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The statement about "4,500 developer-years of work" is insane to me. Java is one of the most backward compatible languages period - other than hashmap iteration

The statement about "4,500 developer-years of work" is insane to me. Java is one of the most backward compatible languages period - other than hashmap iteration order a while back, it's hard to think of what could require that astronomical quantity of engineering effort to upgrade. Do they actually budget over a billion dollars to upgrade Java versions, or is this like "this amazing tool, sed, saved us infinity developer years by replacing strings at one quadrillionth the cost of a $500k human editing each text file by hand"

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
efitz 2y ago
<satire/>In unrelated news, Amazon announces layoff of 4500 developer positions...
DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
> "The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours." *blink* ...why are they boasting about migrating to Java 17... in 2024? ...and from what versions were they migrating from? Java 17 didn't introduce any significant breaking-changes (IME) for users on Java 16 or even the next previous LTS version, Java 11 - I don't work at Amazon, but surely Amazon isn't in the habit of running on unsupported JVMs? - so assuming these Java projects were being competently maintained, then the only work actually required to migrate to 17 is changing your `org.gradle.java.home=` path to where JDK 17 followed by running your test suite. If Amazon was using a monorepo then 1 person could do this in 5 minutes with a 1-liner awk/sed command - whereas I expect it would likely take an AI far longer to do this, if it's even able to make sense of an Amazon-sized monorepo - they'd also likely re-prompt it for every separate project for reliability's sake. So after considering all that, the "50 days" number he gives, without any context either, is a nice shorthand to communicate his disconnection from what really goes-on inside his org... or he's lying - and he knows he's lying - but he also knows there won't be any negative consequences for him as a result of his lying, so why not lie if it gives you a good story to tell for LinkedIn? In conclusion: these remarks by leadership unintentionally make the company look bad, not good, once you fill-in-the-blanks to make up for what they dind't say. (What's next...? Big Brother increasing our chocolate ration to 20 grammes per week?) ----- One more thing: the comment-replies to the post on LinkedIn are utterly derranged and I genuinely can't put my sense of unease into words.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > One more thing: the comment-replies to the post on LinkedIn are utterly derranged and I genuinely can't put my sense of unease into words. I don't want to dig up my old credentials to sign in to see the entire set, but from what's publicly visible... Perhaps the sense that some comments are mostly desperate scrambling to self-promote, and a few of those also contain fawning ingratiation which they seem to think may be reciprocated?
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    > I don't want to dig up my old credentials to sign in to see the entire set A wise decision. > ...but from what's publicly visible...mostly desperate scrambling to self-promote ... fawning ingratiation ... reciprocated Well, yes - there were enough of those - and they were bad enough, but what threw me off was a screenful of rambling comment replies from a single person accusing Amazon of "being racist" against her (a white woman in the US, if her avatar is accurate) while also making references to some kind of lawsuit she was pursuing - with a surprisingly restrained sprinkling of emojis throughout.
- layer8 2y ago
  Probably from JDK 8, which is still actively supported, and will prospectively until around 2030, the main reason being that upgrading from it tends to come with major compatibility headaches. At work I still have to support JDK 8 libraries because the consuming customers won’t upgrade from it before next year at the earliest.
layer8 2y ago
Java 9 and the Jarkarta transition unfortunately introduced a lot of compatibility issues, not the least with regard to frameworks and other dependencies used by an application. For large projects it can take months to upgrade from JDK 8 to JDK 11/17/21. For one enterprise project I’m familiar with it took over half a year.
nayuki 2y ago
> Java is one of the most backward compatible languages period - other than hashmap iteration order a while back I want to know more about this. What were the behaviors before and after the change? In what year or versions did this happen? Are there any write-ups I can read?
cainxinth 2y ago
> Do they actually budget over a billion dollars to upgrade Java versions, or is this like "this amazing tool, sed, saved us infinity developer years by replacing strings at one quadrillionth the cost of a $500k human editing each text file by hand" I think it was more like this: “We need to upgrade Java at some point.” “That would take thousands of hours and a billion dollars.” “Ok, forget it for now then.” “Well, we could try to automate it with an LLM…”

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

efitz 2y ago

<satire/>In unrelated news, Amazon announces layoff of 4500 developer positions...

DaiPlusPlus 2y ago

> "The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours." *blink* ...why are they boasting about migrating to Java 17... in 2024? ...and from what versions were they migrating from? Java 17 didn't introduce any significant breaking-changes (IME) for users on Java 16 or even the next previous LTS version, Java 11 - I don't work at Amazon, but surely Amazon isn't in the habit of running on unsupported JVMs? - so assuming these Java projects were being competently maintained, then the only work actually required to migrate to 17 is changing your `org.gradle.java.home=` path to where JDK 17 followed by running your test suite. If Amazon was using a monorepo then 1 person could do this in 5 minutes with a 1-liner awk/sed command - whereas I expect it would likely take an AI far longer to do this, if it's even able to make sense of an Amazon-sized monorepo - they'd also likely re-prompt it for every separate project for reliability's sake. So after considering all that, the "50 days" number he gives, without any context either, is a nice shorthand to communicate his disconnection from what really goes-on inside his org... or he's lying - and he knows he's lying - but he also knows there won't be any negative consequences for him as a result of his lying, so why not lie if it gives you a good story to tell for LinkedIn? In conclusion: these remarks by leadership unintentionally make the company look bad, not good, once you fill-in-the-blanks to make up for what they dind't say. (What's next...? Big Brother increasing our chocolate ration to 20 grammes per week?) ----- One more thing: the comment-replies to the post on LinkedIn are utterly derranged and I genuinely can't put my sense of unease into words.

Terr_ 2y ago
> One more thing: the comment-replies to the post on LinkedIn are utterly derranged and I genuinely can't put my sense of unease into words. I don't want to dig up my old credentials to sign in to see the entire set, but from what's publicly visible... Perhaps the sense that some comments are mostly desperate scrambling to self-promote, and a few of those also contain fawning ingratiation which they seem to think may be reciprocated?
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  > I don't want to dig up my old credentials to sign in to see the entire set A wise decision. > ...but from what's publicly visible...mostly desperate scrambling to self-promote ... fawning ingratiation ... reciprocated Well, yes - there were enough of those - and they were bad enough, but what threw me off was a screenful of rambling comment replies from a single person accusing Amazon of "being racist" against her (a white woman in the US, if her avatar is accurate) while also making references to some kind of lawsuit she was pursuing - with a surprisingly restrained sprinkling of emojis throughout.
layer8 2y ago
Probably from JDK 8, which is still actively supported, and will prospectively until around 2030, the main reason being that upgrading from it tends to come with major compatibility headaches. At work I still have to support JDK 8 libraries because the consuming customers won’t upgrade from it before next year at the earliest.

layer8 2y ago

Java 9 and the Jarkarta transition unfortunately introduced a lot of compatibility issues, not the least with regard to frameworks and other dependencies used by an application. For large projects it can take months to upgrade from JDK 8 to JDK 11/17/21. For one enterprise project I’m familiar with it took over half a year.

nayuki 2y ago

> Java is one of the most backward compatible languages period - other than hashmap iteration order a while back I want to know more about this. What were the behaviors before and after the change? In what year or versions did this happen? Are there any write-ups I can read?

cainxinth 2y ago

> Do they actually budget over a billion dollars to upgrade Java versions, or is this like "this amazing tool, sed, saved us infinity developer years by replacing strings at one quadrillionth the cost of a $500k human editing each text file by hand" I think it was more like this: “We need to upgrade Java at some point.” “That would take thousands of hours and a billion dollars.” “Ok, forget it for now then.” “Well, we could try to automate it with an LLM…”