12 ms·

As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

• dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
  The tragedy is - why do the young care about technology? Look like they have to find some meaning in their un-fulfilling lives.
  • BuckRogers 3y ago
    Technology is a false god. Speaking of which, I spent about 15 years of my life being an atheist. I went to Mexico last Christmas and came back a changed man. I answered the calling of my conscience. I think over time the current political situation in the US is going to push people back to traditional values as well. Living life for yourself is always going to be ultimately unfulfilling. Men need to sacrifice and be responsible for others. And submitting our own will to the will of our creator is very liberating. And if anyone from Mexico sees this, God bless Mexico. I’m thankful for Catholic nations. The level of devotion and permeance is awe inspiring. I have a new admiration and understanding now of the Catholic world. It almost feels like home in a way.
    • docandrew 3y ago
      I’m probably guilty of idolizing tech at times too. Others here have echoed the importance of using tech as a means to an end, not as an end unto itself. Thanks for sharing your journey.
    • pb7 3y ago
      Religiosity is rapidly going down over time and it's unlikely that it's going to suddenly turn around. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
      • johnnyworker 3y ago
        We don't even have a name for it now, that's how bad it is IMO. All those mere vessels relaying what "the average user" or "the industry" requires, which we should most humbly submit to. The way "disrupt" was thrown around, or the kool-aid required to believe that continuing down the route consolidation and inequality will somehow result in universal basic income. People who fly to 15 conferences a year rolling their eyes at anyone refusing to understand nuclear energy is the way to solve climate change.
        • pb7 3y ago
          Did you mean to reply to someone else?
      • BuckRogers 3y ago
        Everyone knows that. I’m not sure why you would even bother pointing it out when it’s common knowledge. Unless it’s news for you because you were very young. But the fact that one person says there’s no turnaround coming, and the next person, me, says there will be because of a degenerate society in decline means nothing. Believe in salvation is a personal choice that everyone gets to make. We are compelled to confess our belief, but ultimately everyone has free will for their own choice. I’m basing my view off of historical trends during periods of societal decline. There will be a point in time when there will be no Christian revival. That’s the prophecy of Revelation. People are, and will start looking for better answers. There is one answer that has not only served us well, but it’s also true. Unless someone is strictly materialistic and doesn’t believe there is any supernatural realm whatsoever, the question has to be asked. Is Jesus who He says He is. If people seek the answers, I believe they will come to the same one that so many have before us. That Jesus absolutely is who He says He is, our creator, God.
• magicalhippo 3y ago
  I have this weird split. I really like to follow CPU and GPU tech, and I enjoy reading about nerdy stuff like consensus algorithms and esoteric programming languages whatnot even though I'll probably never use them. But "smart" phones and apps? Meh, as long as they work I couldn't care less. Never have.
• ilaksh 3y ago
  Title is misleading. Not getting excited about a new Next.js version doesn't mean you don't care about new technology. Maybe it just means that you don't feel like reorganizing your code or something. Relatively speaking it's still an incremental upgrade to your approach overall. I am 45 and stopped caring much about new web frameworks many years ago. It's not that I don't find them interesting or even advantageous in some ways, I just don't feel compelled to bother learning in detail about most of them. Although I usually do look into them enough to get the gist. You just can't pick up every single new thing. If you try then you won't ever get any real work done. But some things you really have to take notice of. And this is subjective and usually not one right answer. For me, image and text generation was something I felt compelled to jump into. A big part of this calculation is also social. If you are looking to pick up contracts or jobs, your choice of technology is important. And often picking up the latest trend will make that easier. It really depends on the technology and what it offers you. I would say that getting familiar with the OpenAI API provides much more bang for your buck (depending on what you are trying to do) versus upgrading Next.js versions. That's much easier to get excited about.
  • pitaj 3y ago
    Hell, I stopped carrying about new web frameworks when I was 25.
    • zabzonk 3y ago
      i have never cared about them
      • sambapa 3y ago
        And I always despised them!
      • spacecadet 3y ago
        same, complexity for complexity's sake.
        • 3y ago
• Dalewyn 3y ago
  When you're a kid, everything is magical and the world is paradise. When you're an adult, everything is set in stone and the world is out of touch. When you're an elder, nothing is as it was anymore and what world is this?
  • politelemon 3y ago
    And it'll happen to you...
  • lordfrito 3y ago
    Correlary: Technology that existed when you were a child is considered normal. Technology introduced when you are a teen or 20 something is exciting. New technology after 40 is scary.
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      New tech after 40 is boring. 40 is young. New tech after 60 can be scary, it doesn't have to be but you are going to have to relearn a lot of stuff and that gets harder with age. The most annoying is the tech that is forced upon you.
    • BuckRogers 3y ago
      That’s an interesting way to look at it. For a certain generation like me though, I’m over 40 but under 50, all the new technology coming out is trivial. Appliances. The desktop PC era from the Commodore to DOS and Linux and even Windows with a complex set up, is far more challenging than anything coming out today. I think there is a generation of technologists that are the prime era. Not too old to have lived the simple life. And not too young to be living the simple life of the iPad. At least in regards to technology. The modern life is very challenging if you’re doing it right. There is a lot to research and be responsible for unless you just run around signing your life away on paperwork without properly educating yourself about mortgages, real estate, housing. That on top of learning a trade is pretty tough. For the average person at least. And it takes a lot of effort out of everyone. Most people just sluff off though and settle for less. Or blame the system for their condition, since no one is making $50 an hour out of high school anymore, like how it was for decades. One of those two.
• aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
• Joeboy 3y ago
  As I get older, I realize that learning new stuff all the time is a mugs game. 90% of shiny new things will be irrelevant in a few years. So I'm fairly cautious about what I bother to learn. I'll grudgingly learn new stuff if my work requires it, but mostly I coast on my decision to learn python 15 years ago.
  • ilaksh 3y ago
    Right but even staying within Python there is plenty to learn and lots of evolution and new stuff coming up over time. I think that you just realize eventually that you have to be more selective with your attention. And it's often not hard to use up plenty of time keeping up with whatever domain you are already in.
    • cushychicken 3y ago
      Right but even staying within Python there is plenty to learn and lots of evolution and new stuff coming up over time. By the time that’s a problem, there’s a good chance OP will be managing people or in a different field.
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    > python Typing? Get off my lawn.
• Aardwolf 3y ago
  Having grown up in 80s/90s, I also start getting older. While I don't care for technology like "do X with an app" where I know X can also be done without an app, I do get excited for actual real new tech with substance. LLM's, self driving cars once they truly work, much higher video resolutions than the past, etc...
  • BuckRogers 3y ago
    This is the best way to look at it. I feel similarly, and I’ve been thinking for a while now that the one technology that is actually worth embracing or paying for that I have used is adaptive cruise control. It’s close enough to self driving for me that I consider it self driving.
  • zer8k 3y ago
    As I have gotten older I stopped developing for the web entirely. There's a certain simplicity the UNIX philosophy gave us that is sorely missed. I've started to take the Suckless philosophy more seriously when more than a decade ago I used to mock them for being curmudgeons. There's no glamor in sucking less. No youtube videos or made-for-conference code. But, there's a beauty about it that is hard to describe.
    • lacrimacida 3y ago
      What is Suckless philosophy? Gravitating around simplicity more or less?
      • zer8k 3y ago
        http://suckless.org/philosophy/ http://suckless.org/philosophy/ More or less. It's the "Worse is Better" philosophy. Instead of adding features to make user experience better make software instead that is good at one thing. It emphasizes minimalism and frugality. You may know the Suckless group from `dwm`.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
• cushychicken 3y ago
  Feel this, as someone running a modest solo side business. FPGAjobs.com runs on a single Django app, with some Bootstrap-flavored templates on the frontend. Very little JS, ideally none at all. It was a learning curve to implement Django at first (I’m not a SWE by training), but now that I know it, it’s fast and easy to add new features. You don’t get that kind of iterative speed when you’re constantly in the early stages of a technology learning curve. I’ll never give up Django. I’d rather sell the business to someone who knows how to scale it than switch tech stacks. That’s just not what I want to do. It’s easier to get that dopamine hit of “ship thing, watch it get used” when you know your tools well enough to be able to ship and iterate quickly.
  • a6 3y ago
    Just wanted to say I like your website and have used it in the past :)
    • cushychicken 3y ago
      Thanks very much. Please don’t hesitate to shoot us an email at fpga.RTL.jobs@gmail.com if you have any suggestions for improvement, or success stories from your job hunt, or anything we can do to help you find a new gig.
• vouaobrasil 3y ago
  The truth is, producing new stuff follows the law of diminishing returns in every category. After the point where the diminishing returns is really noticeable, new inventions and research actually becomes harmful and pathological. That includes many academic research fields and most technology today. In fact, if you add up all the breakthroughs we've accomplished, most of it is just helping us use resources more efficiently so that we use more of them, eating them all up like a virus. We should have stopped most research and technological invention long ago, and instead focused on sustainability and trying to reach an equilibrium with our natural environment.
  • unforeseen9991 3y ago
    You've put into words perfectly my thoughts on it all too. Sustainability, self awareness, equilibrium - these are foundations of strength and resiliency over the long term. Technology went from empowerment to entrapment
  • StackOverlord 3y ago
    > harmful and pathological Don't forget "toxic" too !
• causality0 3y ago
  As I get older technology seems to be getting worse. Sure my phone charges faster but it's also too tall and not wide enough and it keep using more screen area to show fewer settings and seems to be able to do less every time I get a new one.
  • unforeseen9991 3y ago
    The constant drive for 'more'. When the field was young and smartphones exploded you could easily make money, as well as provide something of big new or unique value - even if it was just entertainment. Now that we're long past the peak of low hanging fruit of productivity and value, we arrive at the inevitable results of late stage capitalism - extracting the most value possible out of the end user through manipulation and coercion. It's bloat, it's enshittification, entrapment into rampant rent seeking and it's the low key subversion that has been happening for years.
• lordnacho 3y ago
  There's fundamental learning and there's superficial learning. After a while you know the fundamentals. Data structures and algorithms, common architectures, known solutions to old problems. But job adverts tend to go for superficial things. The js framework du jour, some language that anyone adjacent can learn in a month, some new face on the same data structures.
• Sparkyte 3y ago
  I'm quite excited about technology. I'm not too excited about the sloppy seconds in technology. We seem to substitute performance for convience. For example the whole need for FSR in rendering to just to get playable performance shouldn't be the desired output. It seems like we keep settling for the half ass solution. AAA Games coming onto desktops needing 4090 with DLSS just to be playable at 4k just feels wrong.
  • BuckRogers 3y ago
    Desktop PC gaming may have spelled its own doom with these GPU prices. I have a 11900K, 4070 and 990 Pro but my next system may be one of those handhelds. I tried to get a fair price on a GPU for a very long time. I won’t be doing that again. On needing a 4090, I think the problem is 4K. These games are getting pretty advanced, and 4K is a very large number of pixels. I like it for the additional horizontal real estate. But I don’t like it for gaming. I would stick to 1080 or 1440. 1440 on a 27 inch screen at the average desktop view in distance is a great all around solution. That said, my next monitor is probably going to be 4K. I will just be playing a lot of games in 1080P on it.
    • beebeepka 3y ago
      Mind if I ask what made you purchase one of the worst CPUs ever? That 11900 is in the same category as the pentium D 820
      • BuckRogers 3y ago
        Because that perception is wrong. Based on poor judgement (often Youtube clickbait and low information Reddit), based on simply a lack of knowledge regarding CPU architecture. I would not upgrade yet from this 11900K because it's the best homogeneous core design that Intel released for desktops. It includes AVX512, and is the only consumer CPU from Intel to have it. Intel engineers have stated that they are dedicated to furthering AVX512, and that it's removal is temporary. All of the errata from Skylake was finally fixed in Rocket Lake, which went on for generations until Rocket Lake. Some people were so deadset against 11th gen that they recommended 10th gen because there were 10-core CPUs. Yet the ringbus design it inherited from Skylake was very strung out by that point with unresolvable issues like the well-known L0 parity error. There's many other reasons but I doubt you're interested in rehashing Rocket Lake as it sounds like you feel you have enough information to make up your mind. And I certainly wouldn't use AMD due to even more bugs than Skylake and poor latency. They're improving, but it's not my choice.
• pxue 3y ago
  I'm feeling a bit of this with all the AI stuff lately. I went all in on AI back in 2017 trying to build a chatbot for ecommerce from scratch and it went nowhere. Maybe a bit sour grapes on my end.
  • ChatGTP 3y ago
    I never built any AI stuff though and I feel a bit the same, I watch people in my group screw around with it, nothing really special has happened except it has been talked about and hyped up endlessly. The CTO even sent a mail around saying to expect a 75% productivity boost within the next few weeks, it never happened...
• outime 3y ago
  It's down to cost benefit. If life has taught me anything is to never be an early adopter, unless you absolutely have to. It applies to many things but specially in tech: never buy the first version of a device (in fact, you'd be spending more money for a worse experience), never use the .0 major version of something important enough, never use the beta version of something unless you must do (e.g. you're a dev and you're preparing your apps for the next version), never learn a language or framework that just came out because there's 100% guarantee things will change a lot and it may as well die within a year, etc. However, I do learn new stuff all the time but they're things that have been somewhat established and solve problems I have. There's also the thing that one may be depressed for one reason or another and then feels like doing nothing new anymore and just want to play with the known - which is a quite natural reaction, but shouldn't be confused with getting old.
• petepete 3y ago
  As I get older, I just care about boring technology. I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware. The only tool I still use with non-trivial config is my text editor, but that's going to be pared down over time. Switching from zsh to fish a few years ago left me with a nearly identical shell with a 20 line config instead of hundreds. I'm trying to use this approach wherever possible.
  • Frost1x 3y ago
    >As I get older, I just care about boring technology. I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware. There's something intellectually alluring about new technology or new shiny in general that I think appeals to your general technologist, it's a trait the draws such people to various fields. I know when I was young I drank the Kool-aid every turn. As I got a little older, and after I was burned several times adopting shiny things either wasting my time or never seeing them widely adopted to a point of reasonable usability, I came to the very realization that everything we create, including technology, exists to serve human needs. It's stupidly obvious, it shouldn't need to be stated but I think it does. Law exists for humans, medicine exists for humans (even medicine for animals, it exists to serve altruism or empathy in humans) and so on. Technology is absolutely no different. There's a few ways technology can serve humans. It can appeal to the general intellectual interest but ultimately, few if any pay money for that. People in general don't care about it, it's neat for a few minutes then gone. So ultimately what functional need does technology really serve? What does it enable me to do that I otherwise couldn't? How does it make my life easier? If it doesn't do these things, I frankly don't care about it anymore. I have plenty of places to tap into serving my intellectual interest, places where the things I learn aren't as vanishingly ephemeral in nature and entirely artificial, be it learning something about physics of the world, medicine, whatever. There's well over a lifetimes worth of other mature and well established things to learn about you won't waste your time in like NewWebFramework with NewSyntacticSprinklings. To me, this is why I similarly only care about new well crafted tech. Your thing needs to either help me do something I otherwise couldn't or make my life easier. A huge amount of new tech does neither, it pedals novelty and the ambiguity of some type of miniscule improvemen in quality of life, all while trying to make a buck.
• boringg 3y ago
  Can I add that being wary of the devs who love all the shiny new things is kind of a tag along of the original feel.
• 2sk21 3y ago
  After working in AI for a big chunk of my career, I have switched gears in retirement and am having a great time learning to program small controllers like Arduinos. It's like going back in time - minimal OS, simple tools and direct access to the hardware. Just for the heck of it, I am building a simple robot from scratch right now and its been great getting back to the basics.
• sylens 3y ago
  Interesting that the Reddit post is about web frameworks and stacks, as the title made me assume this was purely about devices/hardware. Maybe I was projecting my own feelings onto the topic, which are mostly about hardware. As I’ve gotten older, I find it much harder to care about new PC components, cutting edge graphics for video games, and processor cores. I just value stability and consistency above all else
  • Barrin92 3y ago
    I'm honestly not sure it's as much you getting older as its games and hardware getting older and with that change is becoming more incremental. When you got a new graphics card and game generation in 2005 the leaps were pretty wild, nowadays you can probably skip a generation or two of top hardware and you can still run things fine. After they put out the Dead Space remake I was interested to see how the old game from 2008 played, and even that still plays and looks modern. That's 15 years now, go back 15 years from 2008 and it's very different.
    • sylens 3y ago
      That’s very true as well, tech is more iterative now. I also think just having less time due to being a parent now also wipes out a lot of interest or motivation to check out new stuff
  • beebeepka 3y ago
    I am still excited about hardware but progress has slowed down to a crawl, especially on the GPU side. Can't blame AMD and nvidia for trying to make a profit, though it sucks to be a consumer because what we do get right now is severely overpriced junk that couldn't be sold to the big enterprise bois. Literal scraps.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      For another perspective, although I did buy an Apple Silicon MacBook, I do a lot of my computing on almost 10 year old Macs and mostly care in a theoretical sense about new CPUs and GPUs. Most gear that I have is plenty fast for anything I do.
• pacifika 3y ago
  There’s plenty of old technology to explore!
  • Lyngbakr 3y ago
    This. I love getting stuck into new-to-me technologies that are tried, tested, and still around. Is this a good idea from a career perspective? I'm not sure. While I knew some SQL before, I'm deep diving now and I'm sure that'll be useful in snagging future jobs in the data space. But learning Lisp? The principles and perspectives I pick up will no doubt be applicable elsewhere, but perhaps not the language. But then again, not everything is about career progression — I'm really doing it for fun and on that front it's certainly delivering!
• everdrive 3y ago
  One thing that I hear a lot in the tech field is how exciting it is to work in tech since "I'm always learning new things." This doesn't excite me very much since many of the new things I'm learning are not useful outside of a narrow slice of time within that specific tech job. They're not broadly applicable to anything, and are wholly specific to a software product as a service which will be fairly different, or may not even exist in a few years. (even if it does exist, my company will have moved on to some different product by then.) For example, learning regex could be useful because it might be used broadly in many different products. Learning how a specific product handles certain data fields is really not exciting at all. It's wasted space in my mind, except of course for the paycheck.
  • hotpotamus 3y ago
    Nailed my problem with "learning new things". I especially feel this way about "cloud" - you aren't learning some new technology, you're learning some company's (cough... Amazon... cough...) proprietary offering which is designed to lock you in and wring every last penny out of you. Not that it isn't useful, obviously it is, but I just don't get the same joy out of learning about it that I do from playing with SBCs or other tech like I used to. I suppose that is why something like Kubernetes is useful (I haven't touched it; I'm one of those weirdos who uses Swarm); it allows you to abstract away a lot of the underlying provider and create your own overlay environment which does bring back a sense of ownership for me at least.
• myaccountonhn 3y ago
  I used to work 5 days a week, then I was very much in a “I just want my shit to work and do my job” mentality. I had no energy to learn and experiment outside of work. Now that I work 4 days a week, I have found my passion again. I’ve gone back to emacs, started a blog, learning rust, started self hosting and I am having tons of fun in doing it. I haven’t been this passionate since high school.
• j16sdiz 3y ago
  The post was about not wanting to spend time constantly upgrading. Sometimes life is too short to upgrade all my apps to latest standard or framework, no matter how great the new things are. I hope they could be more backward compatible.
• jacquesm 3y ago
  Life is all about choices. Which tech to invest in is a hard question, for me the answer has always been 'as little as I can get away with' while at the same time studying the whole industry for opportunities and things that I believe will have long term staying power.
• sylware 3y ago
  Corollary A: As I get older, it is seriously hard to stay interested in video games: more and more, it feels like playing with little toy cars. I have more and more a hard time accepting the "lore" which pretends to be "serious"... which is actually clearly made for teens/young adults, and often lack coherence even at following the "rules" of their universe or abuse in a cheap way the deus ex machina. Basically, I need something beyond that, which gives me a strong emotional response and/or a feeling of social interaction. I found some very "art"-y games which give me such emotional response, and some online multiplayer games (for instance dota2... until they don't hide AI based bots... because sometimes...), or "strong community based" solo games (for instance celeste) Corollary B: As I get older, I am aware that some nasty human beings are using technology to "take" over big critical parts of our every day life: that's why I am adamant on interop between Big Tech and Small Tech. Tech must stay in user control and not be used to control the user for "others". For instance, why most if not all administration services should be provided to noscript/basic (x)html browsers (as they were before Big Tech brain washed/corrupted administration tech executives with their grotesque and absurd web engines).
  • christophilus 3y ago
    I feel the same way about games— especially AAA titles. I can’t be bothered. Some games that you might consider for giving you a unique feeling without any pretentious nonsense: Limbo, Inside, Journey, Planet of Lana.
    • sylware 3y ago
      Limbo, Journey... yep Heard about Inside, and lurking on Planet of Lana (but I need to validate it runs well in a lean wine+vkd3d build before #noproton). (I am waiting for some of them since I played their demo, don't recall all the names)
  • debug-desperado 3y ago
    Games just don't respect your time any more. Usually 80+ hours to experience an open world game with a handful of side quests. While I don't share the same love of "emotional experience" games, at this point I'm thinking about only sticking to mission-based and "wide linear" games so that I leave plenty of time for other pursuits in life.
• xdennis 3y ago
  What I hate about new technology is that it's not really new. When someone says X is the modern framework for doing this or that what he really means is that X is a cleaner re-implementation of W. But the only reason it's clean is because it doesn't support all the things W did. If X is successful it will eventually add the features that will make it as messy as W was. At that point Y will come along which is the modern (trademark pending) way of doing it.
• Mozai 3y ago
  The volume of "revolutionary new techniques" is exceeds our capacity to master each+all of them. I wonder what a https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ version of https://landscape.cncf.io/ https://landscape.cncf.io/ would look like.
• poxrud 3y ago
  As a counter example, I love learning new languages and frameworks. Reading a “Getting Started” tutorial is as interesting to me as picking up a new book. That’s what I like about public cloud, with hundreds of services there is always something to learn.
• jehb 3y ago
  I think it's interesting that the time horizon being discussed here is so short. I don't think I've cared about new technology... ever. I have cared about "new to me" technology at several points in my life. When I was a teenager, the world was FULL of new (to me) technology, and I ate it all up. Programming in QBasic and Turbo Pascal, using hex editors to figure out file formats in my video games and mod them, building PCs from parts. Along the way to my late 30s, a few more new to me things produced excitement: GIS, Bash, Vim, Raspberry Pis, 3D printing, Linux containers, etc. I was years late to all of those parties, but still happy when I got there. No amount of adopting the new version of an existing thing will ever replicate the joy and wonder of encountering something entirely new to you, and as you stay in the industry longer, there just aren't as many completely-new-to-you things to come across. Now, I have more excitement learning new things that have absolutely no connection to tech, because it's still novel enough to be exciting. Small engine repair, biology, and carpentry have sparked more wonder in my more recent years than anything I did on a computer.
• sebazzz 3y ago
  Basically what I wrote in a different thread: I get idea that some parts of the front-end ecosystem are designed to be busy work, or at least usually turn out to be. But not all of us work in a SaaS development team that can affort 30% or 40% to just play with front-end build systems. Some of us work for clients instead, and need to make the best of the time we have. And more often than not, that means excluding risk factors like large parts of the NPM ecosystem. Limiting things to some simple gulp, dart-sass and some terser to “build” the front-end.
• trentnix 3y ago
  I find as I’ve gotten older I’m no less enthusiastic about new technology. But I’m much more reticent to assign any intrinsic worth to “new”. Young me would have assumed “new” meant “better”. Now I’m absolutely certain that is not the case.
• archibaldJ 3y ago
  After coding for more than 15 years, I can assure everyone that technology is always an enabler, and never the main thing (even if it pretends to be). The main thing is human interaction. We are humans after all. Since "value" can either be a societal construct or a biological one (e.g. needs for food), it has now occured to me that it makes more sense to view technologies themselves as without intrinsic "value". Technology can only be a mean to an end, and not the other way round. (Or who is going to fund it? The military? Then it has to be military tech.. which is used to enable the strong stablization of a status quo, a currency, or the American dream... so once again, tech would always be a mean across any social/cultural/political/psychological vehicles.
• lemper 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 3y ago
    Please don't do this here.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• randomdata 3y ago
  I fail to see how one could get excited about Next.js, young or old. It makes so many poor design decisions for the type of tool it presents itself as. It is my understanding that the original intent of the project differed, so I can understand that the design choices may have been sensible in that context, but are a terrible fit for the change in project scope and, indeed, how people are trying to use it today. I'm old. I still get excited about technology that is worth getting excited about. But Next.js brings nothing to the table.
  • leerob 3y ago
    The original intent of Next.js holds true today: https://vercel.com/blog/next https://vercel.com/blog/next
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  > I want to build things for people. Not constantly update my tools because other developers are bored. i find myself getting frustrated really quickly. if i run a node command and it gives error, i have urge to throw laptop out of window or smash it. web dev use to be about immediacy in the late 90s to mid 00s. now it feels like untangling wires for hours every day. frustrating and tedious.
  • zamalek 3y ago
    > now it feels like untangling wires for hours every day. At least we've moved past webpack, that was a bundle of wires that couldn't ever be completely untangled.
    • nopassrecover 3y ago
      Have we finally? That reemergence of DLL hell on the web that every bright dev insisted was The Modern Way to code (or quit to somewhere else that enabled it) accompanied by spending my days pointlessly upgrading a mix of abandoned and pointlessly breaking packages then submitting forks/patches so they could remain in sync with each other was about the point that I gave up coding because I felt I’d stopped making an impact and moved to management. We seemed to suddenly move from fast REPLs where we could iterate with the customer and solve problems while knowing most of the stack enough to code, deploy, and support, back to the pre-my-days compiling sword fights of old together with days to get undocumented boilerplate up and running with fancy pipelines that no one understood yet alone dared touch. I was never entirely sure what we gained but it certainly seemed to make coding both less fun and less productive yet everyone defended the new normal. Then sitting as a manager after that dev career watching relatively basic form journeys takes teams of five 9 months to implement on the latest stacks when that used to be something a single junior dev knocked out in a week or two and the teams be shocked when in a crisis you could reason out the stack with them in a way that doesn’t seem to really be taught anymore (academically or professionally). I’m not even 35 and I’m still a tad shy of 20 years professional experience but I already feel like a greybeard full of unbelievable “back in my day” stories when I look at the systems I considered and built resiliently a decade ago still ticking along, and still get easily upgraded as the environment and systems around them change. Meanwhile I watch new projects that would have been a small piece of work, maybe even just a ticket for a couple people, now take cross-functional teams of 50 up to 18 months to move through the org machine only to immediately have its replacement lined up as the next initiative because no one can face supporting/upgrading the “legacy” solution they just designed, built, and deployed. Don’t get me started on the way “those that can’t do” have redefined process around their own need for relevance and control. With that said, I’ll concede to having burned out a little on that journey and currently being on a bit of a sabbatical where I’m toying with fun business ideas and other passions to reenergise and reboot creatively, so perhaps my cynicism is an anecdote rather than a snapshot.
• bachmeier 3y ago
  Oh, a post about web development. Yeah, it's hard to imagine anyone getting excited about that. It's different when you do academic research. Learning about machine learning tools, new computational methods to solve nonlinear models, and that sort of thing gets more fun the older you get. The more you learn about them, the easier it is to learn, which reduces the pain.
• hibikir 3y ago
  What makes new technology exciting, whether it's a web framework, a phone, a car, or the internet, is all the things people can do with it that were impossible, or just very expensive, before. In many parts of tech, we've had quite the run where there were leaps and bounds from one year to the next. Innovation curves slow down though: New phones used to really be substantially better than the year before, but now the new capabilities are mostly irrelevant for most people. Even something like OS updates used to bring in relevant changes, but not so much nowadays. Web frameworks, as the OP looked at, have not been doing anything remotely revolutionary in a long time. So anyone that is focused on just one corner of tech, and only looks there, is bound to start not caring about new tech. It really is not getting better. To remain enthusiastic, one needs to keep looking in different places, and see improvements in new areas, or jumps in places that were stagnant. AI was relatively boring in the 90s, not so much today. Even something like Java had a decade of relatively inactivity, and now there are actual, relevant changes. So yes, it makes perfect sense to pay a lot less attention to web frameworks right now. But if what you want is relevant novelty that is likely to change how things are done, the solution is to look elsewhere, instead of getting depressed about how modern UI tech is stagnant.
  • high_5 3y ago
    > Even something like Java had a decade of relatively inactivity, and now there are actual, relevant changes. The key phrase for new tech is _relevant changes_. Much of the "innovation" in software is either NIH syndrome or ideological nuances that address 5% of the problem space. Or simply forgetting or not researching that people fought this problem ages ago. I know that this is HN but most ICT engineers I meet don't care a lot about the history of how we got here in the first place. Just about their puzzle here and know and latest and greatest toolkit.
• PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  > As I get older ... Top comment on the reddit post: > Yeah. 20 year dev here. Oh, the humanity.
  • zer8k 3y ago
    Author probably meant 20 years of experience. That's quite a long time to stay in an industry that values the wet-behind-the-ears-excited-to-be-exploited developer. I've long supposed the "ageism" in the industry is largely people just getting tired of keeping up with the coolest new toy. I've figured that if I lose my job I will probably need to leave the industry because I just can't be bothered to learn the Next Greatest Thing that Google is shilling.
  • king_geedorah 3y ago
    I don’t understand. Somebody who has been developing for 20 years is likely in their late 30s or early 40s at least. Did you read that as the poster claiming they were 20 years old?
    • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      I did. Silly, silly me.
• gumballindie 3y ago
  Web “tech” is saturated, mainly by the loads upon loads of forks and frameworks that reinvent the wheel and somehow end up making everything slower to achieve.
• Dowwie 3y ago
  What tech matters to you and what tech should you care about? If this were an Eisenhower matrix, this would be the urgent-important quadrant.
• jl6 3y ago
  Possibly related: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” — Douglas Adams
  • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    For me the ages are more like <5 is normal, 5-20 is exciting and new, 20-35 is suspicious but I might still try it begrudgingly, and 36+ is nah I’m too for this. I’m in the last group now :) Although I also remember being 18 and meeting some 70+ year olds that were very adept at using computers/the web and that really impressed me.
    • stavros 3y ago
      I don't know, I'm forty and LLMs are exciting as hell. If we're talking web frameworks, Django was the last good thing and there can never be any more innovation in that sector. In seriousness, though, a technology that lets me do things I couldn't do before is great. A technology that slightly reorganizes my code and makes it so I have to throw everything I have so far away, I'm less excited about. What motivates me is building things, which unfortunately means that I'll always reach for the tools I know, and only learn new tools if my current ones don't work, which is why I've been unable to learn Rust. With Django, I can get stuff done really quickly, and people don't care that it's not a SPA, they care that they can solve their problem with it.
      • andrewjl 3y ago
        If you are 40 then you'd have been 33-34 when the "Attention Is All You Need" preprint that laid the foundation for LLMs became available.
        • 3y ago
• raydiatian 3y ago
  That’s what version locking is for
• wnolens 3y ago
  I almost don't care about 'technology' anymore. Rationally, I appreciate it. But it's best when it disappears and I get my time back to go outside and ride a bike, converse with humans, listen to music. It's a means to an end.
• moomoo11 3y ago
  Don’t use frameworks. Problem solved.
• georgeburdell 3y ago
  Content didn’t really follow from the title. It seems like OP wants to minimize unnecessary effort when working towards their goals. I notice it myself in someone who is mid career. I manage the workstation software environment for a group of users, and some of the software versions are a couple of years old because they do the job at hand, everyone knows the UI, etc. I had an intern over the summer and he “upgraded” a station to the latest of everything, modified the terminal profile with mods, tricked out VIM instead of our pre-existing IDE, and so on. I think maybe one of these changes were actually useful, and the rest broke some dependency in our setup that he had to go fix, or I had to get him to revert when someone else needed to use the station. We also have a new hire who keeps using the word “Dockerize”, which makes me wary
• citizenpaul 3y ago
  I don't think this is really true. Its just that that the tech world has plateaued and been generally commoditized and boring. I've noticed over the last 10 years not much has changed. Tech used to have stuff you never saw or features that did not exist or solved some pain point you had. Now next 13 adds new route handling and API fetch changes for its major release, its not exciting. (I don't use nextjs so forgive my generalization on the new features.)
• EMM_386 3y ago
  > Trying to do this Next 12 -> Next 13 upgrade is not fun Oh, the horror! In all seriousness, I have been at this since the late 90s. 1996 specifically when HTML/JS/CSS all became a thing. Do I want to write another complex dynamic HTML form with validation? Not really, no. I really don't enjoy it. Do I want to upgrade this current Angular application from 16 to 17 that I lead? Yes, I actually do. Because I know that will keep us from falling behind, from more tech debt, from an impossible upgrade path. Am I barking orders from on-high? No, I'm not. I'll actually do it myself, because I want to make sure we are are where we need to be. And after all these years, obviously the front-end is only the least of it. The APIs, the database, the custom hardware, the 3rd party vendors ... the ... Anyway, burnout is real, if you are feeling it, take a step back. But otherwise, I'd say with technology, you need to care about "new" otherwise you will fall behind.
  • dasil003 3y ago
    Yeah this was my thought as well. If you’re paid to maintain software you have to actually do the work to keep up to date on its dependencies—that’s the job! We’ve seen the alternative play out countless times, GitHub forking Rails 2.3 and maintaining it for years and absorbing more and more tech debt for years until they bit the bullet and upgraded back to mainline Rails. Sure I’m getting old and it sometimes feels tiresome that software is a treadmill, but hey, it’s job security! And more importantly, change opens space for improvement, which feels good even if it doesn’t always live up to the promise.
    • EMM_386 3y ago
      > Sure I’m getting old and it sometimes feels tiresome that software is a treadmill Precisely. Sometimes, I wonder if people are curious why after all these years am I apparently still working? Have I not become a "VP" or a "founder" or, better yet, a "VC"? To each their own. I'll be ok.
• erichmond 3y ago
  I have a similar but slightly different take on that Instead of "As I get older, I just don't care about new technology" it's more "As I get older, I'm more skeptical of new technology" When I was a young programmer I thought every new framework, language, innovation was amazing. These days I just look at things with a much more critical eye and a higher bar when asking the question "why does this exist?" My general stance is that most things we are using are not ideal but are sufficient. However, most new things are not sufficiently better enough to replace what is technically sufficient enough.
• keiferski 3y ago
  I wonder how much of this is due to innovation happening "under the hood" rather than on the surface. As an example: the newest model of iPhone looks 99% the same as the original one that came out 15-20 years ago. The iPhone 5 years from now will probably look the same. Compare that to the difference between cars in 1960 and 1980, or telephones in 1980 and 2000. The external form is vastly different.
• TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  There isn't a whole lot of new technology around. Apart from LLMs, everything else is a remix/retread/clone/speed bump with a few tweaks. iOS is 16 years old. Android is a year younger. AWS is a year older. The original Oculus Rift is from 2016. Facebook dates from 2004. Twitter from 2006. Amazon has been around for 30 years. (And looks it.) Starlink is a consumerised reinvention of Iridium (1997). Docker - 2013. Git - 2005. Github - 2008. React - 2013. And so on. Also a non-trivial wave of 80s nostalgia, with endless reinventions/emulators of 80s products or 80s ideals (Amiga, Spectrum, Atari ST, even RPi in its own way.) Genuinely new? AI is pretty much it. (And maybe electric cars and scooters.) Quantum computing and robotics are going to make a difference soon-ish, and likely lead to some innovations in User Space. But they're not consumer technologies yet. The big change for me is weariness and enshittification. I used to be as enthusiastic as anyone, but what we have today seems like a nightmarish digital dystopia dedicated to mass surveillance, behaviour modification, and relentless predatory pursuit of profit. This covers the range from the big adtech leviathans, to the mid-tech AirBnBs etc and their catastrophic effects on local economies, to the thousands of crappy addictive phone games that people waste their lives on. There are some good things, but far less than I hoped.
  • doubled112 3y ago
    Honestly, this is how I've been feeling lately. Everything is old now. It's been a long time since a huge revolution tech wise happened. It's just incremental evolution now, and a lot of it is NOT for the better. The Playstation 2 was as far away from the Atari 2600 as we are from the Playstation 2 today. One of these periods had a lot more change.
    • fidotron 3y ago
      > The Playstation 2 was as far away from the Atari 2600 as we are from the Playstation 2 today. One of these periods had a lot more change. Yeah, from PS2 to now is a much bigger difference. Of course you meant in relative terms, but in absolute terms the computation (and especially per watt) that you can do today is astonishing relative to in 2000. Software development on the 2600 had more in common with the PS2 than the PS2 does to today. (Writing assembler in Excel for the vector units was a thing on the PS2). What has happened is we have completely lost sight of what all this is for, and ever more of the created resources get allocated to enabling fast pivots towards anything that looks like it might be worth doing.
• arexxbifs 3y ago
  This sounds more like a complaint about day-to-day work as a developer and less about technology in general. I can certainly relate, though. I personally believe that one of the biggest lies about professional life is that of "working with your passion," because it creates unrealistic expectations. Plenty of people can be passionate about programming, but precious few will have the luxury of being passionate - over time - about working as software developers.
• beebmam 3y ago
  Only tech I've been excited for in the last ten years is generative AI
• analog31 3y ago
  I'm 59, and I'm selective about which new technologies I get excited about. One question I ask myself is, will I regret missing out on this or waiting for the next version? I would have regretted missing out on microcomputers and programming. I don't regret missing out on Windows Vista. I get excited about technologies when I find a use for them. So far I haven't found a use for LLM's, but that could change, and there will always be the next version.
• dentalperson 3y ago
  The AMC series Halt And Catch Fire had the line: “Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.”
• mythrwy 3y ago
  I'm 52 and I care about new technology. If it looks like it improves things. Most of the time that isn't the case and it's simply more useless abstraction and time wasting and marketing and resume building and scamming and ego very clever see!. But it is worth looking into things briefly if they pass the initial 2 second smell test in my opinion. There is the occasional diamond in the dung heap that passes for modern technology.
• Boxxed 3y ago
  It is always striking to me how many of my coworkers truly do not care about solving a problem or getting things done. If they aren't exploring some new database, language, tool, or whatever then they just lose interest and try to force one of those things into the codebase. Oddly enough, I feel like I have some friends that are the same way in their hobbies. It's crazy to me how they'll buy a new board game for $80 and play it once, maybe twice and never look at it every again. This constant novelty-chasing is probably what both groups are really after.
• lafar6503 3y ago
  Me too have developed an aversion to new frameworks, but mostly because the old ones become outdated and go out of support so fast. Feels like we're forced to keep updating and switching tools without any real gain, just to stay compatible with the infrastructure.
• perfectstorm 3y ago
  man i went through the same thing. when Swift was introduced by Apple back in 2014(?) i pushed for its adoption as a senior engineer. when Apple introduced SwiftUI, I was like lets wait 2-3yrs and see how it goes before we adopt it and i'm glad everyone in my team agreed with me.
• ufjfjjfjfj 3y ago
  New physical tech used to make a much bigger difference in the beginning of PCs... Now someone can use a 10 year old PC and be perfectly happy for most applications
• raverbashing 3y ago
  True And it's especially bad in the js world, where it really seems the inmates are running the asylum (Oh but blah.js version 87 fixes that weird thing in version 86 which anyone with a modicum of experience could have predicted it would go bad) well then... At the same time don't be the boring greybeard that can't evolve. Evolution is good, and not everything has to be the "tested and true" technology (that will make you last in the race - this should be your hint that the newer solution can be better)
• ei8ths 3y ago
  if you look at the sys admin side, im only excited about long old stable software, not the new stuff. but for technology as in ebikes and things that make my life better, im all for it. A good one was the wii, if i was in a nursing home or an old man and you showed me that thing i would be super excited. Ebikes allow old people to ride bikes again. So two sides of it, improving my life yes, managing systems - keep it stable for me please.
• thecosmicfrog 3y ago
  Android development is torturous for this. I've been getting emails from Google recently advising me that I need to update my minSdkVersion or my app will no longer be on the Play Store. So I opened up Android Studio yesterday to upgrade things and hopefully release a quick beta to shake things down. It's now the next day and I'm still weeding through compile-time and runtime errors caused through the upgrade. I feel like every time I update Android libraries my code bloats out with extra conditionals and permissions checks, and generally makes my code more brittle. Maybe this is just the nature of building a secure platform which has such a broad reach. I can't claim to know, but it sure sours the developer experience. As a simple, non-commercial public transport app that I wrote mostly for fun and learning, it's hard to be movitated to fix it.
  • butz 3y ago
    While I understand the general concern of keeping Android app on latest SDK to keep it secure and periodically check, if it still works on recent Android version, I really hate when new policies are introduced. Had to resort to using ChatGPT to generate long privacy policy written in "legalese" to pass. My app updates were blocked until then. Not to mention the fact that my app works fully offline and does not collect any user data. Now users will have a long privacy policy to read that says nothing, at least policy bots are happy. Another concern is possible upcoming requirement to display developers phone number. If that ever happens, that day I'm removing my app from Play Store.
• butz 3y ago
  Technology was more interesting about 20 years ago. All different phone models, with constant feature improvements, different form factors, so many different things to choose from. Now we have a boring black rectangle running one of two mobile operating systems, not much to care about here.
  • c-hendricks 3y ago
    "When phones were fun" is a, well, fun series about cellphones of yesteryear. https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwd8abTO4vh2smuMzykXDOPNnsxhHC4Oh https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwd8abTO4vh2smuMzykXDOP...
• hindsightbias 3y ago
  This thread is distressing. I come here to keep tabs on what the yoots are thinking and it reads like I’m in an IHOP next to a retirement community. Where do the edgier Waffle House techies hang out today?
• slifin 3y ago
  As I get older I'm still finding things I care about but they're more niche than flavour of the month JS framework I'm learning Clojure Electric at the moment and it's wild
• Luctct 3y ago
  I don't know about the rest of the world, but I keep losing interest in technology because it's rarely meant to be useful anymore. More and more technology seeks these goals: 1. control 2. vanity 3. ego 4. control 5. megalomania 6. compulsive urge to radically change everything you ever thought you knew about ____________ 7. control I haven't been the target audience of technology for a long time.
• barefootjoey 3y ago
  que Confucius change quotes
• deterministic 3y ago
  There is no new tech in software. Just rehashings and rebranding of old stuff. Different flavors but the same icecream. So pick a flavor you like and stick with it.