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Perhaps ship-it-now is the right answer for the times. With so many rapid changes in technology there should be 1) a lot of low-hanging fruit (i.e., quick, high

Perhaps ship-it-now is the right answer for the times. With so many rapid changes in technology there should be 1) a lot of low-hanging fruit (i.e., quick, high-value solutions), making short-term project more valuable and 2) a shorter shelf-life for any solution (i.e., a new tech will make it obsolete), making long-term projects less valuable.

mattlutze 12y ago
I wonder if ship-it-now isn't more a reflection of the times, rather than the right answer. "Pick off the low-hanging fruit" works for a shop looking to turn some mad profit without having to do a lot of deep thinking. And that's certainly fine. But if that's the culture of the industry, we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar. There's a quiet theme that runs through the community here, and tech in general, that suggests everything that's new is often just old-again. A lot of these "rapid changes" really do feel like reinvention and change for its own sake, and seems plagued with the same issue as above -- building new iterations on existing ideas, picking off low-hanging fruit but not really going anywhere. edit: The problem is that these technologies, being so beginner-friendly and aggressively marketed, rapidly pick up steam and become the “cool” things to use, regardless of actual merit or lack thereof. This line hit it on the head for me. I've been in the business for a while but have only been programming directly for a fraction of that -- I can readily admit, a lot of the newer JS libraries and frameworks made me feel like a superhero with almost no proper training or understanding of computer science.
- chii 12y ago
  > we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar. until the low hanging fruit all got picked.
  - rprospero 12y ago
    The problem with that proposal is that we're currently waiting until all of the low hanging fruit got picked. I'm no masochist - if there are nice fruit on the bottom branches, I'm going to pick those. The problem is that the low hanging branches have been picked of all their nice fruit, just leaving the sour, the rotten, and the immature. We could start putting in the effort and climbing the tree for the nice, ripe fruits at the top, but we're being lazy and waiting until we've picked every last worm-filled mush at the bottom.
    - justinsteele 12y ago
      To further the analogy.. as soon as the fruit on the low hanging branches becomes bad enough to justify the additional effort of climbing the tree for the better fruit, people will do it. Your argument makes it sound like you're saying no hard problems are being worked on currently, which is simply not true.
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        To continue the analogy even further - ... not if people instead invent ways to paint the crappy fruits so that customer buys them anyways. Happens all the time in every sector. As industries mature, products get crappier.
  - mattlutze 12y ago
    On this tree called "life", new low-hanging fruit grows every day. It's a reason we see such churn in the sorts of tech that keeps solving the same easy problems in different ways.
adestefan 12y ago
The only reason why there is low-hanging fruit is because you need to reimplement solution in the tech du juor to problems that were solved 30 and 40 years ago.
laurentoget 12y ago
this sounds like a self-realizing prophecy to me. technologies change quickly because everybody wants to ship fast and put out something just good enough to be better than the last half baked solution that was shipped because technologies change quickly. how do you get out of that vicious cycle?

mattlutze 12y ago

I wonder if ship-it-now isn't more a reflection of the times, rather than the right answer. "Pick off the low-hanging fruit" works for a shop looking to turn some mad profit without having to do a lot of deep thinking. And that's certainly fine. But if that's the culture of the industry, we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar. There's a quiet theme that runs through the community here, and tech in general, that suggests everything that's new is often just old-again. A lot of these "rapid changes" really do feel like reinvention and change for its own sake, and seems plagued with the same issue as above -- building new iterations on existing ideas, picking off low-hanging fruit but not really going anywhere. edit: The problem is that these technologies, being so beginner-friendly and aggressively marketed, rapidly pick up steam and become the “cool” things to use, regardless of actual merit or lack thereof. This line hit it on the head for me. I've been in the business for a while but have only been programming directly for a fraction of that -- I can readily admit, a lot of the newer JS libraries and frameworks made me feel like a superhero with almost no proper training or understanding of computer science.

chii 12y ago
> we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar. until the low hanging fruit all got picked.
- rprospero 12y ago
  The problem with that proposal is that we're currently waiting until all of the low hanging fruit got picked. I'm no masochist - if there are nice fruit on the bottom branches, I'm going to pick those. The problem is that the low hanging branches have been picked of all their nice fruit, just leaving the sour, the rotten, and the immature. We could start putting in the effort and climbing the tree for the nice, ripe fruits at the top, but we're being lazy and waiting until we've picked every last worm-filled mush at the bottom.
  - justinsteele 12y ago
    To further the analogy.. as soon as the fruit on the low hanging branches becomes bad enough to justify the additional effort of climbing the tree for the better fruit, people will do it. Your argument makes it sound like you're saying no hard problems are being worked on currently, which is simply not true.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      To continue the analogy even further - ... not if people instead invent ways to paint the crappy fruits so that customer buys them anyways. Happens all the time in every sector. As industries mature, products get crappier.
- mattlutze 12y ago
  On this tree called "life", new low-hanging fruit grows every day. It's a reason we see such churn in the sorts of tech that keeps solving the same easy problems in different ways.

adestefan 12y ago

The only reason why there is low-hanging fruit is because you need to reimplement solution in the tech du juor to problems that were solved 30 and 40 years ago.

laurentoget 12y ago

this sounds like a self-realizing prophecy to me. technologies change quickly because everybody wants to ship fast and put out something just good enough to be better than the last half baked solution that was shipped because technologies change quickly. how do you get out of that vicious cycle?