4 ms·

This is not just a meme. This is a mentality. At my last job at a big company we had HipChat rooms for all kinds of user groups. The one for frontend devs had

This is not just a meme. This is a mentality. At my last job at a big company we had HipChat rooms for all kinds of user groups. The one for frontend devs had constant discussion about their job (in)security, and every couple of weeks someone posted an article complaining about the existence of "fullstack" engineers. I wouldn't care if this ended at chats and picture, but it's these people who deliberately push for ever increasing fronted complexity to make sure they're not easily replaceable. The sad reality is that IT industry is currently in a bubble. It is choke-full of overspecialized tool junkies with no transferable skills. Certain complexities you "have to know" to perform basic operations are often 100% artificial and shouldn't be there in the first place.

dcosson 7y ago
I never understood this concept at all. Is this a metaphor somehow, or do you literally think everyone is secretly conspiring to make life more complicated for themselves and their team because of job security? What about the fact that everyone changes jobs every 1 to 3 years anyway? The market for engineers is pretty hot these days, I don’t think most devs even want all that much job security, much less are willing to go to such extreme lengths for it. Have you considered that problems you’re not working on may actually have more inherent complexity than you realize? From my own experience, and also just based on Ockham’s razor, it seems much more likely that people are mostly giving an honest effort and trying to solve real problems. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail to solve the problem, or fail to recognize the right problem to work on, but overall real things are certainly getting done in the software world — new products launch and companies provide real value and gain real customers.

dcosson 7y ago

I never understood this concept at all. Is this a metaphor somehow, or do you literally think everyone is secretly conspiring to make life more complicated for themselves and their team because of job security? What about the fact that everyone changes jobs every 1 to 3 years anyway? The market for engineers is pretty hot these days, I don’t think most devs even want all that much job security, much less are willing to go to such extreme lengths for it. Have you considered that problems you’re not working on may actually have more inherent complexity than you realize? From my own experience, and also just based on Ockham’s razor, it seems much more likely that people are mostly giving an honest effort and trying to solve real problems. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail to solve the problem, or fail to recognize the right problem to work on, but overall real things are certainly getting done in the software world — new products launch and companies provide real value and gain real customers.