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> This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Not only is the claim "now it’s five year

by jonahx 9y ago

> This sort of mythology is NOT helping. An experienced Software Engineer has valuable skills that do not age at all. Not only is the claim "now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three" an unhelpful mythology, it's laughably incorrect to the point that I can't imagine anyone knowledgable espousing the view with a straight face. It stems from, on the one hand, "software as popular culture," which is a great way to choose bad tools, and, on the other, the conflation of surface knowledge (the syntax of a new language, the API of a new hot library, etc) with deep knowledge (design principles that transcend language, the ability to evaluate a library based on those principle, etc).

ams6110 9y ago
> Not only is the claim "now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three" an unhelpful mythology, it's laughably incorrect It's narrowly referring to the "framework fads" that do seem to sweep through our profession on about a three-to-five-year cycle.
- jerf 9y ago
  Yes, but when Framework B goes sweeping through the world, Framework A doesn't actually go anywhere. People keep working with it. If software engineers actually burned down all the old code every three years and literally everybody had to learn this new thing in order to do anything at all, this claim would make sense. But it's all additive. Even as we here on HN are shrieking and hooting about Framework B and the way it shines a unique light on the world of programming and how no thinking person could possibly resist its charms, thousands of people keep chugging along on Framework A for years afterwards. In no small part because they've heard it before, and remember that somewhere around the 2 year mark of Framework B's run you can expect well-written and cogent articles about "Framework B Considered Harmful", "Framework B Is Permanently Ruining An Entire Generation Of Programmers", "Why I'm Switching Back To Framework A And Regret Ever Listening To Hacker News" and "Oh Shit, I Bet My Business On Framework B And All My Developers Have Turned Into Feral Wombats And They're Biting Me Ow Ow Ow".
  - rhizome 9y ago
    Not to mention how much Java is written in Ruby, C written in Perl, and so on. Where the round-hole syntax of one language/framework can be hammered into the square-hole of another, it will be.
- skrebbel 9y ago
  Going off topic fast, but I've felt recently that this speed has slowed again. On the frontend, React has been king for quite a long time now, with no obvious contender in sight. Of course there's stuff like Vue but the difference isn't so big that people are throwing away their gigantic React codebases to restart anew with Vue (things that did happen a lot with jquery, bootstrap and even angular based frontends). The new kids on the block may be better, but only by a relatively small margin. Similarly on the backend, Rails has been unfashionable for quite a while now, but there's no obvious single new framework that people are flocking to. Sure, there's many hip options, like Elixir/Phoenix, vanilla Go, and bunch of "serverless" frameworks, but just as many people just start their new projects on Rails, Laravel, and ExpressJS, because that shit is productive and it just works. I feel like, decades after the desktop UI world, the web as a platform has pretty much matured. The core concepts aren't changing that much anymore. I think that maybe something fundamentally new has to happen again for this cycle to truly restart - just like the web as a software platform was once fundamentally new. We'll get new programmers who can reinvent all these ideas again in confusingly subtly different ways. It'll be fun!
  - arethuza 9y ago
    I suspect WebAssembly may provide the start to that new cycle you are (or are not) looking forward to.
Bartweiss 9y ago
I've certainly heard people toss around the myth of "expiring expertise", but even the people who believe that talk on the scale of decades. I honestly have no idea where Friend got "less than three", it's not a claim even the most ignorant ageists seem to make. Sure, there are frameworks that turn over in <3 year timeframes, but even utterly reckless JS cowboys don't pretend experience in an old framework is worthless. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, though, because the article also offers: "With the advent of the cloud and off-the-shelf A.P.I.s—the building blocks of sites and apps—all you really need to launch a startup is a bold idea." It feels like the only skill acknowledged in the entire article is putting a basic JS frontend on a website.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Nothing shows a software expert like putting periods between letters in an initialism.

by jonahx 9y ago

ams6110 9y ago

> Not only is the claim "now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three" an unhelpful mythology, it's laughably incorrect It's narrowly referring to the "framework fads" that do seem to sweep through our profession on about a three-to-five-year cycle.

jerf 9y ago
Yes, but when Framework B goes sweeping through the world, Framework A doesn't actually go anywhere. People keep working with it. If software engineers actually burned down all the old code every three years and literally everybody had to learn this new thing in order to do anything at all, this claim would make sense. But it's all additive. Even as we here on HN are shrieking and hooting about Framework B and the way it shines a unique light on the world of programming and how no thinking person could possibly resist its charms, thousands of people keep chugging along on Framework A for years afterwards. In no small part because they've heard it before, and remember that somewhere around the 2 year mark of Framework B's run you can expect well-written and cogent articles about "Framework B Considered Harmful", "Framework B Is Permanently Ruining An Entire Generation Of Programmers", "Why I'm Switching Back To Framework A And Regret Ever Listening To Hacker News" and "Oh Shit, I Bet My Business On Framework B And All My Developers Have Turned Into Feral Wombats And They're Biting Me Ow Ow Ow".
- rhizome 9y ago
  Not to mention how much Java is written in Ruby, C written in Perl, and so on. Where the round-hole syntax of one language/framework can be hammered into the square-hole of another, it will be.
skrebbel 9y ago
Going off topic fast, but I've felt recently that this speed has slowed again. On the frontend, React has been king for quite a long time now, with no obvious contender in sight. Of course there's stuff like Vue but the difference isn't so big that people are throwing away their gigantic React codebases to restart anew with Vue (things that did happen a lot with jquery, bootstrap and even angular based frontends). The new kids on the block may be better, but only by a relatively small margin. Similarly on the backend, Rails has been unfashionable for quite a while now, but there's no obvious single new framework that people are flocking to. Sure, there's many hip options, like Elixir/Phoenix, vanilla Go, and bunch of "serverless" frameworks, but just as many people just start their new projects on Rails, Laravel, and ExpressJS, because that shit is productive and it just works. I feel like, decades after the desktop UI world, the web as a platform has pretty much matured. The core concepts aren't changing that much anymore. I think that maybe something fundamentally new has to happen again for this cycle to truly restart - just like the web as a software platform was once fundamentally new. We'll get new programmers who can reinvent all these ideas again in confusingly subtly different ways. It'll be fun!
- arethuza 9y ago
  I suspect WebAssembly may provide the start to that new cycle you are (or are not) looking forward to.

Bartweiss 9y ago

I've certainly heard people toss around the myth of "expiring expertise", but even the people who believe that talk on the scale of decades. I honestly have no idea where Friend got "less than three", it's not a claim even the most ignorant ageists seem to make. Sure, there are frameworks that turn over in <3 year timeframes, but even utterly reckless JS cowboys don't pretend experience in an old framework is worthless. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, though, because the article also offers: "With the advent of the cloud and off-the-shelf A.P.I.s—the building blocks of sites and apps—all you really need to launch a startup is a bold idea." It feels like the only skill acknowledged in the entire article is putting a basic JS frontend on a website.

fjsolwmv 9y ago
Nothing shows a software expert like putting periods between letters in an initialism.