Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

This may sound silly and be off topic but I believe this is what got me to peruse a career outside of programming.

This accurately describes modern life and, I think by extension, modern software development.

May I ask why? It seems to me that, facing a fast-changing world as described in the article, you would be best served perfecting a skill such as programming to navigate it.

I can't speak for the OP, but I've felt this way too, and for me it's because I feel that while most industries are changing for the better, software development seems unusually short sited in chasing new stuff. Most industries are improving as they change, where software (from my perspective) is regressing or just pointlessly churning.

The concepts and abstract skill of programming is undoubtedly useful, but the implementation details and how it's done are going to be replaced by something worse in 3 years.

I think it bothers me because I'm attached to it, and it's disappointing to see it move in directions I don't like or that feel wrong to me. It's all "market forces" and "public opinion" and nobody controls it, but it would be less depressing in an industry I didn't care about.

That’s correct. I’ve been programming for 25 years (until I changed careers, still in tech).

Software in web development, at least, has a quickly shrinking shelf life and the value it creates (besides intellectual stimulation for developers) seems very very small.

I whole-heartedly disagree that software engineering is getting worse. The languages, ecosystems, security, processes, etc. are pretty much all far better than they were 10 years ago. You really just have to ignore the loud individuals in the "web3" and JavaScript (JS has largely calmed down lately though) spaces.

I'm curious if you'd share examples. I think I'd sum up the last 10 years as the web and mobile ecosystems doing a mediocre job trying to catch up to where native apps were 20 years ago.

My overall development experience writing C++ 10 years ago was actually better than writing C# and Typescript now. The more interactive environments like Jupyter notebooks and browser dev tools are nice, but they're still not as featureful or as interactive as a good Lisp environment.

For consumer software we're nearly in the same place we were 25 years ago, except we took a round trip through the web, and now we're back to downloading native apps, which are more "secure" in some sense, but are funneling private data off to strangers, making it overall worse. And our hardware is 100x more powerful but our software is 1000x more bloated to make up for it. And the business model of consumer software now is to treat the user like an idiot and monetize them as much as possible.

Business software has some bright spots, like IAAS, SAAS, etc. but they're kinda just regurgitating ideas from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Security is a funny one because it's technically better, but overall worse because software that wouldn't be connected in the past now "has to" go online, opening it up to attack.

There is a lot of good, like the open source world, and Linux and FreeBSD gaining popularity, but even those have dark sides, like corporations exploiting them as a source of cheap or free labor.

I think there are aspects of it that are getting worse.

Is React better than using vanilla JS? Yes. I like not storing state in the DOM.

Is it worth the layers of abstraction, both mental and infrastructural? This is a difficult question to answer.

Did you end up changing careers?

Yes. But not too far away. I went into product management.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com