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That's a terrible take to blame the engineers for the complexity, not the ever changing specs, headcount inflating and managers that have no idea what software

That's a terrible take to blame the engineers for the complexity, not the ever changing specs, headcount inflating and managers that have no idea what software engineering is. I would blame the CTOs.

sunrunner 2y ago
> blame the engineers for the complexity I was going to add that the engineers themselves do (or should, in a healthy organisation) have the mandate to knowingly choose not to bring in artifical complexity where it's not useful or required. But then I thought that in a lot of situtations perhaps the engineers aren't really 'Knowingly choosing not to' but 'Unknowingly choosing to' bring in that complexity, because the volume of content and mindshare that goes into proposing new and alternate ways of working and tools that aren't actually different seems to dwarf the amount of information around fundamentals and things that don't change as often. So perhaps any accountability really should go as much to CTOs, open source developers trying to make their mark, influencers.
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tekla 2y ago
Nope, engineers are engineers because they push back on bad decisions. I don't consider web devs engineers because they refuse to take responsibility for their actions
prewett 2y ago
A lot of the complexity is because HTML, as a document language, is unsuitable for the purpose of making apps, but because the browser is the only cross-platform environment we have (and pushing new versions is easy), that's what gets used. It seems like what we need is a sort of an integrated virtual machine for each application. The OS provides a virtual CPU+memory machine, but that needs to extend to virtual filesystem, peripherals, displays (which the OS would draw into a window), network with user-limitable urls, etc. This would prevent apps from misusing the filesystem, enable users to limit surveillance network requests, and simplify graphics.

That's a terrible take to blame the engineers for the complexity, not the ever changing specs, headcount inflating and managers that have no idea what software engineering is. I would blame the CTOs.

sunrunner 2y ago

> blame the engineers for the complexity I was going to add that the engineers themselves do (or should, in a healthy organisation) have the mandate to knowingly choose not to bring in artifical complexity where it's not useful or required. But then I thought that in a lot of situtations perhaps the engineers aren't really 'Knowingly choosing not to' but 'Unknowingly choosing to' bring in that complexity, because the volume of content and mindshare that goes into proposing new and alternate ways of working and tools that aren't actually different seems to dwarf the amount of information around fundamentals and things that don't change as often. So perhaps any accountability really should go as much to CTOs, open source developers trying to make their mark, influencers.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

tekla 2y ago

Nope, engineers are engineers because they push back on bad decisions. I don't consider web devs engineers because they refuse to take responsibility for their actions

prewett 2y ago

A lot of the complexity is because HTML, as a document language, is unsuitable for the purpose of making apps, but because the browser is the only cross-platform environment we have (and pushing new versions is easy), that's what gets used. It seems like what we need is a sort of an integrated virtual machine for each application. The OS provides a virtual CPU+memory machine, but that needs to extend to virtual filesystem, peripherals, displays (which the OS would draw into a window), network with user-limitable urls, etc. This would prevent apps from misusing the filesystem, enable users to limit surveillance network requests, and simplify graphics.