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It goes without saying that your feelings are personal ones, totally valid, and nobody can really question them. I'm 20 years behind you, and I don't know what

• notacoward 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing your perspective. It honestly warms my heart to see that some people believe the trajectory is still upward. > Maybe I just enjoy software right now because I've now got the technical competence and confidence to avoid some of the frustrations that I experienced earlier Just as some but not all of my (mostly negative) perception is surely personal, might I suggest that some but not all of your (mostly positive) perception is not? Perhaps the industry really has improved in some areas that you care about during that interval. Yay! OTOH, that doesn't necessarily put your perception and mine in opposition. There are other areas and other intervals, and other priorities as well. It's great that your experience has been positive. I hope it remains so.
  • matthewmacleod 6y ago
    I think that's a good way to think about it. Everyone's individual perspectives are valid, and they're a mix of real things that have happened in the industry and their own experiences. I'm very much aware of how bad some parts of the industry can be (particularly having recently dipped my toe into some machine learning work and discovered an entire sub-field in which nobody has ever heard of documentation, testing, coding standards, or things like releasing software that actually works).
  • devilduck 6y ago
    The issue isn't so much the trajectory, but the people in the industry. I've been repeating for a while now that there are too many people who are not team players, who are basically still cowboy coders, looking to scratch their own personal technical itches rather than working together to build good software. This has been my experience for the last 5 years at least. It definitely reminds me more of the 90s, when the industry was a mess because it was new and growing. My issue is mostly with the people though, not the actual work. Lots of self-righteousness. Lots of people wanting everything to be on 'hard mode.' And as someone else commented, there is definitely a Stockholm Syndrome with the money involved since I now can not do anything else and maintain my life. Nor has this industry made it easy to change jobs. Nobody wants to train, everyone seems very cheap, but they want to hire Kobe. I am counting the days before I get broken.
• jlangenauer 6y ago
  I think you are right to say that the methods are vastly improved, but the ends to which those methods are applied have become ever more uninteresting (for a lot of people), and often morally suspect. We have built exquisite tools, but we use them to extract profit, to manipulate behaviour and often for no discernable purpose at all. Programming has become joyless. There are ever-shrinking spaces where a developer gets to build something novel - something that's state of the art, that's creative, that taxes their intellect and brings the pleasure of achievement forth. It seems that for every developer working on rocket guidance systems or self-driving cars there are a hundred toiling away on yet another CRUD app, or wrestling with a hydra of microservices. It pays well, but fun it is not.
  • bad_user 6y ago
    No, programming became useful for the mainstream. I program ever since you had to restrict arrays to 64k in Pascal's 286 real mode. It was definitely fun, but other than building really limited games and freaking text areas (that would regularly crash with out of memory errors, losing your changes), along with bad accounting software build in MS Fox, there wasn't much you could do. And I remember people literally leaving the industry when the migration from MS-DOS to the Win API happened, which was forced around the time of Win 95. Because everything was terrible. But I love it when seeing young, privileged, overpaid software developers complain about joy. Keep at it.
    • djhaskin987 6y ago
      While we should not discount your experiences, and while there are many complainers out there about nothing, I think the poster to which you replied has a deeper point. I too am relatively young. When I was a kid, Bill Gates and windows was the devil. Nowadays I realize I judged him too harshly and that he does a lot of good in the world, but at the time Microsoft was the bridge troll. Looking back, everything seemed so simple. Programming open source things had meaning to it. People didn't program open source back then to my knowledge as part of a larger corporate strategy. They did it because it was fun. Corporations entered open source programming as far as I'm aware en masse in the early 2010s late 2000s. Around the same time Facebook and Google reached their peak of popularity. It felt awesome to have corporations join in the fun and it felt like the software got much cleaner and much higher quality. After a while though it just felt like corporations took over the place. Software is better now but it's tailored to corporate needs even in the open source world. Now that our apps have millions of users, and we can see how they interact with the app in near real time, there is a constant push to manipulate the behavior of the user. Like our app? Leave a review! How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague? And so forth. To your point, we have always been asked to do things like this but in the 90s there wasn't nearly as many ways to do so. Seeing the greater capacity of our code being used for yet more greed is disillusioning. I get it, everything is terrible, and it always has been. But I do wonder if we haven't lost something from the '90s to now. I feel like there have been several Eternal Septembers, but instead of our communities getting flooded with trolls they have been flooded with corporate interests in communities that didn't used to have these interests at play. To try and combat this feeling, I have tried to find those communities for programming that try to get back to our indie roots. In the '90s we didn't care or need corporations to sponsor us or our open source projects. I'm still sure there are those out there that run their projects without the need for GitHub Stars or corporate funding but it's now seen as unreliable or otherwise undesirable to use projects that are simply done for fun. I think remembering that that's all I ever used to use will help me find more fun like I used to have. Preserving the space of programming is a hobby I think is really what's at stake here.
• blueterminal 6y ago
  I completely agree. Docker, amazing frameworks (Laravel, Django, ReactJS etc.), git, CI, amazing IDEs, etc. It's absolutely magical compared to what we had 15 years ago. Entry level is much higher though for sure, you definitely need to learn and know a lot. But once you do know certain things at a certain level, you become a very powerful individual.
  • lmarcos 6y ago
    And here it lays the paradox. All the tools you have mentioned have little to do with programming (one individual solving problems by writing code). The tools you mentioned have to do with software engineering (a bunch of individuals solving problems by writing code, plus a bunch of constraints). The joy is in programming, not in software engineering. At least that's how I interprete the GitHub comment (and all these stories about developers that cannot take it any more and burn out).
    • blueterminal 6y ago
      I don't need to worry about many many trivial things I had to worry about before these tools, and now I can actually work on the problem I'm trying to solve almost immediately.
      • vbezhenar 6y ago
        For some people solving business problems is boring. But tinkering with those things that you're calling trivial is what brings joy.
        • pdimitar 6y ago
          You and me both.
      • sdevonoes 6y ago
        Is that true tho? I mean, I love programming, but I hate React. I love thinking about data structures and their relationships, but I don't like Docker. I spent hours thinking about how can I solve a problem (just for fun) and I absolutely don't need GCP nor Azure. I like coming up with cool algorithms (or reading about them) but I find Laravel (or Django) really unelegant and not worth my time.
• neya 6y ago
  > Compared to the first steps I took as a developer about 15 years ago, almost everything about software development seems better to me. If you mean this is better, I hardly agree with you: https://twitter.com/thomasfuchs/status/810885087214637057?lang=en https://twitter.com/thomasfuchs/status/810885087214637057?la...
  • matthewmacleod 6y ago
    I don't think that this absolutely microscopic slice of the overall software development ecosystem is really representative of anything interesting. But yes – I do think React is a pretty good approach to UIs compared with many things I've used in the past. There are good and interesting discussions to be had about the different possible techniques that can be used; this isn't an entry into one of them.
  • klodolph 6y ago
    Honestly, this IS better. Separating the HTML, JS, and CSS is an approach that works up to a certain size/complexity app. When I’m working on some functionality, I need to be able to understand the relevant parts of the HTML, JS, and CSS. With a smaller app, one person can more or less grok the code base well enough to find everything they need. With simpler apps, you might have fairly uniform or boring styling and not a ton of CSS rules. If I’m setting something up with Bootstrap and just getting it working, I can probably ignore CSS for a LONG time. If you’re working on something larger and more complicated, you really want to have all of the HTML, JS, and CSS for a particular piece of functionality right in the same place so you don’t have to go searching for it. It’s how you survive in large/complex apps. You’ll think, “The margins in this box are too large” and you want to be able to fix that without trying to grok some massive set of CSS rules, and when you do get the CSS rules that you want, you want to know that they’ll be delivered to the client—something that is easy if you deliver all of your CSS rules to every client, but hard if you want to split your CSS. I think the only real tragedy here is that too many people are copying “the way Facebook does it” without wondering if Facebook might have a completely different set of priorities than they do.
    • gagege 6y ago
• jamesbfb 6y ago
  > opposed to code that hacks together some junk to try and make it work with other junk. I think you work for a better company than me :)
• TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I'm ~23 years behind GP, and I feel the same way as them already. Goes to say, this may be a matter of personality. There were few and brief moments in my career as a software developer when I was truly happy at my work. Most of those involved implementing an architecture or algorithm I figured out from scratch, or took from scientific literature - either as prototype or directly in the product. Sometimes as "hold my beer, I got this" moments. But as you can imagine, this is maybe 1% of the things I've been doing at various jobs. From where I sit (a backend developer, thoroughly burned out by webdev a couple years ago), most of coding I do is software bureaucracy. Turn this data into that data, ensuring module X and Y get paged in the process. Oh, half of the code I'm about to write is implemented elsewhere - quick, figure out how to juggle the dependency graph to somehow route control from here to there and back. This data I want to convert is not of the right colour - oh, I need to pass it through three sets of conversion layers to get back essentially the same, but with a correct type tag on it. Etc. It's utterly and mind-numbingly boring, unless you architectured the whole codebase yourself, at which point it's somewhat fun because it's your codebase, and who doesn't like their own Rube Goldberg machines? At this point, I've learned a coping strategy: just forget the project scope and focus on your little plot of land. Doesn't matter that the software I wrote half of is going to help people do exciting stuff with industrial robots. What matters is that the customer changed some small and irrelevant piece of requirements for the 5th time, and I now have to route some data from the front to the back, through the other half of the code, written by my co-worker (a fine coder, btw.). So a bunch of layers of code bureaucracy I'm not familiar with, and discovering which feels like learning how to fill tax forms in a foreign country. If I start thinking about the industrial robots I'll just get depressed, so instead I focus on making the best jump through legacy code possible, so that I impress myself and my code reviewer (and hopefully make the 6th time I'm visiting this pit easier on everyone). Maybe it's a problem of perceptions. Like in the modern military - you join because you think you'll get to fly a helicopter and shoot shoulder-mounted rockets for daily exercise. You get there and you realize it's just hard physical work, a bit of mental abuse, and a lot of doing nothing useful in particular (at least until you advance high enough or quit). And so I started coding, dreaming I'll be lording over pixels on the screens, animating machine golems, and helping rockets reach their desired orbits. Instead, I'm spending endless days pushing people to simplify the architecture, so that I can shove my data through four levels of indirection instead of six (and get the software to run 10x faster in the process), and all that to rearrange some data on the screen that really should've been just given away to people on an Excel sheet with a page of instructions attached. (Another thing that annoys me: a lot of software I've seen, and some I've worked on, could've been better and more ergonomic as an Excel sheet with bunch of macros, and the whole reason they're a separate product instead is to silo in the data, the algorithm, and to prevent the users from being too clever with it. Also because you can't get VC funding for an Excel sheet (unless you're Palisade).) Got a bit ranty here, sorry. I guess my point is: I accept the industry is mostly drudgework, but I refuse to accept that this is all essential complexity. Somehow, somewhere, we got off track, because all this shit is way harder than it should be.
• cs02rm0 6y ago
  I'm 20 years behind you Me too. And all I can do is point at Javascript in webpages. Which, as a Java dev (if I can still call myself that 15 years into doing all sorts of other stuff too), I want nothing to do with but somehow get dragged into all the time. I can really relate with the idea that we're feeding the beast we built rather than the one borne of necessity. Unfortunately, which I'm sure the latter still exists, it's the former that always seems to pay the bills.
  • tstrimple 6y ago
    I'm at the end of my software development life cycle, but I've got the opposite perspective on java vs javascript. There's just so much boiler plate and unnecessary typing to implement solutions in java relative to javascript. The amount of stuff I can accomplish per line of code is significantly higher than any other language I've worked with, with possible exception being python.
• wakawaka1 6y ago
  I agree. I think it's amazing to see CICD tools which make it super easy and quick to deploy web apps-- such as Vercel, for example. Simply by booting up a github project, and starting from a template, I can deploy a SSL-secured site within minutes-- as a frontend example. On the backend, using infrastructure-as-code solutions, to again, "templatize" a starting point, such as an AWS service or set of connected AWS services. Whereas up until recently, I'd typically go rent a chunk of a server to run Linux, and setup NGINX-related security features myself. Not that tough, especially the more I learned NGINX. However the 3-click deployment via tools like Vercel take away so much headache. That said, at times, I think it's can be necessary and easier to simply setup a linux server, so as to have full control over the process. It's just nice to have the additional options. I love how much the software-supporting ecosystem has evolved. It lets me focus more on development, and less on devops. And that what I want, as a developer-- To get to coding ASAP, and not worry about tangential concerns-- as a matter of specializing. (Disclaimer: I only have about 2-3 years of professional experience, but prior to that, was teaching myself for about 5 years off and on. In that timespan of 7-8 years, I feel so assured and emotionally secure given the reduction of headaches due to the fact that I no longer have to learn so much ecosystem related stuff, and can focus more on programming)
• Igelau 6y ago
  We're all on the great curve of programmer productivity through the ages. All we can see are the local maximums and minimums we've encountered. From my journey on the chart, things have only gotten better since the time I crashed a C++ compiler just because I was using std::map.
• thothamon 6y ago
  I started programming on an amateur basis in 1984, professionally in 1997. I'm 52 now. My experience is that coding has become more and more interesting and pleasant. In the early days, I had to deal with under-powered languages that either couldn't do certain things or that made them very difficult. Then I encountered languages that were much more pleasant to use, but had other problems such as not scaling well to team-level development -- sometimes even I couldn't figure out what I had been doing. Languages are clearer now, they make thinking about problems easier, and while this issue has not disappeared, it's less bad for me than it used to be. For me, tools, including languages, do matter. I can well imagine that programming in Java would be soul-deadening (although Java is still better than some languages of the past). Incidentally, I am not dunking on languages of the past. Lisp has been around for a long time, as has Smalltalk or Haskell or ML. Many of those languages were not accessible to anyone without a mainframe or expensive workstation. This situation has improved greatly in the past decades, which to me is another reason to prefer coding today versus the past. Obviously, most of us are not able to cherry-pick our toolset for work. We use whatever our employer says to use, or whatever the demands of our project require. This may be part of why many people find coding to be an uninspiring experience. Also, the problems that people work on might be dull, it's hard to get motivated about a basically tedious problem. Last, it's worth acknowledging that some people just don't love coding all that much. It's hard to imagine doing really well at something you don't deeply enjoy day in and day out. And your passion can change over time: you might really enjoy something in one part of your life, and not derive much joy from it at another part.
• outworlder 6y ago
  > Compared to the first steps I took as a developer about 15 years ago, almost everything about software development seems better to me. I find developing software to be easier, more consistent, and less frustrating than it used to be. Good development practices—things like testing, CI, coding standards and so on—seem more prevalent than they used to be. It's easier to get code out to production than it ever was. Everything in the ecosystem—like tooling, libraries, and services—feel far more open, consistent, and accessible than they used to. All true points. As an individual developer, if you are working on what you want to be working, we are in a great time. You can pick from a selection of outstanding tools and we have, for all practical purposes, access to infinite hardware. As a developer that's part of a team... it sucks. Expectations are getting ever more unrealistic - probably because so many things are quickly done, but other things are just as slow or even slower. Most people's jobs consist of wiring together 150 libraries across 30 'microservices' (which are rarely microservices, but often distributed monoliths) and that's after spending a lot of time bikeshedding on what the tech stack is supposed to be like. At least the UML craze seems to have died down.
• foobiekr 6y ago
  The challenge is that in most projects, the things that make things "better" also hide entire galaxies of technical debt. The MongoDB debacle is an example of that problem, as is the outcome of Docker (images full of vulnerabilities, difficulty in making even the most quotidian tools like strace, etc. run easily, converting a known and enforced-common production userland environment into a hodgepodge of 'whatever', etc.) and so on. Supportability, risk-mitigation, debuggability, etc. are all thrown away in most of today's environments. An awful lot of tech companies are running mostly on hope.