This article really hit the spot. On the other hand, nowadays development is accessible to everyone and it’s really easy to learn development because of the ever growing amount of tools and frameworks. As a result, anybody can become a developer, maybe with superficial knowledge, but if you can make something work, you might be good enough for a company to hire you. However, as a software engineer, I am disappointed of this trend
Totally agree with the article.
Nowadays those companies are all about re-creating and reconfiguring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We see this in everything now Docker/DockerHub/Kubernetes and GitHub actions were the first sign of this cancer.
We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some Docker BS or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.
The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.
Postfix wasn’t in my university degree, nor do I think it should be. It’s useful to know about SMTP but it’s like saying you need to know the history of brick manufacturing to be a material engineer.
I’m off two minds. On the one side, there is far too much reliance on black box libraries to do trivial things.
On the other, this complaint is decades old. Back in the late 80s there was a software developer for the apple iigs called FTA, which stood for Free Tools Association. They claimed that the tools in the os were too slow and you should code to the raw hardware.
I develop an interactive climate / future scenario model, now in scala, earlier in java, almost no dependencies. No visualisation frameworks - the diverse plots hand coded in scala (transpiles using scala.js, makes SVGs on demand). The science code from demography through economy emissions, bioegeochemistry, to climate - just scala, no interface to other languages / models, no “solver” tool. Data input just text files -easy to check. Some modules over 20 years old (except converted java -> scala), still work reliably. It’s efficient as all client-side, no IO/net between adjustments and results. Seems no big institute would employ me for such model dev because my experience doesn’t tick the boxes of all the current fashionable frameworks. But at least I can share a way to explore the future for ourselves … and yes it’s bleak but not so dire as many people here seem to assume, we still have choices.
One choice I think you’ve nicely demonstrated: the choice of a solid base and not choosing to add dependencies.
Choosing not to do something can be hard.
Also double points for having a sustainable software project that helps with environmental sustainability. Really walking the walk haha
Hi, thanks for the encouragement, delayed response due focusing on the code, and a related conference, and now trying to keep up with the COP. As it happens, the “ratchet” system of pledges created in Paris (COP21) is an iterative algorithm - start with wild guesses and gradually improve them by feedback - this made sense given the weaknesses of diplomacy, but it’s hard to summarise this mess with neat code in a compact model.
A big percentage of so-called experts today only know how to configure some kind of hype-tool, but they understand nothing about how things work at the deeper level. This is a real challenge and a big problem for the future.
“Don’t worry about it. Large Language Models are going to fix it.” - Some CEO, probably.
Edit: This is the bit that so few people outside the profession understand: I’m not being paid to write it, I’m being paid to try to understand it enough to change it safely.
Most of the time I don’t understand it well quite enough*, and chaos ensues. I would worry more about that, except that it turns out my paycheck clears either way, most of the time.
- Disclaimer: I’m a genius, but I wasn’t there when their special snowflake software was written.
