5 ms·

I think what’s important to remember is that these kinds of “truth” are not the full story. Yes, a technology probably won’t live up to its marketing. Yes, wh

by tyre 6y ago

I think what’s important to remember is that these kinds of “truth” are not the full story. Yes, a technology probably won’t live up to its marketing. Yes, what works is probably good enough. Yes, changing has switching costs and sacrifices institutional knowledge. Yes, we’ve seen these technologies before and switched away from them from various reasons. That’s all fine and sometimes frustrating as an engineer. But it’s not the only reason decisions are made. Sometimes pitching your exec team on The New Hotness gives cover for changes that actually do need to happen. Sometimes adopting The New Hotness is marketing to recruit engineers who want to try something new. Sometimes adopting The New Hotness is because some people are bored and uninspired in their jobs and just want to believe in something good again. The success of things like MongoDB and blockchain are not because they are better or even very good at most things people use them for. They’ll never live up to the hype. But people need things to get excited about. It’s psychological. Attacking them purely on technical points can lead one to miss the actual point.

still_grokking 6y ago
I don't think burning in sum hundreds of billions of Dollars (or even more) because "it's OK being irrational, because emotions" makes sense.
- travbrack 6y ago
  The business case is that you won't be able to retain good engineers if you refuse to rewrite your AS400 COBOL app.
  - yters 6y ago
    I’ve wondered whether these good engineers are really a net benefit. They crank out something spiffy, move your big systems to it, and then disappear to work on the next hotness, leaving an already burdened tech team to support yet one more spiffy stack that is not quite as reliable or easy to use as we would like.
    - sgt101 6y ago
      I think you need to either talk to your system architecture function or get a system architecture function in your organisation. Managing this stuff is a job, and it requires discipline and organisation. It's one of the few functions of an IT department that is left once you go to cloud (as dealing with Oracle's bullshit is then gone). The younglin's doing development in the business functions have to play by the rules - and the business functions need to agree that there are rules or they will : a) spend much monies on the issue you describe b) get cracked open like fresh eggs by any passing hacker who is keen on sports cars
  - still_grokking 6y ago
    I'm not sure I would call people that would rewrite something just because it gets boring otherwise as "engineers". I think the proper term would be "children".
    - kortilla 6y ago
      Yet the best engineers in the field aren’t working on legacy banking apps. The problem is that once a product is put into production and the hard problems are solved, the engineering becomes significantly less challenging (unless you’re in an ultra rare scenario of exponential growth). The problem we have in software is that we have engineers build bridges and then somehow expect them to stay around to paint the thing, change light bulbs, etc and stay fulfilled. A person who is an expert at making new things won’t like being in maintenance. It’s that simple.
      - still_grokking 6y ago
        Sure, that's absolutely true. But it doesn't mean that you need to rebuild already working stuff over and over. It's much more fun to improve the status quo by inventing something nice as to repeat the work of the past generation (only painting things in a different color).
muglug 6y ago
Thanks for putting this into words. People want a reason to log on, a reason to show up to work. I wrote a blog post on Monday about a relatively old and not-hot language. The post nevertheless trended on Medium and received 50k views. A lot of the feedback was from people who were just happy to see someone senior say something positive about the not-hot language. Anyway, working with The New Hotness also gives people something to put on their resumé: “I built system X on top of The New Hotness. Nobody had built such a system before for The New Hotness”.
- ab8 6y ago
  Is being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars plus stocks and bonuses not enough of a reason to show up at work?
  - randmeerkat 6y ago
    You would think so, but as it turns out, it’s not. First world problems^2.
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    Not when that becomes table stakes, no. If you have five different companies offering you that kind of money, eventually you'll start thinking about more than just the money.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Well the funny thing is that once you crack FAANG interviews you can usually get offers from multiple of them and then money no longer becomes the decision factor. The choice becomes, “work on X and make $400k or work on Y and make $400k”. You bet the tie breaker often ends up being the prospects for working on cool shit.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    I suspect the majority of readers are being paid less than $100k with no stock or bonuses, and correctly intuit that new-hotness things on their résumé will help them climb the salary ladder towards that magic $100k threshold.
watermelon59 6y ago
I think it's sad that the vast majority of people in our field (at least in my experience) is so damn excited about building new stuff all the time. There's no appreciation for maintaining, optimizing, and improving existing systems. There's only talk of "adding value" but very little of "keeping value." So people keep moving on to the next project, leaving the old ones running live but to rot, and at best every once in a while someone will be assigned the dreadful task of having to figure out why the "legacy" (even though it's still fully in operation and servicing customers) system had an outage and can't recover. Our field suffers from a serious lack of focus. People don't learn to work under constraints. Instead, they prefer to build a whole new thing, full of complexity and hidden issues, just to get around a few nuisances that, with the right mindset, actually force one to be creative (which should make work fun). I've recently commented here on HN about how I feel like I'm outside the norm on these things [0]. I was happy to learn I'm not alone. I do think those of us who don't mind working on "legacy" systems and perhaps with limited tools are the minority though. Sometimes it's not even about working on old systems. You work with current tech, build something, and as soon as it's barely deployable, you're expected to move on to the next thing. "It's a great opportunity for your career," they say, "you're gonna get to build something new and make key decisions." Why does it have to be decided for me? It's my current predicament. I'm working on a project that took me two months to get in the right mindset for and get all the context I needed. I had to try things out, sort out ideas, until I got a clear picture of what to build. Now I've built the first iteration of it. It works, and I'm super excited about it. But it's not done by any means. It needs more features. It needs to be polished so it doesn't make operations miserable running the thing. And yet... I have to move on, and hand it over to someone who doesn't have the same excitement for it that I have, and has maybe 10% of the context. All because building new things (and adopting The New Hotness, as you say) is what "everyone" wants. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25404039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25404039
- ljm 6y ago
  It doesn't help if your career path in a company is tied towards 'visibility,' where certain roles will never see a promotion no matter how critical they are. I've chosen to take on more than one heavy maintenance job, no client facing visibility in terms of fancy new features. Feedback in performance reviews would always be "it's hard for people to see what you're doing." In the end you have to find your own way to game the system to get appropriately recognised, but of course that kind of office politics isn't really what you want to spend time either. I'm doing more 'new feature' style work now but I'm happy to not be tumbling through the waves of hype. We get a little bit of new hotness, because of course you need to embrace some aspect of that to avoid stagnating and getting too stuck in your ways, but not so much of it that the engineering team is incentivised to churn through half-assed features.
satyrnein 6y ago
It's great for those engineers that they are so far up Maslow's hierarchy that they're willing to bring significant risk to their employers in the pursuit of self actualization. However, there are a lot of engineers in the world (outside SF and NYC) that are still concerned about lower levels like physiological and safety needs. I wonder if the world getting more accustomed to remote work will change the cost benefit analysis on hiring those engineers instead.

by tyre 6y ago

still_grokking 6y ago

I don't think burning in sum hundreds of billions of Dollars (or even more) because "it's OK being irrational, because emotions" makes sense.

travbrack 6y ago
The business case is that you won't be able to retain good engineers if you refuse to rewrite your AS400 COBOL app.
- yters 6y ago
  I’ve wondered whether these good engineers are really a net benefit. They crank out something spiffy, move your big systems to it, and then disappear to work on the next hotness, leaving an already burdened tech team to support yet one more spiffy stack that is not quite as reliable or easy to use as we would like.
  - sgt101 6y ago
    I think you need to either talk to your system architecture function or get a system architecture function in your organisation. Managing this stuff is a job, and it requires discipline and organisation. It's one of the few functions of an IT department that is left once you go to cloud (as dealing with Oracle's bullshit is then gone). The younglin's doing development in the business functions have to play by the rules - and the business functions need to agree that there are rules or they will : a) spend much monies on the issue you describe b) get cracked open like fresh eggs by any passing hacker who is keen on sports cars
- still_grokking 6y ago
  I'm not sure I would call people that would rewrite something just because it gets boring otherwise as "engineers". I think the proper term would be "children".
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Yet the best engineers in the field aren’t working on legacy banking apps. The problem is that once a product is put into production and the hard problems are solved, the engineering becomes significantly less challenging (unless you’re in an ultra rare scenario of exponential growth). The problem we have in software is that we have engineers build bridges and then somehow expect them to stay around to paint the thing, change light bulbs, etc and stay fulfilled. A person who is an expert at making new things won’t like being in maintenance. It’s that simple.
    - still_grokking 6y ago
      Sure, that's absolutely true. But it doesn't mean that you need to rebuild already working stuff over and over. It's much more fun to improve the status quo by inventing something nice as to repeat the work of the past generation (only painting things in a different color).

muglug 6y ago

Thanks for putting this into words. People want a reason to log on, a reason to show up to work. I wrote a blog post on Monday about a relatively old and not-hot language. The post nevertheless trended on Medium and received 50k views. A lot of the feedback was from people who were just happy to see someone senior say something positive about the not-hot language. Anyway, working with The New Hotness also gives people something to put on their resumé: “I built system X on top of The New Hotness. Nobody had built such a system before for The New Hotness”.

ab8 6y ago
Is being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars plus stocks and bonuses not enough of a reason to show up at work?
- randmeerkat 6y ago
  You would think so, but as it turns out, it’s not. First world problems^2.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  Not when that becomes table stakes, no. If you have five different companies offering you that kind of money, eventually you'll start thinking about more than just the money.
- kortilla 6y ago
  Well the funny thing is that once you crack FAANG interviews you can usually get offers from multiple of them and then money no longer becomes the decision factor. The choice becomes, “work on X and make $400k or work on Y and make $400k”. You bet the tie breaker often ends up being the prospects for working on cool shit.
- jlokier 6y ago
  I suspect the majority of readers are being paid less than $100k with no stock or bonuses, and correctly intuit that new-hotness things on their résumé will help them climb the salary ladder towards that magic $100k threshold.

watermelon59 6y ago

I think it's sad that the vast majority of people in our field (at least in my experience) is so damn excited about building new stuff all the time. There's no appreciation for maintaining, optimizing, and improving existing systems. There's only talk of "adding value" but very little of "keeping value." So people keep moving on to the next project, leaving the old ones running live but to rot, and at best every once in a while someone will be assigned the dreadful task of having to figure out why the "legacy" (even though it's still fully in operation and servicing customers) system had an outage and can't recover. Our field suffers from a serious lack of focus. People don't learn to work under constraints. Instead, they prefer to build a whole new thing, full of complexity and hidden issues, just to get around a few nuisances that, with the right mindset, actually force one to be creative (which should make work fun). I've recently commented here on HN about how I feel like I'm outside the norm on these things [0]. I was happy to learn I'm not alone. I do think those of us who don't mind working on "legacy" systems and perhaps with limited tools are the minority though. Sometimes it's not even about working on old systems. You work with current tech, build something, and as soon as it's barely deployable, you're expected to move on to the next thing. "It's a great opportunity for your career," they say, "you're gonna get to build something new and make key decisions." Why does it have to be decided for me? It's my current predicament. I'm working on a project that took me two months to get in the right mindset for and get all the context I needed. I had to try things out, sort out ideas, until I got a clear picture of what to build. Now I've built the first iteration of it. It works, and I'm super excited about it. But it's not done by any means. It needs more features. It needs to be polished so it doesn't make operations miserable running the thing. And yet... I have to move on, and hand it over to someone who doesn't have the same excitement for it that I have, and has maybe 10% of the context. All because building new things (and adopting The New Hotness, as you say) is what "everyone" wants. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25404039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25404039

ljm 6y ago
It doesn't help if your career path in a company is tied towards 'visibility,' where certain roles will never see a promotion no matter how critical they are. I've chosen to take on more than one heavy maintenance job, no client facing visibility in terms of fancy new features. Feedback in performance reviews would always be "it's hard for people to see what you're doing." In the end you have to find your own way to game the system to get appropriately recognised, but of course that kind of office politics isn't really what you want to spend time either. I'm doing more 'new feature' style work now but I'm happy to not be tumbling through the waves of hype. We get a little bit of new hotness, because of course you need to embrace some aspect of that to avoid stagnating and getting too stuck in your ways, but not so much of it that the engineering team is incentivised to churn through half-assed features.

satyrnein 6y ago

It's great for those engineers that they are so far up Maslow's hierarchy that they're willing to bring significant risk to their employers in the pursuit of self actualization. However, there are a lot of engineers in the world (outside SF and NYC) that are still concerned about lower levels like physiological and safety needs. I wonder if the world getting more accustomed to remote work will change the cost benefit analysis on hiring those engineers instead.