Professionalization, for lack of a better word: tech workers became a flatter workforce rather than a couple thousand creative weirdos.
a larger percentage of us…just don’t care to think about computers much.
Glad the author was able to put into words what I couldn’t. Tech sometimes feels like it tries to be about everything except actually programming. You’re weird if you write things without 1000 dependencies, and there’s an army of people eager to bro-splain that you just invented your own framework when you wrote hello world. Rust is really cool now, because we all decided it was finally cool. (We’ve always thought Rust was cool, even when we were ignoring it.)
It’s all somewhat alienating to me if you can’t tell. :) I mostly don’t pay much attention these days.
In my experience if this is your life it’s time to get out of California Start-Up Country and work for a company that does something real and concrete for a change, instead of a company that builds frameworks for building frameworks for building frameworks. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.
This article was strangely comforting. I feel like I run into a lot of people with strong opinions, loosely held and it’s just exhausting. Even if you “win” an argument some times you end up hearing your own argument parroted back with higher intensity than you originally argued with. The even tone in this article is a welcome breath of fresh air.
In my experience, this pushback mostly comes from insecure engineering managers that got sidetracked from programming into management mostly because they weren’t very good at it to begin with.
Good managers are able to tell that an organization owning the code it operates is usually a net asset, and can simplify things a lot by only having the features that are actually needed and integrating straightforwardly with the already existing ecosystem.
This is an extremely insightful article that really captures the zeitgeist.
The story that solidified is: Use Boring Technology. Use Java (or Python or Ruby or, if you really must, JavaScript. I feel like Golang has now ascended here). At the time, there was a lot more belief that A Different Language might be good to use commercially; today that’s largely viewed as a sign of poor engineering leadership.
I think the fact that the most innovative and impactful technology that got added to the “default” stack (Docker, Kubernetes, the stuff from Hashicorp) were written in Go instead of Haskell or whatever was the biggest contributor to this. Plus maybe, ES6 and TypeScript making JavaScript almost OK to build serious things on.
Glad the author was able to put into words what I couldn’t. Tech sometimes feels like it tries to be about everything except actually programming. You’re weird if you write things without 1000 dependencies, and there’s an army of people eager to bro-splain that you just invented your own framework when you wrote hello world. Rust is really cool now, because we all decided it was finally cool. (We’ve always thought Rust was cool, even when we were ignoring it.)
It’s all somewhat alienating to me if you can’t tell. :) I mostly don’t pay much attention these days.
In my experience if this is your life it’s time to get out of California Start-Up Country and work for a company that does something real and concrete for a change, instead of a company that builds frameworks for building frameworks for building frameworks. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.
Oh I have! More commenting on the online discourse being pretty shallow overall.
This article was strangely comforting. I feel like I run into a lot of people with strong opinions, loosely held and it’s just exhausting. Even if you “win” an argument some times you end up hearing your own argument parroted back with higher intensity than you originally argued with. The even tone in this article is a welcome breath of fresh air.
In my experience, this pushback mostly comes from insecure engineering managers that got sidetracked from programming into management mostly because they weren’t very good at it to begin with.
Good managers are able to tell that an organization owning the code it operates is usually a net asset, and can simplify things a lot by only having the features that are actually needed and integrating straightforwardly with the already existing ecosystem.
The API isn’t dead, it’s just RESTing
This is an extremely insightful article that really captures the zeitgeist.
I think the fact that the most innovative and impactful technology that got added to the “default” stack (Docker, Kubernetes, the stuff from Hashicorp) were written in Go instead of Haskell or whatever was the biggest contributor to this. Plus maybe, ES6 and TypeScript making JavaScript almost OK to build serious things on.