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Hey there, fellow fatalist! My economical-ish education disagrees with you on some points made) If "good software", whatever it is, is not economically viable,

Hey there, fellow fatalist! My economical-ish education disagrees with you on some points made) If "good software", whatever it is, is not economically viable, I would gladly walk away feeling good about the future and open a beach bar instead. Currently it seems that faulty design and code are actively harming the businesses. I personally need to make more research around here — what's the connection between, say, conditional spaghetti and anything important? We should at least start talking about these implications. No code is an aisle) Same goes for "the masses don’t actually want to learn anything" — I see many people getting into web dev right now, and we've made it unreasonably hard to do — why do simple (as in, the ones you can make after a bootcamp) web pages look and work so poor? Word documents from people with a week of training look pretty reasonable.

falcolas 8y ago
> Currently it seems that faulty design and code are actively harming the businesses. So long as a human exists to work around the faulty code, the harm to businesses is minimal. For example, many companies sell feature-full, but absurdly slow and buggy, software to other businesses. The customers aren't going anywhere, and they've protected their niches with a minefield of patents. So, the features hook the execs, and the end-users work around the bugs and slowness, the business sees no blowback from this. My favorite anecdote was a front end engineer claiming "I went in and profiled our code and made an action go from 5 seconds to under a tenth of a second!" To which I can only go "Wait, there was a user-space action that took 5 seconds?!"
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > My favorite anecdote was a front end engineer claiming "I went in and profiled our code and made an action go from 5 seconds to under a tenth of a second!" To which I can only go "Wait, there was a user-space action that took 5 seconds?!" And I'm guessing there was, and you didn't notice it (or stopped noticing it at some point), because that's what people do. They get used to this nonsense. Especially if they have no power to improve it.
- thoughtspile 8y ago
  I'm actually pragmatic about it) 5 seconds is fast enough for an infrequent or complex action — it's not a week, come on! You might as well throw the feature away in a month. If it turns out the action is more useful than originally planned, you should take time to optimize it.
sigfubar 8y ago
I don't know how things are back home, but here in the US "getting into web dev" is something people do mostly as a way to increase their earnings. Yes, there are some gems in the crowd, but the base case, so to speak, is someone who simply wants to make more money. These are the people who want to make the jump from $25k/year to $75k/year and stay there, rather than become masters of a craft. Any learning for them is incidental to the economic process, and such worker bees - productive as they may be - don't actually improve the state of our industry. Good software is exactly economically viable, but it takes upfront investment. Unfortunately, businesses don't like to make that upfront investment in something they don't - yet! - understand. Think of a car: a young person might treat their first car like crap assuming that it would simply run forever like magic. This attitude does a quick 180 the day the car's tranny drops out. I'm thinking that not enough software "transmissions" have quit in order to instill these lessons within the MBA-s of the world.
- thoughtspile 8y ago
  Well, we're all in it for the money to a certain extent) And statistically, the more people come here, the more bright people among them. Not in finance, not in civil aviation, but here in software — isn't that great? The supply / demand gap on programmers should close once — our job is not inherently bad or risky. I feel that we just don't know how to train new programmers on this scale yet.

falcolas 8y ago

> Currently it seems that faulty design and code are actively harming the businesses. So long as a human exists to work around the faulty code, the harm to businesses is minimal. For example, many companies sell feature-full, but absurdly slow and buggy, software to other businesses. The customers aren't going anywhere, and they've protected their niches with a minefield of patents. So, the features hook the execs, and the end-users work around the bugs and slowness, the business sees no blowback from this. My favorite anecdote was a front end engineer claiming "I went in and profiled our code and made an action go from 5 seconds to under a tenth of a second!" To which I can only go "Wait, there was a user-space action that took 5 seconds?!"

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> My favorite anecdote was a front end engineer claiming "I went in and profiled our code and made an action go from 5 seconds to under a tenth of a second!" To which I can only go "Wait, there was a user-space action that took 5 seconds?!" And I'm guessing there was, and you didn't notice it (or stopped noticing it at some point), because that's what people do. They get used to this nonsense. Especially if they have no power to improve it.
thoughtspile 8y ago
I'm actually pragmatic about it) 5 seconds is fast enough for an infrequent or complex action — it's not a week, come on! You might as well throw the feature away in a month. If it turns out the action is more useful than originally planned, you should take time to optimize it.

sigfubar 8y ago

I don't know how things are back home, but here in the US "getting into web dev" is something people do mostly as a way to increase their earnings. Yes, there are some gems in the crowd, but the base case, so to speak, is someone who simply wants to make more money. These are the people who want to make the jump from $25k/year to $75k/year and stay there, rather than become masters of a craft. Any learning for them is incidental to the economic process, and such worker bees - productive as they may be - don't actually improve the state of our industry. Good software is exactly economically viable, but it takes upfront investment. Unfortunately, businesses don't like to make that upfront investment in something they don't - yet! - understand. Think of a car: a young person might treat their first car like crap assuming that it would simply run forever like magic. This attitude does a quick 180 the day the car's tranny drops out. I'm thinking that not enough software "transmissions" have quit in order to instill these lessons within the MBA-s of the world.

thoughtspile 8y ago
Well, we're all in it for the money to a certain extent) And statistically, the more people come here, the more bright people among them. Not in finance, not in civil aviation, but here in software — isn't that great? The supply / demand gap on programmers should close once — our job is not inherently bad or risky. I feel that we just don't know how to train new programmers on this scale yet.