Re:Where have all the hackers gone?
by tracker1 on Thursday May 18, 2023 @01:36PM
(#35991431)
I think it's more about the culture and circle you are in. When you are in education, first starting out, or in irc/slack support channels, you're much more likely to see people with more passion about the technology. If you're in an office or working on a team in an established business it's much more about getting the work done.
Beyond this, priorities shift over time. The priorities of someone in their early 20's that is single will be different than someone in their late 40's with children heading towards college, or even younger children. As you mention, there's also the boot camps and people that simply come in without interest in the technology aspects.
In the end, there's many more people that will get into the gritty details today than decades ago, but there's also many more people that are more concerned about getting work done. This is part of why entropy is really hard to overcome. Trying to get movement in a company towards a new approach can be very hard. If company X is using Java or C#, their developers have likely been using it for many years, know it well and don't see a reason to shift. And for the most part, they are right. You can get work done in many languages, scale and adapt in many ways. Most applications don't even need to scale that much. Most apps are line of business apps that only a few dozen people ever even see and for those that aren't, you can scale vertically quite a bit before you really need to go horizontal.
It's different if you re starting something public facing and want to utilize newer tooling for horizontal scale from the start. Aside: Why CockroachLabs doesn't expose a web api for database queries directly for the likes of Cloudflare Workers or Deno Deploy is beyond me... In the end, it depends on what market you're serving. Getting something working means far more than an optimal approach in one way or aother.
Beyond this, priorities shift over time. The priorities of someone in their early 20's that is single will be different than someone in their late 40's with children heading towards college, or even younger children. As you mention, there's also the boot camps and people that simply come in without interest in the technology aspects.
In the end, there's many more people that will get into the gritty details today than decades ago, but there's also many more people that are more concerned about getting work done. This is part of why entropy is really hard to overcome. Trying to get movement in a company towards a new approach can be very hard. If company X is using Java or C#, their developers have likely been using it for many years, know it well and don't see a reason to shift. And for the most part, they are right. You can get work done in many languages, scale and adapt in many ways. Most applications don't even need to scale that much. Most apps are line of business apps that only a few dozen people ever even see and for those that aren't, you can scale vertically quite a bit before you really need to go horizontal.
It's different if you re starting something public facing and want to utilize newer tooling for horizontal scale from the start. Aside: Why CockroachLabs doesn't expose a web api for database queries directly for the likes of Cloudflare Workers or Deno Deploy is beyond me... In the end, it depends on what market you're serving. Getting something working means far more than an optimal approach in one way or aother.