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It's concerning how typical the hype machine is in IT. I believe Serverless has its place and value. So does Kubernetes or many other products that are often di

It's concerning how typical the hype machine is in IT. I believe Serverless has its place and value. So does Kubernetes or many other products that are often discussed on HN. But let's be clear, we are talking about commercial products and there is a capital interest in selling these services to all of us devs and engineers. So while use cases exists and benefits wait to be reaped, as a consultant I strongly feel that we should be MUCH more insistent in pointing out when a product does not make sense instead of jumping onto the hype train. I am basically surrounded by "LETS TRANSFORM EVERYTHING TO KUBERNETES THIS WEEK!" exclamations, conferences are basically "DID YOU ALREADY HEAR ABOUT KUBERNETES?" and so on ... It reminds me of Ruby on Rails, a mature and well-developed framework used by global tech firms (correct me if wrong: Airbnb, ~Stack Overflow~, Github) to handle parts of their backend in 2019. But for half a decade now even tiny companies have been screaming around about FancyHTTPTechThisYear (tm) because scale while reporting 1/500th of the traffic of some famous Rails users. This is not engineering with objectives in mind, it's more akin to the gaming community yelling for a new console.

Hokusai 7y ago
> It's concerning how typical the hype machine is in IT. Software engineering is still a young discipline. Probably half of the people have less than 4 years of experience. They learned from other employees that also had less than 4 years of experience. And that can be repeated for 10 generations of developers. We are learning, and re-learning the same lessons again and again. Everything seems new and better and then we are surprised when it's not a silver bullet. Software and cloud vendors do not help. They are the first ones to hype their new language, framework or platform. Technology lock-in is a goal for tech companies offering hardware or services. > This is not engineering with objectives in mind Curriculum driven development is a thing. And I cannot blame developers for it when the industry hires you and sets your salary based on it. We need to be more mature and, as you suggest, think about our technical and business goals when choosing a technology instead of letting providers lock us in their latest tech.
- neuronic 7y ago
  > Everything seems new and better and then we are surprised when it's not a silver bullet. We need to live and breathe a culture that makes even young developers aware that this mistake has been done over and over until a growing collective of developers has recognized the pattern behind this. After all, in the analogue trades even apprentices are taught many "don'ts" right from day one. Software engineering should not be any different.
DougBTX 7y ago
> correct me if wrong Stack Overflow is built on ASP.NET: https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/09/21/what-was-stack-overflow-built-with/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/09/21/what-was-stack-overflo...
- neuronic 7y ago
  Thank you!
bsenftner 7y ago
It's a mindless horde, an entire industry of half experienced idiots and half burned out savant engineers conning and rescuing one another in a cluster fuck of confusion. For the old school greys, the cloud itself is a con, as running a server oneself is actually quite easy, and exponentially better in every respect than slices of someone else's oversold hardware.

Hokusai 7y ago

> It's concerning how typical the hype machine is in IT. Software engineering is still a young discipline. Probably half of the people have less than 4 years of experience. They learned from other employees that also had less than 4 years of experience. And that can be repeated for 10 generations of developers. We are learning, and re-learning the same lessons again and again. Everything seems new and better and then we are surprised when it's not a silver bullet. Software and cloud vendors do not help. They are the first ones to hype their new language, framework or platform. Technology lock-in is a goal for tech companies offering hardware or services. > This is not engineering with objectives in mind Curriculum driven development is a thing. And I cannot blame developers for it when the industry hires you and sets your salary based on it. We need to be more mature and, as you suggest, think about our technical and business goals when choosing a technology instead of letting providers lock us in their latest tech.

neuronic 7y ago
> Everything seems new and better and then we are surprised when it's not a silver bullet. We need to live and breathe a culture that makes even young developers aware that this mistake has been done over and over until a growing collective of developers has recognized the pattern behind this. After all, in the analogue trades even apprentices are taught many "don'ts" right from day one. Software engineering should not be any different.

DougBTX 7y ago

> correct me if wrong Stack Overflow is built on ASP.NET: https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/09/21/what-was-stack-overflow-built-with/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/09/21/what-was-stack-overflo...

neuronic 7y ago
Thank you!

bsenftner 7y ago

It's a mindless horde, an entire industry of half experienced idiots and half burned out savant engineers conning and rescuing one another in a cluster fuck of confusion. For the old school greys, the cloud itself is a con, as running a server oneself is actually quite easy, and exponentially better in every respect than slices of someone else's oversold hardware.