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Sometimes I feel like there are two worlds in IT: the one you encounter on a daily basis, and the one you read about on HN. The only thing consistently "terribl

• jmkni 6y ago
  It reminds me of that Instagram thing, you look on Instagram and see beautiful people living perfect lifes and feel completely inadequate in comparison. Then you look a little deeper and realise most of them are pretending, they're photoshopping their selfies, renting their expensive cars for a day and taking their selfies on other peoples property. HN can be a bit like that, you can feel completely inadequate compared to these super-geniuses doing everything perfectly, when really you're doing ok.
  • noir_lord 6y ago
    The simple solution is not to look on Instagram (which is a bit trite). The more complex solution is to develop a worldview where you only compete against yourself, i.e. is what I'm doing now going to make me a better person in X time. It's up to each person to decide for themselves what better means, it could be an emotional thing "will it make me more empathetic?" or a financial thing "will this allow me to earn more money?" or something else "will it make me a better programmer, chess player, cyclist, *happier*?". For all the size of the world and its complexity it collapses down to a local optimisation problem for you as a person.
  • vidarh 6y ago
    It doesn't even require them to pretend (though I do realise many do pretend). All it requires is people to be more likely to post their successes, or if mistakes then at least mistakes on the path to success. Even if everyone were to post the mundane it wouldn't generally be what would get upvoted or liked in a given medium enough to counter the successes.
    • vharuck 6y ago
      This is my thinking, too. On Instagram, we're seeing the best photos of the people who are on their one vacation of the year. Even if we ourselves post a vacation photo and it gets shared and liked, we won't think of it as one of "those" beautiful photos, because we just got lucky with that one. We remember our embarrassingly bad photos. And on HN, comments are filled with insight backed up by decades of deep experience. But the Perl expert in one thread is unlikely to be the Russian historian in the other. There are few masters-of-all-trades (though they do exist, as if to inspire and mock us). Not to mention the majority of readers whose experience is rarely relevant enough to comment.
  • josephg 6y ago
    There’s a bell curve of software engineering ability in the world. There’s a few super geniuses, a bunch of smart cookies and a whole lot of people in the middle. HN attracts a broad range of ability, but generally upvotes the smartest content. So if you sample from “upvoted HN articles and comments”, the content you read is heavily biased toward things written by unusually smart people. But there’s a range. By contrast, most companies will attract and hire people like their current employees. So the variance at any particular company is much smaller than in the general pool. Everyone ends up working alongside people like them. So if you work at a big bank or something, you probably don’t interact with many people like the super geniuses who write interesting articles that get upvoted a lot on HN. They’re over represented amongst HN content, but most programmers are average and getting by just fine. And remember, hotshots are equally ungrounded. Lots of good engineers you meet at Google were hired at straight out of collage. They have no idea how the sausage is made anywhere else. Lots of folks here don’t have your experience. They have no idea what it takes to do software at a company that sees their job as a cost centre. Or what it takes to get good work done in spite of political pressure to stagnate. Having a variety of voices gives all of us something to learn and something to teach.
    • theli0nheart 6y ago
      > HN attracts a broad range of ability, but generally upvotes the smartest content. So if you sample from “upvoted HN articles and comments”, the content you read is heavily biased toward things written by unusually smart people. But there’s a range. Does HN really upvote the “smartest” content? Citation needed, please.
      • asimjalis 6y ago
        I am not certain about this either. My experience has been that the newer posts on the new tab are frequently more interesting than the posts on the leaderboard.
        • bckr 6y ago
          For instance, the OP is not very well written or informative, IMHO. Great discussion though
  • finnh 6y ago
    AA saying: "don't judge your insides by other people's outsides"
• anorwell 6y ago
  Chesterton's fence [1] captures this idea: one should not tear something down until they understand it. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence
• gameswithgo 6y ago
  A think I have been realizing a lot, is that in all aspects of life, a person of even average intelligence can easily imagine how things ought to be. The licensing office should be more organize, the software should start instantly, the government should be more efficient, etc etc. However we are humans, only recently evolve from something a bit like an ape. Hampered by emotions and constant fits of irrationality. Actually achieving the correct behaviors that we can easily imagine is very hard and very rare. So we are correct in our criticisms but could be more calm and understanding about the fact that everything is terrible, and strive to make even very small improvements and enjoy those.
  • bjornsing 6y ago
    True, but don’t forget that the frequency and severity of those fits of irrationality depends tremendously on how accepted irrationally is (and what personal consequences it carries). I know it sounds like a contradiction, but I think we need both high standards and an understanding that working together on intellectual tasks is hard.
  • goatinaboat 6y ago
    A think I have been realizing a lot, is that in all aspects of life, a person of even average intelligence can easily imagine how things ought to be. The licensing office should be more organize, the software should start instantly, the government should be more efficient, etc etc I don't believe this is true, an average person can easily imagine a local maxima, but everyone's local maxima is different. For example it might be very convenient for person A if the licensing office were open 24 hours but probably not so convenient for person B who would have to cover the night shift every other week or person C whose taxes would need to pay for it. And so on. Nearly every sub-optimality from one perspective is an optimality from another.
• rorykoehler 6y ago
  It’s an interesting mental model but I would put forward that it should be the best possible world we are currently capable of creating. Due to our own biological shortcomings I don’t think we’ll ever reach the best possible outcome in anything.
  • ukj 6y ago
    Then why do you call it a "possible" outcome?
    • rorykoehler 6y ago
      It’s possible but infinitely unlikely
      • ukj 6y ago
        1 in infinity likelihood is 0.
        • rorykoehler 6y ago
          I disagree. So does quantum theory
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
• runawaybottle 6y ago
  This flys in the face of how progress occurs. There’s a reason why movie theater seats are full leather reclinable with cup holders. It’s that absurd push for imagining ‘better’. Large systems in general are hard to refactor. Our impulse in tech is to always consider the refactor because we see how in other systems a refactor is impossible or takes blood (our governments and countries, institutions like education/healthcare). Those in tech have seen many systems to compare against (what went wrong, what went good, even on the most basic projects). The first thing they tell you about capitalism is that humans haven’t encountered a better system, which is true. Make that argument to a programmer. They either saw a shittier system, a better one, a more fitting one, a proper one, a terrible one, etc. You pretty much can’t tell us anything because we’ve seen it somewhere. Being content with systems is bad for all of us. Being content with your life is good for all of us.
• reader_mode 6y ago
  I think software is relatively young and evolves faster than any branch I've seen simply because the compute platform changes so much over night. Just imagine that the PC I started coding on was a P1 machine with 16MB RAM. My smartwatch has 10x compute power. Cloud computing, IoT, GPGPU, SSD, multicore - major underlying constraint shifts in how we do compute. Even the best possible solution is only best in the time it was created, and because it's good it will get entrenched and keep getting used, even when the constraints it was created in no longer apply even remotely and it's actually a very suboptimal solution given new constraints. Everything from programming languages, OS kernels, file systems, distributed computing frameworks - soo much of it has ideas and solutions that are technically better but it's hard to overcome the inertia
  • noir_lord 6y ago
    The "PC" I started on was a 1Mhz z80 with 1KB of RAM - the first computer I owned had 48KB. I'm sat in front of a machine that is literally billions of times faster and many orders of magnitude more powerful in every other axis (storage, bandwidth). And yet, strip away the fancy IDE, the container tooling and it's all still my brain, some text on a screen and my understanding of the problem.
    • reader_mode 6y ago
      But the problem isn't "how to do this in 48KB of ram" these days it's "how do I do this on a distributed compute cloud with high level services". Neural networks were a hypothetical approach, nowadays you can rent a ML pipeline for a couple of bucks and download prebuilt models. So taking an approach from that era (for example C or UNIX) has obvious legacy baggage and isn't optimal in modern context but is still used because of inertia. Also at this point it's less about your brain and understanding and more about being able to search and mash together. It's not just having a fancy IDE, internet and search fundamentally changed how you learn and solve problems.
      • noir_lord 6y ago
        Agreed on all counts. The primitives we use are at the wrong level of abstraction for the problems we are solving but..well I haven't seen anyone come up with ones better enough they displace the existing solutions.
• pdimitar 6y ago
  You do have an excellent point for part of the cases. We should IMO also entertain one more possibility: namely pressure from the top. A lot of people who I knew as sympathetic and calm before they took management roles turned into something I could code in one minute: namely a program that asks "how much is this going to take?" and if your answer is above N hours/days then they say "no, we're not doing it". And that's not because they are stupid or suddenly non-sympathetic. It's because their bosses optimize for those metrics and measure them (and their salary, and their bonuses, and even their vacation days) by the same metrics. Perverted incentives play a big part in the current state of things where everyone just looks baffled at thing X and is like "why in the holy frak isn't this working better?". Truth is, MANY, and I mean really A LOT of people know that their work is sub-optimal but pressure from above prevents them from making it better. And people are not independent -- for most people outside IT and other prestige / high-skill professions, standing up to the boss means 3 to 9 months of unemployment and maybe no food on the table. Hence everybody learns to suck it up and do the bare minimum that keeps them employed, perpetuating the cycle. Multiply that to at least 90% of our world and it's IMO quite easy to understand why it is like it is.
  • zaphar 6y ago
    Some of what you say about management is true. But if you really want to fully understand then you need to keep following that trail of incentives. Your bosses boss doesn't optimize for those metrics "just because". There are reasons and persuading them requires understanding those reasons. A company has only so much revenue. Wasting that revenue in the best case reduces profits. In the worst case it kills the company. Changing a perverse incentive requires understanding whether it is actually perverse or not and then proposing a compelling alternative that results in better results for the company.
    • tremon 6y ago
      Changing a perverse incentive requires understanding whether it is actually perverse or not and then proposing a compelling alternative that results in better results for the company. While that's true, considering those incentives and changing them if necessary is part of my boss's job, not mine. My job is only to report the misaligned incentives I perceive to my boss. If my boss isn't able to make me understand his decisions, that's my cue to find a new boss. And I concede, those bosses are rare. I've only had two in twenty years of employment. It takes time to recognize the qualities you need in a boss to perform well. I know myself well enough in that department to actively look for those qualities. Even to the point where I prefer a less challenging job under the right boss than the perfect job under the wrong leadership.
• legulere 6y ago
  A lot of things have entirely historic reasons, that don’t apply anymore.
  • mellavora 6y ago
    if you can enumerate these reasons and demonstrate that they don't apply any more, then you are in a good position to change the thing. If you don't know what these reasons are, it is hard to know with certainty that they no longer apply. see above reference to Chesterton's fence.
    • croes 6y ago
      I don't see it that way. People are creatures of habit and prefer to torment themselves with existing problems that they have learned to deal with rather than get involved in something new.
      • iFreilicht 6y ago
        People also love to create and get new and shiny things. Combine that with force of habit, and you get truckloads of engineers that tear down and replace what was working and only needed maintenance. Both forces exist, the important part is to balance them properly.
        • g8oz 6y ago
          >>People also love to create and get new and shiny things. Ah yes, the novelty seeking magpie developer
• bjornsing 6y ago
  > I think most people who work in tech could use a bit of humility influenced by this line of thought: if a solution exists today, and it has yet to be replaced, it's at least possible that it's over all the best solution, and the reason you're not seeing that is because of a lack of understanding. It also doesn’t have to be the best, and probably isn’t – the space of all possible bit strings large enough to encode Kubernetes is quite big. Being “good enough” is sufficient, and often the discussion really comes down to differing opinions on what that means. These is no uniquely and clearly defined objective function here. People need to stop thinking that theirs is the one and only.
  • KajMagnus 6y ago
    > doesn’t have to be the best, and probably isn’t Precisely. And, building the truly best solution, is often a mistake, in that it can take pointlessly long. Good enough is good enough, and others might find things to improve, and be correct that it'd been better in their way — the important thing is instead to realize that actually making any improvement one might have found, can be far down on the priority list. Maybe there'll always be other more important things to do, so it'll never happen. > > "at least possible that it's over all the best solution" can be rewritten as: > > "at least possible that it's a good enough solution" And maybe it can make sense to make improvement suggestions, and then, when the others say "yea but there's too much else to do", then, ok, maybe forget about it and be happy anyway.
• wpietri 6y ago
  We are at the very beginning of the history of computing. The age of print lasted 500 years, and there's every sign the age of computers will be longer. The notion that anything we are doing now has been perfected is hard to swallow. Especially given the way each innovation creates new opportunities for improvement. I'm willing to assume that this is the best of all possible worlds, that everybody did the best they could in the moment. But having all that history behind us gives us lessons such that tomorrow's best possible world is surely better than today's. I agree that we should have less technical arrogance and jackassery in the future. But that emotional immaturity is also part of today's best possible world.
• mightybyte 6y ago
  Interesting. This kind of seems like the software version of the efficient-market hypothesis from financial economics. It's pretty much obvious that markets have inefficiencies. But at the same time, they're the best we've got and constructing something that's better in general is really hard.
  • rebelos 6y ago
    Good analogy. I'd say the efficient markets hypothesis would be better interpreted as "you cannot deterministically identify an inefficiency", i.e. you're always assuming some amount of risk with any trade. You could probably make a similar case for improvements more abstractly - you cannot be perfectly confident a priori that something will be net value additive over the previous configuration.
• sidpatil 6y ago
  > Gottfried Leibniz suffered no small amount of flak for his conclusion that the reason the world looks the way it does is because it's already "the best of all possible worlds": you may think you see an improvement, but you lack divine understanding and therefore you don't see how it would actually make things worse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as...
• TeMPOraL 6y ago
  In my head, I've started to understand the suck in terms of timescales. Leaving products that are too complicated for the people who build it aside, even if you have the most competent and well-oiled team onboard, there are two things that together guarantee their output will suck: - Usually, the "right way" to do something is only apparent halfway through doing that thing, or after you finished that thing. - There's rarely time to redo things with benefit of hindsight, because the priority is always to work on business goals first. That's how things were everywhere I worked or seen, so I believe this is likely a general phenomenon. But the consequence of that is strong path dependence. It's not that using Kubernetes makes you a moron or a smart person. It's that somebody already deployed Kubernetes for a project that's too simple for it (or they were too inexperienced), but business pressure makes it impossible to spend a couple of weeks undoing it, so everyone is stuck with the pain. Perhaps the reason for the initial Kubernetes deployment was because it was the fastest way to fix some other issue, and the company could not allocate enough time for engineers to do it right. To be clear, this isn't me ranting about "stupid managers with their priorities". Pursuing business goals is the raison d'être of a software company (it's pretty much a tautology). I'm just saying, it's hard to improve things without lots of slack, and slack is a competitive disadvantage. Perhaps another facet to this is: business lifecycle is too short for software lifecycle. If you were to spend time on redoing things properly, by the time you were done, you'd be out of business.
• ignoramous 6y ago
  > ... I think most people who work in tech could use a bit of humility influenced by this line of thought: if a solution exists today, and it has yet to be replaced, it's at least possible that it's over all the best solution, and the reason you're not seeing that is because of a lack of understanding. Agree. See: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/ That said, we may not get far if no one makes an attempt to tear down those fences. Tech is like art in that respect: Lets practitioners experiment like no other engineering discipline.
• de6u99er 6y ago
  Doesn't matter if you use kubernetes. If the system has not been designed for scale-out you will ultimately lose. K8s is just a container orchestrator. And containers are just virtual machines.
  • bckr 6y ago
    That makes sense. > containers are just virtual machines I think this part is false though. Containers are, well, contained processes with contained storage. No simulated hardware like VM implies
    • zo1 6y ago
      Its an unecessary complication when explaining containers to the uninitiated. Just tell them they are essentially VMs and they'll follow along with the other concepts just fine instead of looking at you wide eyed as they try decipher how "contained processes with contained storage" interacts with their use case. Once they get experience, they'll learn the details.
    • betaby 6y ago
      VMs are not 'simulated hardware' either honestly.
      • bckr 6y ago
        How would you put it, then?
      • etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
        To varying degrees they actually are. The hypervisor provides simulated devices and the kernel inside has device drivers to speak to them. For efficiency these devices are as "thin" as possible, but they are still simulated devices. Unless you're using something like PCIe passthrough to give raw hardware access to a VM.
• CuriouslyC 6y ago
  People are afraid of change and uncertainty. Basically all our solutions are basically the best we could do without making any leaps into the unknown from our current position. Just because we couldn't have done better given our starting position, that doesn't mean we couldn't have done better if we'd started over with a new initial position. Think of it like gradient descent. The location you end up is the best location in the neighborhood of your starting position, but it's almost certainly a local minimum, and if you started over from a different initial position there's a good chance you'd find a lower minimum.
• simpleguitar 6y ago
  The recent HN article about how our brains prefer additive solutions vs the subtractive also seems to point in the direction of ever increasing complexity. Maybe the field of software can really mature only when looking for subtractive solutions become part of the computing culture.
• smoe 6y ago
  While I do agree on the humility and lack of understanding points, my perspective is more, that the current solution is probably not the best, but what the best solution would be is pretty much unknowable for any non trivial system. Instead, it is more likely that you are approaching a local maxima. So the question is, whether it makes more sense to optimize your current approach or seeking another maxima which implies making things worse for a while before they get better and you might get stuck halfway there. Either way might be a better choice for a given situation and due to lack of information and changing environments carry their own risks.
• michaelcampbell 6y ago
  > the one you encounter on a daily basis, and the one you read about on HN This is true of any "real world" subset, vs its online outlets; HN may just be more niche than some.
• troelsSteegin 6y ago
  Two rebuttals to Leibniz are "that was then, this is now", and "but this is special". Both are fluff until you answer the real question, which is "why are things the way they are"? It takes both humility and courage to engage with something you don't understand, but if you are curious, it is also deep fun.
• copycatchiller 6y ago
  yes, but there are also things done because "they have always been done this way." That's also a dangerous pattern imo.
• dalbasal 6y ago
  My favourite walking dead character and comic idol is King Ezekiel, because "embrace the contradiction." Since we can't avoid thinking in generalizations, and they're usually false, the only option is to accept contingent thinking. Sometimes, respecting "the way things are" is the right way. Sometimes, rejecting the way things are is the right way. It's often how things get better. There isn't a true "way" you can live by in all circumstances. There are hints though. If you're using disrespect/challenge to write a good essay (like this author) or to try and change something.... rejecting "the way things are" might be good. If you're just whining, probably not. Humility good. Complacency bad. These are definitions, not value statements. They're not necessarily contradictory, if you care about such things... but they can have a Hillel/Shamai^ dynamic to them. Sometimes, an adversarial discussion like "Kubernetes" vs "Learn Tow to Sysadmin, You Moron" is enlightening. Sometimes it's no-it-all asholery. I don't think there are universal rules governing the distinction. In any case, I don't think this author is being "terrible." He does recognize that scaling is a problem that he doesn't fully understand and meanders through a lot of possible reasons. None of it is mean. The title is a little click-bait, but I don't think it's a foul. He's quite respectful, in fact. ^Like political left/right, but more bearded.
  • pier25 6y ago
    > There isn't a true "way" you can live by in all circumstances. It's like applying principles like DRY. If you push that principle to the extreme, your code will be shit. DRY is a good principle, but not a rule to follow blindly.
• jhgb 6y ago
  > Gottfried Leibniz suffered no small amount of flak for his conclusion that the reason the world looks the way it does is because it's already "the best of all possible worlds": you may think you see an improvement, but you lack divine understanding and therefore you don't see how it would actually make things worse. Isn't this line of thought disproven by a single improvement? People before the improvement could have argued along the same lines and then be proven wrong.
• yourabstraction 6y ago
  I've seen this a lot when new people join a software project and immediately start telling people the "right" way to do everything and that all their solutions are far from optimal. Sometimes this can be useful if the project was a mess, but more often than not the new guy is failing to take time to understand the subtle reasons behind the team's various decisions. It's likely that the solutions were actually closer to optimal that meets the eye when you consider time constraints, developer resources, company politics, etc. I've been on both sides of this, and look back and cringe when I think about projects I've criticized before trying to understand them. I've also had the experience of being early at a startup and having later employees come in and constantly complain about how sub optimal everything is. The problem is they're missing the time crunch that was in place, and the fact that if subpar solutions weren't used the company would have never gotten to market and they would have never gotten a job there. Software isn't created in a vaccuum.
• Joeri 6y ago
  Chesterton’s fence as applied to software: don’t replace a bad software solution until you understand why it is that way. Still, looking back we can see how software solutions were not optimal for their age, and how amazing things can be coaxed out of old hardware using new insights. It would be pretty remarkable that precisely now is when we finally achieved optimal software. More likely, we’re still getting it wrong, and this is just one more step along the line. The truth can be a little of both: yes, we can do better than what exists now, but we’re not guaranteed to unless we understand what came before.
• emodendroket 6y ago
  In a bigger sense it just doesn’t matter. A lot of the criticisms in the Unix Hater’s Handbook are still trenchant decades later. And so what? Everyone knows how to use Unix and they’re used to the deficiencies. Up and down the stack until the advantages of the new thing are so overwhelmingly obvious that people will jump.
• narag 6y ago
  Wow, a lot of responses, this one will get buried, but here I go anyway. In my opinion, what makes most of the wrongs we see is that computing is very young and we haven't had the time to set up half decent solutions for anything. There is a huge demand for any solution, because a bad solution is better than no solution. The Kubernetes vs sysadmin is like the Diogenes story. There are two versions. In one of them someone tells Diogenes "if you praised the king, you wouldn't need to eat lentils" and he replied "if you ate lentils you wouldn't need to praise the king". In the other version it's just the same story only Diogenes talks first. I don't like lentils. I don't like to praise the king either. Both are terrible solutions, but while we have kingpraiseless burgers, we need to choose something that somehow works.
• nbardy 6y ago
  This is how I feel about JavaScript. I used to let the HN expert problem solving crowd show me all the problems and think of how bad it sucked. Now I’m happy it just worked most of the time.
• tracerbulletx 6y ago
  It would also be nice to look at the efficiency of software engineering and business practices from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and 30 years ago and realize just how far we've come. Software is running more things, bigger things, more important things, more complicated things, and we get better all the time, it's ok to live in an imperfect world and just make things a little better every day. Its ok to try things, find they're suboptimal and make changes, it's ok to retry things that have been done before but with a new spin.
  • kaba0 6y ago
    How far have we come? I think the answer is sort of disappointingly at most a small constant factor. The thing is, most software projects have an inherent complexity that can’t be reduced. This gives an implicit limit on what can be reasonably created by humans. And most software is insanely complex — simply because otherwise they would not be useful in many cases. So writing software from scratch takes pretty much the same amount of time as it did 10 or 20 years ago. Yeah performance is much better both in hardware and in software (runtime, compiler), but eg. desktop app development may have become less productive since. All in all, there is No Silver Bullets, and there haven’t been since either. The only thing there is is incorporating already existing software.
• m463 6y ago
  When you say that, I'm reminded of Feynman's book[1] describing the challenger accident investigation. Basically he's investigating and goes and talks to the software guys and quickly concludes everything is awesome, and moves onto investigating hardware. I was initially taken aback by this part. But he later he wrote: "To summarize, then, the computer software checking system is of highest quality. There appears to be no process of gradually fooling oneself while degrading standards, the process so characteristic of the solid rocket booster and space shuttle main engine safety systems." It makes sense, I mean they can fly simulations over and over before the shuttle is even built, let alone launched. [1] The first book was "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman", the second with the challenger investigation was, "What do you care what other people think?"
• passivate 6y ago
  The other thing is nobody likes working on problems that don't challenge them. They want to work on problems that are +1 level above their current skill. The problem is that the 'first solution' they developer/engineer is very likely to be shitty (and they probably won't even know how or why its shitty) purely because they're not experienced. Ideally you want 'seasoned vets' for whom this level of engineering/development is old-hat and have them churn out a solid product that handles all the edge cases that you only know about when you have a long-term experience with the technology/domain.
• victor106 6y ago
  This is so true. There’s also the case where you or someone is hired to offer a fresh perspective on an existing system. After looking at it if your solution is “it looks great the way it is”. The person who hired you would think “why the hell did I even hire this guy?” So even though you know the current system it’s a good system you try to propose a solution just to show value. That it was worth it to hire you.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]