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Some thoughts of why software is so hype prone and will likely remain so, if not accelerate * Its intrinsically easy to come up with new approaches. Thinking a
by nologic01 3y ago
Some thoughts of why software is so hype prone and will likely remain so, if not accelerate
* Its intrinsically easy to come up with new approaches. Thinking and writing software is a mental process, it is not limited by physical constraints and messy manufacturing.
* The scope of use contexts in society exploded. You only needed the formula-translation language when you had five whitecoats in a research lab punching instructions on a single computer. Now you have multi-billions of devices.
* The process is self-feeding. With the internet came the development of online interaction tools, techies use them more than any other segment and this creates a large coherent mass of lemmings and network effects.
* The role of bigtech (oligopolies solving their own problems to maintain / expand their dominance and abnormal profitability) which creates a collective osmosis to imitate whatever they are doing.
* There is also intrinsic redundancy and near equivalence of solutions. You only have one way to roll a concrete something on a surface: it must be round. But one can have an infinity of ways to split a workload between a client and a server machine (let alone more servers).
Most of those factors will continue for the foreseeable future so there will be no respite. E.g., Now we are firmly into AI hysteria and this again already shakes things up as it deprecates/de-emphasizes patterns that are not part of the bandwagon and puts emphasis on obscure niches that are deemed critical.
- anonzzzies 3y ago> * The process is self-feeding. With the internet came the development of online interaction tools, techies use them more than any other segment and this creates a large coherent mass of lemmings and network effects I feel it's mostly this; there are a few people actually creating these 'new' (most are just the same thing without little benefit, however, some people are better talkers/pr/marketers than others and so win a lot of souls) technologies and then they get many followers with more loud voices than brain who also start to shout about how everything before this was crap. A lot of effort in software is destroyed for not much reason but resume, ego and opinions. I like software that runs without issues for 10-20 years; it keeps me sane. As with all this tech, not many companies need it but their internal 'gurus' push it along anyway, wasting money and time and speeding up the rot.
- ilaksh 3y agoI think you left out the main factor which is that programmers are people and people subconsciously copy what other people are doing. We are herd animals. Also most people are not really good at judging novel things and are mainly influenced (subconsciously) by surface appearance and popularity.
- nologic01 3y agoI fully agree with that. I just focused on the more exaggerated ways this behavior shows up because programmers are the first tribe to really become fully online and interacting. For software people it is sometimes easy to forget that in most other professional domains exchange of real information, detailed opinions etc. is still much more siloed and inaccesible. It does not happen out in the open. This has a dampening effect as copycat behavior spreads much slower.
- joegibbs 3y agoAlso: software (at least the kind of software that results from hype-driven development) is much less dangerous, and there's a lot less that can go wrong if it fails. If you're working on a new kind of process for making some food ingredient you can easily do it wrong and poison someone, so people are naturally more cautious about trying new things. It's the same with software for e.g. nuclear reactors or plane controls, which is why we don't see them being written with microservices and Typescript.
- austin-cheney 3y agoIts all about consideration for the audience. Those most lured by hype tend to be those least qualified and concerned with doing the work to validate such hype. That means you have a ready audience of low hanging fruit ready to consume shiny new things if the selling point is easiness. When improving things leaders, actual leaders who know how to lead, invest in process. Individual contributors looking for to improve things with easy invest in product hype. The difference is striking.