thenanante

Could you give me some examples of those cycles? Genuinely curious what you mean.

I started my career just a couple years ago. In my first company, they used 10+ year old tooling and imo it was terrible. A very old legacy mess monolith that made adding features pure torture. Trunk-based development with a "who needs tests" mindset, resulting in horrendously buggy code, 50:50 chance pulling newest version would break something. Several instances of files with over 10k lines of code and deep nesting, absolute nightmare. Absolutely no mindset for performance. They wrote quadratic complexity code in the backend to fetch data because hash-based data structures already seemed too advanced to many of my coworkers and then they wondered why their frontend was so terribly slow. Not that they had a lot of pressure to deliver a great product, because they are / were market leader in their B2B niche. I left within a year.

Now I'm working in a company that uses all the latest gitlab CI/CD shenanigans, code reviews and heavy use of unit, integration and end to end tests. Everything is hosted in the cloud with a microservice architecture. We actually need it as we scale to millions of customers and have performance and reliability requirements.

The difference is not just the tech stack that was horribly outdated and imo extremely tedious to work with, but also the mentality is completely different.

In the first company, you couldn't change anything, there was a strict hierarchy and everything stayed as is because "it works". You totally got the feeling that there's some old people up in the hierarchy that were way too lazy to learn new things and didn't want to endanger their meaning in the company. When I left, I spoke with the Head of HR and he told me that basically all people that leave do so because of the mentioned reasons. So that company drives away motivated talent with their crap mentality. Pay wasn't very good either, but a first job is a first job after all.

Now mind you, both companies are a couple decades old, but imo one always kept up and the other didn't. Both companies have 10+ year seniors. Personally, the people in the current company are way more competent and excited about work. Much more fun to work with, I learn more and I absolutely don't get the feeling the tooling is reinvented in any way. It's improved in all possible aspects I could think of and makes the development experience much better.

Yes, at ETH Zürich. I'm not a big fan of Eiffel, but pre- & postconditions + invariants are a great way to verify simple functions in isolation. Still needs integration and end-to-end tests to verify sufficient correctness in a complex distributed environment. On top of that, I really don't like strong OOP. It can be misused so easily. Multiple inheritance sounds good in theory, but just based on some Java inheritance code nightmares I've seen in my career so far, think 10s of layers of deep nesting done by misusing inheritance; multiple inheritance would massively overcomplicate many codebases. I'm very happy the industry seems to move into a pragmatic middle ground, where both lightweight OOP and lightweight FP have their uses.

Using a chaotic system to predict a chaotic system.

I studied at ETH Zürich and am Swiss. It still always surprises me how competitive we are as such a super small country.

Your argument seems to be in bad faith, but I'll bite. As a Swiss, OKAY! Whatever, so my life sucks 0.1% more in order for thousands of potential employees in the taxi service to get better living conditions as demanded by Swiss employment laws. What a proud "hurt" Swiss consumer I am. I make > $110k with just a single year of experience as a software developer, I can live super nicely and safe a ton of money. I'm also super happy and proud that retail and service workers get > 40k in this country, so they can live a decent life as well even if they didn't have the privileges to become highly educated and specialized.

Yes, Redmond got involved later due to the immense success. Doesn't take anything away from the fact that the core is being developed by a small team in Switzerland.

I interviewed with the VSCode team at Microsoft Zürich (didn't get the job because there were more senior candidates that already contributed to the open source repo, fair game). I have to say I'm super impressed that a small team in Switzerland managed to build and maintain it! Coming from that point of view it's imo totally okay that there are some proprietary parts. If it doesn't generate revenue in one way or another, we wouldn't have it. FOSS is cool and all but someone has to pay the devs eventually.