this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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Programming
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I'm glad I at least got closer to understanding your criticism than they did.
Don't let anyone tell you you're old or naive or "stuck in the past" for thinking these things! There is a real crisis in the operating systems world that your criticism is reflecting. It takes an army of software engineers and billions of dollars to keep this ecosystem and these systems going and they still struggle with reliability and security. The reason it's like this is an issue of economic organization.
We can't go back to the old way of doing things but we can't keep maintaining these fundamentally flawed systems either. You may find something inspiring in this brief presentation by Rob Pike: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/
That's a great way of putting it, thanks. I'm actually only 30 years old (lol). Sometimes I feel there's so few people who've ever used or written software at this level in the part of the industry I find myself in. It seems more common to throw money at Amazon, Microsoft, and more staff.
I've replaced big Java systems with small Go programs and rescued stalled projects trying to adopt Kubernetes. My fave was a failed attempt to adopt k8s for fault tolerance when all that was going on was an inability to code around TCP resets (concurrent programming helped here). That team wasn't "unskilled"; they were just normal people being crushed by complexity. I could help because they just weren't familiar with the kind of problem solving I was, nor what tooling is available without installing extra stuff and dependencies.
Thanks for your understanding :)
Yeahh, and I saw someone compare you to the "old man yelling at cloud" lol. Even though there are good reasons to yell at the cloud hehe
I haven't had the "privilege" of working for a wage in the industry (and I still don't know if I want to) but I think I know what you mean. I've seen this kind of tendency even in my friends who do work in it. There is less and less of a focus on a whole-system kind of understanding of this technology in favor of an increased division of labor to make workers more interchangeable. Capitalists don't want people with particular approaches capable of complex problem-solving and elegant solutions to problems; they want easily-replaceable code monkeys who can churn out products. Perhaps there is a parallel here with what happened to small-scale artisan producers of commodities in early capitalism as they were wiped out and absorbed into manufactories and forced to do ever-increasingly small and repetitive tasks as part of the manufacture of something they once produced from scratch to final product in a whole process. Especially concerning is the increasing use of AI by employed programmers. Well, usually their companies forcing them to use AI to try to automate their work.
And like you gave an example of, this has real bad effects on the quality of the product and the team that develops it. From the universities to the workplace, workers in this industry are educated in the virtues of object-oriented programming, encapsulation, tooling provided by the big tech monopolies, etc. All methods of trying to separate programmers from each other's work and the systems they work on as a whole and make them dependent on frameworks sold or open-sourced™ by tech monopolies at the expense of creative and free problem-solving.
Glad at least you were able to unstall some of the projects you've been involved in!
Glad we could share ideas :3
You and other people in the thread gave me a lot to think about. Hope this comment made some sense lol.
I see that the problem arises from the "visionary, but lower experienced newer developers (compared to the past generation) " trying to fix a world where "don't touch it if it works crowd who has seen all old timers" built, by putting each layer over the older one. It has all the capabilities, but there is no "single vision", no "well defined api".
Old established paradigms are being broken. Some conventions are forgotten, new tooling and perspectives are being built.
Sure this means there is an unfortunate clash is happening.
I can't say if this is a better, or wiser world or not, however I can only say this is the way now. You can adapt, try to embrace and push forward things or you can try to stay away and become one of the legendary Cobol developer crowd. We know they are there in the wild, but we can't find them.