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Being “rockstars”: when software was a talents/creatives industry

307 points by srpablo 3y ago

greatgib 3y ago
I almost agree with this guy except when he suggest to use something like Java instead of say Python to be able to scale. Most of the successful tech companies he is referencing are using Python. And no one saw a big successful website/app in java. Most of the time corporate or gouvernement shitty web applications that randomly crash with backtraces when you are using them.
esafak 3y ago
This article is all over the place; I got a neck ache trying to follow it. I can't engage all the points, so I'll just address the titular point. The software industry never exhibited the most salient property of talent/creative industries: rockstar economics. And that's a good thing. Otherwise a handful of Carmacks and Deans would rake in all the money, leaving the rest to man the Genius Bar until they got their "big break". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-take-all_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-take-all_market I agree with bullet points about keeping it simple and not using crap tech for your MVP.
- mgaunard 3y ago
  And yet 10x developers are a thing.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Are they? How do you know they are not 9x or 11x? It is hard to say because the industry (and I live in Silicon Valley) has no idea how to measure productivity. And this is reflected in salaries. If we could accurately measure productivity, we could compensate it, but we don't. "Knowledge worker productivity is the biggest of the 21st century management challenges." - Peter Drucker (the founder of modern management)
    - sb8244 3y ago
      Not to beat a dead horse, but is 10x about 9x or 11x? Or is it about "a magnitude more output than others" (10x)? You don't necessarily need to quantify that exactly. If you've worked on a team with people like that, then you know it. Their managers know it too. To your main point, the size of the markets is drastically different. There is only so much room for headline rockstars and entertainers, but there's way more room for talented technologists. Having "rockstars" in the engineering world doesn't really reduce the size of the pie for others.
      - esafak 3y ago
        If you can't measure it, it might as well be 2x or "just better". If you can't prove your superior productivity, you are not going to get paid for it. Which is going to incentivize you to optimize for your company's promotion rubric instead, if you don't get fed up first. This leads to the lamented "promotion-driven design". Or you can ditch the middle man and take your talents straight to the market, through consulting or incorporation.
        mgaunard 3y ago
        You can definitely measure it. I've seen many times where people were struggling with problems for months with tons of operational incidents, before someone experienced came in and solved it for good in a couple of days.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        That sounds like “just better.” Or it could just be somebody that happened to have a crucial bit of domain knowledge. Or the original composition of the team could have included some negative-contributors.
        mgaunard 3y ago
        a team of people for months = 20 * 3 * 4 one guy for two days = 2 240/2 = 120
  - Hermitian909 3y ago
    They are, and it's reflected in the compensation. I know a developer that Meta offered ~$6 mil Total Compensation, he turned it down for $10 mil from Google. It also exists in a much more banal state lower down the ladder. I have friends who landed in the low end of the developer market. They literally cannot do most of the work I do. They don't understand DB isolation levels, they don't have the skills to design systems around eventual consistency, they are not familiar with basic distributed system problems like clock drift, etc. I'm not even an infrastructure engineer, this is just stuff I and my coworkers need to get through our days to ship product code. Could my friends do this stuff? If they applied themselves, sure! But they're not going to. It's also not enough to learn on the job. We occasionally hire someone who doesn't actually have the skillset and they usually flounder.
    - esafak 3y ago
      Was he paid for his superior productivity, or for special skills?
      - hospitalJail 3y ago
        Why not both? I know a dude who got a nice package from a pizza company to be CTO + lead programmer. I think he has a few people under him, but the bigger deal was that he could get a percentage of the $ saved. He worked all day and night to get LLMs to take orders, in a month 40% of their orders are taken through the LLM. For a company with 100s of stores, this is a huge cost saving. Guy knows how to program, he knows technology, and he knew the domain from a previous job.
        q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
        > he could get a percentage of the $ saved I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. I think I (and most other decent engineers) can probably point to tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in savings generated over the course of a single career. As far as I can tell, it gets frittered away by empire-builders who take that $ and spin up new teams for nonsense. Kicking back a % to the engineers who harvested all the savings seems like a much better model.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sdsd 3y ago
Tbh I think it depends where you work. In 1999, if you worked at a Java shop making accounting software or whatever, it wasn't a talents/creative industry. Same thing now days, but replace Java/accounting with React/CRUD. The rockstar code ninja 10x mentality of 2009 is maybe gone for good, but I see more crazy coders doing rockstar level stuff now than ever before. Asahi Linus and alyssa rosenzweig being great examples from the Asahi project, but these people are all over. People talk about the complexity of the infrastructure making it impossible to do everything yourself, but in my experience is exactly the opposite. The degree of abstration, automation, and high-level tools means that you kinda can do everything without knowing too much.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  For as ambiguous and misused as "10x" is I much prefer it over infantile terms like "ninja rockstar etc."
  - highwaylights 3y ago
    I feel the exact opposite. I much prefer ninja, rockstar, magician, sorcerer, codebro, gnarly dude, big daddy for loop, Little Bobby Tables, SSHelley and Nadine. Nadine doesn’t have a buzzword she’s just really good with Kubernetes. Anything but 10x-er.
  - totallywrong 3y ago
    Please somebody let every recruiter on LinkedIn know.
  - cactusfrog 3y ago
    I feel like 10x developers are those that spent 2 years working on the same problem at their last job and now know a solution
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  Asahi seems like a counterexample to your last point: you need incredibly deep knowledge of several technologies to do what they're doing.
dagss 3y ago
In my career I have seen almost identical systems being built by a) 6 developers in a startup in 1 year b) 100+ developers in a big company with a much much larger budget in 2 years. Almost the same specs, but the one in the startup had better scalability and fewer serious bugs... So, spend 10-50x less and get higher quality? Worst is I now consider case b) quite lean and efficient compared to what I see tech consultancies doing towards public sector, banks, etc... -- My point being: There definitely IS a room for "rockstars" (don't like that term, but interpret this as developers competent enough to carry a lot of weight on their own and work in a smaller company) to deliver a lot of value. The problem with the model is the lack of predictability (what if the few developers you trust don't deliver), the bus factor if one of the few devs quits, etc In a sense inefficiency is a goal, because otherwise you loose redundancy. It costs a lot to hire 100 to produce the output of 10, but much lower risk.
- dagss 3y ago
  Perhaps some day someone will invent a way to get 20 to produce the output of 10 + redundancy... One theory is: If you have just a little too many developers (redundancy), they become bored and find ways to introduce auxiliary complexities to keep things interesting, thus things explode to 100 developers being needed...
  - lanstin 3y ago
    Nothing more dangerous than a bored committer.
  - cudgy 3y ago
    Have 2 teams of 10 develop the same thing and pick the best one?
    - nathants 3y ago
      teams of 2 or 1, self selecting. sometimes double up and compete on the same project with multiple implementations.
    - 3y ago
suzzer99 3y ago
My project manager called me a rock star one time in a kick-off meeting. My fellow programmers never let me live it down – yelling out "rock star!" when they'd see me in the halls, "come on rock star, fix your bug", "I dunno, let's ask the rock star", etc.
- Eumenes 3y ago
  you should start offering to autograph keyboards and mice
- swader999 3y ago
  Trash your monitor in a fit of drunken rage or something like that. Don't let them down.
johnea 3y ago
It still is, and like actual "rockstars", the workers are being exploited by ownership that, for some reason, are the only ones who are supposed to profit off of "rock". Don't know how many musicians you know, just ask one...
billllll 3y ago
Apologies in advance for being a bit negative. I feel like this sentence is just so revealing: > That said, he and I will likely never see eye-to-eye on this because he more-or-less invented Choose Boring Technology, and most of what I advocate is to break playbook, embrace narrative, and be interesting. It really comes down to what you prioritize. Do you prioritize the output and the value added? Or do you prioritize making your engineers feel like "rockstars"? If you don't care about your end product, then yeah sure let your engineers break prod using untested technologies. The reason playbooks have sprung up, is because 99% of use-cases for businesses are for the most part "solved." We're not in the era of renting colos and manually setting up MySQL anymore (which the author advocates for in order to return to "creatives," btw). We have managed solutions that you can throw money at. So, do you leverage those solutions to help you solve your problem? Or do you let your engineers re-invent the wheel so they can feel smart? The "rockstar" treatment is a result of supply and demand. Talent in Hollywood/music can get the rockstar treatment, because the talent alone is the difference between millions of dollars. If you have a really talented coder who can be interchanged with another really talented coder, you do not have a "rockstar." The "rockstar" era of coding was the result of a massive imbalance in supply/demand for engineers, so the rockstar treatment would help attract talent. Now that the supply has began shifting up to meet the demand, it makes sense that the "rockstar" treatment is starting to go away. And good riddance to all that too. I don't need to work with any more software engineers who think it's okay to be a massive dick to everyone just because they can implement a CRUD app. If you want to be a rockstar, go actually be a rockstar, don't make software engineering worse.
- majormajor 3y ago
  I've seen teams today have just as large an FTE team dedicated to infrastructure as my employee 10 years ago to manage a set of cloud services that cost wayyyy more than the colo hardware we had doing basically the same amount of traffic. So people cost hasn't always gone down as infra cost has gone up. "Shitty internal heroku" has some advantages once you have engineers that have been at the company more than 3 months: there's just not nearly as much surface area to understand + you have the source code right there if you really have to get int here. Let's leave judgements out of this - you can just as easily build a fragile tower of cloud services and abstractions to "feel smart" as you can reinventing serving an application (reinventing is a strong word anyway... it's just a different set of off the shelf tools usually). And in many cases "managed" services manage the easy part (standing up the hardware and installing the service) and don't manage the hard part (configuring the hundreds of knobs to optimize your particular use case) particularly well. I'm not close enough to the metal for those services/infra teams, though, to be able to completely tell if the FTE hours spent on all that cloud stuff are necessary. That is - can you throw stuff into the cloud and set-it-and-forget-it and not deal with ongoing cloud/infra/config maintenance? But one of the main things those teams seemed to often focus on was spend - if you leave it unattended is the cost just going to eat you up? But then there's a big irony.
boredumb 3y ago
The playbook works and the more boring the better. If you are doing something on the edges of computing or industry than hooray - you are off the beaten path and it's your time to shine! You can be the one writing the playbook in a retrospective, but please don't try to make a boring application in a boring industry exciting by being unorthodox. I don't want to be excited and interested in how you solved a basic CRUD implementation - I want to intuitively know what it's doing before I even git clone your repository.
- lanstin 3y ago
  I do think that as more things become programmable and hence part of software, the odds that a given project is novel increases. If you maximize the Lisp/hacker/Dry approach, any new code should be novel; if something is just a repeat, you should make an abstraction to make it the same; instead of hand made websites just configure your Wordpress or Django or whatever.
jebarker 3y ago
"When WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, they had 35 engineers. They were able to do this in part because they didn't "follow playbook," and while you probably can't go that extreme..." Not my area of expertise at all but, 35 engineers for WhatsApp sounds like a lot
- grokx 3y ago
  What about several thousand engineers for Twitter then? =) Regarding WhatsApp, I would say that 35 engineers is OK. Not so much, but not so few also.
  - 62951413 3y ago
    https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-than-550-full-time-engineers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
awkward 3y ago
The silly part of this is that the industries he compares software to - music, television, movies - have all been skeletonized and reduced to minimal and repeatable products. Simply looking out the door should be enough to convince you that if you want to bring back the magic, asking to be treated like a television writer isn't the way. Right now the biggest thing bringing down developer wages is the threat of being replaced with an LLM. That's not going to work out in the long run - giving developers productivity increasing tools isn't going to lessen their value. However, it's the most plausible wage suppression hustle for quite some time. Until the limits of LLM generation get tested and felt, the downward pressure on wages is going to continue. Maybe when the first wave of LLM driven startups feel the pain of maintaining code that doesn't have an author, or maybe high profile malicious training data attacks will do it. Even afterwards, the effects of the wage curve being bent downward for a couple years are still going to be there.
- EddieJLSH 3y ago
  Just look at the success of the Superhero franchises in Hollywood
  - srpablo 3y ago
    Author here. Well, sure, but to the contrary: DC has had a much harder time imitating Marvel's success, even with great IP. Universal tried to create the "Dark Universe." And even Marvel is having trouble cranking out the hits with the middling success of Ant-Man Quantumania, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Wakanda Forever. I suspect making these things more streamlined and more of a flat cultural paste through the Disney Machine is a part of the lower outcomes.
    - awkward 3y ago
      I think if we want to talk about the actual value of messy human processes, you're on the nose. The problem is that large, entrenched industries can function using a distorted, rationalized model for a lot longer than any of us can afford to just wait around.
- 3y ago
marginalia_nu 3y ago
I don't think you'll find metaphorical rock stars working in a team in a salaried job, any more than you'll find actual Taylor Swift doing ten hour shifts in an office building. There's nuance to that though. It's really hard to distinguish yourself working in such an environment, you don't have the time, freedom and energy to do that. And if you can't do that, you won't ever be much of a "rock star". Not that you can't work as an independent "creative" in programming though. I've gotten to a point where I can work on Marginalia Search full time, and live off grants and donations for at least a few years. Dunno if I'm a rock star for it, I don't even have a Wikipedia page, but I at least reckon myself a fairly successful busker. If I don't qualify, then certainly Serenity OS Andreas who made like $300k in a week with his browser shenanigans. Him and a other people far more talented than I am are able to live this way. But it's a weird game. I think it's more or less all about the right sort of visibility. You distinguish yourself working on some large problem in a public fashion, and people inevitably will start throwing money your way; this enables additional work and additional visibility, it gives even more opportunities. While maybe not reaching the John Romero levels of rockstar we had in the '90s, this manner of working is certainly closer to the success of a Taylor Swift than being the most talented developer in the IT department.
- convolvatron 3y ago
  my first industry job was in 1995. after the interview process the hiring manager came in with an offer. it was 4x what i was currently making. after i accepted I had a half day with the admin. she showed me the very nice hotel that they would be putting me up at until I found a place. no hurry really. one of my new coworkers was still there after a few months. we went back to the office for tastings. coffee. wine. beer. whiskey. it was important that they knew my tastes and would have my preferred food and drink on hand. i know that was the point - but I certainly felt like a rock star.
  - Cyph0n 3y ago
    Man, the dot-com boom must have been wild.
fivre 3y ago
software as auteur work succeeds when it's entering a vacuum. if you're legit breaking open a field that's never been exposed to it before, sure, go wild. those fields are fewer and far between nowadays unlike creative industries, there's a fuckton of toil work that just needs to be done automating processes. the playbook style excels there, and unlike artistic work there's not really room for memorable standouts that break the rules. music will always have the quality where good novelty is impressive and breaks boundaries. business processes less so. prince can (could) deliver a stellar rendition of purple rain that breaks the bonds between heaven and earth even though you've heard the song before, but ain't nobody delivering a stellar automated check deposit workflow execution that stands out from the rest. commodity services bring commodity work. this is fine. i do not want my mobile check deposit to be a tour de force, i want it to be something i don't give a second thought. there is beauty in the blase' being blase'
marcrosoft 3y ago
I stopped reading after the author criticized gofmt for being boring.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  gofmt solves the right problem; complaints that it makes code boring are misunderstanding code. If you want a different view on your code: write one. Code is the model. Presentation of code in an editing UI is the view. Tools like gofmt normalize the model so that it's easier to build a view that re-represents it.
yuy910616 3y ago
These industries just have a different mechanism, here is an example: the worlds 10,000th best tennis player probably makes $0 dollar from tennis, and the world's top 0.1% of pharmacists make maybe twice as much as the 50th percentile. Some industries you either are the top 0.01% and make millions; in some industries being average means a decent living. Software has long transitioned from one end of that spectrum to something more towards the middle. Super star developers simply aren't productive enough for the demand of software
- hyperhopper 3y ago
  4 times in this comment you referred to one half of a point you were trying to make but not the other half. Makes it much more difficult to parse when you say "either" but only provide one half of that statement.
- culebron21 3y ago
  To be correct, even the worlds top 50th best tennis player makes $0 (read from couple interviews back in the '00s), it's mostly their family that pays. Below top 20, sponsors may cover part of costs. Like other sports, it's fun enough that many play it for free at local tournaments, and some families can afford pay expensive flights and stay abroad. I recall meeting with sportsmen and travellers who do months-long trips across continents. Half of them were pensioneers and just one single guy was a 34-yo die-hard traveller riding a bike across Eurasia for its own sake. Others were professionals, and they'd say they'd been preparing the travel for 2 years, seeking sponsors -- some in equipment, some in money, -- and signing contracts and clarifying sponsorship activity details -- photos here, report and booklet there, etc. This contrasted a lot with our IT industry "let's do it for fun or learning" spirit.
gloryjulio 3y ago
Not sure If I agree with this article. My experience in the big co is that trying to navigate through large systems with many moving parts and stakeholders and come up with a solution and execute as quickly as you can is very exciting. And you definitely need to be creative to trying to align and solve some many problems in 1 design. It's a very challenging and fun experience
- metalforever 3y ago
  Not to bring in this separate issue, but it can be impossible to navigate this as a technically skilled minority . Some people just don't want to work with you and are not going to work with you unless they can tell you exactly how things should be. In large orgs, you may end up with more than one of these people and they just don't align. If coming up with a design that pleases both of them is possible at all, it ends up being a turd architecturally . Later, because its a turd, people pin blame on you.
  - gloryjulio 3y ago
    When you are blocked by non technical issues, it should be the manager's job to help you clear the roadblocks. If the manager is not doing his job, it's probably time to switch teams or jobs. Tbf haven't seen anything like this yet. There are tons minorities working in tech(myself included)
    - cudgy 3y ago
      “If the manager is not doing his job, it's probably time to switch teams or jobs.” You’ll be switching jobs quite a bit then.
      - gloryjulio 3y ago
        I did change jobs a few times but only for the compensation reasons. My current manager and the past managers are great. Expectations goes both ways. The companies expect the ICs to ship code, and the ICs can expect to work with competent managers. Pay attention when selecting your team.
coldcode 3y ago
In the 1980's, the About box of most applications (Mac and DOS primarily) often listed most of the people who worked on them. Many of the people were also known to others; I usually met many at the precursor to WWDC. It was cool to see your name on something you worked on (I worked on three apps over my two startups, Trapeze, Persuasion, and Deltagraph). Some people got to be pretty rockstar-like (I remember at the first WWDC (not called that yet) in 1986 sitting on a boat with what felt like all the Mac programmers in the world, a whole bunch of us aptly listening to Silicon Beach's Charlie Jackson on how he recorded a cricket for their first game). Because apps and programmers were rare compared to today and something new, you had more of a connection to the people who built things. Today you have no clue and probably don't want to know.
- mindentropy 3y ago
  Yes sir. I still remember so many DOS applications and especially games. There was a game called Cannon Fodder which had the developers as characters in the game and the About screen was so cool. Man I miss those days.
trunnell 3y ago
I think the "rock star" analogy did more damage to our profession than most care to admit. Rock stars get treated a certain way, they are catered to, their egos might get fluffed up, etc. None of those behaviors are compatible with working in software teams, and none of the "best" developers I know want to be treated that way, anyhow. That said, I think this article is essentially correct. I would put it like this: building information machines out of pure information is a creative endeavor. Human performance tends to fall on a bell curve, and IMO it's true for developer output in particular. So if you want to create a hugely valuable solution to a big problem, you should probably hire the best people you can find and organize them in a way that lets them max out their creative power. The main obstacle to this IMO is poor leadership attitudes & practices. This article's author said it best in another post: "Boring" is a good strategy if you think the bigger existential risk for your company is that Product & Engineering will [...] fail to ship a reliable product on a reliable schedule. But if you're more afraid of the business risks of shipping average product, at an average cadence, over the course of years, you should consider deviating, at least sometimes, from the playbook whose entire definition is "optimized for safety." https://morepablo.com/2022/04/against-boring.html https://morepablo.com/2022/04/against-boring.html
- kandel 3y ago
  The rock star thing is a bit creepy. I'd like to be good at my job but not have the job turn into my entire life. Why does the conversation around tech imply that software jobs are either grey prisons or stress balls? Methinks reality is a bit more complex, but i'm just an undergrad. Same thing with math academy honestly.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    > Why does the conversation around tech imply that software jobs are either grey prisons or stress balls? There are 10 types of people in the world . . .
- trabant00 3y ago
  > Rock stars get treated a certain way, they are catered to, their egos might get fluffed up, etc. None of those behaviors are compatible with working in software teams, and none of the "best" developers I know want to be treated that way, anyhow. Stars are a thing, they are way beyond what the average dev can ever accomplish and they would only be held back by a team. They should be catered to and really be accountable to nobody as far as technical decisions go. Their time and energy is just too precious to be spent soothing your fragile egos. And that's not just my opinion either. That's why companies have positions like fellow, distinguished, etc. The whole "rock-stars are toxic" is just the inability of some people to accept their limitations. Most of us are nobodies, easily replaceable code monkeys who will never accomplish anything of note. If you're of the opinion that a nice personality somehow is worth more than being excellent you are lying to yourself first and foremost. And you're not that nice anyway since you are willing to spend your time digging through stars' closets in the hope of finding any skeleton to bring them down. Being agreeable only qualifies you to easily being worked in what are essentially sweatshops who produce crap, the subject of the article. Take note though that said sweatshops would not exist without the stars that CREATED this industry. Never in a million years, you and your team of "nice" people would have produced any of the foundations of current IT.
dogleash 3y ago
There's threads of a few interesting ideas in here, unfortunately the presentation teed them up for the current cultural mythos to obliterate them. A number of years ago, the uptight cultural conformity of the valley bubble branded itself with some of the imagery the author attempts to borrow. The collective consciousness hasn't forgotten how that image was power-blasted away. It was done as cover to sneak in a bunch of orthogonal changes while nobody was looking, but that part's neither here nor there. Forget I even mentioned it. The end result is that we're here now and we have the tools to evaporate this article with one shot at 50 paces.
tehjoker 3y ago
The transition from a new growth industry to a mature industry under conditions of nearly interest free loans and low aggregate consumer demand. In this essay, it seems clear that the kinds of designs matter a bit, but lots of companies choose different technologies and practices and survive. The obvious conclusion is that market conditions matter more than the technology stack for a space of "reasonable" choices about it. I expect, until the next big thing hits, the market conditions to be dominated by consolidation. Bitcoin was supposed to bit it, but that was a scam. VR was also a scam (Zuck tried to sell us non-existent real estate), but maybe it'll turn into something more useful soon.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  > under conditions of nearly interest free loans I'm hoping higher interest rates may revive the older style: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34565816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34565816
opportune 3y ago
I disagree with a lot of this for a few main reasons. And some minor ones Application development technology has considerably improved over time - most applications simply do not need to reinvent the wheel! Yes, over-engineering by designing something that will never see more than 1qps to scale infinitely is bad - I’m sure it happens but I think it’s more a strawman. If you need a simple CRUD application with a good-enough UI you have no need to introduce additional complexity (and potentially maintenance, reliability issues) with custom tooling. Two, the software talent market is bifurcated. There is basically commodity development of crud apps, and technically complex novel development. If you think there are no rockstars you might just be in the commodity development scene. There literally are these so-called “rockstars” being flown into SF to work on new stuff in the ML sphere or into NYC/Chicago to work on bleeding edge performance. Maybe the dissonance here is that the commodity developer market has grown a lot, and that over time some technology (like web applications - a lot harder to do at scale in 2005 vs now) shifts from rockstar to commodity as it matures. Reverting to pets-not-cattle and statefulness can be appropriate at low scale. But honestly this is more of a “choose the right solution to the problem” thing and not a rockstar thing. Following this model as you reach large scale allows for cool production heroism and cowboy coding that makes you feel like a true hacker, but that doesn’t mean your users are getting a more reliable experience, or that your dev time is being spent efficiently. My minor quip is that, I think as you get more experienced what you used to think of as rockstar development just looks routine because you’re better at writing software. Another minor point: you can’t just engender a rockstar culture at a company that hires commodity developers as easily as asserted here. The big thing not mentioned: PAY. Nobody wants to get paid like a commodity developer to have to perform like a rockstar. Being a commodity developer is more chill and there is less day to day risk and stress. Once you start getting towards the bleeding edge or reinventing the wheel your work becomes riskier and requires more mental effort and attention.
- hinkley 3y ago
  There aren't that many wheels that need inventing, even back in the so-called rockstar era. > Two, the software talent market is bifurcated. There is basically commodity development of crud apps, and technically complex novel development. This I think is the source of most of the wheel invention. Someone pays a good deal of money for 'talent' they do not actually require, and they end up working at cross purposes. Assign someone with cleverness to work on a crud app, and they're bound to try to reinvent something, if not to keep their resume fresh, at least to fight the boredom. But it's not bifurcation, it's trifurcation. It's not build or invent, it's build, buy, or invent. We are too many of us writing applications that were never really needed in the first place. Not for any single reason, but a whole host of them, from empire building, to rent seeking from people who could have made a tool that adapted well to customers, but saw much more money in keeping them engaged with you instead of operating on their own steam. Open source is also driven by a lot of motivations, but 'your own steam' is a pretty compelling one.
3dsnano 3y ago
i hired a true rockstar once. they were the smartest developer i have ever worked with, ever. this individual could singlehandedly put together massive systems, from technical to design, with confidence and flair. i had to let this person go because they did not know how to work with others. beyond their brilliance, they could simply not empathize with the organization's POV. everything was about them, supporting them, making them feel special, unique, and important. this individual eventually returned the company laptop, which was bent in half. they told me that they had smoked enough DMT to understand that they had created their own god and that if my org needed further investment, to reach out to them. i hired this person from HN "who wants to be hired." they still (to this day) add a post to the monthly thread.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  i hired this person from HN "who wants to be hired." they still (to this day) add a post to the monthly thread. Now it makes sense
- YZF 3y ago
  The greatest developers I've known were nice people, fairly humble and reasonably good team players. I'd like to think that's more common than your example but I also think I know the type.
- danjac 3y ago
  "his individual eventually returned the company laptop, which was bent in half. they told me that they had smoked enough DMT to understand that they had created their own god and that if my org needed further investment, to reach out to them." I guess they were a rock star in the "Led Zepplin trashing a hotel room" sense.
bcrosby95 3y ago
I took the "boring tech" stuff differently. I choose technology that makes my production environment boring. Sometimes that means picking technology that is not mainstream. Choosing mainstream technology is one of the best ways to make your production environment decidedly not boring. I would argue Erlang is one of the most boring pieces of tech you can pick. Look at how boring your production systems can get when you choose that.
mbgerring 3y ago
One interesting thing to note: whether you think software should be more like a “talent/creatives” industry, or more like a trade, one thing both of those models have in common is unions.
abecedarius 3y ago
By the title I thought this would be about the early 80s and e.g. this Electronic Arts ad/poster: https://bytecellar.com/2009/09/30/i_started_life/ https://bytecellar.com/2009/09/30/i_started_life/
varelse 3y ago
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z3t4 3y ago
I think the problem with today's software is that there are few amateurs. Most software developers are professionals who get paid by the hour - that rather build something in 5 years then in 5 days because they get paid to do it, they do not hate complexity they embrace it. Something is taking 5 seconds you better make a framework to solve it. Software is everywhere so CEO's will keep paying. The good news is that a teenager can beat a team of 100 engineers. The large team still have an upper hand with their insane marketing budgets though. But who wants to be a developer when you can get famous on Tiktok instead.
cracrecry 3y ago
The grass was always greener in the past / Cualquier Tiempo pasado fue mejor. Pure creative programming work have always been a small subset of programming in general. Were COBOL programmers creative? Data Base programmers? IBM programmers? Those were the majority of software jobs in the past. I have been mostly a pure C,Verilog, VHDL, analog digital electronics -low level engineer for a long time before becoming entrepreneur and using much higher level languages in our company. Was it creative? A lot. I interacted with machines like robots that did things like moving 20 tons or lasers or robots or whatever. Was is painful, tedious and boring?. It was, also. You need to make it rain using active work of whatever is necessary for your job. The fact that something is not "sexy" is a great advantage for a job as it removes most of the competition. Being hard scares most people. The best advice I could give young people is to find hard problems and to find the techniques and tools that could make those problems easier. We use psychology and things like lisp as secret weapons. Thinking in the 35 people that created Facebook is extremely misleading, because fb got extremely lucky, and they were hundreds of thousand of programmers working in other companies. The monetary success of fb has a lot more to do with free money created by central banks than anything the founders created as their technology was easy to replicate but its financing was not. There are intense opportunities today like they were in the past. But they are hard, like it was hard in the past.
- cudgy 3y ago
  “Were COBOL programmers creative? Data Base programmers? IBM programmers? Those were the majority of software jobs in the past.” Some of those jobs surely had creative aspects to them … far more creative than the recent YAWS (yet another website) using ASWF (another shiny web framework) with all the bells and whistles included.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  Facebook was founded in 2004, well before interest rates became zero.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - 3y ago
cosmiccatnap 3y ago
The thing I find most sad about articles like this is that it doesn't seem to actually address any of the reasons that it got this way, it blames individuals within the field not a series of MBA graduates telling you what the spec is and hiring 50 people to hit an arbitrary deadline for a software project moving in the wrong direction FAST. It's a false dichotomy to say you only have rock stars and as this person smugly tip toes around "normal people" when in reality you don't need rock stars anymore to make good software and let's be honest... Most rock stars didn't make good software they just make it in a time when software was generally even more crap than it is now. You want to stop suffering among us plebs? Don't advocate for goofy rockstar developer propaganda, advocate for healthy work life balance and reasonable deadlines for things that truly don't matter. Stop letting sales and marketing write your software and stop taking opinions about systems design from your project managers and "technical leads" when they do not work in these systems day to day. If you treat engineers well and respect them before a client who will drop you the moment a new product fits their need then yes you will lose clients from time to time but if you focus on making good software and happy people then you will attract stable clients who do the same and maybe the stock holders at the top don't get the ridiculous return per year that they expect out of more shameless companies but at least you have a half decent chance of sleeping at night... I am well aware that we live in a world where this will be borderline impossible but the first step to solving a problem is admitting it
cheekibreeki2 3y ago
It's a bit scary how much weight is put upon k8s and terraform and how little actual skills these jobs require. I miss being a sysadmin in this commodity world.
- digitalsushi 3y ago
  I struggle to understand why declarative tools are apparently so much more difficult to use than imperative. Why is it my team can, with great mediocrity, write a shell script, but cannot write a terraform or ansible to do the same? Why is it they can follow a recipe to kind of make a mint birthday cake but they can't point at a picture of a cake on a picture menu and say "that one!" Sometimes I think they don't actually know what they want before they start. And as the script evolves, like finger painting, they start to kind of like the blobs ... But, I dont work at a software company. I just work at an enterprise with a large IT department.
  - slushh 3y ago
    >Why is it they can follow a recipe to kind of make a mint birthday cake but they can't point at a picture of a cake on a picture menu and say "that one!" They point at the picture of the birthday cake, and they receive an apple pie and cannot figure out why. You have to read the documentation to understand that standing on one foot while pointing makes a difference. Declarative tools are easier when you understand the domain. Otherwise, problems arise because small changes in the requirements can result in huge changes in the outcome.
  - throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    > Why is it my team can, with great mediocrity, write a shell script, but cannot write a terraform or ansible to do the same? They could. They just don't want to, because it's not as sexy as writing code. If you can't do it in Python, from scratch (lol with a lot of modules and very little exception handling), it's clearly inferior and a waste of time to learn. Their intent is to write code, not get things done! They don't learn how to write shell scripts either. I'm sure they will go their entire lives without ever reading the man page. But will read a million bad blog posts about Python and take from them the worst conventions from mediocre programmers trying to get eyeballs on ads.
deleted 3y ago
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Zetice 3y ago
This is written in the style of someone who worships software development, but is not themselves a professional developer and therefore has spent zero time working on a team to build something more complex than, say, a webpage. I recognize the author is a professional developer, and seemingly has worked on teams to build complex things, but it appears as if they forgot how the human machine works, and are now stuck on some kind of nostalgia trip where everyone involved in the process is somehow like them and only able to gain energy through self expression in their software engineering work. I do wonder sometimes if there's something about living in SF or NY that makes you forget how tiny your perspective actually is.
- juunpp 3y ago
  Also the reference to Taylor Swift. I had to re-read that paragraph to see if it was a good thing or a bad thing. Could've used, you know, Eminem or M.O.P or something. > we prevent any Taylor Swifts from ascending So... success?
tru1ock 3y ago
You are just getting old. Nothing much has changed only your perception of things.
joelmichael 3y ago
I think "rock star" is a superficial term which is mostly poking fun at some programmers for having long hair, liking rock music, maybe even owning a guitar.
bloppe 3y ago
I work at a FAANG company on a project from a recent acquisition. The "narrative" of the startup was much like this article describes; a few rock stars knew everything and delivered sweet features everybody loved. Well, now those rock stars are gone, and we're left to pick up the large tech debt tab left over from their free-wheeling days of fast features and relatively poor documentation, code health, and testing. I get why this happened. A startup has to deliver features now if they want to get acquired. It's a completely different mentality from the one we have now: no worries about funding, and we want to do things right in a way that will be robust long-term. Realistically, this is how it was always going to go down. But I can't say that this is ideal. You don't want a couple rock stars carrying your project if you also want that project to be around in 10 years and can't guarantee that all your rock stars will be dedicated for life. You need somebody else to be able to pick up the torch. You want "commodification" (although I don't think it's a very accurate term; it's actually hard to get this right, not easy, but the alternative is much worse over time).
- vikramkr 3y ago
  Was the acquisition a win for the company that sold it or was it more of an aquihire deal? In the success case I think you could argue that was actually the ideal type approach for that company - focus on getting to the point where you or an aquirer can safely adopt that sort of long term mentality and clean up the codebase (or not, if it's good enough). Most projects aren't aiming to be built to last 10 years and slowing down enough to get that right might mean its a moot point if they never shipped. Having to deal with a garbage codebase for a successful product is a good problem to have because it means you have a successful product
- edandersen 3y ago
  There are easy ways to make the rockstars "dedicated for life". It's just seen as expensive.
- YZF 3y ago
  I worked at an S&P 500 company on a project from an acquisition. It was extremely well engineered. Reliable. Attention to details that you sometimes don't see in larger companies. A lot of seasoned amazing engineers worked at that startup. I think there are plenty of examples of amazing software coming out of small teams or even single developers and plenty of examples of large corporations producing garbage with huge teams. > we want to do things right in a way that will be robust long-term. If you don't have the right people that know what "right" is and have seen projects through the long term then this is often used as an excuse to over-engineer and do work nobody cares about. At least that's my experience.
nsonha 3y ago
Maybe it's just me but I hate the word "creative". I don't like that engineers are refered to by the same word that describes actors, poets etc. Problem solving is subposed to be rational/unsurprising, most of the time you follow a logical flow and a consistent methodology to come up with solutions that make the most sense. "Innovation" is supposed to be a side effect of that.
juunpp 3y ago
> Getting flown as an undergrad to SF in 2009 for an interview at Facebook, put in a hotel, served free food, all because you could code? You felt cool Sorry, you drank too much of the kool aid. Let me clear it up for you: you're a cost center that the corp would rather not have.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Software was never really a "creatives" industry, in the way people and articles like this mean. It was, at the dawn of computing, the realm of typists and mathematically inclined women, then slowly through the 70s and 80s, increasingly nerdy men, including the "rockstar" neckbearded ingenious tricksters finding incredibly convoluted ways to save 500 bytes. Besides being "wizards" of a world most people could never understand, you had to actually bend your brain to find solutions to hard problems, because technology was so limited. Now there are no hard problems. Just throw more hardware at it. Just write another CRUD app. Just wrap it in JavaScript. It is commodified because it's now a commodity. Software is ubiquitous and easy. There is no need to be creative, any more than for filing your taxes. The people who like to program are, almost universally, nerds who get off on logic, solving problems, building things. But there aren't really new problems to solve. So they try to re-solve the same problems, over and over, without improving on what came before. Never satisfied. Software will always be the realm of these people that are obsessed with reinventing their toys in a sandbox. So the products will always be kind of toy-like. That's why hardware gets better while software stays about the same. Hardware people can't just play with toys. If the hardware doesn't get better, nobody will buy new hardware, and they'll be out of a job. But people will buy different software and call that "better". Even though it's doing about the same thing as before, less efficiently.
- aprdm 3y ago
  Don’t forget that Star Wars and Pixar were created at the dawn or computing too. What is creative for you ?
  - throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    Creativity is tying one hand behind your back and assembling IKEA furniture. Or making a brand new film that's nothing like the old films, that says something new, tells a new story. Rewriting an old story with new words, using the same old tropes, will sell. But it isn't creative.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  To me writing software is similar to writing fantasy. You need to find good abstract concepts and how to compose them. Then you need to take care of how you put them in whatever language you use. I find it to be a very creative process and I pity the one who does not find their creativity at least tickled when writing code.
hyperthesis 3y ago
Industries mature. I kinda thought coding might be immune, because it's about information. But of course, you build on lower levels. Today, you can get outsized returns by applying LLMs to real problems. Also about information.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Most new software sucks. Nobody is excited by it. Neither users, nor programmers. Rockstars don't work on boring projects. Employers don't want rockstars, they want underpaid, overworked workers. First web browsers were a thing. Napster was a thing. Altavista was a thing. Skype was a thing. One of the first mobile apps (anyone remembers Symbian?) was a thing. Things that some people enjoyed using and other people enjoyed creating. Now, what can excite you as either an user or creator? Your average LOB app? A random chat app that takes ages to start and eats all your computer memory? Uber? Netflix app?
horns4lyfe 3y ago
Cue all the weirdos starting with “Well frankly I’m a rock star and here’s what you normies don’t understand…”. Ya, sure you are.

307 points by srpablo 3y ago

I almost agree with this guy except when he suggest to use something like Java instead of say Python to be able to scale. Most of the successful tech companies he is referencing are using Python. And no one saw a big successful website/app in java. Most of the time corporate or gouvernement shitty web applications that randomly crash with backtraces when you are using them.

esafak 3y ago

This article is all over the place; I got a neck ache trying to follow it. I can't engage all the points, so I'll just address the titular point. The software industry never exhibited the most salient property of talent/creative industries: rockstar economics. And that's a good thing. Otherwise a handful of Carmacks and Deans would rake in all the money, leaving the rest to man the Genius Bar until they got their "big break". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-take-all_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-take-all_market I agree with bullet points about keeping it simple and not using crap tech for your MVP.

mgaunard 3y ago
And yet 10x developers are a thing.
- esafak 3y ago
  Are they? How do you know they are not 9x or 11x? It is hard to say because the industry (and I live in Silicon Valley) has no idea how to measure productivity. And this is reflected in salaries. If we could accurately measure productivity, we could compensate it, but we don't. "Knowledge worker productivity is the biggest of the 21st century management challenges." - Peter Drucker (the founder of modern management)
  - sb8244 3y ago
    Not to beat a dead horse, but is 10x about 9x or 11x? Or is it about "a magnitude more output than others" (10x)? You don't necessarily need to quantify that exactly. If you've worked on a team with people like that, then you know it. Their managers know it too. To your main point, the size of the markets is drastically different. There is only so much room for headline rockstars and entertainers, but there's way more room for talented technologists. Having "rockstars" in the engineering world doesn't really reduce the size of the pie for others.
    - esafak 3y ago
      If you can't measure it, it might as well be 2x or "just better". If you can't prove your superior productivity, you are not going to get paid for it. Which is going to incentivize you to optimize for your company's promotion rubric instead, if you don't get fed up first. This leads to the lamented "promotion-driven design". Or you can ditch the middle man and take your talents straight to the market, through consulting or incorporation.
      - mgaunard 3y ago
        You can definitely measure it. I've seen many times where people were struggling with problems for months with tons of operational incidents, before someone experienced came in and solved it for good in a couple of days.
        bee_rider 3y ago
        That sounds like “just better.” Or it could just be somebody that happened to have a crucial bit of domain knowledge. Or the original composition of the team could have included some negative-contributors.
        mgaunard 3y ago
        a team of people for months = 20 * 3 * 4 one guy for two days = 2 240/2 = 120
- Hermitian909 3y ago
  They are, and it's reflected in the compensation. I know a developer that Meta offered ~$6 mil Total Compensation, he turned it down for $10 mil from Google. It also exists in a much more banal state lower down the ladder. I have friends who landed in the low end of the developer market. They literally cannot do most of the work I do. They don't understand DB isolation levels, they don't have the skills to design systems around eventual consistency, they are not familiar with basic distributed system problems like clock drift, etc. I'm not even an infrastructure engineer, this is just stuff I and my coworkers need to get through our days to ship product code. Could my friends do this stuff? If they applied themselves, sure! But they're not going to. It's also not enough to learn on the job. We occasionally hire someone who doesn't actually have the skillset and they usually flounder.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Was he paid for his superior productivity, or for special skills?
    - hospitalJail 3y ago
      Why not both? I know a dude who got a nice package from a pizza company to be CTO + lead programmer. I think he has a few people under him, but the bigger deal was that he could get a percentage of the $ saved. He worked all day and night to get LLMs to take orders, in a month 40% of their orders are taken through the LLM. For a company with 100s of stores, this is a huge cost saving. Guy knows how to program, he knows technology, and he knew the domain from a previous job.
      - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
        > he could get a percentage of the $ saved I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. I think I (and most other decent engineers) can probably point to tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in savings generated over the course of a single career. As far as I can tell, it gets frittered away by empire-builders who take that $ and spin up new teams for nonsense. Kicking back a % to the engineers who harvested all the savings seems like a much better model.
deleted 3y ago
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sdsd 3y ago

Tbh I think it depends where you work. In 1999, if you worked at a Java shop making accounting software or whatever, it wasn't a talents/creative industry. Same thing now days, but replace Java/accounting with React/CRUD. The rockstar code ninja 10x mentality of 2009 is maybe gone for good, but I see more crazy coders doing rockstar level stuff now than ever before. Asahi Linus and alyssa rosenzweig being great examples from the Asahi project, but these people are all over. People talk about the complexity of the infrastructure making it impossible to do everything yourself, but in my experience is exactly the opposite. The degree of abstration, automation, and high-level tools means that you kinda can do everything without knowing too much.

intelVISA 3y ago
For as ambiguous and misused as "10x" is I much prefer it over infantile terms like "ninja rockstar etc."
- highwaylights 3y ago
  I feel the exact opposite. I much prefer ninja, rockstar, magician, sorcerer, codebro, gnarly dude, big daddy for loop, Little Bobby Tables, SSHelley and Nadine. Nadine doesn’t have a buzzword she’s just really good with Kubernetes. Anything but 10x-er.
- totallywrong 3y ago
  Please somebody let every recruiter on LinkedIn know.
- cactusfrog 3y ago
  I feel like 10x developers are those that spent 2 years working on the same problem at their last job and now know a solution
KerrAvon 3y ago
Asahi seems like a counterexample to your last point: you need incredibly deep knowledge of several technologies to do what they're doing.

dagss 3y ago

In my career I have seen almost identical systems being built by a) 6 developers in a startup in 1 year b) 100+ developers in a big company with a much much larger budget in 2 years. Almost the same specs, but the one in the startup had better scalability and fewer serious bugs... So, spend 10-50x less and get higher quality? Worst is I now consider case b) quite lean and efficient compared to what I see tech consultancies doing towards public sector, banks, etc... -- My point being: There definitely IS a room for "rockstars" (don't like that term, but interpret this as developers competent enough to carry a lot of weight on their own and work in a smaller company) to deliver a lot of value. The problem with the model is the lack of predictability (what if the few developers you trust don't deliver), the bus factor if one of the few devs quits, etc In a sense inefficiency is a goal, because otherwise you loose redundancy. It costs a lot to hire 100 to produce the output of 10, but much lower risk.

dagss 3y ago
Perhaps some day someone will invent a way to get 20 to produce the output of 10 + redundancy... One theory is: If you have just a little too many developers (redundancy), they become bored and find ways to introduce auxiliary complexities to keep things interesting, thus things explode to 100 developers being needed...
- lanstin 3y ago
  Nothing more dangerous than a bored committer.
- cudgy 3y ago
  Have 2 teams of 10 develop the same thing and pick the best one?
  - nathants 3y ago
    teams of 2 or 1, self selecting. sometimes double up and compete on the same project with multiple implementations.
  - 3y ago

suzzer99 3y ago

My project manager called me a rock star one time in a kick-off meeting. My fellow programmers never let me live it down – yelling out "rock star!" when they'd see me in the halls, "come on rock star, fix your bug", "I dunno, let's ask the rock star", etc.

Eumenes 3y ago
you should start offering to autograph keyboards and mice
swader999 3y ago
Trash your monitor in a fit of drunken rage or something like that. Don't let them down.

johnea 3y ago

It still is, and like actual "rockstars", the workers are being exploited by ownership that, for some reason, are the only ones who are supposed to profit off of "rock". Don't know how many musicians you know, just ask one...

billllll 3y ago

Apologies in advance for being a bit negative. I feel like this sentence is just so revealing: > That said, he and I will likely never see eye-to-eye on this because he more-or-less invented Choose Boring Technology, and most of what I advocate is to break playbook, embrace narrative, and be interesting. It really comes down to what you prioritize. Do you prioritize the output and the value added? Or do you prioritize making your engineers feel like "rockstars"? If you don't care about your end product, then yeah sure let your engineers break prod using untested technologies. The reason playbooks have sprung up, is because 99% of use-cases for businesses are for the most part "solved." We're not in the era of renting colos and manually setting up MySQL anymore (which the author advocates for in order to return to "creatives," btw). We have managed solutions that you can throw money at. So, do you leverage those solutions to help you solve your problem? Or do you let your engineers re-invent the wheel so they can feel smart? The "rockstar" treatment is a result of supply and demand. Talent in Hollywood/music can get the rockstar treatment, because the talent alone is the difference between millions of dollars. If you have a really talented coder who can be interchanged with another really talented coder, you do not have a "rockstar." The "rockstar" era of coding was the result of a massive imbalance in supply/demand for engineers, so the rockstar treatment would help attract talent. Now that the supply has began shifting up to meet the demand, it makes sense that the "rockstar" treatment is starting to go away. And good riddance to all that too. I don't need to work with any more software engineers who think it's okay to be a massive dick to everyone just because they can implement a CRUD app. If you want to be a rockstar, go actually be a rockstar, don't make software engineering worse.

majormajor 3y ago
I've seen teams today have just as large an FTE team dedicated to infrastructure as my employee 10 years ago to manage a set of cloud services that cost wayyyy more than the colo hardware we had doing basically the same amount of traffic. So people cost hasn't always gone down as infra cost has gone up. "Shitty internal heroku" has some advantages once you have engineers that have been at the company more than 3 months: there's just not nearly as much surface area to understand + you have the source code right there if you really have to get int here. Let's leave judgements out of this - you can just as easily build a fragile tower of cloud services and abstractions to "feel smart" as you can reinventing serving an application (reinventing is a strong word anyway... it's just a different set of off the shelf tools usually). And in many cases "managed" services manage the easy part (standing up the hardware and installing the service) and don't manage the hard part (configuring the hundreds of knobs to optimize your particular use case) particularly well. I'm not close enough to the metal for those services/infra teams, though, to be able to completely tell if the FTE hours spent on all that cloud stuff are necessary. That is - can you throw stuff into the cloud and set-it-and-forget-it and not deal with ongoing cloud/infra/config maintenance? But one of the main things those teams seemed to often focus on was spend - if you leave it unattended is the cost just going to eat you up? But then there's a big irony.

boredumb 3y ago

The playbook works and the more boring the better. If you are doing something on the edges of computing or industry than hooray - you are off the beaten path and it's your time to shine! You can be the one writing the playbook in a retrospective, but please don't try to make a boring application in a boring industry exciting by being unorthodox. I don't want to be excited and interested in how you solved a basic CRUD implementation - I want to intuitively know what it's doing before I even git clone your repository.

lanstin 3y ago
I do think that as more things become programmable and hence part of software, the odds that a given project is novel increases. If you maximize the Lisp/hacker/Dry approach, any new code should be novel; if something is just a repeat, you should make an abstraction to make it the same; instead of hand made websites just configure your Wordpress or Django or whatever.

jebarker 3y ago

"When WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, they had 35 engineers. They were able to do this in part because they didn't "follow playbook," and while you probably can't go that extreme..." Not my area of expertise at all but, 35 engineers for WhatsApp sounds like a lot

grokx 3y ago
What about several thousand engineers for Twitter then? =) Regarding WhatsApp, I would say that 35 engineers is OK. Not so much, but not so few also.
- 62951413 3y ago
  https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-than-550-full-time-engineers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...

awkward 3y ago

The silly part of this is that the industries he compares software to - music, television, movies - have all been skeletonized and reduced to minimal and repeatable products. Simply looking out the door should be enough to convince you that if you want to bring back the magic, asking to be treated like a television writer isn't the way. Right now the biggest thing bringing down developer wages is the threat of being replaced with an LLM. That's not going to work out in the long run - giving developers productivity increasing tools isn't going to lessen their value. However, it's the most plausible wage suppression hustle for quite some time. Until the limits of LLM generation get tested and felt, the downward pressure on wages is going to continue. Maybe when the first wave of LLM driven startups feel the pain of maintaining code that doesn't have an author, or maybe high profile malicious training data attacks will do it. Even afterwards, the effects of the wage curve being bent downward for a couple years are still going to be there.

EddieJLSH 3y ago
Just look at the success of the Superhero franchises in Hollywood
- srpablo 3y ago
  Author here. Well, sure, but to the contrary: DC has had a much harder time imitating Marvel's success, even with great IP. Universal tried to create the "Dark Universe." And even Marvel is having trouble cranking out the hits with the middling success of Ant-Man Quantumania, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Wakanda Forever. I suspect making these things more streamlined and more of a flat cultural paste through the Disney Machine is a part of the lower outcomes.
  - awkward 3y ago
    I think if we want to talk about the actual value of messy human processes, you're on the nose. The problem is that large, entrenched industries can function using a distorted, rationalized model for a lot longer than any of us can afford to just wait around.
3y ago

marginalia_nu 3y ago

I don't think you'll find metaphorical rock stars working in a team in a salaried job, any more than you'll find actual Taylor Swift doing ten hour shifts in an office building. There's nuance to that though. It's really hard to distinguish yourself working in such an environment, you don't have the time, freedom and energy to do that. And if you can't do that, you won't ever be much of a "rock star". Not that you can't work as an independent "creative" in programming though. I've gotten to a point where I can work on Marginalia Search full time, and live off grants and donations for at least a few years. Dunno if I'm a rock star for it, I don't even have a Wikipedia page, but I at least reckon myself a fairly successful busker. If I don't qualify, then certainly Serenity OS Andreas who made like $300k in a week with his browser shenanigans. Him and a other people far more talented than I am are able to live this way. But it's a weird game. I think it's more or less all about the right sort of visibility. You distinguish yourself working on some large problem in a public fashion, and people inevitably will start throwing money your way; this enables additional work and additional visibility, it gives even more opportunities. While maybe not reaching the John Romero levels of rockstar we had in the '90s, this manner of working is certainly closer to the success of a Taylor Swift than being the most talented developer in the IT department.

convolvatron 3y ago
my first industry job was in 1995. after the interview process the hiring manager came in with an offer. it was 4x what i was currently making. after i accepted I had a half day with the admin. she showed me the very nice hotel that they would be putting me up at until I found a place. no hurry really. one of my new coworkers was still there after a few months. we went back to the office for tastings. coffee. wine. beer. whiskey. it was important that they knew my tastes and would have my preferred food and drink on hand. i know that was the point - but I certainly felt like a rock star.
- Cyph0n 3y ago
  Man, the dot-com boom must have been wild.

fivre 3y ago

software as auteur work succeeds when it's entering a vacuum. if you're legit breaking open a field that's never been exposed to it before, sure, go wild. those fields are fewer and far between nowadays unlike creative industries, there's a fuckton of toil work that just needs to be done automating processes. the playbook style excels there, and unlike artistic work there's not really room for memorable standouts that break the rules. music will always have the quality where good novelty is impressive and breaks boundaries. business processes less so. prince can (could) deliver a stellar rendition of purple rain that breaks the bonds between heaven and earth even though you've heard the song before, but ain't nobody delivering a stellar automated check deposit workflow execution that stands out from the rest. commodity services bring commodity work. this is fine. i do not want my mobile check deposit to be a tour de force, i want it to be something i don't give a second thought. there is beauty in the blase' being blase'

marcrosoft 3y ago

I stopped reading after the author criticized gofmt for being boring.

shadowgovt 3y ago
gofmt solves the right problem; complaints that it makes code boring are misunderstanding code. If you want a different view on your code: write one. Code is the model. Presentation of code in an editing UI is the view. Tools like gofmt normalize the model so that it's easier to build a view that re-represents it.

yuy910616 3y ago

These industries just have a different mechanism, here is an example: the worlds 10,000th best tennis player probably makes $0 dollar from tennis, and the world's top 0.1% of pharmacists make maybe twice as much as the 50th percentile. Some industries you either are the top 0.01% and make millions; in some industries being average means a decent living. Software has long transitioned from one end of that spectrum to something more towards the middle. Super star developers simply aren't productive enough for the demand of software

hyperhopper 3y ago
4 times in this comment you referred to one half of a point you were trying to make but not the other half. Makes it much more difficult to parse when you say "either" but only provide one half of that statement.
culebron21 3y ago
To be correct, even the worlds top 50th best tennis player makes $0 (read from couple interviews back in the '00s), it's mostly their family that pays. Below top 20, sponsors may cover part of costs. Like other sports, it's fun enough that many play it for free at local tournaments, and some families can afford pay expensive flights and stay abroad. I recall meeting with sportsmen and travellers who do months-long trips across continents. Half of them were pensioneers and just one single guy was a 34-yo die-hard traveller riding a bike across Eurasia for its own sake. Others were professionals, and they'd say they'd been preparing the travel for 2 years, seeking sponsors -- some in equipment, some in money, -- and signing contracts and clarifying sponsorship activity details -- photos here, report and booklet there, etc. This contrasted a lot with our IT industry "let's do it for fun or learning" spirit.

gloryjulio 3y ago

Not sure If I agree with this article. My experience in the big co is that trying to navigate through large systems with many moving parts and stakeholders and come up with a solution and execute as quickly as you can is very exciting. And you definitely need to be creative to trying to align and solve some many problems in 1 design. It's a very challenging and fun experience

metalforever 3y ago
Not to bring in this separate issue, but it can be impossible to navigate this as a technically skilled minority . Some people just don't want to work with you and are not going to work with you unless they can tell you exactly how things should be. In large orgs, you may end up with more than one of these people and they just don't align. If coming up with a design that pleases both of them is possible at all, it ends up being a turd architecturally . Later, because its a turd, people pin blame on you.
- gloryjulio 3y ago
  When you are blocked by non technical issues, it should be the manager's job to help you clear the roadblocks. If the manager is not doing his job, it's probably time to switch teams or jobs. Tbf haven't seen anything like this yet. There are tons minorities working in tech(myself included)
  - cudgy 3y ago
    “If the manager is not doing his job, it's probably time to switch teams or jobs.” You’ll be switching jobs quite a bit then.
    - gloryjulio 3y ago
      I did change jobs a few times but only for the compensation reasons. My current manager and the past managers are great. Expectations goes both ways. The companies expect the ICs to ship code, and the ICs can expect to work with competent managers. Pay attention when selecting your team.

coldcode 3y ago

In the 1980's, the About box of most applications (Mac and DOS primarily) often listed most of the people who worked on them. Many of the people were also known to others; I usually met many at the precursor to WWDC. It was cool to see your name on something you worked on (I worked on three apps over my two startups, Trapeze, Persuasion, and Deltagraph). Some people got to be pretty rockstar-like (I remember at the first WWDC (not called that yet) in 1986 sitting on a boat with what felt like all the Mac programmers in the world, a whole bunch of us aptly listening to Silicon Beach's Charlie Jackson on how he recorded a cricket for their first game). Because apps and programmers were rare compared to today and something new, you had more of a connection to the people who built things. Today you have no clue and probably don't want to know.

mindentropy 3y ago
Yes sir. I still remember so many DOS applications and especially games. There was a game called Cannon Fodder which had the developers as characters in the game and the About screen was so cool. Man I miss those days.

trunnell 3y ago

I think the "rock star" analogy did more damage to our profession than most care to admit. Rock stars get treated a certain way, they are catered to, their egos might get fluffed up, etc. None of those behaviors are compatible with working in software teams, and none of the "best" developers I know want to be treated that way, anyhow. That said, I think this article is essentially correct. I would put it like this: building information machines out of pure information is a creative endeavor. Human performance tends to fall on a bell curve, and IMO it's true for developer output in particular. So if you want to create a hugely valuable solution to a big problem, you should probably hire the best people you can find and organize them in a way that lets them max out their creative power. The main obstacle to this IMO is poor leadership attitudes & practices. This article's author said it best in another post: "Boring" is a good strategy if you think the bigger existential risk for your company is that Product & Engineering will [...] fail to ship a reliable product on a reliable schedule. But if you're more afraid of the business risks of shipping average product, at an average cadence, over the course of years, you should consider deviating, at least sometimes, from the playbook whose entire definition is "optimized for safety." https://morepablo.com/2022/04/against-boring.html https://morepablo.com/2022/04/against-boring.html

kandel 3y ago
The rock star thing is a bit creepy. I'd like to be good at my job but not have the job turn into my entire life. Why does the conversation around tech imply that software jobs are either grey prisons or stress balls? Methinks reality is a bit more complex, but i'm just an undergrad. Same thing with math academy honestly.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > Why does the conversation around tech imply that software jobs are either grey prisons or stress balls? There are 10 types of people in the world . . .
trabant00 3y ago
> Rock stars get treated a certain way, they are catered to, their egos might get fluffed up, etc. None of those behaviors are compatible with working in software teams, and none of the "best" developers I know want to be treated that way, anyhow. Stars are a thing, they are way beyond what the average dev can ever accomplish and they would only be held back by a team. They should be catered to and really be accountable to nobody as far as technical decisions go. Their time and energy is just too precious to be spent soothing your fragile egos. And that's not just my opinion either. That's why companies have positions like fellow, distinguished, etc. The whole "rock-stars are toxic" is just the inability of some people to accept their limitations. Most of us are nobodies, easily replaceable code monkeys who will never accomplish anything of note. If you're of the opinion that a nice personality somehow is worth more than being excellent you are lying to yourself first and foremost. And you're not that nice anyway since you are willing to spend your time digging through stars' closets in the hope of finding any skeleton to bring them down. Being agreeable only qualifies you to easily being worked in what are essentially sweatshops who produce crap, the subject of the article. Take note though that said sweatshops would not exist without the stars that CREATED this industry. Never in a million years, you and your team of "nice" people would have produced any of the foundations of current IT.

dogleash 3y ago

There's threads of a few interesting ideas in here, unfortunately the presentation teed them up for the current cultural mythos to obliterate them. A number of years ago, the uptight cultural conformity of the valley bubble branded itself with some of the imagery the author attempts to borrow. The collective consciousness hasn't forgotten how that image was power-blasted away. It was done as cover to sneak in a bunch of orthogonal changes while nobody was looking, but that part's neither here nor there. Forget I even mentioned it. The end result is that we're here now and we have the tools to evaporate this article with one shot at 50 paces.

tehjoker 3y ago

The transition from a new growth industry to a mature industry under conditions of nearly interest free loans and low aggregate consumer demand. In this essay, it seems clear that the kinds of designs matter a bit, but lots of companies choose different technologies and practices and survive. The obvious conclusion is that market conditions matter more than the technology stack for a space of "reasonable" choices about it. I expect, until the next big thing hits, the market conditions to be dominated by consolidation. Bitcoin was supposed to bit it, but that was a scam. VR was also a scam (Zuck tried to sell us non-existent real estate), but maybe it'll turn into something more useful soon.

082349872349872 3y ago
> under conditions of nearly interest free loans I'm hoping higher interest rates may revive the older style: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34565816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34565816

opportune 3y ago

I disagree with a lot of this for a few main reasons. And some minor ones Application development technology has considerably improved over time - most applications simply do not need to reinvent the wheel! Yes, over-engineering by designing something that will never see more than 1qps to scale infinitely is bad - I’m sure it happens but I think it’s more a strawman. If you need a simple CRUD application with a good-enough UI you have no need to introduce additional complexity (and potentially maintenance, reliability issues) with custom tooling. Two, the software talent market is bifurcated. There is basically commodity development of crud apps, and technically complex novel development. If you think there are no rockstars you might just be in the commodity development scene. There literally are these so-called “rockstars” being flown into SF to work on new stuff in the ML sphere or into NYC/Chicago to work on bleeding edge performance. Maybe the dissonance here is that the commodity developer market has grown a lot, and that over time some technology (like web applications - a lot harder to do at scale in 2005 vs now) shifts from rockstar to commodity as it matures. Reverting to pets-not-cattle and statefulness can be appropriate at low scale. But honestly this is more of a “choose the right solution to the problem” thing and not a rockstar thing. Following this model as you reach large scale allows for cool production heroism and cowboy coding that makes you feel like a true hacker, but that doesn’t mean your users are getting a more reliable experience, or that your dev time is being spent efficiently. My minor quip is that, I think as you get more experienced what you used to think of as rockstar development just looks routine because you’re better at writing software. Another minor point: you can’t just engender a rockstar culture at a company that hires commodity developers as easily as asserted here. The big thing not mentioned: PAY. Nobody wants to get paid like a commodity developer to have to perform like a rockstar. Being a commodity developer is more chill and there is less day to day risk and stress. Once you start getting towards the bleeding edge or reinventing the wheel your work becomes riskier and requires more mental effort and attention.

hinkley 3y ago
There aren't that many wheels that need inventing, even back in the so-called rockstar era. > Two, the software talent market is bifurcated. There is basically commodity development of crud apps, and technically complex novel development. This I think is the source of most of the wheel invention. Someone pays a good deal of money for 'talent' they do not actually require, and they end up working at cross purposes. Assign someone with cleverness to work on a crud app, and they're bound to try to reinvent something, if not to keep their resume fresh, at least to fight the boredom. But it's not bifurcation, it's trifurcation. It's not build or invent, it's build, buy, or invent. We are too many of us writing applications that were never really needed in the first place. Not for any single reason, but a whole host of them, from empire building, to rent seeking from people who could have made a tool that adapted well to customers, but saw much more money in keeping them engaged with you instead of operating on their own steam. Open source is also driven by a lot of motivations, but 'your own steam' is a pretty compelling one.

3dsnano 3y ago

i hired a true rockstar once. they were the smartest developer i have ever worked with, ever. this individual could singlehandedly put together massive systems, from technical to design, with confidence and flair. i had to let this person go because they did not know how to work with others. beyond their brilliance, they could simply not empathize with the organization's POV. everything was about them, supporting them, making them feel special, unique, and important. this individual eventually returned the company laptop, which was bent in half. they told me that they had smoked enough DMT to understand that they had created their own god and that if my org needed further investment, to reach out to them. i hired this person from HN "who wants to be hired." they still (to this day) add a post to the monthly thread.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
i hired this person from HN "who wants to be hired." they still (to this day) add a post to the monthly thread. Now it makes sense
YZF 3y ago
The greatest developers I've known were nice people, fairly humble and reasonably good team players. I'd like to think that's more common than your example but I also think I know the type.
danjac 3y ago
"his individual eventually returned the company laptop, which was bent in half. they told me that they had smoked enough DMT to understand that they had created their own god and that if my org needed further investment, to reach out to them." I guess they were a rock star in the "Led Zepplin trashing a hotel room" sense.

bcrosby95 3y ago

I took the "boring tech" stuff differently. I choose technology that makes my production environment boring. Sometimes that means picking technology that is not mainstream. Choosing mainstream technology is one of the best ways to make your production environment decidedly not boring. I would argue Erlang is one of the most boring pieces of tech you can pick. Look at how boring your production systems can get when you choose that.

mbgerring 3y ago

One interesting thing to note: whether you think software should be more like a “talent/creatives” industry, or more like a trade, one thing both of those models have in common is unions.

abecedarius 3y ago

By the title I thought this would be about the early 80s and e.g. this Electronic Arts ad/poster: https://bytecellar.com/2009/09/30/i_started_life/ https://bytecellar.com/2009/09/30/i_started_life/

varelse 3y ago

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z3t4 3y ago

I think the problem with today's software is that there are few amateurs. Most software developers are professionals who get paid by the hour - that rather build something in 5 years then in 5 days because they get paid to do it, they do not hate complexity they embrace it. Something is taking 5 seconds you better make a framework to solve it. Software is everywhere so CEO's will keep paying. The good news is that a teenager can beat a team of 100 engineers. The large team still have an upper hand with their insane marketing budgets though. But who wants to be a developer when you can get famous on Tiktok instead.

cracrecry 3y ago

The grass was always greener in the past / Cualquier Tiempo pasado fue mejor. Pure creative programming work have always been a small subset of programming in general. Were COBOL programmers creative? Data Base programmers? IBM programmers? Those were the majority of software jobs in the past. I have been mostly a pure C,Verilog, VHDL, analog digital electronics -low level engineer for a long time before becoming entrepreneur and using much higher level languages in our company. Was it creative? A lot. I interacted with machines like robots that did things like moving 20 tons or lasers or robots or whatever. Was is painful, tedious and boring?. It was, also. You need to make it rain using active work of whatever is necessary for your job. The fact that something is not "sexy" is a great advantage for a job as it removes most of the competition. Being hard scares most people. The best advice I could give young people is to find hard problems and to find the techniques and tools that could make those problems easier. We use psychology and things like lisp as secret weapons. Thinking in the 35 people that created Facebook is extremely misleading, because fb got extremely lucky, and they were hundreds of thousand of programmers working in other companies. The monetary success of fb has a lot more to do with free money created by central banks than anything the founders created as their technology was easy to replicate but its financing was not. There are intense opportunities today like they were in the past. But they are hard, like it was hard in the past.

cudgy 3y ago
“Were COBOL programmers creative? Data Base programmers? IBM programmers? Those were the majority of software jobs in the past.” Some of those jobs surely had creative aspects to them … far more creative than the recent YAWS (yet another website) using ASWF (another shiny web framework) with all the bells and whistles included.
disgruntledphd2 3y ago
Facebook was founded in 2004, well before interest rates became zero.
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cosmiccatnap 3y ago

The thing I find most sad about articles like this is that it doesn't seem to actually address any of the reasons that it got this way, it blames individuals within the field not a series of MBA graduates telling you what the spec is and hiring 50 people to hit an arbitrary deadline for a software project moving in the wrong direction FAST. It's a false dichotomy to say you only have rock stars and as this person smugly tip toes around "normal people" when in reality you don't need rock stars anymore to make good software and let's be honest... Most rock stars didn't make good software they just make it in a time when software was generally even more crap than it is now. You want to stop suffering among us plebs? Don't advocate for goofy rockstar developer propaganda, advocate for healthy work life balance and reasonable deadlines for things that truly don't matter. Stop letting sales and marketing write your software and stop taking opinions about systems design from your project managers and "technical leads" when they do not work in these systems day to day. If you treat engineers well and respect them before a client who will drop you the moment a new product fits their need then yes you will lose clients from time to time but if you focus on making good software and happy people then you will attract stable clients who do the same and maybe the stock holders at the top don't get the ridiculous return per year that they expect out of more shameless companies but at least you have a half decent chance of sleeping at night... I am well aware that we live in a world where this will be borderline impossible but the first step to solving a problem is admitting it

cheekibreeki2 3y ago

It's a bit scary how much weight is put upon k8s and terraform and how little actual skills these jobs require. I miss being a sysadmin in this commodity world.

digitalsushi 3y ago
I struggle to understand why declarative tools are apparently so much more difficult to use than imperative. Why is it my team can, with great mediocrity, write a shell script, but cannot write a terraform or ansible to do the same? Why is it they can follow a recipe to kind of make a mint birthday cake but they can't point at a picture of a cake on a picture menu and say "that one!" Sometimes I think they don't actually know what they want before they start. And as the script evolves, like finger painting, they start to kind of like the blobs ... But, I dont work at a software company. I just work at an enterprise with a large IT department.
- slushh 3y ago
  >Why is it they can follow a recipe to kind of make a mint birthday cake but they can't point at a picture of a cake on a picture menu and say "that one!" They point at the picture of the birthday cake, and they receive an apple pie and cannot figure out why. You have to read the documentation to understand that standing on one foot while pointing makes a difference. Declarative tools are easier when you understand the domain. Otherwise, problems arise because small changes in the requirements can result in huge changes in the outcome.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  > Why is it my team can, with great mediocrity, write a shell script, but cannot write a terraform or ansible to do the same? They could. They just don't want to, because it's not as sexy as writing code. If you can't do it in Python, from scratch (lol with a lot of modules and very little exception handling), it's clearly inferior and a waste of time to learn. Their intent is to write code, not get things done! They don't learn how to write shell scripts either. I'm sure they will go their entire lives without ever reading the man page. But will read a million bad blog posts about Python and take from them the worst conventions from mediocre programmers trying to get eyeballs on ads.

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Zetice 3y ago

This is written in the style of someone who worships software development, but is not themselves a professional developer and therefore has spent zero time working on a team to build something more complex than, say, a webpage. I recognize the author is a professional developer, and seemingly has worked on teams to build complex things, but it appears as if they forgot how the human machine works, and are now stuck on some kind of nostalgia trip where everyone involved in the process is somehow like them and only able to gain energy through self expression in their software engineering work. I do wonder sometimes if there's something about living in SF or NY that makes you forget how tiny your perspective actually is.

juunpp 3y ago
Also the reference to Taylor Swift. I had to re-read that paragraph to see if it was a good thing or a bad thing. Could've used, you know, Eminem or M.O.P or something. > we prevent any Taylor Swifts from ascending So... success?

tru1ock 3y ago

You are just getting old. Nothing much has changed only your perception of things.

joelmichael 3y ago

I think "rock star" is a superficial term which is mostly poking fun at some programmers for having long hair, liking rock music, maybe even owning a guitar.

bloppe 3y ago

I work at a FAANG company on a project from a recent acquisition. The "narrative" of the startup was much like this article describes; a few rock stars knew everything and delivered sweet features everybody loved. Well, now those rock stars are gone, and we're left to pick up the large tech debt tab left over from their free-wheeling days of fast features and relatively poor documentation, code health, and testing. I get why this happened. A startup has to deliver features now if they want to get acquired. It's a completely different mentality from the one we have now: no worries about funding, and we want to do things right in a way that will be robust long-term. Realistically, this is how it was always going to go down. But I can't say that this is ideal. You don't want a couple rock stars carrying your project if you also want that project to be around in 10 years and can't guarantee that all your rock stars will be dedicated for life. You need somebody else to be able to pick up the torch. You want "commodification" (although I don't think it's a very accurate term; it's actually hard to get this right, not easy, but the alternative is much worse over time).

vikramkr 3y ago
Was the acquisition a win for the company that sold it or was it more of an aquihire deal? In the success case I think you could argue that was actually the ideal type approach for that company - focus on getting to the point where you or an aquirer can safely adopt that sort of long term mentality and clean up the codebase (or not, if it's good enough). Most projects aren't aiming to be built to last 10 years and slowing down enough to get that right might mean its a moot point if they never shipped. Having to deal with a garbage codebase for a successful product is a good problem to have because it means you have a successful product
edandersen 3y ago
There are easy ways to make the rockstars "dedicated for life". It's just seen as expensive.
YZF 3y ago
I worked at an S&P 500 company on a project from an acquisition. It was extremely well engineered. Reliable. Attention to details that you sometimes don't see in larger companies. A lot of seasoned amazing engineers worked at that startup. I think there are plenty of examples of amazing software coming out of small teams or even single developers and plenty of examples of large corporations producing garbage with huge teams. > we want to do things right in a way that will be robust long-term. If you don't have the right people that know what "right" is and have seen projects through the long term then this is often used as an excuse to over-engineer and do work nobody cares about. At least that's my experience.

nsonha 3y ago

Maybe it's just me but I hate the word "creative". I don't like that engineers are refered to by the same word that describes actors, poets etc. Problem solving is subposed to be rational/unsurprising, most of the time you follow a logical flow and a consistent methodology to come up with solutions that make the most sense. "Innovation" is supposed to be a side effect of that.

juunpp 3y ago

> Getting flown as an undergrad to SF in 2009 for an interview at Facebook, put in a hotel, served free food, all because you could code? You felt cool Sorry, you drank too much of the kool aid. Let me clear it up for you: you're a cost center that the corp would rather not have.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Software was never really a "creatives" industry, in the way people and articles like this mean. It was, at the dawn of computing, the realm of typists and mathematically inclined women, then slowly through the 70s and 80s, increasingly nerdy men, including the "rockstar" neckbearded ingenious tricksters finding incredibly convoluted ways to save 500 bytes. Besides being "wizards" of a world most people could never understand, you had to actually bend your brain to find solutions to hard problems, because technology was so limited. Now there are no hard problems. Just throw more hardware at it. Just write another CRUD app. Just wrap it in JavaScript. It is commodified because it's now a commodity. Software is ubiquitous and easy. There is no need to be creative, any more than for filing your taxes. The people who like to program are, almost universally, nerds who get off on logic, solving problems, building things. But there aren't really new problems to solve. So they try to re-solve the same problems, over and over, without improving on what came before. Never satisfied. Software will always be the realm of these people that are obsessed with reinventing their toys in a sandbox. So the products will always be kind of toy-like. That's why hardware gets better while software stays about the same. Hardware people can't just play with toys. If the hardware doesn't get better, nobody will buy new hardware, and they'll be out of a job. But people will buy different software and call that "better". Even though it's doing about the same thing as before, less efficiently.

aprdm 3y ago
Don’t forget that Star Wars and Pixar were created at the dawn or computing too. What is creative for you ?
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  Creativity is tying one hand behind your back and assembling IKEA furniture. Or making a brand new film that's nothing like the old films, that says something new, tells a new story. Rewriting an old story with new words, using the same old tropes, will sell. But it isn't creative.
zelphirkalt 3y ago
To me writing software is similar to writing fantasy. You need to find good abstract concepts and how to compose them. Then you need to take care of how you put them in whatever language you use. I find it to be a very creative process and I pity the one who does not find their creativity at least tickled when writing code.

hyperthesis 3y ago

Industries mature. I kinda thought coding might be immune, because it's about information. But of course, you build on lower levels. Today, you can get outsized returns by applying LLMs to real problems. Also about information.

DeathArrow 3y ago

Most new software sucks. Nobody is excited by it. Neither users, nor programmers. Rockstars don't work on boring projects. Employers don't want rockstars, they want underpaid, overworked workers. First web browsers were a thing. Napster was a thing. Altavista was a thing. Skype was a thing. One of the first mobile apps (anyone remembers Symbian?) was a thing. Things that some people enjoyed using and other people enjoyed creating. Now, what can excite you as either an user or creator? Your average LOB app? A random chat app that takes ages to start and eats all your computer memory? Uber? Netflix app?

horns4lyfe 3y ago

Cue all the weirdos starting with “Well frankly I’m a rock star and here’s what you normies don’t understand…”. Ya, sure you are.