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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Web development shouldn't even be a thing in the year 2021. We were supposed to have flying cars, and instead we pay people 3-5x salary of the average worker to make a screen display some text and pictures. But it's fancy text. It requires codes.

This whole industry is a mass psychosis that generates dollars.

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>to make a screen display some text and pictures. But it's fancy text. It requires codes.

This rhetoric vastly understates why businesses hire developers: there is far more than displaying text and pictures. Consider Hacker News. The system involves user account creation, security, and the ability to reset passwords. There is a voting system and an input system to record comments.

You need to run backups and set up auto-moderation features. There is spam detection. There is the need for performance and fast loading speeds. The software needs to be maintained over time. The website must be responsive, and adapt to different display sizes (e.g. laptop display versus smartphone). The website should run across different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) and on various devices. The website should follow accessibility standards.

There are strong reasons to believe that there are other causes than "mass psychosis" for competently-led organizations to want to hire web developers.

> We were supposed to have flying cars, and instead we pay people 3-5x salary of the average worker to make a screen display some text and pictures. But it's fancy text. It requires codes.

Are you aware of what magazine editors and newspaper editors/writers used to make in the heyday of print media (can probably add TV and radio too since the web has eaten that as well)? This is a ridiculous trope.

Flying cars turn out to be limited by laws of physics in a cost effective way and it also turns out that communication, storytelling, software services that automate processes (such as HR, sales pipelines, etc), search, etc are hugely valuable to humanity.

>We were supposed to have flying cars,

We were supposed to have something that would have sounded really cool to an 11 year old boy, but was actually a profoundly stupid mode of transportation and an especially unimaginative extrapolation of 1950s American life.

Many have tried to remove the codes, but looks like text is just the most expressive way to write software.

No-code is to codes, as emoji's are to words... easy to read and use, but also confusing and implicit...

I tend to come to the same conclusion. we communicate in characters forming words or sentences, symbols, and whitespace. As you indicate, text can be imprecise, but a good author knows how to phrase a sentence such that its meaning is better understood by a reader through varying techniques

Almost anybody who has used a computer before can, in about an hour, quickly compile text and pictures in an animated sequence to present to their team (after they forgot it's demo day) with a thing called PowerPoint. But to make text and pictures for a web site, we can't just fire up a tool and drag and drop some text and pictures. We have to develop software.

It's like every time you want a new chair you get out a two-by-four and a knife and start whittling. But instead of questioning why we whittle our own chairs, we reinvent the knife.

You must have a good add blocker if you haven’t seen the promos for tools that let you point and click your way to a functional website. There are plenty of storefronts out there built with those tools by people with little or no coding knowledge.

Actually a very good point, things can definitely be better

you make it seem easy, and yet not everyone can code.

Yet the value of computers and code is almost indispensable.

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