking, fundamentally making computers do something other people thought are not possible to do or never tried. It looks like the latest cutting edge tech but rather its a bunch of people just experimenting.

It does not show whats the norm, but what is possible.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#68

Post by ar_lan »

I don't know why, but Scott's comments in here came off pretty condescending.

If you're a developer on Twitter, it's really easy to fall into the trap of believing that the only developers that matter are front-end engineers. Just because helping develop the kernel, or integrating a new product on an already existing, proven stack that runs Angular for the front and Spring in the back, does not provide shiny things to look at doesn't make them less important, and it really comes off as if he's saying the "famous developers" should feel bad about that.

I don't know, maybe it just rubbed me the wrong way.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#69

Post by NoInputSignal »

mzkply wrote: post #44

The HN front page is similar to any community. For example, a car site's homepage will be listing the latest supercars, expensive turbos, rims, whatever... while most readers are driving a $30,000 Civic. The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems, and that's what gets talked about, regardless of what the mass is doing.

This is implying the best & brightest drivers are driving tricked out super cars.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#70

Post by knightofmars »

idlewords wrote: post #11
sanxiyn wrote: post #4

HN is an early adopter community. If you want technical community, there are places like https://www.reddit.com/r/systems/ . Edit: Disclaimer: I am one of moderators and this is a blatant advertisement.

Speak for yourself, man. Lots of proud dinosaurs here, when it comes to deployed production systems.

When does one start counting oneself as a dinosaur? I'm pushing 15 years.
Post reply on HN