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Comment by JeremyMorgan | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about the Silicon Valley, but I'm in the Silicon Forest (Hillsboro/Portland Oregon) and this market seems to be very merit driven. You can be 80 years old and get a job if you can do work. Maybe you can't get a job at fart.IO building an API for some craft beer BS but at many mid to large companies 40 is still an average.

The last 4-5 companies I've been at value bullet points over anything else (for what that's worth). If you're 40+ and coming in showing off your PHP skills, JQuery or WinForms experience you'll get dumped, but the same goes for the 23 year old with that skill set.

My advice is always the same for developers my age: Keep with the times! If you aren't passionate enough about this work to continue learning and advancing on your own time get out. Go do something slower paced. Don't expect the industry to change.

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>If you aren't passionate enough about this work to continue learning and advancing on your own time get out. Go do something slower paced. Don't expect the industry to change.

Spending time learning something that dies a few months later is boring and annoying. Give me practical and tested toys, damn it, not some new language every month.

There's a comfortable wave to ride between "plenty established" and "highly experimental joyride that's really meant for someone's resume". Things on that wave have a high chance of becoming a decent slice of the job market but they haven't yet. That's the category I like to learn from but it takes time for things to get to that position.

You also have to pick what you put on your resume carefully, because some employers will see you as being all over the place. But if you don't put new things, you're seen as old and behind-the-times.

Is the potshot on jQuery and PHP really necessary? I know enough people where I live making six figures (low COL city) with PHP, SQL and jQuery that I don't think they're ready to sunset.

This unfortunate obsession with new and shiny in the Valley is why we have to learn lessons like the benefits of relational databases over and over. Most of the new stuff isn't improved, it is simply different.

Relational dbs sure, but there are legitimate scale reasons to use a distributed key value store (for instance). There is no reason to be stuck with PHP today though. It's a very backward language when you compare to something with a modern type system/features (e.g. Go, Rust, Clojure, Java 8+, Scala...). Devs need to have a passion for learning technology. Not because it's the shiny new thing but because the new tech often _does_ offer benefit.

Often times you have no control over the technology stack you use because other factors drive your choices. I'm stuck developing in PHP because the tool we are using is written in PHP.

You often have to learn this stuff outside of your regular job. Once you know another stack then you can find another job using it. That's how you exert control over your career. Tying yourself to one company (or stack) is a slow death sentence.

EDIT: to those downvoting this... Do you disagree with me (i.e. you think it's a good career decision to stick with a single tech stack) or do you agree but dislike that it has to be this way? Genuinely curious because I didn't think what I said was controversial at all, just industry observation/common sense.

You're being downvoted because you are arguing the details and have missed the wider point being made.

I live and work outside the valley, and I know python and Java, dabbled in scala, rust and lately C# -- no one out here will give me a job on any of those languages because I have no professional experience with them, and some of them no one here is using yet

Have you looked at modern PHP though? I haven't looked extensively, and I'm not very familiar with type systems in general, but PHP 7 just might qualify as a modern type system (albeit optional) and since about 5.5 it's had pretty modern features like closures and traits. There's also hack-lang (Facebook's extended PHP.)

I have not and you're probably correct that it's not as bad as it used to be. That being said, this looks like a great case for learning new technologies/languages since the language you do know may change out from under you eventually anyway. For instance if a real type system shows up in PHP, prior experience with Haskell or Rust would allow a PHP developer to take advantage of it.

tl;dr: always be learning.

few days ago had a guy tell me that "relational dbs are dying because google only uses non-relational dbs"

I've now used several relational databases, Cassandra, couchbase, and dynamoDB and here's what I've learned: They all suck. Every one of them in their own special snowflake ways, but they all suck.

That's what differentiates good engineers from great engineers: they know what to avoid and when to avoid it.

It is relevant to the discussion because that's not a fresh skill set. Anyone not moving on from those technologies at this point should be concerned about their future in the industry. Maybe they can find jobs now, but without learning something new they won't in the future.

Tell that to all the COBOL programmers making serious money.

COBOL is tied to specialized hardware that's hard to move away from due to massive capital investment. PHP will run anywhere better languages run. And really, COBOL will be gone someday. If your career is on the line, it pays to stay current.

The issue is not the capital investment on hardware. You can get an equally powerful modern server to replace your old AS/400 machine for a few thousand dollars. The issue is the risk to move away from that is not worth it.

COBOL itself isn't tied to any specialized hardware, and you can get COBOL compilers (whether proprietary or open source) for all major platforms. If it runs PHP, it probably can run COBOL too.

The real problem with porting most COBOL code is that few COBOL applications are actually pure COBOL, they are full of calls to proprietary middleware, databases and operating systems. For example, a lot of COBOL code runs on IBM mainframes and calls mainframe packages like CICS and IMS and the underlying mainframe OS (z/OS aka MVS). While there are replatforming solutions which emulate some of these mainframe software packages on other platforms, the emulation is generally imperfect hence there is still effort and risk in migrating.

I think the biggest problem with mainframe COBOL software is not the hardware but finding people with the right skills to maintain it. Even if you use some replatforming solution to port it to a more mainstream platform (Linux/Unix/Windows), you will still need COBOL programmers familiar with the relevant mainframe technologies, plus they'll need to understand the limitations of the replatforming solution you chose.

The potshot was aimed at Winforms, actually, not SQL.

The sentiment often echoed on HN usually includes relational DBs that aren't postgres, but you are right, he didn't explicitly call out SQL, I included it because that's the usual skillset the devs I was talking about have

Oh, the geek pecking order is fractal and recursive on every scale, to be sure.

Here here, that's me. Not going away any time soon. It's not exactly sexy but it pays the bills and there's plenty of demand.

I didn't even know PHP before I started on this journey at the beginning of the year. I was trying to peddle my (admittedly meager) Python skills but everyone who had money to pay wanted boring PHP devs to maintain and build on 7-10 year old systems, so I brushed up and landed a few nice stable gigs. Will easily clear 6 figures within the next month or so for the year.

I've been thinking of specializing in maintenance of super boring old systems. I was wondering Is there much of a higher end market for it(100-200/hr)? And did you find one client for full time or a bunch of smaller gigs at 5-10 hours a week?

I have one main client that will basically pay me hourly as much as I'm willing to work for them, but then I also try to take at least 2-3 other clients on each month just for diversity. The smaller clients I typically charge by project rather than by hour, and so far I've been able to get my rate on those after the project is done in the lows 100s/hour range. For me personally I don't know that I could get my schedule completely full of work like that, but it might be possible I suppose.

It's not a potshot at the technology, but the market itself.

I'm glad you're making that, but in Portland they are paying $15 an hour for PHP/MySQL/Jquery developers all day long. It's an over saturated market that peaked 10 years ago. Sure there are a few edge cases here and there but the majority of it is a swampy wordpress ghetto.

Folks who started on that stack in the 2000s (like me) and refuse to move forward aren't making 6 figures around here.

I think you're missing the point when you say that people working in the PHP dev space "refuse to move foreward." Other people above have made the point that there is PHP 7. PHP is now a modern language with namespaces. It's strange to me when I hear people commenting about PHP as if it's 1998 (or even 2008) or something.

Some people enjoy developing in PHP now. And there's plenty of work there, let me tell you. And all of it that I've seen pays a lot more than chump change.

Craft beer in portland just means "more hops." I call it crap beer.

Fully agree with your post, just felt like griping about "craft" beer here.

On that note, why are there so many new IPAs in PNW? I like IPAs, but I doubt most people want them.

On the contrary, that's why so many are made.

My theory: they taste like pine trees, and we've got a lot of pine trees, so it just feels right. Try drinking an IPA in Mexico sometimes. Super inappropes. But in PNW it makes sense. For awhile, til you get sick of it.

Pine trees smell good. They do not taste good.

We've got a lot of pinetrees in michigan as well, but we generally dont have these super hoppy styles.

I think theres also regional hop variations, so maybe theyre just less piney here.

Cascade hops are super strong, and are grown out in the PNW/Colorado area, so that's a big chunk of the problem. Other hop varieties lend themselves much better to malty beers, or to darker options where the bitterness is more subtle.

Pine trees are even on the flag for New England.

Here's an idea for a craft brew. Replace the hops with actual white pine needles.

And Googling for "beer with pine needles"...

...dammit. "Spruce beer". That idea is literally centuries old. At least five breweries currently use evergreen bits as flavoring agents, and at least 16 have tried reviving gruit recipes in some form or another. Apparently, Sitka spruce tips are popular in Alaska, being far more available than hops.

Yeah, the Alaskan Winter ale with spruce tips is good. Not as good as their Alaskan Amber alt beer. (Though, it's a bit variable, sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's the nectar of the gods.)

(Personally, I wasn't a fan of IPAs before they got big, but preferred the amber -> porter/stout range)

Don't know about PNW (Pacific Northwest??), but at least over here (northern Europe) IPAs are terribly trendy, you can find them in every grocery store. I suppose it's some worldwide trend..

80% of hops in America come from the Yakima Valley, which is in Eastern Washington. They even have a large hop festival every year. I think this presence influences the beer scene dramatically.

The same reason there are so many JS frameworks.

Not just Portland, the entire American craft beer scene is infected with shitty, indistinguishable IPA's that all taste like a mountain of hops.

There are definitely a lot of bad IPA's, but that's hardly even a significant part of the American Craft Beer scene these days.

Googling "west coast beer style" has this[0] as the first result. You could argue that this isn't a canonical source or that things have changed since the thread in 2011--but the stigma is still around.

[0] https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic...

I would argue that the IPA fandom hasn't diminished (especially out west), but other things have arisen alongside it.

On the east coast, I see an impressive number of sours and dubbels coming out of craft shops, and the midwest is big on bold, malty offerings like ambers and oatmeal stouts.

I haven't seen IPAs drop in popularity (I much prefer darker, maltier beers), but I do feel like more recently IPAs have tried to use hops in more interesting ways instead of just going for XIPA/DIPA. I hope if hops stay around this trend continues.

I would have thought the hops shortage of 2008 would have forced breweries to try something else, so by now it's probably demand driven. I hear there's a new hops shortage coming up.

Yeah, I don't know that I've seen an actual drop, but there definitely seems to be more development in other areas. Craft beer aisles keep growing, and a good chunk of what gets added isn't IPAs. Still not enough porters and dark ales for my taste, but I'll take what I can get.

I'm definitely glad to see the push into more interesting IPAs. I'm seeing more whites, doubles, and other exotic stuff. Plus people finally seem to be learning that 80 IBUs demands some malt and complexity to make something drinkable.

(For some reason, the Wyoming/Idaho region is awesome for dark beers. Something practical, or just a regional fascination? Try some Wake Up Call or 3 Picket Porter if you can find 'em.)

I keep on thinking that surely this hops fad will die out soon, but it keeps on increasing. The West coast is especially big on hops. Even lagers from breweries like Lagunitas are extremely hoppy. No thank you. Hops are a cheap and easy way to disguise the taste of bad beer.

It's insane. I'd honestly rather have a Miller or something than Yet Another IPA.

I'll drink a miller just to troll the insufferable yuppie dbags that hate that shit

Hey, it's the champagne of beers.

I think its mostly a west coast thing - here in the midwest we get plenty of malty beers!

I feel like American beer is bizarrely segmented. The West Coast (from Colorado on, roughly) is still fixated on IPAs and hoppiness. The midwest is full of great ambers and other malty things, and the east has taken to both sours and darker ales like dubbels.

The non-coastal west I struggle to characterize, but it's putting out a lot of truly awesome beer, including really dark stuff like porters and imperials that I love.

I think people are on a quest to make the perfect IPA.. And make money in the process. For me it's IPA or nothing.

Sierra Nevada (which makes some decent beers!) deserves a lot of blame for this nonsense.

They've been chasing the dragon more than anyone else, putting out stuff like Hop Hunter which is defined exclusively by how strong they can make it. "Beer with added hop oil"? Really? If brewing with more hops isn't enough, it's probably time to stop adding hops and improve the beer some other way!

Cascade hops are a great flavor, I love them, but they need to go together with the other tastes.

I stopped drinking IPA's for that reason. I wont try one unless it's recommended by somebody I know has taste. Too much wasted cash...

The reason IPA is so popular is because for so long the american beer landscape was dominated by brews like Budwiser that are quite weakly flavored. This was an artifact of prohibition destroying most of the competitive landscape with the survivors dominating the market for decades and in turn using anticompetitive laws to their advantage.

IPA is a reaction against that flavor profile. You'll be starting to see new flavors come about as people (like yourself) become tired of IPAs.

Why not flavor with malts? I haven't looked into the history of American beer, but many styles seem to come from the price of local ingredients and qualities of local water. That makes me things hops were cheap and plentiful and caused the IPA trend.

I'm not a super expert, this is just what my friends in the biz have told me. I wouldn't be surprised if several factors conspired to create the IPA trend. Yes, there are many ways to infuse flavor into beer, some of which you mentioned above. My friends make IPA styles, but also many others using all kinds of tricks like malts, waters with different minerals, pHs, different base ingredients, brewing wheat in different ways. My buddy even domesticated a new strain of yeast.

If you're in Boston, give Aeronaut Brewery in Somerville a try (https://goo.gl/maps/bm22XaBvFPQ2). I have something of an interest of it, but I (unsurprisingly) recommend them.

Aeronaut is a great option for some new flavors. They do all-out hoppy IPAs, but if that's not your thing the other options are distinctive and tasty.

I have wondered about the same thing--both hoppiness and maltiness are good reactions against bland mass market beers, but somehow big malts never took off the way hoppy IPAs did. Is it difficult/expensive to make malty beers?

Hoppiness is partly a reaction to the variance in hops and a pride in "American beer". Cascade hops in particular are cheap, available, and have a strong and distinctive flavor; hence the popularity of IPAs on the west coast, and the presence of companies like Sierra Nevada in the hoppy vanguard.

Even as the Cascade trend has diminished, lots of people have 'reacted' by rediscovering other hop flavors and advertising things like Nobel hopped beers.

Having said that, it's all getting a bit played out (except on the west coast, perhaps) and I'm starting to see more experimentation with other stylings like wheat, fruit tones, and dark ales.

I worked at a company in the suburbs of Portland for about a year and was really impressed when they hired a guy in his 60s to do a job currently being done by 4-5 people in their late 20s (a mix of males and females). I wouldn't necessarily say he was slow in picking up stuff, but his style of learning is was definitely a lot different. He was a great asset and it alleviated some of the subconscious biases I had myself.

Ouch man.... not all craft beer software is BS CRUD apps overbuilt on react.js by 22 year old hipsters deploying single function "micro-services" each in their own docker container...

Brewing beer is a form of manufacturing, and most manufacturing can be made better or more efficient though targeted software.

[0] commenting because I don't want "craft beer software" to become a joke. Some of us actually work in that industry.

How about we qualify that instead as "craft-beer-advertising software"?

Monitoring the temperature and pressure of your fermentation vessels securely from any commodity mobile device would be productive and useful.

Figuring out how to re-skin the collect-and-compete RPG game genre onto all the different flavors of HoppyHipsterBeard-brand beers seems to be the sort of thing grandparent post was referring to.

Isn't manufacturing also dominated by PLCs and ladder logic? Not sure that's much better for my sanity!

>[0] commenting because I don't want "craft beer software" to become a joke. Some of us actually work in that industry.

So make good craft beer, and it won't last as a joke. Trying to police people's words doesn't. I'm not trying to be a dick, either. It didn't work for SJWs, it won't work for craft beers. Ten million people nagging for 8 hours a day doesn't accomplish as much as one person doing.

That's a shame, I like WinForms, JQuery and PHP.

If you aren't passionate enough about this work to continue learning and advancing on your own time get out.

I understand that many other domains value this sort of thing, but perhaps not to the same degree as the software industry. The issue could be that employers are afraid to invest in their current employees (that is, given them opportunities to advance their skills on company time) because there is such a high rate of turnover in many tech companies. It makes more financial sense to put the burden on the employee (or potential employee) because it likely only benefits them in the long run.

I do, however, see that in more established companies (particularly those that don't still operate in "start-up mode"), there is more willingness to invest in the employees and build their skill sets. I've been with my current employer for over eight years, and they have always been willing to give me time to learn new tech and stay on top of trends that affect our business. Of course, on my current team of 10 people, only one person has been with the company for less than three years.

If PHP and Jquery are fine to get the job done, whats the point?

I have learned a few languages now - Java, Perl and now Python. Python has pretty much everything I need. I have looked at NoSQl databases, but haven't found a use case where they would be better than relational databases. I prefer to write good quality Django code than to write my first app in yet another language / stack.

Dammit.... fart.IO is unavailable.

It's just parked too :( What a waste.

Could have make some nice parody material.

coming in showing off your PHP skills, JQuery or WinForms experience you'll get dumped

This sounds odd to me. I don't doubt it happens, but why? PHP roles are still going strong, and there's a ton of PHP work that is not legacy code.

Is jQuery too low level for people now?

It's too reliant on state changes all over the place, making even medium-complexity web apps really hard to maintain. I find with Mithril (similar to React but smaller) it's a lot easier to understand how my app gets into a particular state.

Only if you keep too much of the complexity in the front end.

Well.. as a client interface HTML/CSS/Javascript have all been fairly anaemic compared to what is possible with native interfaces.

Once you've worked with a native interface, you're loathe to give up the potential for creation that comes with it, just to keep complexity out of the front-end.

Arguably, one could say people need to be retrained, and need to stop trying to make the web into something its not.... but considering the trends, I think that ship has sailed.

It's too primitive an abstraction.

It was great when you were just fiddling a few little ajax widgets on a static page, but it doesn't scale.

That's what I meant by low level. Frankly, I disagree about scalability - that's up to the program's architect.

So, how would you go about altering all large numbers of page sections in realtime, without suffering the performance hit of serial page repaints, using jquery?

Haven't run into that need, I doubt most sites have, so I don't have a ready answer for you. We typically only change the parts of the page that have data that has actually changed, so DOM rendering performance hasn't been a difficult problem for us.

I thought you meant scalability in terms of code size, or number of people working on it, or number of users.

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