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Intelligence. Tenacity. Ambition. Judgement. Bonus points for recognizing the bullshit parade that is the current startup world. e.g.: NodeJS has value, but it
by meritt 10y ago
Intelligence. Tenacity. Ambition. Judgement.
Bonus points for recognizing the bullshit parade that is the current startup world. e.g.: NodeJS has value, but it's mostly the same wheel we've had for 20+ years. Or that MongoDB's changelog has consisted of standard SQL features for the past five years and that pgsql would have been just fine (had people read some boyce-codd anyhow).
- raverbashing 10y ago> Or that MongoDB's changelog has consisted of standard SQL features Funny, because it's pgsql that added a JSON data type in response to MongoDB and others.
- z3t4 10y agoWhat's so special about NodeJS: * It has a revolutionary module system (Common JS) witch allows less coupling, more code reuse and better abstractions.
- statictype 10y agoCouldn't you say the same thing about C? Or C++? Or really, any language made in the last 3 decades? (Except JavaScript which only got it recently and has several competing module/import mechanisms)
- nornagon 10y agoC/C++ has no module system to speak of. Libraries are packaged in a whole menagerie of ways and shapes, with different build systems and different ways of linking and including various parts of them. Try building something with SDL on Windows if you want to see this for yourself.
- eropple 10y agoThere's nothing "revolutionary" about CommonJS. It's a packaging system that offers simple encapsulation (but so does Java/Kotlin/Scala or C#). There's something different about it, in that it allows concurrent use of different versions--but, frankly, to me that's a demerit, not a positive, 'cause I'd rather keep my dependencies squared away.
- some1else 10y agoI believe there was a way to package and deploy apps with multiple versions of the same deps in the Java world before NodeJS came to be. I remember a buddy candidly explaining those capabilities to me, back when Rails gems were still managed with rake tasks.
- eropple 10y agoOSGi, probably. Which is kind of hairy. But it's a difficult problem on the JVM.
- z3t4 10y agoNodeJS allows lexical (function) scoping of modules. I do not know any other language that allows this. Function scoping allows better decoupling when functions do not depend on the outer scope. And modules in NodeJS are truly modular as they contain all their dependencies, even libraries.
- eropple 10y agoThe former: I'd like to know how this is better than, say, assembly-level scoping in a PCL in C#. It's different, but I wouldn't call it better, and I wouldn't say that it enables better decoupling--just decoupling at a different level. The latter: as mentioned in my previous post, this is, to me, a misfeature. Transitive dependencies being encapsulated in a dependency increases the likelihood that those dependencies don't get fixed when bugs inevitably arise in those transitive dependencies. Do not want.
- 10y ago
- blauditore 10y agoI'm honestly not sure if this is sarcastic or not. CommonJS is just one approach to solve missing native modularization in JS, but not really revolutionary. Other languages usually have built-in features with a similar purpose, like "import" in Java or Python.
- collyw 10y agoWhat do you put in your job ads? Usually all I see is a list of tech that I haven't had the inclination to learn as it seems like a step backwards for the majority of use cases- e.g. MongoDB in place of relational databases.
- shubhamjain 10y agoI guess most companies need to pretend that they are a cool tech company with a "challenging line of work". The sheer shortage of programmers manifests a developer-centric market where using the cutting-edge technology matters, even if the business considerations make less of a sense. Take for example, Walmart Labs move to Node.JS + React [1]. The rationale is quite obvious here. It's a step to distance from the corporate portrayal of "Walmart" and create an image of a nimble, developer-friendly team (There maybe other important reasons, but I'd assume good PR mattered a lot). Contrary to what HN may suggest, the first thing that exhilarates a developer (the early ones to say the least) isn't the business, it's the tech. [1]: https://blog.hellojs.org/walmart-labs-releases-electrode-moves-to-node-react-5cd8221e0dbd https://blog.hellojs.org/walmart-labs-releases-electrode-mov...
- raverbashing 10y agoMaybe because developers were sick of being forced to use "corporate technologies" sold at golf courses (like crap from IBM or Oracle) So when I see a job posting advertising those I know the people in charge have no clue in what they're doing and treat developers as janitors. Or as pg said: "The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those."
- saiya-jin 10y ago> ... "corporate technologies" sold at golf courses don't forget the tennis courts
- collyw 10y agoI am busy wrestling with Salesforce right now (the height of crapness in my opinion), but it hasn't stopped me seeing relational databases as more useful than Mongo in the majority of use cases.
- karmicthreat 10y agoThese are actually the things I have come to value as well. Especially tenacity. It seems like a distressingly large number of devs just wilt under failure. I am always interested in people who can reverse a failing project or system even if it was their own failure to begin with.
- apenney 10y agoHow do you judge those qualities? I too interview for a similar set of skills (intelligence, curiosity, a desire to constantly improve things, someone who's just willing to put in the hard slog as well as work on the fun projects) but it's incredibly hard! I've definitely had people that interviewed well that just wanted JIRA tickets fed to them immediately upon starting. It's very hard to figure out if someone will seek out and make improvements consistently from the basis of conversations. (I'm in ops so there's rarely a body of code available they can share for how they work, either.)
- saiya-jin 10y agotake it with a pinch of salt... people that excel in all 4 criteria are at most 1% of workforce, and you need to bring some serious money and interesting challenges to attract them over from other seriously paying places with great challenges and atmosphere and whatnot. I mean, what ambitious person would like to worse in less that best job available on the market, for best possible money?
- sleight42 10y agoCommunication and compassion to go with these. I don't want a "team" of hotshots. I want a team. And I want that team to be able to work with other teams.