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I increasingly feel like the development community maintains an equilibrium of "Accidental Complexity" and "Essential Complexity". As better methods for managin

by ern 3y ago

I increasingly feel like the development community maintains an equilibrium of "Accidental Complexity" and "Essential Complexity". As better methods for managing Essential Complexity come to the fore, Accidental Complexity gets jacked up to keep the workload high, so the geeks stay stimulated and the consultancies collect the $$$.

steve1977 3y ago
I‘m not even sure it’s an equilibrium. I’m in tech for around 25 years now, I feel developer productivity and output is not the same but lower today.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  Between mind-blowing complexity and never-ending distractions, I find doing actual work near impossible. After getting laid off, I just... didn't look for work. I instead started writing my own product for pull request assignments and direct Slack notifications for those (my personal frustration). I needed to get away from it all and decompress. It's been refreshing writing code.
travisgriggs 3y ago
I have been feeling this for a while now. It’s like the army of eager labor, the ranks of managers who derive value from larger work forces, and sick amount of VC money, has really eclipsed emphases on various axes of efficiency seeking that used to dominate the industry (often in overrated/oversold ways admittedly). Remember when “tech stack X enabled you to do y per coney more with z fewer developers?
renegade-otter 3y ago
In VC-backed startups, "growth" does not refer to user growth or profits. Most of the "daily active user" metrics are bullshit. I've worked for a company once that gave away employees free funding money to make purchases. Yes, to get the number of orders up before a board meeting. It was blatant, unethical, but not really illegal. So what is growth? The number of developers you have doing stuff. You hire more and more, and every few months you parade some Patagonia vests through your offices to show them. "Observe, more devs! Growth!" The problems is, the devs all have to do something. I stopped feeling productive years ago. It's all just never-ending grind, dealing with complexity that has no f--ing business being there. And the younger engineers have no idea. They think this is normal.
- metalforever 3y ago
  Yeah, I can't deal with it anymore.
bob1029 3y ago
Out of the tar pit suggests we should all go back to one big SQL server and probably resort to something approximating SSR web apps again. You know... 2-3 big powerful servers like we used to have. How fast is a stack like this today compared to 20 years ago? This is mostly what we have done. We want to make money. There are barely 10 of us. We don't have time for make believe work that doesn't bring in extra revenue. We used to play in traffic with conversations like "micro services" and "one repo per service" but our investor killed that mode of business and gave us one more chance to do it right. I recall the original reason for moving away from one big database being something approximating "it won't scale". How well are those various k8s contraptions scaling relative to the "legacy" verticals they purport to replace? How many of us would go back in an instant if given the opportunity? I think the biggest fear for most on HN is going through ego death over this. The fact that even your "hard" problem is trivially solved with boring tools that were invented before you were born.
- mwcampbell 3y ago
  I wonder if even the multiple servers and dedicated SQL server are overkill for most applications. The simplicity of running the whole thing on one machine using SQLite, with Litestream or something like it for backups, is really seductive. Edit to add: and as you've pointed out before, the locality of having the database right there in the application process leads to really good performance.

by ern 3y ago

steve1977 3y ago

I‘m not even sure it’s an equilibrium. I’m in tech for around 25 years now, I feel developer productivity and output is not the same but lower today.

renegade-otter 3y ago
Between mind-blowing complexity and never-ending distractions, I find doing actual work near impossible. After getting laid off, I just... didn't look for work. I instead started writing my own product for pull request assignments and direct Slack notifications for those (my personal frustration). I needed to get away from it all and decompress. It's been refreshing writing code.

travisgriggs 3y ago

I have been feeling this for a while now. It’s like the army of eager labor, the ranks of managers who derive value from larger work forces, and sick amount of VC money, has really eclipsed emphases on various axes of efficiency seeking that used to dominate the industry (often in overrated/oversold ways admittedly). Remember when “tech stack X enabled you to do y per coney more with z fewer developers?

renegade-otter 3y ago

In VC-backed startups, "growth" does not refer to user growth or profits. Most of the "daily active user" metrics are bullshit. I've worked for a company once that gave away employees free funding money to make purchases. Yes, to get the number of orders up before a board meeting. It was blatant, unethical, but not really illegal. So what is growth? The number of developers you have doing stuff. You hire more and more, and every few months you parade some Patagonia vests through your offices to show them. "Observe, more devs! Growth!" The problems is, the devs all have to do something. I stopped feeling productive years ago. It's all just never-ending grind, dealing with complexity that has no f--ing business being there. And the younger engineers have no idea. They think this is normal.

metalforever 3y ago
Yeah, I can't deal with it anymore.

bob1029 3y ago

Out of the tar pit suggests we should all go back to one big SQL server and probably resort to something approximating SSR web apps again. You know... 2-3 big powerful servers like we used to have. How fast is a stack like this today compared to 20 years ago? This is mostly what we have done. We want to make money. There are barely 10 of us. We don't have time for make believe work that doesn't bring in extra revenue. We used to play in traffic with conversations like "micro services" and "one repo per service" but our investor killed that mode of business and gave us one more chance to do it right. I recall the original reason for moving away from one big database being something approximating "it won't scale". How well are those various k8s contraptions scaling relative to the "legacy" verticals they purport to replace? How many of us would go back in an instant if given the opportunity? I think the biggest fear for most on HN is going through ego death over this. The fact that even your "hard" problem is trivially solved with boring tools that were invented before you were born.

mwcampbell 3y ago
I wonder if even the multiple servers and dedicated SQL server are overkill for most applications. The simplicity of running the whole thing on one machine using SQLite, with Litestream or something like it for backups, is really seductive. Edit to add: and as you've pointed out before, the locality of having the database right there in the application process leads to really good performance.