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I'm afraid to mention(considering many might feel offended) that IMO most "web 2.0 startups" are full of ill-competent self-claimed "software developers" who ha

by zxcdw 14y ago

I'm afraid to mention(considering many might feel offended) that IMO most "web 2.0 startups" are full of ill-competent self-claimed "software developers" who have 3 months of experience in PHP and JS and then build "cool apps", who then are considered "technically talented" just because their "cool app" has had some exposure on different media which has brought in some users. There's much more to actual technical talent when it comes to building software than what you get from year or two of experience, let alone 3 months. Though, in this era when you can actually build usable software products in weeks, if not days(as there have been many interesting "weekend projects" mentioned here in HN) this doesn't matter as much than it did in the past. For example game development has never been as easy it is today, there are thousands if not millions of young people creating games for mobile devices. Some of them succeed in making money but that is most certainly not due to technical talent, as many may easily think. Back in 90's kids(under 20 yo) literally wrote their own 3D renderers in software because there was no hardware acceleration available. Now 20 years later, how many teens would be able to write their own 3D rendering engine even when using graphics APIs, let alone when doing it all in software? Although the amount of programmers has gone up, I think amount of competence has gone down simply because technical competence is far less needed these days. These days there's far less need for technical talent when it comes to "building web apps" than what one would've needed say 10 years ago to create a simple client-side desktop program. Yet, now more than ever there's talk about technical talent. Strange.

ojr 14y ago
These days people are experimenting with compilers and parsers.. . If you want to reinvent the APIs of the JVM or the DOM be my guest. My college computer science teacher said it in the best, "software is about standing on the shoulders of giants." Its not so much about brains but technique, the technique of the software community as a whole is increasing, we are way better in making software that REACH than the 90s, I am 20 btw
- zxcdw 14y ago
  The ability to reach is a problematic one; consider e.g. Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store in which you see literally thousands of new products appearing daily. Technical excellence is secondary and often neglected(see e.g. WhatsApp's security issues!) which results in poor quality software and poor progress. Simply the barrier of entry is much lower, which in turn reduces the programming talent. I'd be interested to see what the quality of software would be when average 65 yo granny would be reading API documentation of some "web app" because it's just so easy and it just works. :) I think the difference between "average programmer" 20 years ago and now is the fact that back 20 years ago you had nothing fancy. A text-based editor, command line and a compiler. You were perhaps able to set graphics mode with some obscure commands and get some pixels on the screen. And that was just so fascinating. You really had to me one-in-a-hundred kind of person to be proficient with that stuff. If you put an average programmer of 2012 to such situation, I really bet a huge percentage will just drop the hobby and do something else. Though, on the other hand, things were so simple back then. What does it take these days to have access to the screen pixels as an array? Libraries, frameworks, documentation, APIs and whatnot. Back then you just moved a value to CPU register and called a certain interrupt and voila, 320x200x256 graphics mode with framebuffer starting from a well-known address. Then it's just a matter of writing to memory addresses, very simple. Couldn't be any simpler really!

by zxcdw 14y ago

ojr 14y ago

These days people are experimenting with compilers and parsers.. . If you want to reinvent the APIs of the JVM or the DOM be my guest. My college computer science teacher said it in the best, "software is about standing on the shoulders of giants." Its not so much about brains but technique, the technique of the software community as a whole is increasing, we are way better in making software that REACH than the 90s, I am 20 btw

zxcdw 14y ago
The ability to reach is a problematic one; consider e.g. Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store in which you see literally thousands of new products appearing daily. Technical excellence is secondary and often neglected(see e.g. WhatsApp's security issues!) which results in poor quality software and poor progress. Simply the barrier of entry is much lower, which in turn reduces the programming talent. I'd be interested to see what the quality of software would be when average 65 yo granny would be reading API documentation of some "web app" because it's just so easy and it just works. :) I think the difference between "average programmer" 20 years ago and now is the fact that back 20 years ago you had nothing fancy. A text-based editor, command line and a compiler. You were perhaps able to set graphics mode with some obscure commands and get some pixels on the screen. And that was just so fascinating. You really had to me one-in-a-hundred kind of person to be proficient with that stuff. If you put an average programmer of 2012 to such situation, I really bet a huge percentage will just drop the hobby and do something else. Though, on the other hand, things were so simple back then. What does it take these days to have access to the screen pixels as an array? Libraries, frameworks, documentation, APIs and whatnot. Back then you just moved a value to CPU register and called a certain interrupt and voila, 320x200x256 graphics mode with framebuffer starting from a well-known address. Then it's just a matter of writing to memory addresses, very simple. Couldn't be any simpler really!