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It's because most software developers add negative value. Most not them aren't investing in learning at all and are just playing around and understanding things

It's because most software developers add negative value. Most not them aren't investing in learning at all and are just playing around and understanding things on the surface level. I'm fairly certain it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer. I've been getting into elixir and was very sad to realise that a lot of the best practices have been enshrined into the erlang otp library for 20 years and we've forgotten about it. Think how many engineers you know that can reason well about db indexes or could implement something like redis given enough time. On the one hand it's fairly depressing, on the other hand it makes sense from the incentive structure - business people treat them like "nerds" they're not on the same career path as someone in management, PMs come from weird professions that have nothing to do with software and are focussing on weird scrum processes and jira tickets... At least that has been my experience. I've seen massive amounts of wasted resources that has made me a bit jaded

ardit33 6y ago
"it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer" you are wrong in many levels.... accounting is a field that moves slowly and it is highly regulated Software is still in the wild wild west phase, and it catches and loses trends all the time. We are currently using languages and platforms that didn't exist at all 10-12 years ago, yet, in 10 years whatever you are doing now, might be completely obsolete and you have to retrain-retool.
- mstipetic 6y ago
  Why is that? It's because we don't learn from the past and keep thinking we're the smartest and have to reinvent everything with every new generation of developers. I've worked at a company where elasticseatch, postgres, message queues, custom microservice platforms, custom cicd platforms were deployed for a load that could fit in ram of one machine. With maybe 10 customers per minute. And you're wrong about accounting, new laws and regulations are being passed constantly and one has to keep up with them all the time
  - pm90 6y ago
    Its important to distinguish b/w anecdotal experience and industry trends. A lot of great tech was invented to solve very real problems that groups of people faced. Once it gets hyped though, everyone wants it in their stack because they've read about it in blog posts or want to give a conference talk about or <INANE_REASON_X>. Elasticsearch, postgres, message queues etc. all were invented by people when they faced real problems. As such, I don't view them as reinventions, but as simply inventions. Software engineers tackle a problem space thats truly ginormous and diverse. It seems quite natural that this situation would spawn a multitude of tools to manage that complexity, get a competitive edge, or just build a product that just wasn't possible before.
    - mstipetic 6y ago
      You're just proving my point. As a profession we base our decisions on blog posts and potential fun. I'm all for these technologies, I'm against the fact that regularly as a profession we order multi million dollar digging equipment to dig a small hole. I've literally seen a bored group of devops start building their own cicd solution and give up after a few months of (highly paid) work Not to mention that all these powerful technologies are super complicated and developers don't take the proper time to learn how to operate it correctly. Just think of the Hadoop craze 5 or so years ago when people were throwing it at few gig datasets. Or even now what's happening with "data engineering" where we build massive pipelines that could be handled by a competent python script. It's crazy and we don't as a profession have any success criteria on our deliverables and we've just accepted that "things are hard" while getting paid more than most professions can dream about
      - pm90 6y ago
        It’s becoming pretty clear that you’ve never seen the power of these tools in action. I don’t think I proved your point at all. I very explicitly showed the opposite. I’ve worked at companies that ingest petabytes of data, processing it would just not be possible without hadoop and sister tech (chiefly hdfs). Hundreds of developers working on a common codebase that would not have been possible without modern ci/cd solutions. Data pipelines whose reliability would be 0 without a modern rpc system like thrift to ensure system interfaces are well defined and consistent. There are very real and practical use cases for these technologies. Just because you haven’t experienced them doesn’t mean that they’re overkill. Just because enterprise engineers like to overengineer using these tools does not mean that everyone does. There are very real scenarios where these tools have helped smaller companies and startups to punch beyond their weight.
- kaba0 6y ago
  But experience with one language tranfers quite well to a new one. I also see a deep problem from the business side, that a programmer is easily replaceable ot that just by throwing more (mediocre) people at the problem will help solve it faster, or even the existence of rock-star developers. Building software is slow, because essential complexity. We are writing programs that no one person can hold in their heads. And based on the average CRUD app, it might not be trivial (even though they are already increasingly complex), but more complex applications really can take multiple years/decades to create. And it is a bit sad that there is little focus on reuse, even though that is the only silver-bullet out there. No language, no tool; but (high-quality) libraries.
  - berkes 6y ago
    Experience with languages transfers well, because programming is 80% "architecture" and 20% language (or framework or stack). (numbers made up). The latter is a fast moving field. The first requires deep knowledge, and experience. When you build an application with the latest javascript framework, vue-native, or ncurses, there is far more than learning ECMA2020, MVC or that ncurses-rust-binding-lib. It requires you to study and understand the domain. Translate that into a domain model. Finetune that. Search for patterns and frameworks that fit this model. Develop the software in a way that it can be maintained, react to market demands and so on. These are skills that transcend languages or frameworks. That you can apply to both the latest kubernetes-docker-cluster and to the server in the closet. That you can apply to ncurses or vue-native. You'll need to learn when, but mostly why, Rails becomes a PIAS for certain jobs, but also when or why ASP.net or Spring is not magically going to solve the problems you have with Rails. ASP.net or Spring probably don't translate well to, say Rails, wrt syntax or features. But the deeper knowledge, about how to model your OOP translates just fine. Or when all of those tools are going to be a PIAS because the domain is ill-fitted for OOP or MVC and needs something else. And knowing React and Redux is neat (untill react is replaced by vue?) the knowledge it teaches you about functional state patterns will help you in your next elixir or even Rust project. Or vice-versa: a dev who only ever worked on your typical MVC CRUD-app, will probably have a hard time grokking Redux, whereas someone withour any JS experience but knowledge and experience in events, CQRS, or functional programming can pick it up in days: all they'll need to learn is the quircks of javascript (undefined-is-not-a-function).
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  Accounting is highly regulated, but the regulations change basically every year and the penalties for not following them can be very severe.
gonzo41 6y ago
You may be jaded, but it doesn't mean you're wrong. Framework churn is such an issue, and so it language and all the other fashions that we are victim too. People don't spend enough time getting value from what they decide to use. I think a more relaxing way to think about software, is to think about bridges and buildings. Sometimes bridges and buildings fall down. It happens less now. However, Civil engineers have had about ~2500 years to try all the combos and now they can both make things both robust and pretty. If software is bridges, we as an industry spend a lot of effort on the gold plating very rickety construction. Gold plating in the form of over security engineering inconsequential little things, over complicating UI's, rapidly building new languages because of a perceptual deficiency in language Y. It'll stabilize, and success will go up. The business / PM side is also new at this and doesn't control risk well yet. Agile and Scrum attempt it but .... the same fundamentals that get a building built well and on budget also apply to good software.

ardit33 6y ago

"it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer" you are wrong in many levels.... accounting is a field that moves slowly and it is highly regulated Software is still in the wild wild west phase, and it catches and loses trends all the time. We are currently using languages and platforms that didn't exist at all 10-12 years ago, yet, in 10 years whatever you are doing now, might be completely obsolete and you have to retrain-retool.

mstipetic 6y ago
Why is that? It's because we don't learn from the past and keep thinking we're the smartest and have to reinvent everything with every new generation of developers. I've worked at a company where elasticseatch, postgres, message queues, custom microservice platforms, custom cicd platforms were deployed for a load that could fit in ram of one machine. With maybe 10 customers per minute. And you're wrong about accounting, new laws and regulations are being passed constantly and one has to keep up with them all the time
- pm90 6y ago
  Its important to distinguish b/w anecdotal experience and industry trends. A lot of great tech was invented to solve very real problems that groups of people faced. Once it gets hyped though, everyone wants it in their stack because they've read about it in blog posts or want to give a conference talk about or <INANE_REASON_X>. Elasticsearch, postgres, message queues etc. all were invented by people when they faced real problems. As such, I don't view them as reinventions, but as simply inventions. Software engineers tackle a problem space thats truly ginormous and diverse. It seems quite natural that this situation would spawn a multitude of tools to manage that complexity, get a competitive edge, or just build a product that just wasn't possible before.
  - mstipetic 6y ago
    You're just proving my point. As a profession we base our decisions on blog posts and potential fun. I'm all for these technologies, I'm against the fact that regularly as a profession we order multi million dollar digging equipment to dig a small hole. I've literally seen a bored group of devops start building their own cicd solution and give up after a few months of (highly paid) work Not to mention that all these powerful technologies are super complicated and developers don't take the proper time to learn how to operate it correctly. Just think of the Hadoop craze 5 or so years ago when people were throwing it at few gig datasets. Or even now what's happening with "data engineering" where we build massive pipelines that could be handled by a competent python script. It's crazy and we don't as a profession have any success criteria on our deliverables and we've just accepted that "things are hard" while getting paid more than most professions can dream about
    - pm90 6y ago
      It’s becoming pretty clear that you’ve never seen the power of these tools in action. I don’t think I proved your point at all. I very explicitly showed the opposite. I’ve worked at companies that ingest petabytes of data, processing it would just not be possible without hadoop and sister tech (chiefly hdfs). Hundreds of developers working on a common codebase that would not have been possible without modern ci/cd solutions. Data pipelines whose reliability would be 0 without a modern rpc system like thrift to ensure system interfaces are well defined and consistent. There are very real and practical use cases for these technologies. Just because you haven’t experienced them doesn’t mean that they’re overkill. Just because enterprise engineers like to overengineer using these tools does not mean that everyone does. There are very real scenarios where these tools have helped smaller companies and startups to punch beyond their weight.
kaba0 6y ago
But experience with one language tranfers quite well to a new one. I also see a deep problem from the business side, that a programmer is easily replaceable ot that just by throwing more (mediocre) people at the problem will help solve it faster, or even the existence of rock-star developers. Building software is slow, because essential complexity. We are writing programs that no one person can hold in their heads. And based on the average CRUD app, it might not be trivial (even though they are already increasingly complex), but more complex applications really can take multiple years/decades to create. And it is a bit sad that there is little focus on reuse, even though that is the only silver-bullet out there. No language, no tool; but (high-quality) libraries.
- berkes 6y ago
  Experience with languages transfers well, because programming is 80% "architecture" and 20% language (or framework or stack). (numbers made up). The latter is a fast moving field. The first requires deep knowledge, and experience. When you build an application with the latest javascript framework, vue-native, or ncurses, there is far more than learning ECMA2020, MVC or that ncurses-rust-binding-lib. It requires you to study and understand the domain. Translate that into a domain model. Finetune that. Search for patterns and frameworks that fit this model. Develop the software in a way that it can be maintained, react to market demands and so on. These are skills that transcend languages or frameworks. That you can apply to both the latest kubernetes-docker-cluster and to the server in the closet. That you can apply to ncurses or vue-native. You'll need to learn when, but mostly why, Rails becomes a PIAS for certain jobs, but also when or why ASP.net or Spring is not magically going to solve the problems you have with Rails. ASP.net or Spring probably don't translate well to, say Rails, wrt syntax or features. But the deeper knowledge, about how to model your OOP translates just fine. Or when all of those tools are going to be a PIAS because the domain is ill-fitted for OOP or MVC and needs something else. And knowing React and Redux is neat (untill react is replaced by vue?) the knowledge it teaches you about functional state patterns will help you in your next elixir or even Rust project. Or vice-versa: a dev who only ever worked on your typical MVC CRUD-app, will probably have a hard time grokking Redux, whereas someone withour any JS experience but knowledge and experience in events, CQRS, or functional programming can pick it up in days: all they'll need to learn is the quircks of javascript (undefined-is-not-a-function).
TheCoelacanth 6y ago
Accounting is highly regulated, but the regulations change basically every year and the penalties for not following them can be very severe.

gonzo41 6y ago

You may be jaded, but it doesn't mean you're wrong. Framework churn is such an issue, and so it language and all the other fashions that we are victim too. People don't spend enough time getting value from what they decide to use. I think a more relaxing way to think about software, is to think about bridges and buildings. Sometimes bridges and buildings fall down. It happens less now. However, Civil engineers have had about ~2500 years to try all the combos and now they can both make things both robust and pretty. If software is bridges, we as an industry spend a lot of effort on the gold plating very rickety construction. Gold plating in the form of over security engineering inconsequential little things, over complicating UI's, rapidly building new languages because of a perceptual deficiency in language Y. It'll stabilize, and success will go up. The business / PM side is also new at this and doesn't control risk well yet. Agile and Scrum attempt it but .... the same fundamentals that get a building built well and on budget also apply to good software.