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> it's absolutely exhausting I'm not young, yet I don't find any of this all that bad. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I see refactoring and learning new tools as j

> it's absolutely exhausting I'm not young, yet I don't find any of this all that bad. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I see refactoring and learning new tools as just keeping the blade sharp. Migrating to new frameworks, tools, etc. is just superficially iterative. I've yet to see some kind of massive paradigm shift blow me away and stress me out.

fodkodrasz 3y ago
I wanted to share my ideas, but it just turned into a rambling: The problem is not with massive paradigm shifts... actually we are yet to see something like that. The constant busywork on industrial scale is what the problem is, the constant reinvention of the wheel in a way that is somewhat still incompatible yet the same thing. Most change is only for the sake of change, for NIH-syndrome. when a solution for a problem gets half-decent, and almost as good as it was in the windows 2000 times, then it gets forked/dumped and a new half as good fad appears... There is no problem with learning new tools, but learning a new UI framework every 2 years just to be constantly half-as capable as Delphi was (okay, with rounded corners and animations, I give you that) can be really tiresome. Cloud vendors changing their line-up constantly so that your certifications expire, and they can remove the really good value for the buck services and push the shiny new globally replicated and 10x more expensive new stuff (which delivers value for many, but the barebones stuff also did for many others). Just my 0.02$, probably saw too many lets rewrite in $current-thing and don't use $industry-standard-battle-tested-thing, as it is hard to learn it, but let's write one from scratch! (last time a team in a job decided that configuring HAProxy (my suggestion to get stuff done cheaply and quickly) is too hard, it is better to write a high performance reverse proxy, because it will be our thing! (I guess they were more interested in their resumes than in the company's interests). Since then that company is bankrupt... who would've thought)
einpoklum 3y ago
> as just keeping the blade sharp Replacing weapons and keeping blades sharp is not the same thing. Now, the metaphor kind of breaks down because new weapons are sharp, but abilities with a new technology are typically not, i.e. you use new tech as somewhat of a blunt instrument until you learn the finer points of it - and until it develops and matures enough itself. So, if you want to use "sharp blades" - don't switch technologies, but rather keep with the updates to those you already know.
CuriousSkeptic 3y ago
I’ve been in that camp the last 20 years, and even yearned for a paradigm shift or two. But I have to say, the coming shift from formal languages, type systems and somewhat predictable failure modes to… “prompt engineering” has me a bit worried

fodkodrasz 3y ago

I wanted to share my ideas, but it just turned into a rambling: The problem is not with massive paradigm shifts... actually we are yet to see something like that. The constant busywork on industrial scale is what the problem is, the constant reinvention of the wheel in a way that is somewhat still incompatible yet the same thing. Most change is only for the sake of change, for NIH-syndrome. when a solution for a problem gets half-decent, and almost as good as it was in the windows 2000 times, then it gets forked/dumped and a new half as good fad appears... There is no problem with learning new tools, but learning a new UI framework every 2 years just to be constantly half-as capable as Delphi was (okay, with rounded corners and animations, I give you that) can be really tiresome. Cloud vendors changing their line-up constantly so that your certifications expire, and they can remove the really good value for the buck services and push the shiny new globally replicated and 10x more expensive new stuff (which delivers value for many, but the barebones stuff also did for many others). Just my 0.02$, probably saw too many lets rewrite in $current-thing and don't use $industry-standard-battle-tested-thing, as it is hard to learn it, but let's write one from scratch! (last time a team in a job decided that configuring HAProxy (my suggestion to get stuff done cheaply and quickly) is too hard, it is better to write a high performance reverse proxy, because it will be our thing! (I guess they were more interested in their resumes than in the company's interests). Since then that company is bankrupt... who would've thought)

einpoklum 3y ago

> as just keeping the blade sharp Replacing weapons and keeping blades sharp is not the same thing. Now, the metaphor kind of breaks down because new weapons are sharp, but abilities with a new technology are typically not, i.e. you use new tech as somewhat of a blunt instrument until you learn the finer points of it - and until it develops and matures enough itself. So, if you want to use "sharp blades" - don't switch technologies, but rather keep with the updates to those you already know.

CuriousSkeptic 3y ago

I’ve been in that camp the last 20 years, and even yearned for a paradigm shift or two. But I have to say, the coming shift from formal languages, type systems and somewhat predictable failure modes to… “prompt engineering” has me a bit worried