The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2017 | Hacker News Reader

The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2017

jetbrains.com

45 pointsmihau29 comments

Note that these results are likely a bit skewed towards Jetbrains' customers.

The stat that surprised me most was how many people never used an issue tracker. 28%? That's insane!

About 50% of the companies I consulted for between 2004-2013 had no issue tracker. Most emailed and/or emailed spreadsheets around.

What's even more shocking is about 25% of them didn't even use a VCS, most relying on some poor guy to sit there with a diff tool and merge everyone's shit into something cohesive. One company used a wooden spoon as an ownership lock.

That's just depressing. WHYYYYYY?

A lot of the companies, software was a function of the business, not the business itself. There was no motivation for the staff to do anything other than minimal effort or even research what their job was about. There was no pride, no ingenuity or creativity. Inevitably this descended into chaos and then I got hired to unfuck the places. Some places you couldn't fix because they were too cheap, too lazy and didn't want to make a change because they were in denial that the poo was actually already over the fan blades.

It was depressing and if I'm honest it made me physically ill and I folded the company and got a permanent job with a company that wielded the clue stick.

Feel much better now :)

You would think they would set up version control just to make their own minimal effort jobs less painful.

Indeed. Apparently some of the human race loves suffering!

To be honest, even though we were just pulling TortoiseSVN into most of the companies, some people just couldn't figure it out even after being bought books, reading the manual AND sitting in training sessions for hours where we hand-held them through every day use cases.

A few weeks ago, someone had a thread up asking what people did to help them get past impostor syndrome, and I had a stab at writing up an answer that revolved around "realise that if you read hacker news, you're probably inside a quality bubble. Look at how bad some people who are employed in software are at their jobs and get some perspective".

I ended up deleting the comment without posting it because I didn't have any good examples that I felt I could talk about in detail.

This is a great one though. To everyone on hacker news, if you ever feel inadequate about not writing as many unit tests as you know you should (or whatever is bugging you), remember that time Staofbur found a whole company of people so clueless they used a wooden spoon instead of version control.

Yeah you should probably write more unit tests, but overall, the fact that you even know enough to feel worried about that makes you the cream of the software industry. There's a whole pail of rather thin milk below you.

Hey, the spoon worked well, until I bought another one and left it in the office :) They had SVN running for everyone a week after and a month later they were running feature branches.

Just last week, I witnessed a meeting where a QA guy said he doesn't want to update any jira ticket as it should be the business analyst who updates tickets?

More strangely, not everyone can open a pull request. I can understand not everyone being able to merge but not being able to request a merge? Is say your team was better than what I witnessed even when they didn't have version control.

> "until I bought another one and left it in the office"

Ooh! You mean 'whoever has the spoon has the lock', type thing? I genuinely presumed you meant, 'don't mess up this code with conflicts or you'll get a smack of the wooden spoon' :D

Yes it was a "hardware lock" i.e. the holder of the spoon was allowed to diff their copy with the master on a file share and update that. The spoon was used as a casual weapon to beat idiots as well in jest ;)

> skewed towards Jetbrains' customers.

Doesn't seem so. From their methodology [1]:

> "We used Twitter Ads, Google Adwords and JetBrains' own communication channels to invite potential survey respondents. To minimize possible bias, the reports include only responses coming from Twitter Ads and Google Adwords."

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/research/devecosystem-2017/demogra...

I have had issue tracker in the places I worked, but if no one ever uses them properly they become more of a hinderance than a help.

Am I alone in finding Go's syntax atrocious? It just seems so needlessly obtuse, and puts me off to an otherwise great ecosystem.

What do you find obtuse with it? I don't care that much for syntax when looking at a language, because it is something you can get used to fairly quickly. The error checking is quite repetetive though.

> I don't care that much for syntax when looking at a language, because it is something you can get used to fairly quickly. The error checking is quite repetetive though

I agree, it's entirely an aesthetic issue. Just choices like using "func" instead of just writing out "function" or using an actual shorthand like "fn" really bother me. Also the seemingly arbitrary choices that run against the grain of C inspired languages like using "[]<type>" instead of "<type>[]" to initialize an array.

Those examples both seem a little like nitpicking. The argument that something is not like C is particularly interesting to me, because C has arguably the most obtuse and unintuitive syntax out there. We just accept it as normal because we've seen it so much.

I encourage you to look back and think about how you felt when reading your first C for loop.

Try rust for a while and you'll love Go.

I didn't get very far reading this until I realized that because Java developers skewed the results pretty hard, there really weren't going to be any takeaways from it that aren't also only relevant to the Java ecosystem.

It's why I don't pay much attention to statistics in general. Nobody's constraints are going to match how I would do it.

44% of developers surveyed said they don't contribute to open source code, but are willing too.

I assume that some people say they are willing but when push comes to shove they don't actually want too, but still seems like a gap in the market.

Someone could try and build a tool to arbitrage for the two communities.

What's the definition for contributing to open source code here? Is it publishing code (ie pushing to a public repo on GitHub), putting in the effort to maintain/market it, identifying reproducible issues in other open source projects, submitting patches/features to existing open source?

I think a lot of those people are probably in the "I would do it, but I have enough / too much work already" or "I have other stuff to do in my life" category.

There needs to be community pressure on companies to allocate resources and time for employees to contribute back to whatever projects they use.

It's not unreasonable for someone to have hobbies other than coding outside of work. Many people that contribute to open source end up doing so during their free time, but I'd guess that a fair share of those 44% of developers have different priorities.

> There needs to be community pressure on companies to allocate resources and time for employees to contribute back to whatever projects they use.

Companies don't allocate resources and time to employees without expecting a return on investment. Any contributions made on company time would have to managed by the company with the intent that they serve its needs first and foremost, or else be considered theft of company resources and time.

It sounds like a good idea but I can't see it turning into anything but an opportunity for companies to leverage control over open source projects.

Most places I've worked at had policies against contributing to open source projects.

Was about to say the same. My company explicitly forbids it for some stupid reason. One of the main drivers for my current job search.

For some its hard because they want to help somehow but don't understand the structure. If you can get to the point of creating a patch in the right format someone needs to accept the pull request. The barrier is too high for most so most work on there own stuff and publish to github.

21% target Windows mobile OS? That seems especially high since most Windows developers would start visual studio by default.

For some people writing clever clean code is much more important than making $10 million profit a year.

What type of person are you?

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