SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Nikita Prokopov has written a blog post detailing disenchantment with current software development. He has been writing software for 15 years and now regards the industry’s growing lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence as a problem to be solved. He addresses the following points one by one:
- Everything is unbearably slow
- Everything is too large
- Bitrot
- Half-baked products get shipped
- The same old problems recur again and again
- Most code has grown too complex to refactor
- Business is uninterested in improvement
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
On Disenchantment with the Current State of Software Development
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 99 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:23PM (12 children)
This is what happens when you young d(_)che bags graduate college, and all you know is some toy language like Python, Java, C#, or Ruby. You think they're awesome because they're easy. I think they're crap because then I'm forced to work with you, and you can't write deterministic code to save your life. I had one young guy flip his sh*t because he had to write some code because "OMG, you mean there isn't already a library for that in the language?!!" I said, "welcome to software engineering."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Fluffeh on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:52PM (10 children)
And that sort of elitist attitude is just as much part of the problem. You were young and fresh out of education (self or formal) at some point. You had no clue but didn't know it. We all were. And slowly or quickly we all got better.
Rather than being the guy who knows a lot but doesn't share and looks down his nose at all the new guys, why don't you try to be the experienced guy who lifts the new folks to greater heights. Empower them to become more, show them the next part of the journey.
Or... you know... sit here bitching anonymously about those young whipper-snappers and their fancy-schmancy languages.
*sips coffee*
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @10:12PM (4 children)
You probably love systemd.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @10:30PM (3 children)
Obviously you love the regular D
(Score: 4, Touché) by coolgopher on Thursday October 04 2018, @06:44AM (2 children)
Personally I favour regular expressions
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday October 04 2018, @02:52PM (1 child)
You're one of those 'eh? https://xkcd.com/1313/ [xkcd.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 04 2018, @06:12PM
Since the last election, the regex in the title text is irreparably broken: There's no way a regex at the same time both matches Clinton (last name of Bill Clinton) and doesn't match Clinton (last name of Hillary Clinton).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @10:35PM (1 child)
I think his point is that millennials leave school without the tools required to be good programmers. Rather than learning deterministic coding, they spend their time taking gender studies courses. The end result is Ruby on Rails.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @05:30PM
“Ruby on Rails”
Is that some porn series about a girl with a train fetish?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @03:47AM
-s"
What upset me the very most about my homelessness is that I was unable to mentor the young people during that time.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @03:48AM
Somewhere I read his explanation for his enthusiastic reception of shitty code from the newbies:
Because mentoring the newbies is how we obtain oldbies.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @12:50PM
Can't you recognize drill sergeant tough love when you see one?
"You worthless maggots! I've never seen so sorry bunch of wannabe software engineers in my entire life! You won't last a minute out there in the field. I am gonna wipe out that smug smiles from your faces.
Now hit the vim and give me for (i = 0; i 50; i++) pushup();"
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @02:10AM
Been there, seen that.
$job had a project where they were migrating data from 'legacy' data storage system into 'new improved shiny thing' storage system that was, at this point, also an untested storage system (this last bit is important). Migration was occurring by reading from 'legacy' system, over a network connection, and writing to 'shiny new system' over a network connection.
Dev's had not even considered the possibility that untested shiny new thing might just accept data writes, reply with "success" response, but not actually store the data that was sent to be stored. Additional fact, a prior 'shiny new, but different, storage system' failed for just this reason. Writes were indicated as "successful" but attempting to retrieve written data later resulted in failure from prior 'shiny new system' for some substantial portion of reads.
So, I asked that they add a test of data written to verify it was in fact stored successfully by reading the newly stored data back out from 'shiny new' and comparing it to the original that was still stored in 'legacy system'.
I learned a few days later that the dev's had been looking for a prebuilt "compare" library to accomplish this ask instead of simply coding a simple compare loop.