EnKopVand

In what world is it easier to fire someone than to fix them? Because in any sort or management I’ve been involved with here in Denmark it’s always the exact opposite.

When you fire someone. You tax HR and yourself with the process both of letting someone go and finding their replacement. You have to pay their salary 3-6 months going forward as well as all the paid vacation they may have saved up. Most importantly you tax your team with the added resource drain of covering the tasks as well as integrating the replacement. You also risk damaging morale, and worse, you risk increasing employee anxiety as even the best employee can have inferiority issues.

That being said, the basic mantra in management should always be that you can get rid of anyone, it’s just a matter of cost. So if you need to fire someone, then you need to fire someone.

Personally I prefer building people to the point where they will leave you themselves, but, that’s a style or management that isn’t present in a lot of companies because it takes a corporate culture that is very hard to maintain in large organisations and require quite a lot of management talent in small organisations. It’s also something that is incredibly hard to do as a single manager if the culture is against you.

> but with typescript are you not ending up writing more code?

I think that depends on who you are and where you work. I actually come from a decades worth of C# and Python experience before starting at this place. I even wrote my first five “serverless” services in Python here, before switching to Typescript around December 2021. It wasn’t love at first sight, let me tell you that, but the control Typescript gives you once you decide upon some standards and enforce them, just makes things easier to manage. Basically what we do is write functional services that utilise interfaces (bad name) as a form or data-object Types and it sort of gives you this magical environment that has the best of both Python and C# mixed together.

You could probably achieve the same with Python, but we couldn’t. ;)

As far as speed, I’m talking about how we can reuse our internal packages. I wrote a NPM package to handle Odata API calls with the ability to add generics so that you can auto-complete anything in the query. I wrote it for our react clients (we use typescript for those) and then when I was writing a “serverless” function to do some heavy lifting in C# or Python it annoyed me that I couldn’t just consume the same library/package. Which is basically how I was converted to Typescript. I mean, there were other compelling arguments, but that’s what really did me in.

I’m not a fanatic though. I’m sure I’ll write more C# and Python and probably something else when it’s going to make sense to do so. But our Python “serverless” applications are frankly build the same way our Node applications are. It’s a little different with C# because the thing I haven’t yet named is Azure, but ideally, they too should be decoupled.

We’re doing more and more full stack typescript because it’s incredibly powerful resource (as in money) wise to have the same environment across everything in non-tech enterprise.

We also do a lot of “serverless” but the way we do it seems far less vendor dependent than this. Basically what we do is layer out the “node” part of our “serverless” application and let our cloud provide act as what is essentially the role of what expressJS or similar might have done for you 5-10 years ago. We’re also handling a lot the federated security through a combination of ORMs, OPA, AD and direct DB access control for the very rare BI application that needs it.

This way we can leave our cloud vendor at any time. Not without figuring out a suitable replacement but far easier than this article, and maintaining almost all of its advantages.

Interesting read, and if you’re certain AWS is a good home for the next five years from your most recently deployed service, then I don’t see too much of an issue with vendor lock-in.

I think the biggest issue will be finding an organisation that actually wants to replace Microsoft.

I know there are a few examples of it happening, but one of the reasons Microsoft is so successful is because they actually sell a really nice product with some really good support. This isn’t true for you or me as private customers, but when I was working in an average sized Danish City our IT department had a direct line to Seattle, and not only would they sometimes change Office365 or Azure in ways that we suggested, they would call you every hour with updates during major incidents. Part of what Microsoft sells to enterprise organisations is the ability for IT management to tell their organisation that Microsoft is giving them personal hourly updates while outlook is down.

As bad as bribes are, I don’t think they are going to move public opinion enough for politicians (or anyone else really) to push for alternatives. In fact, I doubt I’ll be reading about this outside of HN, as sad as that may be.

I spent 7 years working with digitalisation in the Danish public sector and it depends on what you mean, and what you want to pay for it. Basically the short answer is that it is impossible.

What is often forgotten about non-tech enterprise here on HN is that a typical public sector organisation has a ratio of 20-50 IT people (this is everyone, from the network and operations people to developers and project managers) per 10.000 employees in organisation where almost every employee uses some form of IT system to perform their duty.

Some users will not be capable of telling you if they are on an iOS or Android devices, and almost all of them know Microsoft Office and Outlook because that is what every place they have ever worked and will ever work uses. Or to frame it differently, the change management and retraining of 10000 employees is going to crush you, very, very quickly. On top of that your IT staff is certified and trained with Microsoft technologies, and most of them are likely happy about that to the point where they will leave your organisation if you push them toward Linux.

That is the employees. There is also the technology, and all the IT systems that only works on windows and have no competitors. This can be everything from your million dollar MRI machine to the dentist program (dentists are part of the public sector in Denmark). Cutting ties with Microsoft completely, would mean you’d need someone to develop alternatives to these things. (Yes, your million dollar MRI machine shouldn’t depend on windows XP, but it does).

So obviously it’s not impossible, nothing is, it’s just really, really, expensive. It’s so expensive that it will likely be it would be political suicide because the money you need to pay for the transition is going to come from firing nurses, school teachers, and other primary functions.

That being said, a lot of public sector organisations do take open source seriously. Especially here in Europe. But there isn’t a clean way to cut ties with Microsoft, and it’s actually become harder and harder. Because where is the Linux alternative to office365?

Disclaimer: I consider Microsoft to be the best external business partner that I’ve worked with while I was in the public sector.

It’s a problem in any ecosystem. It’s not like there haven’t been attacks in nuget packages or the recently famous Log4j vulnerability. I’m not going to pretend there aren’t some pretty deep flaws with nested dependencies in Node modules, but it’s really more an issue with unprofessionalism in my eyes.

I’ve never worked a place that would auto-magically roll out things like windows or chrome updates without having them vetted first. If you can’t trust those, then you certainly can’t trust some random NPM package, and if your organisation doesn’t have a strategy for how you handle something that unsafe then you really need to step up your professionalism.

I personally consider NPM packages to be sort or nice, in the very cynical way, that the community tends to beta test updates for you much faster than with any other dependency system.

I’ve been a C# developer for a decade, before that I worked with Java. These days I mostly work with Typescript as we use it both for our client programming and for our backend which increasingly consists of Node micro-services running as Azure functions. If you had told me that I would be writing backends in JavaScript five years from now back in 2017. I would have likely considered you to be crazy. Yet here we are.

Before I worry you too much let me tell you that I’m not at all religious about programming languages. It’s just that using the same language for the front and back end is very convenient, and now that Typescript (and Node) are actually good enough, also possible. Which leads me to the point I want to make here. Over the years both C# and Java have also gotten much, much, better. But because programming languages and environments in general, have become much, much better, there is rarely a reason to chose a technology based on its tech-specs. Heresy to most people, I know, I know, but we aren’t Netflix. Our most expensive resource isn’t how much iron we burn in Azure, it’s our developers and the speed at which they can deliver reliable and safe applications.

I think it will become increasingly hard to “bring developers back” in this world. Because why would we come back? .Net has seen some really awesome innovation in recent years, and is still seeing it, and yet we’ve moved away from C# and onto Typescript (still benefiting from a lot of .net stuff in azure functions), and .Net moves much faster than Java. So I doubt it, but I hope someone makes it anyway.

I wound up in a bit of a analysis paralysis figuring out what to replace my old 2015 13” mbp pro with. As a lot of others I looked to the pros, and went down the “well if I’m spending x, then I might as well spend a little extra to get so much more”.

Long story short, I ended up buying the smallest Air available with no upgrades, and I’m so happy that I did. Unless you’re doing some serious heavy lifting it’ll be fine, and at it’s small price point it’s not something I worry about breaking. That last part may be an ADHD thing, but it does add to the experience of using a laptop around the house where you also have a car and a 3 year old.

I was on the fence about the 8gb ram, but it frankly out performs my work t14s thinkpad which has 32gb for any sort of programming I do on it.

The only real downside is the lack of the MagSafe charger, but it holds power so well that it’s rarely in the charger when I’m using it. So my advice would be to get the smallest air, unless you know why you’re getting something more powerful.

I’m Danish so that may have an impact, but basically every company I’ve been with has had some sort of HR onboarding system where applicants submit their cv and letter of application to.

A typical process is that you or your manager sets down a group to hire. This group fills out a HR form of what sort of responsibilities, challenges and opportunities the applicant will meet as well as the requirements and wanted level of experience. Then HR puts up the position in various places and people apply online.

Once the period closes (sometimes while it’s running) the hiring group logs in and rates all applicants 1-5/7/10 (depending on the system) and then the system automatically moves the best x to the final group.

How people handle the first step variates and this is probably where the person I was replying to got the 8 seconds. But around here, people read the letter and look over the CV and often spend the most time on this step because it’s where you “grade” everyone.

The next step is group discussion about the top x where the people we want to talk to are selected. Then come the interviews and possible HR personality tests like DISC profiling and the occasional technical interview/test if there is doubt as to the applicants ability.

Here in Denmark the most important part of getting an interview is the letter you write. If it’s generic people will grade you lower. Your CV is sort of important, but only in the sense that “I know this skill, and these people recommend me” - LinkedIn style. In fact, people with good LinkedIn profiles might as well be submitting those as their CV as far as I am concerned (but still make a pretty one yourself because not everyone agrees with me).

Unless you’ve done some extraordinary work that actually sees real world use, nobody is going to look at your GitHub. Even if you have, write about it and how it makes you a good applicant instead of linking to it, because 99% or the time nobody is going to look at your stuff. This isn’t because hiring groups aren’t interested, it’s because it takes a lot of time and the process is already resource demanding.

Once people get to the interview, here in Denmark, it’s 95% about finding the person you think will fit into your team the best. Sometimes people will fall through because they’ve “hacked” their way and aren’t as capable technically as we thought, but that’s not often.

There are no rights and wrongs here, but I personally like applicants who seem to be “grading” us. As though they’re figuring out whether or not the job we’re selling is something, they, will want. Even if it’s a junior straight out of an education I like this, even when everyone knows they will kill for the opportunity it’s good to see people actually be curious.

It’s obviously a situation where the power dimension is insanely tipped to one side, but it’s important to remember that good teams are shopping as much as you are. We want the right match, because the most expensive mistake any manager or hiring group (at our level) will ever make is hiring the wrong person.

So be honest, be yourself and hope you’re seen as a good fit. And train your interviewing skills by applying for jobs that aren’t “as” important to you so that you’re not a completely nervous wreck when you apply to that one dream job. (This isn’t advice for new people), I recommend everyone doing a few interviews every 2-3 years.

> The typical screener in the hiring process spends 8 seconds or less making a decision to discard or advance a resume to the next stage.

I’ve been involved in hiring several people and this has never been the case. So I’m curious as to where you got those 8 seconds.

Hell, it usually takes the damn HR onboarding systems more than 8 seconds to load each page.

I have an anecdote that I think fits your assumption. It comes from my years in the Danish public sector where some of the systems are many decades old. In Denmark we’re all issued a social security number that is designed in such a way that the last number of it, is odd for males and even for females.

To make things short and somewhat anonymous, we had several systems that couldn’t handle people changing the “gender” of their social security number. They could handle you getting a new social security number, but it had to be of the same “gender” as your previous.

This makes no real sense, as it’s just a number and all these systems handle both types of numbers. But there we were, and it took us several years to get to a point where we could accommodate an employee changing the “gender” of their social security number.

So sometimes, developers do weird things because of their assumptions.

Ps. I’ve put “gender” in “”s because I’m unsure what the right word is in English.

This is just my anecdotal view but it’s based on a few decades in non-tech organisations, from startup to emerging-into-enterprise to enterprise (my path was enterprise -> startup -> e2e) and I think we’re a while out from non-tech organisations understanding the value of their own development resources.

Its everything from how IT is still often viewed as a “them-and-us” resource drain similar to HR but less understood (and this less valued by the organisation) even though 95% of the people in every organisation now works with IT devices that wouldn’t operate without IT. To how development continues to live in the weird spectrum of the business that actually needs something more than excel, being under digitalisation (efficiency) and IT (operations and development are natural frenemies).

It’s having to live in a 2022 where the “standard” solutions, the “document libraries” the “data-warehousing”, the “data-management-systems”, the “enterprise-architecture”, the “data/ml/bi-architecture “ is still just a bunch of really shitty systems and drawings that can’t connect together and quickly become a nightmare for anyone trying to do any real work leading back to massive excel usage and a constant need for “connection-inhouse-solutions” to make things actually work.

Leading to developers still being one of the best paid resources inside organisations with almost limitless tolerance for their non-conformity and rolling eyes in management meetings because most of us simply don’t understand the organisation lingo or the internal political power plays (yes, the bullshit).

Anyway, I’ve seen no change in change management to suggest that developers are going to be more valued going forward. If anything I think the want and belief in “standard” solutions might just birth the opposite in the coming decade, until the money managers once again realise that developers are simply necessary in a world where every “standard” solution is just as shitty as it was 20 years ago.

Interesting! I’ve recently made a switch from C# to TypeScript and I’ve found prisma to be such a relief from working with entity framework.

Not that entity is bad in any way, it’s just not as productive. Which is sort of how I have it with most of the journey into TypeScript. It’s just a really great environment especially in Azure Function apps, and a massive cadeau to Microsoft for making the node in docker such a first class citizen in their Azure environment!

In many ways I feel like TypeScript is a mix of the best of Python and C# and that’s just wonderful, for me.

But writing things like Odata APIs in .Net sure has some benefits from the massive work Microsoft has done with the .net and C# environment since moving core into the main .net or however you describe it.

So now I’m not sure where I am going with this, I’m probably just very appreciative of the work Microsoft has done for us enterprise developers in non-tech enterprise in the past few years.

Why is it crazy? Doesn’t a lot of the office tools also use react these days (maybe just the online ones but still)?

I’ve only recently started working with react, but so far it’s been the best experience I’ve had working with GUI in decades of working with different things.

I’ve always been what you’d call a full stack developer, but I’ve always very much not been the front end design developer, and react with bootstrap and font awesome is the first time I’ve been able to effortlessly create GUI stuff that doesn’t look like it should’ve been made by a front end design type.

So to me this is not at all surprising or crazy. It’s simply what happens when you have a really effective tool that a lot of people know how to use.

I’m personally a big fan of the Odata way of doing APIs, especially because they sort of write themselves according to your data model and basically works on anything where a full graph api would be overkill.

The one thing these articles never really deep dive into is access control, however, and that’s probably the area I personally need the most guidance on. Maybe that’s just me, but in this new GDPR world where every piece of data is basically categorised what I’ve found my teams to need to most is a best practice for linking data to employee functions and roles.

The Google api for gmail is sort of the good example. “Your messages” -> “your data”, but what happens when employees performing different functions in different parts of the organisation needs to access the same data but with different access to specific fields in it? Say you have 100 asset managers who each manage 50 things. They all have access to the overall data on all the things, but then they each have restricted access to the financial data on the specific things they manage.

You can link an asset manager to a thing, but you need to do it in a way that allows the asset manager role to change employee, without anyone actually going in to change “Mark” to “Hannah” manually when mark finds a new job.

That sort of hell is what I need best API practices for.

Gsuite and office365 business essentials lets you do it for around $80 a year, and also gives you online office + storage.

iCloud lets you do it cheaper if you have apple+ or whatever it’s called.

Email services like Runbox and their American counterpart that someone here can probably name. Will let you do it even cheaper.

All of these options have guides on how to do it that I could follow with now knowledge on the stuff.

I have personally used all those options except for the iCloud one. I’m currently using office365, but I’m considering moving to iCloud since we have the Apple+ family thing anyway and it would save me $80 a year. I’ve just been too lazy to make the switch yet. I left runbox for gsuite because I wanted the storage, then left gsuite for office365 because Google made it harder to be a “private” customer on their business plan. The office365 thing is pretty amazing, but again, it’s currently a redundant expenditure for me.

Do they share lanes for different directions?

I’ve read that they run so well in Norway because the goo they put on the power lines doesn’t get scraped off because they have two sets of rails, one for each direction.

It doesn’t bother me personally, I live inside the city so I typically walk or bike to work, so I haven’t followed the evolving scandal too much.

I think you’re right. My experiences in the Danish enterprise sector has been that banking and medical are very serious. But that can’t be taken as a universal truth.

I also think it depends on how you define quality. In terms of medical my qualification criteria is based around a 0 deaths or 0 failure rate over a lifetime, not so much what it was build with. Some people would likely disagree with that.

Building houses became a profession over thousands of years, however, only beginning to have real standards when the masons banded together in guilds. These guilds only attained the power they did because people die when buildings collapse, and important people care when churches collapse. By comparison our profession is, extremely, young and a lot of the software we build doesn’t really matter and doesn’t really have anyone that cares enough about it for there to be consequences.

This is why I both agree and disagree with the article. Because anyone can frankly build a house, and a lot of people around the world, not only do so themselves, they do so poorly. At the same time there are a lot of parts of software that are inaccessible to most software developers.

Banking and medical software developers tend to care quite a lot about your qualifications and even the modern coding interview is sort of there because our profession lack the “trade skill approval” seal that builders and electricians get.

On the flip side of this I live in the city of Aarhus. Some years ago we got a new form of public transportation called Letbanen, which is a street level metro (I’m not sure what they are called in English). It was sort of a standard product that my city bought and it runs in both Norway and Switzerland during their winters that are worse than hours. Last week it was cancelled 5 days out of 7 because the electricity lines were frozen. I love the thing and I don’t mean to complain about it or pretend to know why my city can’t make it work when a city in Norway can, but the fact is that it doesn’t work and tens of thousands of commuters haven’t been able to rely on it for a couple of winters now.

It’s CEO hasn’t changed.

This is a standard product that was build by certified people that keeps people from getting to their jobs without having a car (in Denmark it’s common not to need a car in our larger cities), and yet, there hasn’t been a lot of consequences for it failing the same way for several years.

> Counter example: Tom standardized a bunch of services... and it worked! Everything is easier and more efficient now.

I’m sorry, but that isn’t really a counter point unless you have some cases to back it up.

In my completely anecdotal experience standardisation never really works. I say this as someone who’s worked on enterprise architecture at the national level in Denmark and has co-written standardisations and principles on how to define things from common building blocks.

The idea was that something like a journal of your health can be defined as a model that can be used by everyone who ever needs to define a journal for health data. And for some cases it works well, it lets thousands of companies define what a “person” is as an example and which parts are the person and which parts are the employee and so on, and it lets them exchange data between systems.

Until it doesn’t. Because all of the sudden an employee is two different things depending on what time of the day it is, because a Nurse has different responsibilities while patients are awake, in some hospitals, and not in others. But because the “standardisation” doesn’t account for this, 50 years of enterprise architecture in the Danish public sector is yet to really pay off.

Some of our best and most successful public sector projects are the ones that didn’t do fanatical standardisation but build things with single responsibilities so that they could easily be chained together to fit a myriad of unique needs.

Now, I’m not against standardisation in any way, but sometimes it just doesn’t make sense and sometimes it does. The issue is that the standardisation approach tends to begin before anyone knows which situation you are actually in.

How would they do that though? Russian interest rates are through the roof, so even if you could borrow money to start a business you likely couldn’t make it profitable. If you had assets to begin with they better not have been in the stock market, because that has been closed since the invasion began and basically everything you own is now rated 0. If your assets were in savings, then they too have lost basically all value along with the rubbles.

Even if you somehow overcome the need for capital, how do you setup the supply chain necessary in a world where you can’t readily trade with anyone but China? Which you may not be able or doing in a month if things turn sour and China also start sanctioning.

Sure Russia has a lot of wood, but Russia doesn’t have the industrial material to transform it into furniture, and right now, Russia doesn’t have access to the high tech commodities required to build an efficient lumber industry, let alone factories to process it.

You’re right of course, this will open up for opportunities in the very long run, but it’ll be very localised opportunities that can’t take advantage of the global supply chain in a country that had an economy which was around the size of the economy of Italy before this began.

If you look at history, then you can’t really build empires in isolation. Even the current “American empire” saw a lot of its economic rise throught things like the Marshall plan, which as an example, lifted my country (Denmark) from what was basically medieval farming methods with lots and lots of manual labour to the average farmer owning tractors in less than a decade. Unless the oligarchs of Russia plan on investing basically all their national profits into building the country’s industry, then I would personally wager that these images are the last chance that a lot of Russian have to but IKEA things for a good while. It won’t stop there either, after a few years of isolation the average Russian won’t be able to buy things like coffee if the sanctions get worse.

War is hell.

Maybe it’s just me, but I notice a difference in response from the author that I personally try to avoid. To me these two things:

> There are no docs for [this thing you're doing].

And:

> Coworker: I have (specific concern) about [thing you're doing]. I couldn't find anything about it in that group post or on the wiki.

Would receive a somewhat similar response. Sure it’s annoying when people can’t find something, or when they don’t bother looking, but we also work in a field where someone might ask you something in a very hostile sounding way simply because they aren’t very skilled socially.

Telling them “yes there is”, sort of escalates the conflict in my book and while it’s totally understandable (and I’ll do this myself on my less good days) it’s also just asking for things to go south. Which is something I have learned not to waste time on.

If they continue being hostile after you respond openly, helpful and defusing, then sure, they can go fuck themselves. Just be sure that you use the corporate-speak fuck you instead of what you actually want to say to keep your hands clean.

This is anecdotal and just what I’ve seen but here in Denmark one of the leading Apple retailers and certified repair shops is called Humac. Until recently I didn’t know they had a Russian owner. Now it’s become so much of a problem for them that they’ve edited their website to try and hide it.

Companies that don’t severe ties with Russia as fast as possibly seem to be at a very real risk losing their customer bases here in Europe in the wake of the invasion.

I can’t even claim to be above it. I cancelled my Netflix subscription when it was aired that they complied with Russian broadcast laws. Something Netflix no longer does by the way.

I’ve never had an issue buying products from Russia before, so if I’m not the only one reacting like this, and it seems like my reaction has been amongst the milder here, then you may find some of the answer in that.

> Additionally, there's some very unusual resistance to Russian troops.

One or the reasons the Blitzkrieg worked so well for Nazi Germany was because many of their soldiers were experienced combat veterans from the international brigades during the Civil war in Spain.

Ukrainian soldiers have been in active combat since 2014, and they are fighting to defend their own country.

That being said, I don’t think any of us really have much of a clue as to what is going on, I just hope the best for Ukraine.

> 99% of normal people don't know anything about the world.

Are you talking about Americans? Because I can assure you that 99% of the people in Europe knows exactly where Chernobyl is.

It almost wiped out our entire continent, and it’s still an active threat that is going to be a security issue for the next thousands of years.

We’re taught about it in school.

Russia didn’t take it because they wanted to generate headlines, they took it to secure it. I personally believe in the experts who think the Russian army vastly overestimated their first day effort, but whatever you believe, it would be foolish to think that Chernobyl isn’t a very serious thing for everyone involved.

If it was accidentally destroyed in this war, and Russia didn’t immediately fix it, EU forces would be forced to trigger WW3 to recapture it, or 650 million or us, would need to find a different part of the world to live in. That wouldn’t happen or course, because 80% of the Russian population also lives in zones that would become uninhabitable.

I think the only real solution to this is going to be once we hold platforms accountable for the content they let people host.

I know the general HN crowd is very much against this, but it’s the standard we hold every other media platform and I don’t see why things should get a free pass just because they pretend to be platforms.

After a decades worth of working in non-tech enterprise and small companies. Which means I’ve worked on major projects, minor projects, as an advisor and later implementation guide to external developers and so on, I’m not sure I’ve seen a good recipe that doesn’t involve making sure that people work together on the same things ever so often and to keep things as simple as possible.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t build generic things for code-reuse and easier maintaining. Because you should, just be aware that as soon as you build a generic something, you’re likely stepping into the land of someone’s headspace, and other people might take a while to understand that. Which is where working on each others projects, or doing code reviews help in my experience.

I still encourage good and clean documentation. Something that quickly tells the reader what X does and why it does it.

I also encourage everyone to draw what connects to where and how it does so. Not in any form of detail, just so that you don’t end up in a situation where you have to doable a SQL user to find out who screams about it.

I’m also personally a fan of writing to-do-lists containing all the steps I took to make something work. I recently wrote one for how to connect sequelize to an instance msSQL server in azure. It wasn’t trivial, and because it involved a lot of trial and error, it’s something I couldn’t repeat again in two weeks if I hadn’t written down the steps that worked.

Good question though. It’s something we should all work on.

Oh this is very true. There are actually a few django and Ruby on Rails jobs open in my area (region midt) on a fairly regular basis. There are a lot of node jobs as well as most things have moved to have some sort of TypeScript front end.

I’m not sure those really count as “new and hipster”, however, I mean the person I was replying to was lamenting “react” being old. ;)

I’ve got quite a lot of experience with non-IT enterprise, in Denmark, and almost nobody uses those fancy new technologies around here. Over the past few years everything has moved to typescript (typically with react, but some angular remains from older decisions), dotnet, Java, php or c++.

That’s basically it. The only job listing to even mention things like Rust in the region where I live in the past 5 years is Google, and they list it as “nice to have” on a recurrent phd position for c++ development.

Python is obviously a thing, but not so much for software development, but typically requires you to be a statistician first and then maybe capable of writing a little Python second.

So there is probably a bit of a disconnect between what is hip and what puts food on the table for a lot of us.

You’re probably on to a lot of it too. I recently got back into development, returning from a stint in management, project management and enterprise architecture and I’ve grown quite fond of typescript and the node environment.

It’s obviously a place where you can cause a lot of harm if you brute-force-program 100% or the time all of the time, but it’s also a place where you can create some great business value faster than I’ve ever experienced elsewhere. I mean, I can do things faster in Python but only until whatever I’m doing outgrows what I’m capable of keeping in my head.

That being said. Looking at the previous 20 years of getting to running office365 in your browser, sort of explains why people have been working so hard to come up with newer and smarter things, doesn’t it?

For the vast majority of us, however, the boring old languages are likely going to be around long after we retire, and as such, the “popularity” measures in these articles is probably not something to pay too much attention to.

Google is simply not a very reliable business partner for tech. I have a decade worth of experience in the Danish public sector, where I’ve had plenty of great experiences with both Amazon and Microsoft. I know that a lot of people would prefer things to be open source, but part of what you pay for in an Enterprise Organisation is availability of support. When AWS first entered the European market, most of what they sold in the support side was rather automated. Which just couldn’t compete with what Microsoft sells, where Seattle will call you with updates every hour on the hour if you’re a big enough customer. This is a big part of why Azure managed to capture the market share it did under the nose of AWS, the other part being that once you buy Office365 well… Anyway, I’ve never seen a huge tech company change their ways as quick as Amazon did, and today they’re actually ahead of Microsoft in terms of compliance with EU legislation and Enterprise support.

Google mean while has the same business-to-business support that it does for private customers like the author here. For some services it’s because Google doesn’t care, but they do care about Education and they still can’t figure out how to readjust to be a valuable business partner even when they actually want to sell you something.

So my best advice to anyone using Google services would be to find a better vendor as quick as possible. It’s completely ridiculous that you can lose your business account over someone replying to a spam mail.

Just imagine if Microsoft kicked the Danish government out of Office365 every time one of our employees did something silly in their emails. I know there is a difference between us as individuals and the Danish governed, but the point in trying to make is that there isn’t, not to Google at least. So maybe they are just a terrible vendor?

This is all anecdotal by the way. I haven’t seen anyone complain about getting locked out of their azure essential subscription, so in my eyes that is simply a safer way to pay for g-suite type services than g-suite. That being said, I do personally host my domain and DNS stuff on their own separate accounts at their own separate vendors, both privately and professionally, exactly because you want that stuff to remain unaffected by everything else.