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The article perfectly summarizes my frustration and sentiment. These days I hear these buzzwords all time. I work as a consultant for an enterprise product and

by rajeshp1986 10y ago

The article perfectly summarizes my frustration and sentiment. These days I hear these buzzwords all time. I work as a consultant for an enterprise product and most people whom I meet they somehow catch these buzzwords and blurt it out in front of everyone during meetings and discussions to either showoff that they know technology and things that are in the market these days(also latest iphone, apple news, tesla, space exploration and what not) or I feel they are somewhat trying to hide their insecurities. Anyway long story short, most of these people do not really understand why they need all this rocket science to manage < 500 internal users. One of the new buzzwords I am hearing these days is mostly related to bigdata and machine learning. One of my managers came to me and asked me why dont we integrate our product with hadoop it will solve the performance problems as it can handle lot of data. I am frustrated by the industry as a whole. I feel industry is simply following marketing trends. Imagine the no. of man-hours are put into investigating technologies and projects dropped mid-way realizing the technology stack is still immature or not suitable for at all.

johnward 10y ago
I too consult for an enterprise product and hear the same things. People don't know what the buzzwords mean but they know they must have it. That and then the assumption that ML based products are all just magic and require no effort. "You mean it doesn't just figure that out for me". Thanks marketing department.
- chucknelson 10y ago
  > ...the assumption that ML based products are all just magic and require no effort. Yep, same experience here with both "Big Data" and the ML space. The decision makers need to see the sheer amount of Java, Scala and/or Python code you need to actually implement to do anything useful. Nope...not magic.
karrotwaltz 10y ago
My manager and CEO are going wild with "blockchains", and how we should use it for everything. "We could store gigabytes of data on the clients without having to pay for servers"
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Well, maybe... if you had any clients left, or the infrastructure to support such a thing.
- nickbauman 10y ago
  This is hysterically funny! Can you tell us who this CEO is?
huuu 10y ago
"I am frustrated by the industry as a whole" Unfortunately I have to agree as a developer. My job is to make a fast, reliable, stable product but at the same time I'm questioned the tools I use by people who don't have any knowledge but heard the latest trend. But sometimes it's also very easy to please people. Big data: just insert 10M records in a database and suddenly everyone is happy because they now have big data :|
- collyw 10y ago
  As long as the database isn't relational, I guess.
  - kasey_junk 10y ago
    10M rows in a relational database is a very low number (depending on the size of the row of course).
    - collyw 10y ago
      I know, it was a sarcastic follow up to the "now they have big data" part of the original comment. "SQL doesn't scale". It needs to be in Mongo or whatever NoSQl database is in right now. I have heard all sorts of nonsense regarding "big data" in the last few years.
      - chewbacha 10y ago
        ahaha, i didn't read the sarcasm that time, sorry for replying with tmi
  - chewbacha 10y ago
    10 million rows in a relational database doesn't need to be bad nor is it big data. Rows is a bad measure of "big" when it comes to data. A measurement of bytes and probably more specifically bytes per field and how many fields the records have, as this gives a better indication into the way this will be written and potentially searched. 10 million rows of 5 integer values is pittance for any relational database worth using in production. 10 million rows of 250 text columns would be horrendous for a relational database.
gtk40 10y ago
It seems like it's been going on in our industry for a long time. I'm reminded of it being referenced in comics from the past two decades. http://www.hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=52 http://www.hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=52
dirtyhenry 10y ago
Totally agreed. As a freelance, it's really scary to invest time into a full stack of technologies. I should start a discipline to pick tools and not look back before n years went by. Maybe n = 2 or 3 ? (right now, I'm Objective-C - not even Swift - for native iOS, Ember for client, Rails for API/back-office and Heroku for deployment)
- wooptoo 10y ago
  Swift should be mature enough by now for development. Or start with version 3 when it comes out.
- KurtMueller 10y ago
  Honest question: How's that tech stack working out for you? What if you want to dev an Android mobile app? Have you looked at React Native at all? Thanks.
  - matwood 10y ago
    React native was not mature enough the last time I had to solve this problem. After writing and maintaining native clients in both Android and iOS for years, I decided to try something different. SPA app + Cordova + writing custom, native plugins for performance has worked out pretty well. Some things in the UI are not as fast as I would like, but develop/test/release cycle is so much faster (web, ios, android released nearly at the same time). It does help that I can write native Android or native iOS (obj-c/swift) to handle the plugins where needed. Cordova can also be a bit of a mess to deal with sometimes, but it is improving.
    - KurtMueller 10y ago
      Another question... how do you like Ember for your web apps? :)
      - dirtyhenry 10y ago
        I still have a love/hate relationship with Ember (and other JS frameworks). They are simultaneously very powerful and quite restrictive. My most recent example: there's still no common and fast&easy way to integrate Google Analytics in a project. It takes some (reasonable) effort, like 1 hour for research and implementation, when it takes 10 minutes on good old server generated HTML/JS.
Maro 10y ago
Honest advice: Stop working for/with stupid companies/people and start working for smart ones.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Not really practical advice without some hint as to how one is supposed to spot those smart companies.
- gambiting 10y ago
  The thing is that for a lot of people, work is a balancing act - between how much you like doing something, and how much you like money. If a "bad" company pays you a tonne of money, you might still work for them because you like having shiny things. However, for each person the line is someplace else - I know some people who will take shit pay just to do what they enjoy, and I know people who don't have a problem working in the most frustrating environments 80 hours a week because they like being paid big $$$. It's all relative to what's important for you.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  The smart companies already have more qualified applicants than slots, and often arbitrary hiring processes to boot. Not everyone has the luxury of working for one.
ryanmaynard 10y ago
> I am frustrated by the industry as a whole. I feel industry is simply following marketing trends. My work lands me in a number of different conferences in non-software industries. This is true for all industries. Its just that ours has a faster revolving door. That, in addition to a low barrier to entry (anyone can claim they're a web developer), leads to a higher degree of this madness. Its just part of human behavior to seek out, and parrot, social signals that let others know you, too, are an insider. Personally, I have to avoid a great number of those gatherings, since the lot of them are just a circlejerk of low-density information. If I pay too much attention to those events, I catch myself looking down my nose, and since that isn't productive/healthy behavior, I avoid landing myself in a place where guys with buddy-holly glasses and <obscure-craft-beer> argue which Wordpress plugin is the best.
- discordianfish 10y ago
  Another way to signal others that you, too, are an insider is by calling a current trend a hype.
  - ryanmaynard 10y ago
    I agree, and am guilty as charged.
  - ryanmaynard 10y ago
    To make a clarification, I was not calling Docker hype, nor specifically remarking on any particular item. I use docker religiously. I even use dokku for about 30+ toy projects. My remark was to highlight that buzzwords are often used for "me-too" ankle-deep conversations/articles. Whether someone calls it Devops, or Systems Engineering, makes no difference to me. However, I favor pragmatic conversations about the topic, rather than buzzword bingo. Examples include: "MongoDB sucks.", "Everyone should use Docker", and "What? You mean you're not using Kubernetes for your CRUD app?" Basically, blanket statements that accomplish nothing more than to send social signals.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    From 20+ years of experience and having seen tons of trends just die, most are just that, hype.
jventura 10y ago
Oh, I feel your pain! There's too much fashion going on in this industry, and the high salaries and the youth rediscovering the same concepts from 40 years ago doesn't help.. I mean, it's great to have this new tech and all, but when you're trying to build something to last some years, sometimes it's hard to filter the crap between all the buzzwords. It just reinforces the thought that smart people should just leave this field entirely or search for other fields of knowledge (or business) where our knowledge of programming can be made of use. I'm 35 now, but I'm starting to realize that I will not have the patience to keep with all the crap just to be employable.. There are some areas where being old and experient is valuable. Philosophy, science, psychology, teaching, etc., are maybe some of them, but this industry is definitely not one of those areas. It makes me think that what I'm building now will some day be completely wiped out of existence..
- tsunamifury 10y ago
  https://youtu.be/zut2NLMVL_k https://youtu.be/zut2NLMVL_k "All my work will be obsolete by 2005" -Steve Jobs If you aren't willing to accept that obselence is part of life, then you are either building something you aren't passionate about or confused about the cruelty of time.
  - pmyjavec 10y ago
    As inspirational as Steve Jobs was, he wasn't correct about everything, nor was he a brilliant engineer.
    - kafkaesq 10y ago
      Nor did anyone (in this thread) say he was. The quote has bounded context. And in that context, seems generally valid and applicable.
  - jventura 10y ago
    I'd say it goes beyond than building physical or virtual things. I'm talking about something that resembles compound interests, where you build knowledge or experience over previous knowledge and experience such that in some years you are way ahead of where you are now. I'm basically saying that the high churning we have now does not give you enough time to build significant experiences that you can use later on in life, and, as such, it's the opposite of a good investment to the future. It is almost as we are only living for the present status, forgetting that on the future we will have less patience and energy to have to "re-learn" almost the same things.
liveoneggs 10y ago
What other parts of getting old suck? :)
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Having to work with people who see caution and wisdom as "getting old".
  - scrupulusalbion 10y ago
    Virtues are generally disregarded by those who seek instant gratification. Most of the times that I bring up the concept of virtue to my peers in age they seem either confused with the concept or contemptuous of it. They behave like virtue is a purely religious thing, yet caution in the face of possible danger is a very basic survival skill.
    - Retra 10y ago
      That's probably because you're talking about 'virtue' as an abstract quality, rather than good decision making as a practical framework.
    - bogomipz 10y ago
      How does the concept of morality have anything to do with enthusiasm for new technology?
avindroth 10y ago
Our industry is a pop culture. A fad. Computer science is not a real field.
- chadgeidel 10y ago
  Computer science is a real field. It's just not "developing site/app for BigCo". But - then again - it never has been. :-)
- Retra 10y ago
  This comment makes me believe that you've never been exposed to any computer science.
  - avindroth 10y ago
    Of course not. I am in undergrad. But I think Alan Kay has been "exposed" to computer science, and I follow his logic, based on my limited scope of knowledge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc
alpeb 10y ago
I remember Larry Ellison saying once that the only industry more driven by fashion than fashion itself was IT. That was when the «cloud» thing was starting to take off. He was refusing to have Oracle use those new buzzwords, but at the end he was forced to.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Perhaps because in both fashion and IT, the surface appearance conceals a tremendous amount of underlying complexity. Fashion signals, well, virtually everything about social interactions. A tremendously complex world. Including, for that matter, whether or not you care about fashion trends, and quite possibly, why you might or might not (you're not in the game, you've quit the game, you're so fabulously successful you don't need to play the game, you couldn't play the game if you wanted to, ...) In IT, TLAs, ETLAs, buzzwords, slogans, brands, companies, tool names, etc., all speak to what you know, or very often, don't know. It's not possible to transmit deep understanding instantaneously, so we're left with other means of trying to impart significance. Crucially, the fact that clothing and IT fashion are so superficial (of necessity) means they can be game, and that those who are good at following just the surface messages can dive in. Some quite effectively. But they're not communicating the originally intended meaning.
mamcx 10y ago
This is how we manage this problem at the times when Visual Basic was the king and we use instead Visual FoxPro. People want theirs apps to be made with Visual Studio (BTW, FoxPro was part of the package). So they ask: "In what is the app made"? "In Visual, Sir." Done. End of story (like most of the time, obviously some times people are more dangerous and press it ;) ). ---- The point is not focus in the exact word but in what the people know the word will give to them. So, for example "Big Data". The meaning for us matter zero. The meaning to some customer is that it have a largeish excel file that with his current methods and tools take too long to get results. So. Do you use "Big Data Tools"? "Yes Sir." And what about use Hadoop? "We use the parts of big data tech necessary for solve this, and if we need to use hadoop or other similar tools that fit better with your industry and that use the same principles will depend in our evaluation. Not worry, we know this" Or something like that ;). Know that worry the people behind the words have help me a lot, even with people with WORSE tech skills (damm, I have build apps for almost iliterate people with big pockets but only witch cellphones as references of tech!) And the anecdote about the largeish excel file that was too big and take too long? Yep, true. And was for one of the largest companies in my country ;)
- StavrosK 10y ago
  You're exactly right. In the end, the customer is worried about solving their problem and they're asking if you're aware of <latest thing they've heard>. It's like when you go to the doctor and say "I've read of an experimental new treatment for X, can't we do that?". The doctor has probably already heard about it.
  - jrapdx3 10y ago
    Yup. An experimental treatment is probably not even available to be prescribed, besides it's ethically questionable to use a treatment when the risks (or benefits) haven't been clearly delineated. Even if it could be used, a responsible prescriber would want to try all "standard" remedies before attempting an experimental method. That's called practicing conservatively, minimizing chances of bad outcomes. It's a matter of astute clinical judgement to glean optimum risk/benefit ratio in a particular case. Since no two cases are ever exactly the same, good judgement is a constant necessity. I see that the process of developing software has many parallels and not surprising that everyone experiences so much brokenness. When people complain to me about some mysterious program misbehavior (stuff I had nothing to do with) I empathize with them, and try to help them think logically about the problem they're having. Only rarely can I offer any real insight, but given the insane proliferation of the alphabet soup of identifiers attached to all the "new things" out there, no one I know in the industry feels they have a handle on what's happening. Seems like the pace of "innovations" will lead to even greater levels of incomplete and dysfunctional systems and can only lead, sooner or later, to truly catastrophic failures.
szxnyc 10y ago
Yea, but does it scale?
brightball 10y ago
I never thought I would appreciate Java...but the industry has really made me. Take your .war file, drop it onto JBoss. It deploys across the cluster in a zero downtime manner, isolates configuration, provides consistent log structure, cert management, deployment. You can deploy dozens of small war's to the same server and they can talk to each other. Load balance across the cluster automatically based on actual load. Run scheduled jobs and load balance the scheduled jobs themselves. Allow them to be isolated and unique within the cluster. I may not like Java as a language, but from an infrastructure standpoint Java was basically Heroku long before Heroku was Heroku. The infrastructure is just...solid. The downside was that the XML config stuff was just messy.
- wry_discontent 10y ago
  Can you do similar stuff with clojure or Scala? Maybe there's a way to avoid the bad parts
  - dnissley 10y ago
    These days there are workarounds to avoiding a lot of xml configuration in the java ecosystem (although you end up with a decent amount of annotations). Spring boot is a great example of this.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      > These days there are workarounds to avoiding a lot of xml configuration in the java ecosystem As is, believe it or not JavaEE.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Actually for many of us it isn't bad. I have come to the point where I only look at other languages once in a while and it serves me well. A few years ago when I was still in farming we had the ostrich craze: ostriches were crazy profitable (or so the ostrich sellers said) and every farm needed to consider it. Eggs where $300 a piece etc etc. Of course the first to get one made great money by selling eggs, chicken and consulting hours to all the rest. The rest where not so lucky and today I don't know a single ostrich farm. Same goes for latest tech: if you want to you can try to be first and make a good living on the hype stream.
carsongross 10y ago
Micro-services are the current-year deity of the cargo-cult that is Silicon Valley. Unlike the natives, however, who simply wasted some time building extraneous fake runways, in the Valley people are royally screwing up their own core architecture. I'm old enough to find this more humorous than frustrating.
- lj3 10y ago
  It should give anyone with a better grip on core technologies a competitive edge. The Valley is ripe for disruption. ;)
- flukus 10y ago
  I think micro services only came into existence because SOA was such a disaster, everyone confused SOA architectures with web services. These ended up being n-tier apps with a web service RPC (or several) in the middle just to add some unnecessary serialization and network transfer bottlenecks. So far I've seen micro services repeat this trend almost exactly.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    Microservices take all the SOA problems and turn them up to eleven, as far as I can tell. It intertwines decomposition of your system (sometimes good) with network communication (rarely good) and additional ops management (never good). Yanking out the major chucks of independent functionality into separate deployable services makes sense at a large enough scale and for large enough, independent enough components. But you would only do so out of necessity, not as an initial architecture. And yet here we are.
anuraaga 10y ago
I have seen excel, SQL, even MS office used as a buzzword. Of course there's also agile, scrum, etc. Bigdata and machine learning are also hot word. But they are clearly modern engineering. Consultants exist to explain the best way to achieve modern best practices to people without the appropriate background. If someone asks about "Why no Hadoopz plx?", either explain the other technology used instead (maybe spark, storm?) or explain that the scale is small enough for Access to handle. That's a consultant's job.
jacques_chester 10y ago
> I feel industry is simply following marketing trends. 'twas ever thus. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-17 http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-17
bogomipz 10y ago
This is not new. This industry has been about trends since the first dot com boom - remember Java Beans?, J2EE, 3 tier architectures, blade servers, virtualization, Rails, full stack, Nosql and big data, ad infinitum. It's an industry like any other with its own signal to noise ratio. You can get frustrated about it or accept it and accept that's also what makes it an interesting industry to work in.
deleted 10y ago
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chiefalchemist 10y ago
Some things never change. It's been this way for as long as I can remember. The sad irony is, satisfaction remains the same (i.e., low) as well. We keep chasing our tails and products remain sub-par and users still frustrated. It's a shame SOS isn't a loved buzzword.

johnward 10y ago

I too consult for an enterprise product and hear the same things. People don't know what the buzzwords mean but they know they must have it. That and then the assumption that ML based products are all just magic and require no effort. "You mean it doesn't just figure that out for me". Thanks marketing department.

chucknelson 10y ago
> ...the assumption that ML based products are all just magic and require no effort. Yep, same experience here with both "Big Data" and the ML space. The decision makers need to see the sheer amount of Java, Scala and/or Python code you need to actually implement to do anything useful. Nope...not magic.

karrotwaltz 10y ago

My manager and CEO are going wild with "blockchains", and how we should use it for everything. "We could store gigabytes of data on the clients without having to pay for servers"

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Well, maybe... if you had any clients left, or the infrastructure to support such a thing.
nickbauman 10y ago
This is hysterically funny! Can you tell us who this CEO is?

huuu 10y ago

"I am frustrated by the industry as a whole" Unfortunately I have to agree as a developer. My job is to make a fast, reliable, stable product but at the same time I'm questioned the tools I use by people who don't have any knowledge but heard the latest trend. But sometimes it's also very easy to please people. Big data: just insert 10M records in a database and suddenly everyone is happy because they now have big data :|

collyw 10y ago
As long as the database isn't relational, I guess.
- kasey_junk 10y ago
  10M rows in a relational database is a very low number (depending on the size of the row of course).
  - collyw 10y ago
    I know, it was a sarcastic follow up to the "now they have big data" part of the original comment. "SQL doesn't scale". It needs to be in Mongo or whatever NoSQl database is in right now. I have heard all sorts of nonsense regarding "big data" in the last few years.
    - chewbacha 10y ago
      ahaha, i didn't read the sarcasm that time, sorry for replying with tmi
- chewbacha 10y ago
  10 million rows in a relational database doesn't need to be bad nor is it big data. Rows is a bad measure of "big" when it comes to data. A measurement of bytes and probably more specifically bytes per field and how many fields the records have, as this gives a better indication into the way this will be written and potentially searched. 10 million rows of 5 integer values is pittance for any relational database worth using in production. 10 million rows of 250 text columns would be horrendous for a relational database.

gtk40 10y ago

It seems like it's been going on in our industry for a long time. I'm reminded of it being referenced in comics from the past two decades. http://www.hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=52 http://www.hackles.org/cgi-bin/archives.pl?request=52

dirtyhenry 10y ago

Totally agreed. As a freelance, it's really scary to invest time into a full stack of technologies. I should start a discipline to pick tools and not look back before n years went by. Maybe n = 2 or 3 ? (right now, I'm Objective-C - not even Swift - for native iOS, Ember for client, Rails for API/back-office and Heroku for deployment)

wooptoo 10y ago
Swift should be mature enough by now for development. Or start with version 3 when it comes out.
KurtMueller 10y ago
Honest question: How's that tech stack working out for you? What if you want to dev an Android mobile app? Have you looked at React Native at all? Thanks.
- matwood 10y ago
  React native was not mature enough the last time I had to solve this problem. After writing and maintaining native clients in both Android and iOS for years, I decided to try something different. SPA app + Cordova + writing custom, native plugins for performance has worked out pretty well. Some things in the UI are not as fast as I would like, but develop/test/release cycle is so much faster (web, ios, android released nearly at the same time). It does help that I can write native Android or native iOS (obj-c/swift) to handle the plugins where needed. Cordova can also be a bit of a mess to deal with sometimes, but it is improving.
  - KurtMueller 10y ago
    Another question... how do you like Ember for your web apps? :)
    - dirtyhenry 10y ago
      I still have a love/hate relationship with Ember (and other JS frameworks). They are simultaneously very powerful and quite restrictive. My most recent example: there's still no common and fast&easy way to integrate Google Analytics in a project. It takes some (reasonable) effort, like 1 hour for research and implementation, when it takes 10 minutes on good old server generated HTML/JS.

Maro 10y ago

Honest advice: Stop working for/with stupid companies/people and start working for smart ones.

emodendroket 10y ago
Not really practical advice without some hint as to how one is supposed to spot those smart companies.
gambiting 10y ago
The thing is that for a lot of people, work is a balancing act - between how much you like doing something, and how much you like money. If a "bad" company pays you a tonne of money, you might still work for them because you like having shiny things. However, for each person the line is someplace else - I know some people who will take shit pay just to do what they enjoy, and I know people who don't have a problem working in the most frustrating environments 80 hours a week because they like being paid big $$$. It's all relative to what's important for you.
vonmoltke 10y ago
The smart companies already have more qualified applicants than slots, and often arbitrary hiring processes to boot. Not everyone has the luxury of working for one.

ryanmaynard 10y ago

> I am frustrated by the industry as a whole. I feel industry is simply following marketing trends. My work lands me in a number of different conferences in non-software industries. This is true for all industries. Its just that ours has a faster revolving door. That, in addition to a low barrier to entry (anyone can claim they're a web developer), leads to a higher degree of this madness. Its just part of human behavior to seek out, and parrot, social signals that let others know you, too, are an insider. Personally, I have to avoid a great number of those gatherings, since the lot of them are just a circlejerk of low-density information. If I pay too much attention to those events, I catch myself looking down my nose, and since that isn't productive/healthy behavior, I avoid landing myself in a place where guys with buddy-holly glasses and <obscure-craft-beer> argue which Wordpress plugin is the best.

discordianfish 10y ago
Another way to signal others that you, too, are an insider is by calling a current trend a hype.
- ryanmaynard 10y ago
  I agree, and am guilty as charged.
- ryanmaynard 10y ago
  To make a clarification, I was not calling Docker hype, nor specifically remarking on any particular item. I use docker religiously. I even use dokku for about 30+ toy projects. My remark was to highlight that buzzwords are often used for "me-too" ankle-deep conversations/articles. Whether someone calls it Devops, or Systems Engineering, makes no difference to me. However, I favor pragmatic conversations about the topic, rather than buzzword bingo. Examples include: "MongoDB sucks.", "Everyone should use Docker", and "What? You mean you're not using Kubernetes for your CRUD app?" Basically, blanket statements that accomplish nothing more than to send social signals.
- coldtea 10y ago
  From 20+ years of experience and having seen tons of trends just die, most are just that, hype.

jventura 10y ago

Oh, I feel your pain! There's too much fashion going on in this industry, and the high salaries and the youth rediscovering the same concepts from 40 years ago doesn't help.. I mean, it's great to have this new tech and all, but when you're trying to build something to last some years, sometimes it's hard to filter the crap between all the buzzwords. It just reinforces the thought that smart people should just leave this field entirely or search for other fields of knowledge (or business) where our knowledge of programming can be made of use. I'm 35 now, but I'm starting to realize that I will not have the patience to keep with all the crap just to be employable.. There are some areas where being old and experient is valuable. Philosophy, science, psychology, teaching, etc., are maybe some of them, but this industry is definitely not one of those areas. It makes me think that what I'm building now will some day be completely wiped out of existence..

tsunamifury 10y ago
https://youtu.be/zut2NLMVL_k https://youtu.be/zut2NLMVL_k "All my work will be obsolete by 2005" -Steve Jobs If you aren't willing to accept that obselence is part of life, then you are either building something you aren't passionate about or confused about the cruelty of time.
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  As inspirational as Steve Jobs was, he wasn't correct about everything, nor was he a brilliant engineer.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    Nor did anyone (in this thread) say he was. The quote has bounded context. And in that context, seems generally valid and applicable.
- jventura 10y ago
  I'd say it goes beyond than building physical or virtual things. I'm talking about something that resembles compound interests, where you build knowledge or experience over previous knowledge and experience such that in some years you are way ahead of where you are now. I'm basically saying that the high churning we have now does not give you enough time to build significant experiences that you can use later on in life, and, as such, it's the opposite of a good investment to the future. It is almost as we are only living for the present status, forgetting that on the future we will have less patience and energy to have to "re-learn" almost the same things.

liveoneggs 10y ago

What other parts of getting old suck? :)

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Having to work with people who see caution and wisdom as "getting old".
- scrupulusalbion 10y ago
  Virtues are generally disregarded by those who seek instant gratification. Most of the times that I bring up the concept of virtue to my peers in age they seem either confused with the concept or contemptuous of it. They behave like virtue is a purely religious thing, yet caution in the face of possible danger is a very basic survival skill.
  - Retra 10y ago
    That's probably because you're talking about 'virtue' as an abstract quality, rather than good decision making as a practical framework.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    How does the concept of morality have anything to do with enthusiasm for new technology?

avindroth 10y ago

Our industry is a pop culture. A fad. Computer science is not a real field.

chadgeidel 10y ago
Computer science is a real field. It's just not "developing site/app for BigCo". But - then again - it never has been. :-)
Retra 10y ago
This comment makes me believe that you've never been exposed to any computer science.
- avindroth 10y ago
  Of course not. I am in undergrad. But I think Alan Kay has been "exposed" to computer science, and I follow his logic, based on my limited scope of knowledge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc

alpeb 10y ago

I remember Larry Ellison saying once that the only industry more driven by fashion than fashion itself was IT. That was when the «cloud» thing was starting to take off. He was refusing to have Oracle use those new buzzwords, but at the end he was forced to.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Perhaps because in both fashion and IT, the surface appearance conceals a tremendous amount of underlying complexity. Fashion signals, well, virtually everything about social interactions. A tremendously complex world. Including, for that matter, whether or not you care about fashion trends, and quite possibly, why you might or might not (you're not in the game, you've quit the game, you're so fabulously successful you don't need to play the game, you couldn't play the game if you wanted to, ...) In IT, TLAs, ETLAs, buzzwords, slogans, brands, companies, tool names, etc., all speak to what you know, or very often, don't know. It's not possible to transmit deep understanding instantaneously, so we're left with other means of trying to impart significance. Crucially, the fact that clothing and IT fashion are so superficial (of necessity) means they can be game, and that those who are good at following just the surface messages can dive in. Some quite effectively. But they're not communicating the originally intended meaning.

mamcx 10y ago

This is how we manage this problem at the times when Visual Basic was the king and we use instead Visual FoxPro. People want theirs apps to be made with Visual Studio (BTW, FoxPro was part of the package). So they ask: "In what is the app made"? "In Visual, Sir." Done. End of story (like most of the time, obviously some times people are more dangerous and press it ;) ). ---- The point is not focus in the exact word but in what the people know the word will give to them. So, for example "Big Data". The meaning for us matter zero. The meaning to some customer is that it have a largeish excel file that with his current methods and tools take too long to get results. So. Do you use "Big Data Tools"? "Yes Sir." And what about use Hadoop? "We use the parts of big data tech necessary for solve this, and if we need to use hadoop or other similar tools that fit better with your industry and that use the same principles will depend in our evaluation. Not worry, we know this" Or something like that ;). Know that worry the people behind the words have help me a lot, even with people with WORSE tech skills (damm, I have build apps for almost iliterate people with big pockets but only witch cellphones as references of tech!) And the anecdote about the largeish excel file that was too big and take too long? Yep, true. And was for one of the largest companies in my country ;)

StavrosK 10y ago
You're exactly right. In the end, the customer is worried about solving their problem and they're asking if you're aware of <latest thing they've heard>. It's like when you go to the doctor and say "I've read of an experimental new treatment for X, can't we do that?". The doctor has probably already heard about it.
- jrapdx3 10y ago
  Yup. An experimental treatment is probably not even available to be prescribed, besides it's ethically questionable to use a treatment when the risks (or benefits) haven't been clearly delineated. Even if it could be used, a responsible prescriber would want to try all "standard" remedies before attempting an experimental method. That's called practicing conservatively, minimizing chances of bad outcomes. It's a matter of astute clinical judgement to glean optimum risk/benefit ratio in a particular case. Since no two cases are ever exactly the same, good judgement is a constant necessity. I see that the process of developing software has many parallels and not surprising that everyone experiences so much brokenness. When people complain to me about some mysterious program misbehavior (stuff I had nothing to do with) I empathize with them, and try to help them think logically about the problem they're having. Only rarely can I offer any real insight, but given the insane proliferation of the alphabet soup of identifiers attached to all the "new things" out there, no one I know in the industry feels they have a handle on what's happening. Seems like the pace of "innovations" will lead to even greater levels of incomplete and dysfunctional systems and can only lead, sooner or later, to truly catastrophic failures.

szxnyc 10y ago

Yea, but does it scale?

brightball 10y ago

I never thought I would appreciate Java...but the industry has really made me. Take your .war file, drop it onto JBoss. It deploys across the cluster in a zero downtime manner, isolates configuration, provides consistent log structure, cert management, deployment. You can deploy dozens of small war's to the same server and they can talk to each other. Load balance across the cluster automatically based on actual load. Run scheduled jobs and load balance the scheduled jobs themselves. Allow them to be isolated and unique within the cluster. I may not like Java as a language, but from an infrastructure standpoint Java was basically Heroku long before Heroku was Heroku. The infrastructure is just...solid. The downside was that the XML config stuff was just messy.

wry_discontent 10y ago
Can you do similar stuff with clojure or Scala? Maybe there's a way to avoid the bad parts
- dnissley 10y ago
  These days there are workarounds to avoiding a lot of xml configuration in the java ecosystem (although you end up with a decent amount of annotations). Spring boot is a great example of this.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    > These days there are workarounds to avoiding a lot of xml configuration in the java ecosystem As is, believe it or not JavaEE.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Actually for many of us it isn't bad. I have come to the point where I only look at other languages once in a while and it serves me well. A few years ago when I was still in farming we had the ostrich craze: ostriches were crazy profitable (or so the ostrich sellers said) and every farm needed to consider it. Eggs where $300 a piece etc etc. Of course the first to get one made great money by selling eggs, chicken and consulting hours to all the rest. The rest where not so lucky and today I don't know a single ostrich farm. Same goes for latest tech: if you want to you can try to be first and make a good living on the hype stream.

carsongross 10y ago

Micro-services are the current-year deity of the cargo-cult that is Silicon Valley. Unlike the natives, however, who simply wasted some time building extraneous fake runways, in the Valley people are royally screwing up their own core architecture. I'm old enough to find this more humorous than frustrating.

lj3 10y ago
It should give anyone with a better grip on core technologies a competitive edge. The Valley is ripe for disruption. ;)
flukus 10y ago
I think micro services only came into existence because SOA was such a disaster, everyone confused SOA architectures with web services. These ended up being n-tier apps with a web service RPC (or several) in the middle just to add some unnecessary serialization and network transfer bottlenecks. So far I've seen micro services repeat this trend almost exactly.
- carsongross 10y ago
  Microservices take all the SOA problems and turn them up to eleven, as far as I can tell. It intertwines decomposition of your system (sometimes good) with network communication (rarely good) and additional ops management (never good). Yanking out the major chucks of independent functionality into separate deployable services makes sense at a large enough scale and for large enough, independent enough components. But you would only do so out of necessity, not as an initial architecture. And yet here we are.

anuraaga 10y ago

I have seen excel, SQL, even MS office used as a buzzword. Of course there's also agile, scrum, etc. Bigdata and machine learning are also hot word. But they are clearly modern engineering. Consultants exist to explain the best way to achieve modern best practices to people without the appropriate background. If someone asks about "Why no Hadoopz plx?", either explain the other technology used instead (maybe spark, storm?) or explain that the scale is small enough for Access to handle. That's a consultant's job.

jacques_chester 10y ago

> I feel industry is simply following marketing trends. 'twas ever thus. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-17 http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-17

bogomipz 10y ago

This is not new. This industry has been about trends since the first dot com boom - remember Java Beans?, J2EE, 3 tier architectures, blade servers, virtualization, Rails, full stack, Nosql and big data, ad infinitum. It's an industry like any other with its own signal to noise ratio. You can get frustrated about it or accept it and accept that's also what makes it an interesting industry to work in.

deleted 10y ago

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chiefalchemist 10y ago

Some things never change. It's been this way for as long as I can remember. The sad irony is, satisfaction remains the same (i.e., low) as well. We keep chasing our tails and products remain sub-par and users still frustrated. It's a shame SOS isn't a loved buzzword.