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Comment by andirk | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder how people who are only in the room when things happen have any pride in their work and aren't embarrassed at their lack of production. A couple jobs ago was people who put most of their effort in to making sure their group of shitty engineers wasn't found out. It was a lot of work! Since they were all about quantity of people over any quality, they had to keep hiring more people, so there was a lot of time and effort in to interviewing to make sure they only hired other shitty engineers of their same ilk. I was hired outside of their scheme so we weren't best of friends lets say.

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I’ve never understood the people who make no effort to better themselves - they work in technology, everything has a 3-5 year engineering life, they should always be preparing for the next thing.

People often can’t control what technologies their employer uses, but if they have solid fundamentals and I can tell they have tried to learn things on their own, more often then not I’ll give them a chance, and it usually works out because they are doing what they really want to do, and they are always looking for ways to build upon and improve what they’ve worked on.

How excellent do you want to be at generic enterprise CRUD apps?

Somebody has to build and maintain them.

Have you considered that maybe they’re fine with their level of responsibility and can leave work at the office?

That is usually the part where I shake their hands and wish them luck in their next endeavor.

If they are not there because they love working with technology, there are other places for them to be.

Agreed. I personally have seen divorces and breakdowns of entire families and friend groups of my colleagues, but what is most important is making sure that they stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and look to further improve themselves for the company.

spoils19 has been awarded +200 corp tokens, congratulations!

Dystopias happening right in front of us!

Or… am I hearing a new web3 startup?

(If I ever end up doing this; this comment will age super well)

Most definitely! There is nothing more glorious than sacrificing your health, soul, and personal relationships to perfect that CRUD application your users are forced to use to keep their job.

Dang you didn't have to do em like that!

Most programming jobs are utterly boring. You are hoarding yes men and people who are good at lying.

Cringe.

Some people have a family, or otherwise time consuming personal lives, which does limit the ability to learn new things outside of work. I wouldn’t really blame them for not ”bettering themselves” if they don’t get to do that on paid company time.

I have never had an engineering (or really any!) job where learning on company time was absent. A lot of people like to grow and a lot of people don't. And a lot of the latter realize their waning usefulness and how they're one algorithm update away from being obsolete so they put time and effort in to masking that.

I enjoy being the dumbest person in the room. Others find it threatening.

And for those who are so busy outside of work that they can't grow inside of work, I feel for them because that sounds like an exhausting life.

Sure there's a market for cheap disposable stuff hastily thrown together by people who barely know what they're doing because they're always using the latest tools for the first time to pad their resume.

But there's also a place for durable things of lasting value, built by people who enjoy perfecting their skills, technique, and craftsmanship with mature tools to solve problems well, learn the domain well, and build lasting relationships with customers who are big spenders.

It's kind of naive to assume that those people are making no effort to better themselves just because they're not always chasing after the latest hot new thing.

>everything has a 3-5 year engineering life

This isn’t true for all industries. Some have software systems with engineering life measured in decades

True, but what percentage of software engineers work on those?

The only pool of software that both employs a large number of engineers, has an engineering life measured in decades and isn't rewritten every 3-5 years to a large degree is enterprise software, in my experience. Think C/C++/Java/.NET middleware type stuff.

And I imagine 90% of HN actively runs away from those jobs :-)

I wouldn't know. But I imagine there's an availability bias.

I've worked in more 'traditional' engineering fields (manufacturing, energy, healthcare, aerospace) and the vast, vast majority are long tenured systems built for dedicated uses. I've worked on many systems that are older than me. For those in SV, I imagine it's the opposite. Like you said, HN may be biased to a specific type of development which often leads to biased claims. Tbf, my main issue is with the "everything" modifier in the OPs claim.

> everything has a 3-5 year engineering life

Nope. 30+ years of experience here working for different software companies in 5 different countries. I still use most of the knowledge today that I learned 30 years ago.

Software development fundamentally changes very rarely. However software development fashion changes all the time. But the latest fashion is just a slightly different implementation of the same underlying fundamental things I already understand. It is just a slightly different flavour of ice cream.

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