8 ms·
"That's how you influence willingness. People are willing to do much dirtier jobs given enough money." Sort of. I dealt with a large smalltalk system with it'
by ransom1538 5y ago
"That's how you influence willingness. People are willing to do much dirtier jobs given enough money."
Sort of. I dealt with a large smalltalk system with it's own datastore. Finding smalltalk devs was painful. Training new ones? It was a mess. The dev environments didn't seem to port correctly to modern linux systems - mac? forget it, we could never work out contracts with Cincom Systems to get proper licenses - they would demand us pay a portion of revenue with audit rights (wtf), staging environments were layers of hacks, smalltalk could work on port 80 but making it work with apache/nginx/load balancers was always a mess, smalltalk itself was covered in bugs and would crash for no apparent reason. All new devs knew learning smalltalk was a waste of their future job prospects - they also had no good mentors. Good luck finding things on stackoverflow. The smalltalk contractors that could help would just raise their price so high it turned into extortion (one of them even wanted a portion of gross revenue). These contractors would delete histories, use hand written journals, hide documentation, refused to train anyone, not use version control, quit in the middle of meetings -- and they all were friends - it was a total shakedown. "Just pay them more" never really worked out for us.
- tdeck 5y agoMy uncle was a smalltalk developer for a while - growing up I never realized how unusual that was. What kinds of things is it used for these days?
- burntoutfire 5y ago> A company might as well spend months of their experienced developers' time while making them mentor the more junior devs and invest a lot of resources in this, as well as have more overhead to their development because of needing to spend longer on QA and fixing bugs introduced by these juniors, for them to just turn around and leave when they've gotten the seniority that they desire. Then they behaved like Oracle, Terradata and every other "business-sensible" vendor, who manages to get his customer into a technology-based lock-in. The only way Oracle only shakes down customers for tens of millions per year and not for billions is that, if it were billions, companies would just invest into migrating off Oracle.