Comment by pas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pas | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There are specialist subfields of programming nowadays: frontend, mobile app, embedded/microcontroller.

And a frontend sitebuilder doesen't have to know anything about transistors, FinFET, system calls, and only the most curious would know about reflow and painting calls in a browser's rendering engine. Sure, the quest for performance always pushes people toward the metal, but from a website's perspective that's just the browser, and maybe TCP window tuning. (And sometimes someone finds that DNS was slow, but sometimes it was a bad BGP constellation, and there was nothing to do really. Or maybe the load balancer - or the backend - was overloaded because there was mutex contention in the kernel - or in the DB behind the backend, but that's again rather far from the usual sphere of investigation for "Frontend Engineers".)

The imporant point would be to be able to go deeper, if there's a need. Or go higher, more abstract. That's engineering (or software design), recognizing, analyzing, and solving problems.

I can't really blame the people who get by just knowing parts of AWS. They make great money by being a Cloud Consultant. It simply shows the low hanging fruits on the market. And how bad the demand side is when it comes to picking the experts.

> And how bad the demand side is when it comes to picking the experts.

You meant, there is a very strong demand ?

I mean big companies that hire "AWS consultants" are big, slow, dumb, incompetent blobs of IT.

And yes, there's a demand for these specific skills, because big inefficient companies are willing to pay for just this, because their in house people are usually overworked or simply not allowed to do it themselves without an expert on site (or on call, or on skype).

And of course AWS is a big jungle of buzzwords itself, without clear documentation (and that's of course very important for them, they don't want to give away trade secrets, nor it should matter for the guarantees they offer, but their own custom nomenclature and sort of arbitrary abstractions over the standard Xen/KVM/qemu, VLAN, VXLAN, etc stuff makes it very hard to know exactly what's going on), so no surprise that there's demand for this. But as others said, sometimes these consultants have rather narrow skills.

And to add a bit more to this, generalists are few, and always quickly disappear from the market, so the holes/niches are plugged by whoever happens to be around.

Finally, I don't exactly blame these corps, it's just what makes sense nowadays. Need for extremely short turn around, instant risk-elimination, ASAP ROI, all point to "experts" and "consultants". No point in getting someone who understands the full stack top-to-bottom, when the project is in the initial phase and you just need EC2 and a DB on RDS.

Yeah, thanks for clarification. As a technical person I find myself a bit confused as I don't know if I should follow some buzz and try to make money in the short term of go deep and go for the long term. Will it pay off ?

Of course I get more satisfaction in "feeling" a "deep" and "true" technical folk.

> money in the short term [or] go deep and go for the long term

I think these are never contradictory, at least I think software jobs allow for the flexibility to keep working on high-yield things while learning something for depth on the side. (Or vice-versa, if you live off your side job, and do/learn something deeper/longterm.)

Especially with network, virtualization, security, distributed systems (DB, storage), etc. the ideas that are trendy now are spin-offs of older things. (Docker is basically LXC with a sane UI/UX, which is just chroot done better, a'la BSD jails, which is just Solaris zones, which is just IBM mainframe partition shit. Similarly everything on the network, like overlay networking, VXLAN, Geneve, OpenFlow, etc. are just natural layering abstractions and applied trade offs that were considered silly a decade ago, or were simply not needed a decade ago. Now that north-south traffic is dwarfed by east-west traffic in every system [this means that north is the client, south is your "DB", and east-west just means services in your system, and since people nowadays use a lot more complicated systems, the inter-component = intra-system communication is huge, compared to the few MBs sent to the client].)

Yeah, same pattern applies so many times, Slack -> IRC + WEB and many others.

>Now that north-south traffic is dwarfed by east-west >traffic in every system [this means that north is the >client, south is your "DB", and east-west just means >services in your system, and since people nowadays use a >lot more complicated systems, the inter-component = >intra-system communication is huge, compared to the few >MBs sent to the client].)

Never thought about it, in those terms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com