5 ms·

Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.

giantg2 5y ago
I'd like to see it that way for my own situation. But I have no alternatives for making decent money. It's not wise to be a slacker without a contingency plan. I'm just dumb.
jseban 5y ago
Yeah always switching tools basically resets your experience to zero, so you have to do the same mistakes over and over, no wonder it's hard to stay motivated. And the "senior" jobs have zero power, so you can't stop people from making mistakes, and trying to "influence" just makes the experience even more exhausting and frustrating when people have no reason to listen to you. I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss. It's really rigged for shorter careers.
- trevormcneal 5y ago
  the whole tech thing is changing fast, ageism is a true thing, in a scenario where most of the previous knowledge can be ignored, being a senior with 5 years of experience, 10 or 20 doesn't change much. Given that young people usually simp for the companies much more due to being naive, they have a huge preference in the hiring process. Tech is removing the root of the knowledge, migrating from understanding the solution, to quick copy&paste from some places.
  - helge9210 5y ago
    Half life of knowledge in our profession is more or less a year and a half. This means 5 years of experience is the maximum you can accumulate. Maybe years are not a good metric for experience.
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      Do you mean as in you forget or that new ways to do stuff are reinvented?
      - helge9210 5y ago
        The latter. As an example I can think of: - jQuery, Backbone/Knockout, React progression - C++03, C++11 - Qt Widgets, Qt Quick - SQL to NoSQL and back again - Windows NT, 2000, Server On the other hand, AWS Lambda seems like CGI/FastCGI all over again, but with proper automation, so I have at least one data point on 20 year cycles (to confirm we need someone who is in profession for at least 40 years).
        shrimp_emoji 5y ago
        >- C++03, C++11 Seriously? Amending a trash fire with a mound of glowing embers (that can't all be extinguished because precious backwards compatibility -- e.g., `auto_ptr`) is "just reinvention"? You can only hold that view if you don't understand C++11. :p You're more accurately complaining about "invention" (well, in the C++ world; in the Rust world, it's "C++ implemented our stuff").
        pdfernhout 5y ago
        Developer here who has been programming over 40 years (since I was a teenager in the late 1970s). I know I am stretching things a bit here, but IBM mainframes, multi-user Forth systems, and distributed QNX systems ranging from the 1970s to the 1980s -- not to mention UNIX systems -- could all support remote procedure calls or interprocess/interapplication scripting across standard APIs to some extent (for a loose sense of process or application, especially with Forth). Even Smalltalk back then could do that to an extent but mostly from a single-user perspective in the sense that Smalltalk is mostly about message-passing objects. Essentially, you could have a system that could talk to itself or other similar systems in standard ways. Yeah, there have been so many cycles of forgetting and reinventing with new generations of programmers. Although it is true some things improve even as sometimes other things decay for a constantly changing kaleidoscope of opportunities and risks (a bit like host/parasite arms races in evolutionary cycles). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CP/CMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CP/CMS https://www.forth.com/resources/forth-programming-language/ https://www.forth.com/resources/forth-programming-language/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/qnx_4.25_docs/tcpip50/prog_guide/rpc_pro.html https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/qnx_4.25_docs/tcpip50/pr... And also from the 1960s-1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28computer_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28computer_system%29 "Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education, perhaps its most enduring legacy is its place in the origins of online community. This was made possible by PLATO's groundbreaking communication and interface capabilities, features whose significance is only lately being recognized by computer historians. PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley in 1973, was among the world's first online message boards, and years later became the direct progenitor of Lotus Notes." And from a different perspective, what is email but a standard way to do a remote procedure call to hopefully invoke some behavior -- even if a human may often be in the loop? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email And from the 1930s an earlier Paul Otlet invented the idea of using a standard 3x5 index card to store and transmit information (mainly metadata): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet "Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU) which utilized 3x5 inch index cards, used commonly in library catalogs around the world (now largely displaced by the advent of the online public access catalog (OPAC)). Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world's knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935)." For another example of cycles, my current favorite UI technology is Mithril+HyperScript+Tachyons for JavaScript (although Elm is great too conceptually, and likely inspired Mithril and React in part) which is so easy to use from a developer ergonomic point of view in part by (simplifying with a very broad brush) re-inventing the OpenGL video game paradigm of redrawing everything (with behind-the-scenes VDOM optimizations) from essentially a global state tree whenever the UI is considered "dirty" because someone touched it. Mithril is so much easier to use than UI systems that are all about creating dependencies (like most Smalltalk systems) or which require storing and updating state in carefully managed components (like React) or similar constrained models. But sadly React+JSX+SCSS has so far won the mindshare war despite overall worse developer ergonomics. I hope that cycle continues to turn someday and the Mithril approach will win out (if maybe in some other implementation by then). https://github.com/pdfernhout/choose-mithril https://github.com/pdfernhout/choose-mithril Frankly it has been frustrating over the decades to see great ideas lose out for a time to lesser ones with better marketing or other institutional advantages or other non-technical issues (Forth vs. DOS, CPM vs. DOS, Smalltalk vs. Java, Mithril vs. React) or which better fit with the familiarity of developers with earlier systems (HyperScript vs. JSX, Lisp vs. C++). Yet, I can also still be hopeful things may improve as social dynamics and technical dynamics change over time in various ways. Like was said about JavaScript which I mainly program in now: "It is better than we deserve..."
- sinenomine 5y ago
  > I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions In my experience, the only way of getting some decision power is moving into management. Even team lead roles don't count and don't give you any ownership over the product direction. In big tech engineers are generally trusted more, but still product ownership is dedicated to management.
- 7speter 5y ago
  > I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss. Uhh... who are these junior people who don't like having a boss? I read the first part of this sentence and wondered why wouldn't a lower level colleague not want a senior helping them avoid potholes in the road...
  - jseban 5y ago
    > why wouldn't a lower level colleague not want a senior helping them avoid potholes in the road Because they become much more influential in a shorter time, if they make a coup d'Etat by paving a completely new road, now they are the new road master. The old potholes are gone so they don't have to worry about those, and the new potholes are still unknown and yet to be discovered.
- 1270018080 5y ago
  Is that not what architects do? Seniors with decision making authority?
trevormcneal 5y ago
Notice the fast decline in the last 20 years? Even active X was less crappy than the most well-polished actual react project, and active X was crap. Even java applets did more and in an easier way than modern frameworks and JS shit. One simple page, with login, logout, some search, and navigation nowadays require a few plugins, router, state management, lib for requests, lib to handle cookies, lib for JWT, etc...
- leetrout 5y ago
  I feel like I am one of the few that switched from angular to react in 2014 and while enjoying how "simple" it was started noticing how much people liked building complexity in it. Now I have used react at a few different sized companies, taught it to some students and completely stopped using it for personal projects. It just seems like too much added complexity for almost every situation and people just see everything as a SPA now.
  - conradfr 5y ago
    That's why I like Vue. It's mix of the two with a synchronized ecosystem for the core libs and a simple API. Vue 3 kinda tanked all that though.
    - FractalHQ 5y ago
      What do you think of Svelte? I haven’t used Vue since I discovered Svelte but I’m always curious about peoples perspectives and try to keep my finger on the pulse. The new Nuxt looks pretty awesome! Love the api design. I’m hoping Sveltekit steals a few ideas from it before 1.0.
      - brimble 5y ago
        I looked at it the other day after the discussion thread about JS frameworks, but bounced when I saw ".svelte" files. I accept (demand, really) TypeScript but I've become allergic to any attempt to add much more on top of JS than that. I can just see the next poor bastard coming along in a short year or two and going "oh god, WTF is a '.svelte' file? What did my piece of shit predecessor fall for?" I'm looking into Vue today. Possibly I'll settle on something even simpler. React's certainly out, and thank god the mood is finally shifting enough that I can abandon it without harming my career (much). Slow, janky, and god they've made some weird choices with it in the last few years. It was always a bit heavy, but it felt like it had some degree of elegance to it before that—if only in parts of the API itself, not the implementation. [EDIT] Oh good lord, '.vue'. Don't any of these just use normal-ass code? Sigh.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I do think this is true - if you don't see the advantages of learning a new tool then you won't feel motivation or energy to do so - but I can also understand that it has to be done because of career reasons. I mean if you were all in on e.g. Backbone.js or Dojo ten+ years ago, you're kinda running behind now and it'll get harder and harder to find a gratifying job. I can see it happening for Vue vs React as well.
balaji1 5y ago
Another level of wisdom is to realize this is a form of job security. Put in the 8 hours, whatever the grind. If that's good enough for you. Else there seems to be suggestions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285969 lol
samstave 5y ago
The things I was doing in my 20s made me feel as though I was changing the world, and I had an impressive project list. In my 40s, I can hardly stand certain aspects of the tech space... and keeping motivation is all about things I can make, but not make for others. Find something that sparks your imagination. Skill atrophy is my main thing. Mitigating skill atrophy on legacy skillsets, sub-sets of skills you have used for 20 years, but have no passion for any longer is tough as HELL -- and it makes me feel I can't learn... but the fact is I fail to learn anything I dont have a spark of passion about. And I am not talking that romantic passion that some billionaire founder is taking about -- I am talking about *enough* passion that your ADHD can be quelled, and that small distractional things dont have undue heavy draw against your attention (passion)
jweir 5y ago
We switched to using Elm for our front end. One of the complaints about Elm is doesn't get upgrades very often (like years in between). This has been a feature for us – we don't need to be upgrading or fixing for upgrades or learning new "things". We focus on building with what we have and know and it works.

giantg2 5y ago

I'd like to see it that way for my own situation. But I have no alternatives for making decent money. It's not wise to be a slacker without a contingency plan. I'm just dumb.

jseban 5y ago

Yeah always switching tools basically resets your experience to zero, so you have to do the same mistakes over and over, no wonder it's hard to stay motivated. And the "senior" jobs have zero power, so you can't stop people from making mistakes, and trying to "influence" just makes the experience even more exhausting and frustrating when people have no reason to listen to you. I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss. It's really rigged for shorter careers.

trevormcneal 5y ago
the whole tech thing is changing fast, ageism is a true thing, in a scenario where most of the previous knowledge can be ignored, being a senior with 5 years of experience, 10 or 20 doesn't change much. Given that young people usually simp for the companies much more due to being naive, they have a huge preference in the hiring process. Tech is removing the root of the knowledge, migrating from understanding the solution, to quick copy&paste from some places.
- helge9210 5y ago
  Half life of knowledge in our profession is more or less a year and a half. This means 5 years of experience is the maximum you can accumulate. Maybe years are not a good metric for experience.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Do you mean as in you forget or that new ways to do stuff are reinvented?
    - helge9210 5y ago
      The latter. As an example I can think of: - jQuery, Backbone/Knockout, React progression - C++03, C++11 - Qt Widgets, Qt Quick - SQL to NoSQL and back again - Windows NT, 2000, Server On the other hand, AWS Lambda seems like CGI/FastCGI all over again, but with proper automation, so I have at least one data point on 20 year cycles (to confirm we need someone who is in profession for at least 40 years).
      - shrimp_emoji 5y ago
        >- C++03, C++11 Seriously? Amending a trash fire with a mound of glowing embers (that can't all be extinguished because precious backwards compatibility -- e.g., `auto_ptr`) is "just reinvention"? You can only hold that view if you don't understand C++11. :p You're more accurately complaining about "invention" (well, in the C++ world; in the Rust world, it's "C++ implemented our stuff").
      - pdfernhout 5y ago
        Developer here who has been programming over 40 years (since I was a teenager in the late 1970s). I know I am stretching things a bit here, but IBM mainframes, multi-user Forth systems, and distributed QNX systems ranging from the 1970s to the 1980s -- not to mention UNIX systems -- could all support remote procedure calls or interprocess/interapplication scripting across standard APIs to some extent (for a loose sense of process or application, especially with Forth). Even Smalltalk back then could do that to an extent but mostly from a single-user perspective in the sense that Smalltalk is mostly about message-passing objects. Essentially, you could have a system that could talk to itself or other similar systems in standard ways. Yeah, there have been so many cycles of forgetting and reinventing with new generations of programmers. Although it is true some things improve even as sometimes other things decay for a constantly changing kaleidoscope of opportunities and risks (a bit like host/parasite arms races in evolutionary cycles). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CP/CMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CP/CMS https://www.forth.com/resources/forth-programming-language/ https://www.forth.com/resources/forth-programming-language/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/qnx_4.25_docs/tcpip50/prog_guide/rpc_pro.html https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/qnx_4.25_docs/tcpip50/pr... And also from the 1960s-1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28computer_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28computer_system%29 "Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education, perhaps its most enduring legacy is its place in the origins of online community. This was made possible by PLATO's groundbreaking communication and interface capabilities, features whose significance is only lately being recognized by computer historians. PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley in 1973, was among the world's first online message boards, and years later became the direct progenitor of Lotus Notes." And from a different perspective, what is email but a standard way to do a remote procedure call to hopefully invoke some behavior -- even if a human may often be in the loop? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email And from the 1930s an earlier Paul Otlet invented the idea of using a standard 3x5 index card to store and transmit information (mainly metadata): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet "Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU) which utilized 3x5 inch index cards, used commonly in library catalogs around the world (now largely displaced by the advent of the online public access catalog (OPAC)). Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world's knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935)." For another example of cycles, my current favorite UI technology is Mithril+HyperScript+Tachyons for JavaScript (although Elm is great too conceptually, and likely inspired Mithril and React in part) which is so easy to use from a developer ergonomic point of view in part by (simplifying with a very broad brush) re-inventing the OpenGL video game paradigm of redrawing everything (with behind-the-scenes VDOM optimizations) from essentially a global state tree whenever the UI is considered "dirty" because someone touched it. Mithril is so much easier to use than UI systems that are all about creating dependencies (like most Smalltalk systems) or which require storing and updating state in carefully managed components (like React) or similar constrained models. But sadly React+JSX+SCSS has so far won the mindshare war despite overall worse developer ergonomics. I hope that cycle continues to turn someday and the Mithril approach will win out (if maybe in some other implementation by then). https://github.com/pdfernhout/choose-mithril https://github.com/pdfernhout/choose-mithril Frankly it has been frustrating over the decades to see great ideas lose out for a time to lesser ones with better marketing or other institutional advantages or other non-technical issues (Forth vs. DOS, CPM vs. DOS, Smalltalk vs. Java, Mithril vs. React) or which better fit with the familiarity of developers with earlier systems (HyperScript vs. JSX, Lisp vs. C++). Yet, I can also still be hopeful things may improve as social dynamics and technical dynamics change over time in various ways. Like was said about JavaScript which I mainly program in now: "It is better than we deserve..."
sinenomine 5y ago
> I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions In my experience, the only way of getting some decision power is moving into management. Even team lead roles don't count and don't give you any ownership over the product direction. In big tech engineers are generally trusted more, but still product ownership is dedicated to management.
7speter 5y ago
> I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss. Uhh... who are these junior people who don't like having a boss? I read the first part of this sentence and wondered why wouldn't a lower level colleague not want a senior helping them avoid potholes in the road...
- jseban 5y ago
  > why wouldn't a lower level colleague not want a senior helping them avoid potholes in the road Because they become much more influential in a shorter time, if they make a coup d'Etat by paving a completely new road, now they are the new road master. The old potholes are gone so they don't have to worry about those, and the new potholes are still unknown and yet to be discovered.
1270018080 5y ago
Is that not what architects do? Seniors with decision making authority?

trevormcneal 5y ago

Notice the fast decline in the last 20 years? Even active X was less crappy than the most well-polished actual react project, and active X was crap. Even java applets did more and in an easier way than modern frameworks and JS shit. One simple page, with login, logout, some search, and navigation nowadays require a few plugins, router, state management, lib for requests, lib to handle cookies, lib for JWT, etc...

leetrout 5y ago
I feel like I am one of the few that switched from angular to react in 2014 and while enjoying how "simple" it was started noticing how much people liked building complexity in it. Now I have used react at a few different sized companies, taught it to some students and completely stopped using it for personal projects. It just seems like too much added complexity for almost every situation and people just see everything as a SPA now.
- conradfr 5y ago
  That's why I like Vue. It's mix of the two with a synchronized ecosystem for the core libs and a simple API. Vue 3 kinda tanked all that though.
  - FractalHQ 5y ago
    What do you think of Svelte? I haven’t used Vue since I discovered Svelte but I’m always curious about peoples perspectives and try to keep my finger on the pulse. The new Nuxt looks pretty awesome! Love the api design. I’m hoping Sveltekit steals a few ideas from it before 1.0.
    - brimble 5y ago
      I looked at it the other day after the discussion thread about JS frameworks, but bounced when I saw ".svelte" files. I accept (demand, really) TypeScript but I've become allergic to any attempt to add much more on top of JS than that. I can just see the next poor bastard coming along in a short year or two and going "oh god, WTF is a '.svelte' file? What did my piece of shit predecessor fall for?" I'm looking into Vue today. Possibly I'll settle on something even simpler. React's certainly out, and thank god the mood is finally shifting enough that I can abandon it without harming my career (much). Slow, janky, and god they've made some weird choices with it in the last few years. It was always a bit heavy, but it felt like it had some degree of elegance to it before that—if only in parts of the API itself, not the implementation. [EDIT] Oh good lord, '.vue'. Don't any of these just use normal-ass code? Sigh.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I do think this is true - if you don't see the advantages of learning a new tool then you won't feel motivation or energy to do so - but I can also understand that it has to be done because of career reasons. I mean if you were all in on e.g. Backbone.js or Dojo ten+ years ago, you're kinda running behind now and it'll get harder and harder to find a gratifying job. I can see it happening for Vue vs React as well.

balaji1 5y ago

Another level of wisdom is to realize this is a form of job security. Put in the 8 hours, whatever the grind. If that's good enough for you. Else there seems to be suggestions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285969 lol

samstave 5y ago

The things I was doing in my 20s made me feel as though I was changing the world, and I had an impressive project list. In my 40s, I can hardly stand certain aspects of the tech space... and keeping motivation is all about things I can make, but not make for others. Find something that sparks your imagination. Skill atrophy is my main thing. Mitigating skill atrophy on legacy skillsets, sub-sets of skills you have used for 20 years, but have no passion for any longer is tough as HELL -- and it makes me feel I can't learn... but the fact is I fail to learn anything I dont have a spark of passion about. And I am not talking that romantic passion that some billionaire founder is taking about -- I am talking about *enough* passion that your ADHD can be quelled, and that small distractional things dont have undue heavy draw against your attention (passion)

jweir 5y ago

We switched to using Elm for our front end. One of the complaints about Elm is doesn't get upgrades very often (like years in between). This has been a feature for us – we don't need to be upgrading or fixing for upgrades or learning new "things". We focus on building with what we have and know and it works.