7 ms·

I started my first dev job in early 1997 which is more like 25 than 30 years ago but I think the milieu was similar. The internet was mostly irrelevant to the

I started my first dev job in early 1997 which is more like 25 than 30 years ago but I think the milieu was similar. The internet was mostly irrelevant to the line of work I was involved in although it was starting to have impact. We had one ISDN 2x line for the entire office. It was set up to open on demand and time out a few minutes later as it was billed by the minute. I worked on an OpenGL desktop application for geoscience data visualization running on Irix and Solaris workstations. The work life balance was great as the hardware limitations prevented any work from home. Once out of the office I was able to go back to my family and my hobbies. Processes were much lighter with far less security paranoia as cyber attacks weren't a thing. Biggest IT risk was someone installing a virus on a computer from the disk they brought to install Doom shareware. The small company I worked for did not have the army of product managers, project managers or any similar buffoonery. The geologists told us developers what they needed, we built it and asked if they liked the UI. If they didn't we'd tweak it and run it by them again until they liked it. In terms of software design, OO and Gang of Four Patterns ruled the day. Everyone had that book on their desks to accompany their copies of Effective C++ and More Effective C++. We took the GoF a little too seriously. Compensation was worse for me though some of that is a function of my being much more advanced in my career. These days I make about 10x what I made then (not adjusted for inflation). That said, I led a happier life then. Not without anxiety to which I'm very prone but happier.

doug_durham 4y ago
Effective C++ was an amazing book. I bought copies for the entire team out of my own pocket. The Gang of Four on the other hand was an unfortunate turn for the industry. As you say we took it too seriously. In practice very few projects can benefit from the "Factory pattern", but I've seen it used in way too many projects to the detriment of readability. I worked in one source code base where you had to invoke 4 different factories spread across many different source files just to allocate one object.
- mikrl 4y ago
  Would you say the GoF are more descriptive than prescriptive? That is, not “do these to write good code” but “well written code looks like this”
  - munificent 4y ago
    It is meta-prescriptive. It doesn't say, "Do this to make your code better." It says, "If you have this specific problem under these constraints, then this can help."
  - black3r 4y ago
    definitely yes, I'd even go as far as to say they're just exemplary, meaning "well written code can look (for example) like this", but since they became "industry standards", they help your code be understood (either by other people, or by you when you eventually forget how/why you wrote it that way), which helps speed up code review and make it easier to maintain / refactor old code...
- raspberry1337 4y ago
  I am a newly employed engineer and I am assigned to learn Design patterns (the book and all) right as of today. Needless to day, I am very intrigued. Could you expand what you mean by too far, beyond over-applying the patterns?
  - abraxas 4y ago
    It's that. Over applying patterns in the areas of the code that are unlikely to need the extensibility afforded by employing these patterns. The cost of using the patterns is that they add a level of indirection which later costs you and others some extra cognitive load. By and large though the GoF patterns are relevant today and when applied judiciously they do help to organize your code.
    - raspberry1337 4y ago
      Have these OO-patterns become less relevant or is it just that they were absolutely standard 20-30 years ago- so that they are old and less relevant only in the perspective of their previous dominance?
      - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
        A lot of is is that modern frameworks include a lot of those behaviors that required you to manually code the patterns back them. e.g., I can create a an ObservableCollection in C# with a single line of code, but in 1996 C++ I'd have to go to the trouble of building out an Observer pattern and it still wouldn't have all the features that IObservable does.
      - mch82 4y ago
        HeyLaughingBoy is right about patterns being built into frameworks we use today (can’t reply to that comment because it’s nested too deeply). Rails is an example. I’ve seen a number of talks and articles by DHH that emphasize patterns and talking with people who wrote patterns. Rails built those in (like “model view controller”). Libraries and frameworks weren’t publicly available 30 years ago. Certainly not for free. The patterns are still useful, it’s just that a library or framework is often more efficient than reimplementing a pattern from scratch.
- munificent 4y ago
  > As you say we took it too seriously. The real problem is that many people didn't actually read the book or, if they did, they only took part of it seriously. Each pattern chapter has a pretty long section that details when you should and should not use the pattern. The authors are very clear about understanding the context and not mis-applying patterns. But once it became popular (which happened because these patterns are quite useful), it got cargo culted and people started over-applying them because it sent a social signal that, "Hey, I must be a good developer because I know all these patterns." The software engineering world is a much better one today because of that book now that the pendulum has swung back some from the overshoot.
  - codalan 4y ago
    It's amazing how many times I saw the Singleton pattern between 2000 - 2012 or so, and in almost every case, it degenerated into a global variable that was used by everything in a component or system. It would have been more apt to name it the Simpleton pattern, after most of their practitioners. This stuff started to go away w/ modern DI frameworks. In fact, I don't really see much of the GoF patterns anymore, particularly ones for managing the order of instantiation of objects. Everything in the C# world has been abstracted/libraried/APIed away. But I wouldn't be surprised if GoF patterns are still prevalent in C/C++/SmallTalk code.
- feoren 4y ago
  > In practice very few projects can benefit from the "Factory pattern" The factory pattern in C#: public IMeasuringDevice CreateMeasuringDevice(Func<IUnitConverter> unitConverterFactory) In TypeScript: function createMeasuringDevice(unitConverterFactory: () => UnitConverter): MeasuringDevice Very few projects can benefit from this!?
doktorhladnjak 4y ago
I was working at an internet startup in 1996. We basically built custom sites for companies. It’s hard now to appreciate how “out there” the internet was at the time. One of the founders with a sales background would meet with CEOs to convince them they needed a website. Most of those meetings ended with a, “We think this internet web thing is a fad, but thanks for your time”.
- shuntress 4y ago
  It's interesting to consider this viewpoint 30 years later and wonder what will bring about the next age. Is it something in it's infancy being dismissing as a fad? Have we even thought of it yet?
  - abraxas 4y ago
    Well, the answer has to be the "metaverse". The jury is of course out on whether it will take root the way the internet did.
    - shuntress 4y ago
      I disagree. "The Metaverse" is still fundamentally the same as other content/experience the same way 3D movies are fundamentally the same as 2D movies. Being able to see a projection of someone in chair next to you does not really deepen or hasten the sharing of ideas in any drastic way compares to pre-internet vs post-internet communication. If I had to guess, my suspicion is that direct brain-to-brain communication is the next epoch-definiting development.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Instant 3d printing. It is too costly and slow now but things will change.
pjc50 4y ago
Similarly I started in 2000, just as internet applications were starting to become a thing. I could list a whole load of defunct tech stacks: WebSphere, iPlanet, NSAPI, Zeus Web Server (where I worked for about a year), Apache mod_perl, Delphi etc. And the undead tech stack: MFC. Compensation: well, this is the UK so it's never been anywhere near US levels, but it was certainly competitive with other white-collar jobs, and there was huge spike briefly around 2001 until the "dotcom boom" burst and a whole load of us were laid off. Tooling: well, in the late 90s I got a copy of Visual Studio. I still have Visual Studio open today. It's still a slow but effective monolith. The big difference is version control: not only no git, but no svn. I did my undergraduate work in CVS, and was briefly exposed to SourceSafe (in the way that one is exposed to a toxin). Most of the computers we used back in 2000 were less powerful than an RPi4. All available computers 30 years ago would be outclassed by a Pi, and the "supercomputers" of that day would be outclassed by a single modern GPU. This .. makes less difference than you'd expect to application interactive performance, unless you're rendering 3D worlds. We ran a university-wide proto-social-network (vaguely similar to today's "cohost") off a Pentium with a 100MB hard disk that would be outclassed by a low-end Android phone. Another non-obvious difference: LCD monitors weren't really a thing until about 2000 - I was the first person I knew to get one, and it made a difference to reducing the eyestrain. Even if at 800x600 14" it was a slight downgrade from the CRT I had on my desk.
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  I kept buying used higher-end CRTs for almost a decade because their refresh rate and resolution so greatly outstripped anything LCD that was available for sale.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  My parents got an early 2002 LCD display... I never knew what I lost... by not gaming on a CRT. Low rez too... sad. All for what, space and "enviroment"? Like, look at this shit: https://imgur.com/a/FiOf7Vw https://imgur.com/a/FiOf7Vw https://youtu.be/3PdMtwQQUmo https://youtu.be/3PdMtwQQUmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya3c1Ni4B_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya3c1Ni4B_U
- evilbob93 4y ago
lowercased 4y ago
> The internet was mostly irrelevant to the line of work I was involved in although it was starting to have impact. We had one ISDN 2x line for the entire office. It was set up to open on demand and time out a few minutes later as it was billed by the minute. Early gig I had in 97 was working on building an internal corp intranet for a prototyping shop. There were around 50-60 folks there - probably 20 "upstairs" - doing the office/business work. I was upstairs. I was instructed to build this in Front Page. Didn't want to (was already doing some decent PHP on the side) but... hey... the IT guy knew best. Asked for some books on FP. Nope - denied. So I spent time surfing through a lot of MS docs (they had a moderate amount online docs for FP, seemingly) and a lot of newsgroups. I was pulled aside after a while saying I was using too much bandwidth. The entire building had - as you had - a double ISDN line - a whopping 128k shared between 20+ people. I was using 'too much' and this was deemed 'wrong'. I pointed out that they decided on the tool, which wasn't a great fit for the task, and then refused to provide any support (books/etc). I left soon after. They were looking for a way to get me out - I think they realized an intranet wasn't really something they could pull off (certainly not in FP) but didn't want to 'fire' me specifically, as that wasn't a good look. Was there all of... 3 months IIRC. Felt like an eternity. Working in software in the 90s - a bookstore with good tech books became invaluable, as well as newsgroups. No google, no stackoverflow, often very slow internet, or... none sometimes.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  For some things, it was possible to substitute grit, experimentation, practice and ultimately mastery. But for others, especially being closer to hardware, a good book was necessary. These days, it still might be.
  - lowercased 4y ago
    > substitute grit, experimentation And.. there were far fewer distractions. Waiting for compiling? Maybe you could play solitaire, but there were fewer 'rabbit holes' to go down because... you likely weren't on a network. Even by mid 90s, you weren't easily 2 seconds away from any distraction you wanted, even if you were 'online'.
gwbas1c 4y ago
> I started my first dev job in early 1997 which is more like 25 than 30 years ago but I think the milieu was similar. My first internship was in 2000, and I feel like, overall, not a lot has changed except the deck chairs. Things still change just as fast as back then.
markus_zhang 4y ago
Taking inflation and especially rocketing housing plus wlb into account maybe you actually earned more in 1997 than today for the same kind of jobs?

doug_durham 4y ago

Effective C++ was an amazing book. I bought copies for the entire team out of my own pocket. The Gang of Four on the other hand was an unfortunate turn for the industry. As you say we took it too seriously. In practice very few projects can benefit from the "Factory pattern", but I've seen it used in way too many projects to the detriment of readability. I worked in one source code base where you had to invoke 4 different factories spread across many different source files just to allocate one object.

mikrl 4y ago
Would you say the GoF are more descriptive than prescriptive? That is, not “do these to write good code” but “well written code looks like this”
- munificent 4y ago
  It is meta-prescriptive. It doesn't say, "Do this to make your code better." It says, "If you have this specific problem under these constraints, then this can help."
- black3r 4y ago
  definitely yes, I'd even go as far as to say they're just exemplary, meaning "well written code can look (for example) like this", but since they became "industry standards", they help your code be understood (either by other people, or by you when you eventually forget how/why you wrote it that way), which helps speed up code review and make it easier to maintain / refactor old code...
raspberry1337 4y ago
I am a newly employed engineer and I am assigned to learn Design patterns (the book and all) right as of today. Needless to day, I am very intrigued. Could you expand what you mean by too far, beyond over-applying the patterns?
- abraxas 4y ago
  It's that. Over applying patterns in the areas of the code that are unlikely to need the extensibility afforded by employing these patterns. The cost of using the patterns is that they add a level of indirection which later costs you and others some extra cognitive load. By and large though the GoF patterns are relevant today and when applied judiciously they do help to organize your code.
  - raspberry1337 4y ago
    Have these OO-patterns become less relevant or is it just that they were absolutely standard 20-30 years ago- so that they are old and less relevant only in the perspective of their previous dominance?
    - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
      A lot of is is that modern frameworks include a lot of those behaviors that required you to manually code the patterns back them. e.g., I can create a an ObservableCollection in C# with a single line of code, but in 1996 C++ I'd have to go to the trouble of building out an Observer pattern and it still wouldn't have all the features that IObservable does.
    - mch82 4y ago
      HeyLaughingBoy is right about patterns being built into frameworks we use today (can’t reply to that comment because it’s nested too deeply). Rails is an example. I’ve seen a number of talks and articles by DHH that emphasize patterns and talking with people who wrote patterns. Rails built those in (like “model view controller”). Libraries and frameworks weren’t publicly available 30 years ago. Certainly not for free. The patterns are still useful, it’s just that a library or framework is often more efficient than reimplementing a pattern from scratch.
munificent 4y ago
> As you say we took it too seriously. The real problem is that many people didn't actually read the book or, if they did, they only took part of it seriously. Each pattern chapter has a pretty long section that details when you should and should not use the pattern. The authors are very clear about understanding the context and not mis-applying patterns. But once it became popular (which happened because these patterns are quite useful), it got cargo culted and people started over-applying them because it sent a social signal that, "Hey, I must be a good developer because I know all these patterns." The software engineering world is a much better one today because of that book now that the pendulum has swung back some from the overshoot.
- codalan 4y ago
  It's amazing how many times I saw the Singleton pattern between 2000 - 2012 or so, and in almost every case, it degenerated into a global variable that was used by everything in a component or system. It would have been more apt to name it the Simpleton pattern, after most of their practitioners. This stuff started to go away w/ modern DI frameworks. In fact, I don't really see much of the GoF patterns anymore, particularly ones for managing the order of instantiation of objects. Everything in the C# world has been abstracted/libraried/APIed away. But I wouldn't be surprised if GoF patterns are still prevalent in C/C++/SmallTalk code.
feoren 4y ago
> In practice very few projects can benefit from the "Factory pattern" The factory pattern in C#: public IMeasuringDevice CreateMeasuringDevice(Func<IUnitConverter> unitConverterFactory) In TypeScript: function createMeasuringDevice(unitConverterFactory: () => UnitConverter): MeasuringDevice Very few projects can benefit from this!?

doktorhladnjak 4y ago

I was working at an internet startup in 1996. We basically built custom sites for companies. It’s hard now to appreciate how “out there” the internet was at the time. One of the founders with a sales background would meet with CEOs to convince them they needed a website. Most of those meetings ended with a, “We think this internet web thing is a fad, but thanks for your time”.

shuntress 4y ago
It's interesting to consider this viewpoint 30 years later and wonder what will bring about the next age. Is it something in it's infancy being dismissing as a fad? Have we even thought of it yet?
- abraxas 4y ago
  Well, the answer has to be the "metaverse". The jury is of course out on whether it will take root the way the internet did.
  - shuntress 4y ago
    I disagree. "The Metaverse" is still fundamentally the same as other content/experience the same way 3D movies are fundamentally the same as 2D movies. Being able to see a projection of someone in chair next to you does not really deepen or hasten the sharing of ideas in any drastic way compares to pre-internet vs post-internet communication. If I had to guess, my suspicion is that direct brain-to-brain communication is the next epoch-definiting development.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Instant 3d printing. It is too costly and slow now but things will change.

pjc50 4y ago

Similarly I started in 2000, just as internet applications were starting to become a thing. I could list a whole load of defunct tech stacks: WebSphere, iPlanet, NSAPI, Zeus Web Server (where I worked for about a year), Apache mod_perl, Delphi etc. And the undead tech stack: MFC. Compensation: well, this is the UK so it's never been anywhere near US levels, but it was certainly competitive with other white-collar jobs, and there was huge spike briefly around 2001 until the "dotcom boom" burst and a whole load of us were laid off. Tooling: well, in the late 90s I got a copy of Visual Studio. I still have Visual Studio open today. It's still a slow but effective monolith. The big difference is version control: not only no git, but no svn. I did my undergraduate work in CVS, and was briefly exposed to SourceSafe (in the way that one is exposed to a toxin). Most of the computers we used back in 2000 were less powerful than an RPi4. All available computers 30 years ago would be outclassed by a Pi, and the "supercomputers" of that day would be outclassed by a single modern GPU. This .. makes less difference than you'd expect to application interactive performance, unless you're rendering 3D worlds. We ran a university-wide proto-social-network (vaguely similar to today's "cohost") off a Pentium with a 100MB hard disk that would be outclassed by a low-end Android phone. Another non-obvious difference: LCD monitors weren't really a thing until about 2000 - I was the first person I knew to get one, and it made a difference to reducing the eyestrain. Even if at 800x600 14" it was a slight downgrade from the CRT I had on my desk.

ComputerGuru 4y ago
I kept buying used higher-end CRTs for almost a decade because their refresh rate and resolution so greatly outstripped anything LCD that was available for sale.
rejectfinite 4y ago
My parents got an early 2002 LCD display... I never knew what I lost... by not gaming on a CRT. Low rez too... sad. All for what, space and "enviroment"? Like, look at this shit: https://imgur.com/a/FiOf7Vw https://imgur.com/a/FiOf7Vw https://youtu.be/3PdMtwQQUmo https://youtu.be/3PdMtwQQUmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya3c1Ni4B_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya3c1Ni4B_U
evilbob93 4y ago

lowercased 4y ago

> The internet was mostly irrelevant to the line of work I was involved in although it was starting to have impact. We had one ISDN 2x line for the entire office. It was set up to open on demand and time out a few minutes later as it was billed by the minute. Early gig I had in 97 was working on building an internal corp intranet for a prototyping shop. There were around 50-60 folks there - probably 20 "upstairs" - doing the office/business work. I was upstairs. I was instructed to build this in Front Page. Didn't want to (was already doing some decent PHP on the side) but... hey... the IT guy knew best. Asked for some books on FP. Nope - denied. So I spent time surfing through a lot of MS docs (they had a moderate amount online docs for FP, seemingly) and a lot of newsgroups. I was pulled aside after a while saying I was using too much bandwidth. The entire building had - as you had - a double ISDN line - a whopping 128k shared between 20+ people. I was using 'too much' and this was deemed 'wrong'. I pointed out that they decided on the tool, which wasn't a great fit for the task, and then refused to provide any support (books/etc). I left soon after. They were looking for a way to get me out - I think they realized an intranet wasn't really something they could pull off (certainly not in FP) but didn't want to 'fire' me specifically, as that wasn't a good look. Was there all of... 3 months IIRC. Felt like an eternity. Working in software in the 90s - a bookstore with good tech books became invaluable, as well as newsgroups. No google, no stackoverflow, often very slow internet, or... none sometimes.

AstralStorm 4y ago
For some things, it was possible to substitute grit, experimentation, practice and ultimately mastery. But for others, especially being closer to hardware, a good book was necessary. These days, it still might be.
- lowercased 4y ago
  > substitute grit, experimentation And.. there were far fewer distractions. Waiting for compiling? Maybe you could play solitaire, but there were fewer 'rabbit holes' to go down because... you likely weren't on a network. Even by mid 90s, you weren't easily 2 seconds away from any distraction you wanted, even if you were 'online'.

gwbas1c 4y ago

> I started my first dev job in early 1997 which is more like 25 than 30 years ago but I think the milieu was similar. My first internship was in 2000, and I feel like, overall, not a lot has changed except the deck chairs. Things still change just as fast as back then.

markus_zhang 4y ago

Taking inflation and especially rocketing housing plus wlb into account maybe you actually earned more in 1997 than today for the same kind of jobs?