6 ms·

> it is a seemingly never-ending race just to keep up with the state of the art It is, there is noting seemingly about it. And it's the whole industry, from sy

by pmlnr 8y ago

> it is a seemingly never-ending race just to keep up with the state of the art It is, there is noting seemingly about it. And it's the whole industry, from sysadmin level, through ML to front end dev. You sit down for 2 years, boom, you're so outdated, it hurts. A regularly I wish I was a carpenter, where you learn something and it may stay valid for a long while. (EDIT: I admire carpenters, before someone thinks otherwise.)

pdkl95 8y ago
"I was sitting here, [reading HN] and drinking my coffee and replaying the [bug reports] in my head, when I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity." https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
- greatNespresso 8y ago
  Thanks for the link ! Shared it with my colleagues
skybrian 8y ago
You might want to read House by Tracy Kidder to get an idea of how crazy building a house can be, even on a good project. One of the builders in that book wrote a book of his own, The Well-Built House by Jim Locke, which I bought and found to be interesting reading. In his obituary it says: "The revised edition is still in print although Jim dismissed it in recent years as technically out-of-date." Which is to say that things do apparently change in building industry too. (I think this is another case of the grass being greener.)
- baroffoos 8y ago
  My grandpa was commenting on some tiling that was being done in our house and mentioned that back when he did tiling they had none of these tools they use for tiling now and the result would have been close to impossible to do back then.
- Moru 8y ago
  Can't remember exactly what it was about now but it was all over the news here in Sweden. A few years ago there was some new cover tiles for houses. They were widely used because they were new and cheap but now they realized it was a ticking bomb. Turns out the house under the tiles was damaged from moisture or a reaction to the material or some such. Most jobs have a lot of new things all the time, the web industry just have it a lot more. There is always some fresh meat out of school that think the old ways are stupid and we should do it this way instead. The old ones that warns that we tried that already and it blew up in our faces are "Backwards" and gets pushed asside.
jimbokun 8y ago
"Sometimes I wish I was a carpenter, where you learn something and it may stay valid for a long while." But what's stopping you? I prefer programming and development, exactly because it's always changing and interesting.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
shriphani 8y ago
I am a semi-professional carpenter and wood carver - much better field to work in than frontend development.
- onemoresoop 8y ago
  Your tools are for you to keep and the gratification you get when you finish something from a to z are something we lack in this IT industry.
  - debaserab2 8y ago
    Personally, I get a lot of gratification seeing customers use the code I produced. If you don't get gratification from the output of your work as a software developer, why do you continue to do it?
    - Fwirt 8y ago
      Probably necessity. It pays the bills relatively easily, and if you live anywhere in an urban area (that doesn't have hackerspaces/shared workspaces readily available) it's going to be hard to find a place to practice a craft like woodworking when software development barely pays the rent on a small apartment. Now if you happen to have a garage or access to a place with tools/equipment, working with your hands is immensely satisfying. But electrons and magnetic domains take up very little space and really only require the purchase of one modestly priced power tool to work with.
phkahler 8y ago
>> > it is a seemingly never-ending race just to keep up with the state of the art >> It is, there is noting seemingly about it. But if you build a foundation on HTML and CSS then you have something that stays relatively constant in the face of change. All that other stuff is often just fluff and programmers thinking they know a better way.
- rchaud 8y ago
  The foundation of HTML and CSS was separation of concerns, yet the most popular web app framework mixes HTML, CSS and JS together and says that it's fine. That's the first moment of confusion for students who are learning React after doing the basic HTML/CSS courses. Someone who can build a static site (not Hugo/Jekyll/whatever) in HTML and CSS and upload it via sFTP will struggle to understand loop functions in a database-driven CMS, which require some knowledge of a server-side language. Same goes with learning Git; there's a big jump in perceived complexity when you go from coding inside Sublime Text and typing commands into a Terminal.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    > most popular web app framework mixes HTML, CSS and JS together and says that it's fine. This was always the case. Because you could never build any reliable foundation on HTML+CSS alone.
    - goatlover 8y ago
      And that's because the web wasn't meant to be an application platform. It got turned into one on top of html/css.
      - root_axis 8y ago
        Yet here we are. The internet wasn't "meant" to be the global apex of commerce and communication, yet here we are. People started making more than just static documents because running programs on the web was fun and cool and it still is.
fsloth 8y ago
“And it's the whole industry, from sysadmin level, through ML to front end dev. You sit down for 2 years, boom, you're so outdated, it hurts.” Whole industry is bit of an exaggeration. I’m implementing features to a decades old product and a new tech stack that grows on it’s side. QR decomposition and a bit of linear algebra never go out of style. The hype cycle is just a gimmick. You don’t need the latest hotness for it’s own sake. Business users pay for solid products that deliver added value even though they are not utilizing the latest buzzword.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- BigJono 8y ago
  Yeah, that's true, but as a peon you're not at the mercy of the business users. Your career tech choices are mostly determined by the horde of technical managers who spend 8 hours a day brushing up on the latest tech and fuck all of it actually coding anything other than a project boilerplate. Whatever they decide they want to use is what 80% of the industry is going to be hiring for. If you're good you can just avoid all that and stick to the other 20%, but that's probably not a great strategy for someone with less experience. That's why I always scoff when some shit new feature gets added to a language or library and the response is always "well you can still use the old stuff". Yeah, maybe if you have your own solo venture, but everyone else has to suffer through it. Even being the lead on a project doesn't spare you from it. If all your devs want to use something new it's probably never a good idea to veto it, unless it's batshit insane.
  - learc83 8y ago
    > 80% of the industry is going to be hiring for 80% of the industry is hiring programmers to work on some boring line of business app using Java or whatever language they've been using for the last 10 years.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
commandlinefan 8y ago
> regularly I wish I was a carpenter I'm happy being a programmer, I just wish that any of the management folks understood that we're NOT carpenters, and their expectations that we learned everything we need to know ten years ago and should never need to learn anything ever again are unreasonable.
pjmlp 8y ago
Only if you are targeting startups. Plenty of companies whose main business isn't anything related to software, which are quite happy to have devs automate their infrastructure, they could even be done in BASIC or Pascal for what their sales people and management would care.

by pmlnr 8y ago

pdkl95 8y ago

"I was sitting here, [reading HN] and drinking my coffee and replaying the [bug reports] in my head, when I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity." https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

greatNespresso 8y ago
Thanks for the link ! Shared it with my colleagues

skybrian 8y ago

You might want to read House by Tracy Kidder to get an idea of how crazy building a house can be, even on a good project. One of the builders in that book wrote a book of his own, The Well-Built House by Jim Locke, which I bought and found to be interesting reading. In his obituary it says: "The revised edition is still in print although Jim dismissed it in recent years as technically out-of-date." Which is to say that things do apparently change in building industry too. (I think this is another case of the grass being greener.)

baroffoos 8y ago
My grandpa was commenting on some tiling that was being done in our house and mentioned that back when he did tiling they had none of these tools they use for tiling now and the result would have been close to impossible to do back then.
Moru 8y ago
Can't remember exactly what it was about now but it was all over the news here in Sweden. A few years ago there was some new cover tiles for houses. They were widely used because they were new and cheap but now they realized it was a ticking bomb. Turns out the house under the tiles was damaged from moisture or a reaction to the material or some such. Most jobs have a lot of new things all the time, the web industry just have it a lot more. There is always some fresh meat out of school that think the old ways are stupid and we should do it this way instead. The old ones that warns that we tried that already and it blew up in our faces are "Backwards" and gets pushed asside.

jimbokun 8y ago

"Sometimes I wish I was a carpenter, where you learn something and it may stay valid for a long while." But what's stopping you? I prefer programming and development, exactly because it's always changing and interesting.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

shriphani 8y ago

I am a semi-professional carpenter and wood carver - much better field to work in than frontend development.

onemoresoop 8y ago
Your tools are for you to keep and the gratification you get when you finish something from a to z are something we lack in this IT industry.
- debaserab2 8y ago
  Personally, I get a lot of gratification seeing customers use the code I produced. If you don't get gratification from the output of your work as a software developer, why do you continue to do it?
  - Fwirt 8y ago
    Probably necessity. It pays the bills relatively easily, and if you live anywhere in an urban area (that doesn't have hackerspaces/shared workspaces readily available) it's going to be hard to find a place to practice a craft like woodworking when software development barely pays the rent on a small apartment. Now if you happen to have a garage or access to a place with tools/equipment, working with your hands is immensely satisfying. But electrons and magnetic domains take up very little space and really only require the purchase of one modestly priced power tool to work with.

phkahler 8y ago

>> > it is a seemingly never-ending race just to keep up with the state of the art >> It is, there is noting seemingly about it. But if you build a foundation on HTML and CSS then you have something that stays relatively constant in the face of change. All that other stuff is often just fluff and programmers thinking they know a better way.

rchaud 8y ago
The foundation of HTML and CSS was separation of concerns, yet the most popular web app framework mixes HTML, CSS and JS together and says that it's fine. That's the first moment of confusion for students who are learning React after doing the basic HTML/CSS courses. Someone who can build a static site (not Hugo/Jekyll/whatever) in HTML and CSS and upload it via sFTP will struggle to understand loop functions in a database-driven CMS, which require some knowledge of a server-side language. Same goes with learning Git; there's a big jump in perceived complexity when you go from coding inside Sublime Text and typing commands into a Terminal.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  > most popular web app framework mixes HTML, CSS and JS together and says that it's fine. This was always the case. Because you could never build any reliable foundation on HTML+CSS alone.
  - goatlover 8y ago
    And that's because the web wasn't meant to be an application platform. It got turned into one on top of html/css.
    - root_axis 8y ago
      Yet here we are. The internet wasn't "meant" to be the global apex of commerce and communication, yet here we are. People started making more than just static documents because running programs on the web was fun and cool and it still is.

fsloth 8y ago

“And it's the whole industry, from sysadmin level, through ML to front end dev. You sit down for 2 years, boom, you're so outdated, it hurts.” Whole industry is bit of an exaggeration. I’m implementing features to a decades old product and a new tech stack that grows on it’s side. QR decomposition and a bit of linear algebra never go out of style. The hype cycle is just a gimmick. You don’t need the latest hotness for it’s own sake. Business users pay for solid products that deliver added value even though they are not utilizing the latest buzzword.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
BigJono 8y ago
Yeah, that's true, but as a peon you're not at the mercy of the business users. Your career tech choices are mostly determined by the horde of technical managers who spend 8 hours a day brushing up on the latest tech and fuck all of it actually coding anything other than a project boilerplate. Whatever they decide they want to use is what 80% of the industry is going to be hiring for. If you're good you can just avoid all that and stick to the other 20%, but that's probably not a great strategy for someone with less experience. That's why I always scoff when some shit new feature gets added to a language or library and the response is always "well you can still use the old stuff". Yeah, maybe if you have your own solo venture, but everyone else has to suffer through it. Even being the lead on a project doesn't spare you from it. If all your devs want to use something new it's probably never a good idea to veto it, unless it's batshit insane.
- learc83 8y ago
  > 80% of the industry is going to be hiring for 80% of the industry is hiring programmers to work on some boring line of business app using Java or whatever language they've been using for the last 10 years.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

commandlinefan 8y ago

> regularly I wish I was a carpenter I'm happy being a programmer, I just wish that any of the management folks understood that we're NOT carpenters, and their expectations that we learned everything we need to know ten years ago and should never need to learn anything ever again are unreasonable.

pjmlp 8y ago

Only if you are targeting startups. Plenty of companies whose main business isn't anything related to software, which are quite happy to have devs automate their infrastructure, they could even be done in BASIC or Pascal for what their sales people and management would care.