Why programmers can’t make any money: dimensionality and the Eternal Haskell Tax

Oh yeah, but it even affects Java programmers.

If you want a job working with Lucene 3.6, it is easy. There is always some recruiter who knows these guys who have an opening because the last programmer burned out and they need you in a hurry because the product was supposed to hit the market 2 weeks ago.

It doesn't take great interviewing skills to win this job because everybody involved wants to stop putting out fires and if you can avoid sexually harassing somebody or making a jewish joke in front of somebody named Cohen you can get the job.

If you are so foolish to accept the mission you'll get issued a bottom-of-the-line "business" laptop from Dell which is a hand-me-down from a salesman who couldn't sell anything. You'll find the servers are bursting at the seams even though the system isn't in production yet. And then you'll find that your team has smashed Lucene 3.6 in ways that devastate performance and that are very hard to maintain. You can't get a straight answer from the lead developer as to how to build the system, never mind anything else.

Now Lucene 4 uses half the memory of Lucene 3 because it avoids the UCS-16 tax. Many operations are sped up up to hundreds of times. The code base is easier to work with and wouldn't have required to have the violence done against it that had been done against Lucene 3.

If search performance matters, they'll get smoked by a competitor who uses Lucene 4, so I feel it is malpractice to work on Lucene 3 projects.