Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

I can’t share the sentiment on constant learning. 20+ years in profession and the fastest delivered, the most practical and the most value-for-client things I made were on a platform that didn’t change since around 2000-ish. Not 1.5x difference, but like more than an order of magnitude.

Love for constant learning is a moonshine we drink to avoid looking soberly at our “industry”. It went through one breakthrough per hundred breaking rehashes type of “evolution”, and still goes. Can’t express how morally tired of it I am.

My road was also long, broad and bumpy, from assembly to ts with most of the intermediates you may find in popularity/year charts. And every time I was hoping it was the last thing I learned, that it is a bullet mostly silver, and where it is not, I know what to do. But this train never stopped and now I know 20-30 times more than what can be effectively used. Not that I’m the brightest bulb out there, but isn’t that a senseless waste of intellectual effort.

Learning new things is good, learning the same things in new paint, or too much paint to find the genuinely new, is tiring. In particular languages and ecosystems I find quite boring, it's hard to find the genuinely new after learning maybe 5-7 very different languages.

Trying out new architectural approaches to avoid known problems, achieve better maintainability, flexibility, performance... compared to older approaches hasn't gotten old to me. Not the brightest bulb myself though :-)

I know how you feel: There is no end in sight for learning, and the signal-to-noise ratio is low (aka: percentage of actual breakthroughs to rehashes of old things, or pretention of progress).

And the exposure to this "noise" - which is unavoidable - leads to the feeling of being overwhelmed. I could not start anything, because, what is the point?

That is one of the reasons why I am building those little isolated islands for myself: my personal projects that I want to do. I am trying to keep at it for a couple of years now, and there was some epic failures, but when it works, it feels really good.

Also, I am trying - sometimes unsuccessfully - to isolate the state of the industry (or my work) from my hobby. Work wise, it is laughable at best: so much talent is being wasted. I don't want to claim a high ground here by saying that this waste was avoidable, but really, it was (and is, most of the time).

I feel like complexity has been weaponized by whole industries, by companies and by professionals. It doesn't require a conspiracy: it's easier to let complexity creep in, it makes people feel smart and makes clients captive to tools they don't understand well enough to replace and ecosystems that preclude migrating away from. The rationale I keep hearing is always: "I just wanna solve the immediate problem and move on", and the complaints are also very consistent: "Systems are hard to understand, to reason about and to change". Yet no-one seems to acknowledge the cause-effect relationship and just pretend like all of this is inevitable.

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