The silent majority in software

https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/the-silent-majority/

by bndr • 4 years ago

291 353 4 years ago

bpmayer• 4 years ago

This original silent majority was a victim of Soviet propaganda. Nothing is better in war when the enemy no longer wants to fight because he has self-doubt.

thrown_222• 4 years ago

And that’s fine, we’re all amateurs, and sometimes we can be wrong.

I'm not an amateur. Or if I am than everyone is too since I have written software for project that would kill tens of thousands if it fails.

Other than that the vocal minority was always my opinion on Rust. A small core of true believers who decided that convincing people they should change the world is worth more than actually doing any work in Rust.

verisimilitudes4• 4 years ago

Such a saying is what the incompetent obsessively repeat to themselves. They can't stand by the thought of people who don't need an Internet connection to program, who don't copy and paste from the fools over at StackOverflow, and the many other things they do which their betters don't.

The fools over at Reddit call some things "adulting", because the idea of growing out of childhood is so foreign to them that they'd rather make it childish too. It's the same basic disease.

tailspin20192• 4 years ago

we’re all amateurs, and sometimes we can be wrong.
Such a saying is what the incompetent obsessively repeat to themselves.

I'll take humble over arrogant.

Transfinity2• 4 years ago

The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war.

Excuse me? The "silent majority" was the set of Americans who were for the war, not (loudly) protesting against it. Nixon was all for continuing the war.

freddie_mercury• 4 years ago

That's literally what it says in the very next sentence.

"In this usage, it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time"

astura3• 4 years ago

It was stealthily changed. Someone else quoted the original further down in the comments

The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war.

throwawaylmtn• 4 years ago

Can we please stop supporting political operations like BLM, MAGA, and political parties in software. I am tired of every open source project asking for donations to BLM. Uyghurs matter too.

silisili• 4 years ago

Usually, the comments on HN/Reddit are polarised by a single group of people who have the same opinion,

Can't speak for Reddit, but that's not at all the case here. For example, I often speak of my hatred of microservices here. I'll get some upvotes and agreement, some people telling me it's a dumb opinion, and some people telling me we're doing it wrong and explain their right way. Believe it or not, I learn a lot from different people and their experiences.

I can't think of a single topic that seems to be prevelant here that doesn't have a sizeable amount of disagreement, in fact. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

hot_gril4• 4 years ago

The phrase "HN/Reddit" is weird by itself. This place feels so different from Reddit.

meowkit• 4 years ago

HN is like what Reddit used to be. Heavy emphasis on news, technology. Usually some interesting debate in the comments when they were added.

Found some screenshots from the early years:

https://www.reddit.com/r/historyofreddit/comments/q1zks/redd...

nextaccountic• 4 years ago

HN culture is quite like a subreddit IMO. The only real difference is that it doesn't receive drive-by comments and upvotes from redditors browsing /r/all while not subscribed to it. This helps to curb most forms of reddit humor

However; check out subreddits like /r/rust, it looks a lot like HN

grog454• 4 years ago

Usually, the comments on HN/Reddit are polarised by a single group of people who have the same opinion,
polarize: divide or cause to divide into two sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions or beliefs. "the cultural sphere has polarized into two competing ideological positions"

Hmm...

narag• 4 years ago

At school, they used to say that two don't fight if one doesn't want to. Except that was a lie. Bullies didn't get the memo, while teachers and parents were happy to repeat the lie, wash their hands and blame the victims.

eternityforest• 4 years ago

I don't think microservices are silent majority. They seem like more of a blogger architect who likes to tinker with stuff thing.

I would expect the true silent majority just uses monoliths. If it works and doesn't make people complain every day when they work on it, why use a microservice? That's more work.

Everyone likes to think of microservices as a modern high tech thing, but to me it seems like old fashioned unix stuff, that appeals to people who enjoy doing simple weekend projects, trying to make their job into a series of tiny projects of the type they might do at home for fun.

The focus seems more on individual parts than on the vision of the complete project.

Of course it seems to just mostly move complexity into the high level gluing it all together, and spread it out in bits of interface code, but if you are more interested in working on simple but interesting challenges, and don't mind the more hands on dev ops maintenance work, and aren't that into building complex systems, I imagine you would like it.

EdwardDiego3• 4 years ago

I've joined a company with a silent majority monolith, and joined at the inflection point where they realise their monolith is strangling them...

If your dev guide in the wiki says "to run unit tests, use docker-compose exec monolith test some.package.test_class", you're in danger.

This company needs to start breaking the monolith down into, well maybe not microservices, but at least smaller monoliths, if they want to achieve what they want to achieve.

trasz2• 4 years ago

The focus seems more on individual parts than on the vision of the complete project.

Quite the opposite - they think about architecture as opposed to a crappy unmaintainable hodgepodge that the vast majority of web applications are.

Inferiority of web-based apps doesn’t come from nowhere.

packetlost2• 4 years ago

The silent majority are mostly corporate devs building internal tooling. Microservices are a fantastic method for building distributed, horizontally scaling, dynamic services in a way that's sane. But the overwhelming vast majority of services would be perfectly ok with a simple monolith that occasionally gets a VM spec bump.

powerhour• 4 years ago

but to me it seems like old fashioned unix stuff

It's exactly this for me. Unix has been around longer than I've been around and will outlive my career if not my life. Components have been successfully updated and replaced mostly without significant disruption. Unix is a model for producing and maintaining complicated systems.

giancarlostoro3• 4 years ago

I forget the exact quote I read on HN once, but it made me laugh, all concurrent systems will eventually recreate Erlang. If you think of Microservices and even Kubernetes Clusters and company, they're all barely doing a fraction of what Erlang can do, because Erlang had the right concept, it was just 40 years ahead of its time.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th3• 4 years ago

I feel the same way about OAuth2.

It's very complex. It has it's business use cases, but if you don't need it (or don't need full-blown OAuth2) then don't use it. If you're worried about the future separate auth user from account internally in your application (SSO ready) and move on.

It sometimes feels like there's a cabal of people who think the more complex something is, the more skilled they are for being able to implement it. That's not really where the skill lies for an engineer.

cestith2• 4 years ago

Microservices vs monoliths with nothing in between is a false dichotomy itself of course. There's been SOA and n-layer applications for decades now. Not every service is a microservice and not everything bigger than a microservice is written as one big application.

From the discourse on forums these days, someone fresh to the field might think there's no such thing as an internal API or an ongoing ETL layer without breaking each feature down to its own container and throwing the whole thing on Kubernetes. All those systems that are two to four layers and decomposed into half a dozen or so parts at the outer interface still exist in the world, even if they're not on track to be one container per feature.

lifeisstillgood6• 4 years ago

I have a slightly different view on microservices. They are not a technical solution but a business solution. Technically it's a fairly dumb idea ... but if every microservices is actually a tiny business function (that is some "atom" of the domain) then suddenly the business can see and manipulate and monitor and see stats in usage for each atom of its processes. Things become isibke that were hidden in giant "oh the refund section of screen four does that and bobbys team is working on that".

I think Programmer Anarchy was a early adopter of microservices and as they ran a business as developers I think this may have been useful

brynjolf• 4 years ago

I also think HN usually come from the same background with predominantly comments from California USA or USA in general.

Compare any topic relating to capatilism, the plights of the low income classes or politics in general. I often amuse myself comparing the takes between the two sites relating it those topics.

Also HN is more clinical, it discussed the death of Swedish reporter like it was a cold case ready to be ripped through.

And also more easily distracted by seemingly innocent open questions like in politics for example "Why is it X job to care about this?" since you can't dismiss it with a short meme it creates discussion that the OP only wanted to distract from the original article.

Apart from that HN discourse is 100% better than reddit and I agree with you in some terms.

politelemon2• 4 years ago

but that's not at all the case here.

Very sorry but it absolutely is the case here. Your anecdotal data is limited to you, but HN very much operates as a hive mind, it just hides it better.

Considering this place to be "superior" to other places only leads to complacence and further strengthens the echo chamber.

timeon2• 4 years ago

HN very much operates as a hive mind

Most of us here agree with you.

jrm4• 4 years ago

It's getting better, but e.g. try talking about race.

jonshariat2• 4 years ago

I think your experience actually proves the point and touches on why many dangerous and crazy POV have also been getting so much air time in the news.

Let's say you have 2 opposing POV: A or B

"A" has a silent majority so only 5 of the 5,000 people post a comment about A being the right POV.

"B" is a passionate minority so 5 of the 50 people post a comment about B being the right POV.

To the viewer, it looks like a balanced discussion and a topic open to much debate, both sides have equal voice but in reality "A" is by far the most accepted position.

jonshariat2• 4 years ago

It also shows up in bad news writing and science writing.

For example you have 99% of scientist agreeing about global warming.

You have 1% who disagree.

So they write that "Some scientist disagree" and it sounds like its up for debate or maybe a significant portion know something the others don't.

In the pursuit of a "Balanced" POV they tip the scales vs just reporting where the scales are at accurately.

ttpphd4• 4 years ago

There's nothing quite like an author getting basic history completely wrong at the very beginning. Really builds confidence.

hot_gril4• 4 years ago

And it's even the title of the article.

lvturner• 4 years ago

What color is the bike-shed?

quietbritishjim• 4 years ago

If the colour of the bike shed is in the name of your nuclear reactor, maybe it actually does matter.

ttpphd4• 4 years ago

The actual silent majority was a violent, reactionary, prowar group led by Nixon. They were not anti war, and they were not silent. The comparison the author made is an incredibly bad analogy, at least to anyone who actually understands reality.

trasz2• 4 years ago

Nixon’s internal politics isn’t “basic history” anywhere except US.

noirbot• 4 years ago

Sure, but if your premise for the article is "This thing in my field is a lot like Nixon's politics", I'd expect you to not get Nixon's politics wrong, specifically because a lot of people may not know it enough to tell if your comparison is correct.

astura3• 4 years ago

I'm flagging this; it's marketing drivel[1] devout of any sort of substance or insight. The author of the post is the submitter.

[1] the marketing here is a CTO position himself as some sort of "though leader," which I wouldn't be opposed to, if there was some sort of substance.

drewcoo• 4 years ago

Do you mean the paragraph that was lifted almost verbatim from the first paragraph of this Wikipedia page?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority

ttpphd4• 4 years ago

Oh bless your heart

evan_2• 4 years ago

The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war.

This is a shocking misunderstanding of history. The “silent majority” Nixon spoke of were folks opposed to anti-war protests. Nixon intentionally prolonged the war for political gain- killing additional thousands of people.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nixon-prolonged-vi...

If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts.

bndr• 4 years ago

Fixed it. Thank you :) Just took the quote directly from Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority#:~:text=The%20...

olau• 4 years ago

Just to save time for other people who might be wondering how Wikipedia could get this wrong, bndr seems to have forgotten to read the last part of the admittedly long sentence in Wikipedia. It lists several vocal groups.

spacechild12• 4 years ago

I think you completely misread that article...

coldtea3• 4 years ago

If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts.

Actually Nixon did several things "a non-evil person would do", Nixon as evil is a carricature.

Like giving back Native American lands, or green-lighting the first major environmental protection legislation, or to get talking with China. And of course the Vietnam war itself was escalated by the "good" JFK, and even more so Johnson.

Later presidents did things many times worse than Nixon (his Watergate business included) and got off scot-free. But Nixon had an ugly mug, and was an old-style politician, in an era when the boomers were young and "rebellious" and wanted someone more trendy.

beebeepka• 4 years ago

I've never been into history, so my perception of the guy was "formed" almost entirely by Futurama. So, in reality I don't know anything about Nixon except I do not want him to get Cambodian on my ass

mcv• 4 years ago

He very nearly signed a Basic Income law. I originally read that the Democrats voted against it because it was too low, but more recently read that someone convinced Nixon that a Basic Income would have terrible consequences based on some faulty historical information about the Speenhamland system, which turned Nixon against BI. But it was close; he could have made history in a much more positive way than what we currently remember him for.

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

to get talking with China.

What a waste of time that was.

lifeisstillgood6• 4 years ago

Yes. The first thing the chinese government did after Nixon ended sanctions and allowed trade, was to order 12 fertiliser plants from R W Kellogs (not the cornflakes one). Giant things that squeeze ammonia out of the atmosphere. That meant climbing out of a starvation cycle.

Nixon going to China probably saved 100s of millions of lives. Chinese lives of course but lives. Sadly for Nixon the lives he saved did not vote in Chicago.

Nixon was not evil. People arent evil. Decisions people make are evil.

rl3• 4 years ago

If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts.

I mean, he did give us the EPA. What the ulterior motive was, I'm unsure.

ckolkey• 4 years ago

I believe it was to undercut the numerous state-level organisations that had started appearing, consolidating power with the federal govt (and executive branch, specifically)

lordnacho2• 4 years ago

But you triple checked it, that's the point. Default evil.

Aeolun3• 4 years ago

Huh, that’s funny. Even though the author wrote the opposite, I still read exactly what you said.

Cthulhu_• 4 years ago

folks opposed to anti-war protests

That's a very specific wording; were these people also pro-war, or did they just not like the protests themselves?

I think that's an important distinction to make. In my country we've had farmer's protests (environmental legislation has caused the government to target some farmers, things like forced buy-outs. It's all on paper and wouldn't affect that many people or the food supply since 65% is exported anyway, but still); while a lot of people agree and stand with the farmers, what they don't agree with is the protests they've done where they block the highways, first with just slow moving tractors as they made their way to the government seat, more recently with barricades, manure and burning hay bales. That affects people directly, the upsdie-down flags and slogans on fields along the roadside don't.

Dudeman112• 4 years ago

That affects people directly, the upsdie-down flags and slogans on fields along the roadside don't

Those also don't achieve anything. The only form of protesting that the population at large accepts are either illegal or useless

evan_2• 4 years ago

That’s the thing- the war was widely unpopular, but there was a growing reactionary sentiment against the protests, so Nixon gave a speech where he basically said “if you aren’t with me on the war then you’re a dirty hippie” and people feel for it.

Gordonjcp• 4 years ago

If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts.

Well naturally. He's a right-wing politician. See also Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Benito Mussolini, and any of the rest.

swyx• 4 years ago

also known as the "one percent rule" - 90% of people passively view content, 9% comment on content, 1% create

(i've written on it here and how it does favor creators https://www.swyx.io/puwtpd#why-does-this-work-on-them )

Jensson2• 4 years ago

I don't think that 10% comments, the numbers I remember are 10% votes and 1% comments. And looking at some random topics it seems to be roughly there, 10% comments is way too high.

omega3• 4 years ago

I'd go further than this and say out of that 1% who create content further 99% shouldn't.

lytefm2• 4 years ago

I'd suppose that on a personal level and for HN, activity also changes with experience.

I've been passively reading HN for a few years as a junior dev after my team lead introduced the site to my before even creating an account.

I've been making comments on a few topics of interest now and then in the past three years.

Since a few months I feel like "yeah, I should probably write some docs + blog posts" which might be interesting to other HN readers.

I've also noticed that some HN users write a lot of comments to any kind of post whereas others mainly commment on articles related to their are of expertise.

wiseowise2• 4 years ago

So what’s the point of the article? Because I see a lot discussions and appreciation for the unpopular langs that author mentioned.

dollo_7• 4 years ago

I may belong to that silent majority. I have learnt a lot from the discussions here in HN and other sites, but I rarely participate on them. This post made me think about being a little more active because, sincerely, most of the times it is just laziness what prevents me from commenting anything.

In fact, this is my first comment here in HN. Little by little.

the_omegist3• 4 years ago

For me it's more that I think a comment should really "bring something" : a new perspective or a complement of information.

That's why there are places on the internet (like here) where, usually, I don't find the usual online fluff content.

MexicanJoe• 4 years ago

this is my first comment here in HN. Little by little.

Here have an upvote!

veltas2• 4 years ago

I will say that in my own experience, if you go against the zeitgeist on HN you can often get by as long as you're sensitive/respectful and intelligent on the issue. There are people who downvote things they disagree with, but I think most people on here downvote people who sound unconstructive or argumentative.

And at the end of the day, if you're respectful etc, who cares about being downvoted or having people argue back to you? Just take it on the chin.

gernb2• 4 years ago

you're supposed to downvote things you disagree with on HN. Here's Dang pointing to PG saying that downvoting for disagreeing is what you're supposed to do

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

specialist2• 4 years ago

Not commenting is a superior personal strategy.

I've always been the vocal outspoken critic. XML, EJB, annotations, aspects, ORMs, everything JavaScript, agile, ad nauseum. (My non-technical list is way longer.) It's always cost me.

I really wish I could tell young me to just smile and STFU.

caprock• 4 years ago

Are you referring to situations like work, or do you feel that way about the online world as well?

kodah2• 4 years ago

There also seems to be an assumption on HN/Reddit that vocal activity on the internet, in any form — be that videos, blogging, podcasts, etc. — is proportional to activity behind the screen.

Personally, I dislike this attitude. I think the internet is a good signal for what will be in the streets in 2-4 years time unabated. The attitude OP reflects is one that was valid in the 90s and early 2000s, but not today.

tannhaeuser• 4 years ago

No, I think that's very wrong, now more than ever. What you read "on the internet" is almost always fabricated and published with manipulative intent and asymetric capabilities to promote a product, lang/skill, or whatever. It's the negative comments you should care about.

webmobdev2• 4 years ago

I agree with both of you. There are useful contents indicating trends and there is so much shilling and fake news online. We need somebody to sift through it all - like an honest, ethical media ...

the_omegist3• 4 years ago

Exactly : troll farms, astroturfing and Sock Puppets are a thing.

Not being skeptic in 2022 of comments or news online is being very naive.

kodah2• 4 years ago

I think you and I may be talking about different things. I do agree with your point that there's lots of hot garbage on the internet. We might as well be doing Olympic laps in it. My point was more at trends in general. If you see something appear on the internet that has even moderate staying power, it will weave its way into society eventually.

the_omegist3• 4 years ago

I totally disagree. Slacktivism is a thing. It's easy, especially when you're jobless or still at school or without any social life or hobbies to be an activist online. It's less easy when you have to face the material world.

Moreover "the internet", whatever the meaning, is not a faithful representation of the "real world". Go tell the millions of people without toilets or working the whole day the slacktivists spending their days on twitter represent their struggle...

verisimilitudes4• 4 years ago

The disgusting natures of UNIX, UTF-8, and the general culture here whose members don't understand that touching a computer (poorly) doesn't entitle them to dominion over the non computer-touchers is generally controversial on orange Reddit.

cookieswumchorr• 4 years ago

a professional community has the right to a place to communicate among themselves, about things they like and understand. This has nothing to do with dominion

verisimilitudes4• 4 years ago

I'll elaborate. Firstly, this may be a community of "professionals", but that term means something very different for programmers. No "professional" here is an engineer, as an example, because real engineers would be imprisoned and stripped of title for what the typical programmer does. The dominion to which I refer is the fact that many of these "professionals" work for large advertising corporations who encourage them to believe they know better than the people trying to do real work with a computer. They expect their tools to have a price, and then work on tools intended to never be sold, but be rented forever. They touch computers poorly, because out of one side of their mouths do they decry things such as Bitcoin and out of the other they excuse the extreme waste of their corporations and of asinine practices such as embedding an entire WWW browser solely to execute a chat program wastefully.

about things they like and understand

They like politics and understand very little about being a hacker, certainly.

dang4• 4 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382.

Cryptonic• 4 years ago

Mh I've never seen a developer who is not passionate about a few topics. Eventually he's not participating in online discussions, but I think the silent-mayority thinking assumption is plain wrong.

Without a good bunch of enthusiasm you cannot do this job well. Moreover without some strong opinions that you are able to voice you just are a puppet of pull request comments and cannot profile yourself in your team.

CapsAdmin• 4 years ago

Most, if not all of the developers I know online are passionate developers, but the majority I met in real life at various work places are not it seems.

allendoerfer• 4 years ago

Can we flag/correct/remove the article?

I am reading this as someone a little too young and too European to yet know much about Nixon, but would prefer if HN could avoid potentially making an idiot out of myself, when talking about recent history.

tailspin20192• 4 years ago

Looks like the author’s corrected it now

theteapot• 4 years ago

PHP is the best.

Lapsa4• 4 years ago

that's a good one

uncletaco• 4 years ago

Besides getting history wrong and eventually making a non-sensical point I'm pretty sure the author is going to point to this thread as some kind of gotcha to confirm their opinion.

actually_a_dog5• 4 years ago

Try criticizing capitalism or "free markets" sometime.

sofixa• 4 years ago

Or Apple, or libertarians, or Rust, or any other similar darling. Or suggesting that absolute free speech comes with issues when coupled with the global reach and pseudo anonymity of the Internet.

actually_a_dog5• 4 years ago

Or saying anything negative about any country ("nationalistic flamebait," anyone?)

marcosdumay6• 4 years ago

Funny thing that the top comment right now criticizes Rust.

Gigachad• 4 years ago

If you give good criticisms with well thought out and logical statements. It’s received well. If you dump a buzzword loaded handwavy comment, it isn’t.

I think most HN users are quite receptive to debate around capitalism. It’s just that the majority of this debate is copy pasting slogans and making easily disproven statements.

int_19h• 4 years ago

As someone far left, I criticize capitalism routinely here, and it usually gets upvoted. As for free markets, it's hard to criticize something that is largely absent in our modern economy: capitalism is actively hostile to free markets and is basically a positive feedback loop for market monopolization. But I've seen people criticize free markets (as they understand them) and get upvoted as well, many times.

actually_a_dog5• 4 years ago

As someone far left, I criticize capitalism routinely here....

I'm glad you told me that, because I never would have discerned either of those things from your recent post history. I would suggest you probably don't have the perspective to see just how many downvotes get aimed at someone who's actually critical of capitalism and "free markets."

marginalia_nu• 4 years ago

I've found you can get away with criticizing almost anything on HN, if you do it as an open discussion rather than from a closed position of just espousing doctrine. It's one of the great strengths of this community.

Karrot_Kream2• 4 years ago

+1 though some threads/topics/crowds are more downvote happy than others. I still find the sheer breath of opinion on this site to be fantastic.

dang4• 4 years ago

People do that all the time on HN - I can give you a long list of comments complaining that HN is dominated by socialists, communists, Marxists, you name it.

We should distinguish between making substantive anti-market arguments and shrill ideological rhetoric—the latter is going to get downvoted (correctly) regardless of ideology because it's against the site guidelines and the intended spirit of curious conversation - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382.

actually_a_dog5• 4 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382.

Well, golly gee, thanks! That's gonna generate some insightful discussion.

I don't recall seeing very much thought to the left of Bernie Sanders/AOC on here (which is to say, left of the entire American mainstream). I'll believe that when I see it.

oars• 4 years ago

There are thousands of Java developers in the US who make $80,000 a year and live a fantastic life.

No leetcode, no Bay Area, no FAANG.

Just people writing the code responsible for our banking, travel, supermarkets and many other systems which underpin our society.

danwee• 4 years ago

I know many developers (over 35 years old) in Europe doing the same (they earn above the average european salary, so like 140K EUR/year or so): Java, no HN, no Linkedin, no FAANG, no leetcode, no switching jobs every 2 years. They have families, they are normal people. If you ask them about monads, they would have no idea (like me) what are you talking about. That's the path I'm heading to (hopefully).

silh• 4 years ago

140k a year in most of the countries in the EU would mean you are working in trading/banking or some Big Tech, which means they probably had to do go some of the leetcoding to end up there.

t_mann3• 4 years ago

140k EUR for a dev role? Normally I'd say you're delusional, but since you say you actually know people who consider that normal, may I ask which country(ies) you're talking about (since it's apparently not Switzerland or Norway, where I might have believed it)?

I still have a strong suspicion that either your friends gave you wildly inflated numbers, or you happen to know some serious outliers. Check this out for a reality check - the highest-paying Eurozone country is Germany, with an average dev salary of about 60k, and 76k for seniors: https://blog.helloastra.com/2021/10/18/the-average-software-...

albertopv• 4 years ago

140k is well above average european salary.

ChuckNorris89• 4 years ago

they earn above the average european salary, so like 140K EUR/year or so: Java, no HN, no Linkedin, no FAANG, no leetcode, no switching jobs every 2 years

Do you have more details about the country and industry? As this is way way above the Java dev salaries in Austria and they'd kill for this kind of money without grinding leetcode. Nobody pays Java devs that kind of money here.

Positions like these don't grow on trees and since you say there's no leetcode, Linkedin or big-tech involved, I'm guessing there's other forms of gatekeeping for such a lucrative and easy gig, like having the right industry connections or knowing the right people in order to hear about the openings I would assume, as if they were to advertise this salary on Linkedin or other places they would be drowning in quality applicants, for even less money than that.

jonahss• 4 years ago

My friend’s father is a firmware engineer in Bulgaria and he hadn’t even heard of Rust. I’ve noticed that it takes a looong time for technologies to propagate globally

timeon2• 4 years ago

Is anyone expecting that most firmware engineers would already hear about Rust?

cutler2• 4 years ago

$80,000 is hardly the measure of a true professional these days surely?

pdimitar• 4 years ago

Try looking outside of the USA.

StayTrue• 4 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority

kilburn• 4 years ago

While browsing HackerNews, [...] you might think that PHP is never used nowadays because whenever it’s mentioned, everyone is hating on it in the comments.

This is one of those things that "everyone knows". It may have been true at some point, but it definitely isn't true anymore. The reality is that most discussons here treat PHP fairly, giving it credit where it deserves it and also pointing out its weaknesses.

Examples:

- (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325055 : top comment praising PHP

- (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219984 : the top comment is a fairly positive comment overall, without falling into zealotry.

- (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655 : the top comment is someone praising Laravel and the "modern" approach to php. The general feeling is that PHP got some things right (shared-nothing), doesn't offer anything particularly unique but is surprisingly effective in reality.

Joel_Mckay• 4 years ago

I’d argue people greatly underestimate confinement by the Status Quo, or producing what stakeholders asked for... rather than what they needed. As an engineer one may have opinions about how things should be done, but in reality it is often not really your call if you are just an employee.

Put another way, if you are not listening to the person who signs the checks, than your career will be rather short.

"Nor would a wise man, seeing that he was in a hole, go to work and blindly dig it deeper..." (The Washington Post October 25, 1911)

Lapsa4• 4 years ago

with all the banning, down-voting and cancel culture in general - it's just not worth it. why should I even care if the receiving part isn't listening, got different agenda (yet another celebrity cult buildup || greed)? heck... the youth doesn't even know how to swear anymore. n word this, r word that - as if Lord Voldemort's gonna pop in. internet has created an illusion that teachers have become obsolete, even at work I refuse to criticize co-workers as it's not my job to evaluate them.

eh2beifhe2• 4 years ago

What is your point? Are you saying you can't advocate for different tech stacks without using the n word?

Lapsa4• 4 years ago

already said it. point is - *it's not worth it*. placed a small bait and that's pretty much all you took away from the post. why even bother? it's much easier to live w/o giving a crap that random dude from the interwebz might assume I'm a racist. unless you are an established public figure with bunch of sheep dancing around - exactly this is always the response. snarkiness, down votes, timeouts, public shaming. then I tell them to go fuck themselves and they ban me from their useless community. never ending bitching on stackoverflow about what's a duplicate and what's not. ending with KEKW

nonrandomstring2• 4 years ago

I think what the author says is true. The mass of digital workers use older, established and unfashionable technology, and are neither vocal nor particularly curious about the work.

But there's an implication of moral purity at play. Are those who just quietly "mind their own business" a good, wholesome but misrepresented group?

On the contrary, I think that in matters with far reaching consequences, which computing is, silent majorities are the problem. Unreflectively going along with the programme becomes a kind of passive negligence which should not be lionised in a folksy way.

ThinkBeat• 4 years ago

The insane race to adopt any fad to be cool, is a mindset I find far worse morally than using tried and true tools.

It enhances risk. The latest tool language and/or framework is uncharted territory

A tried-and-true solution has had a lot of bugs and issues documented and some of them solved.

It also mean the team must take a break from development to learn whatever the new thing is. Some will need more time than other, which may slow it down even further.

A lot of systems are developed in domains where "go fast and break things", A/B testing etc. would not be at all advisable.

The main selfish focus on "adopt whatever is hip this week" is to pad resumes with it, consultant can come in to help train people $$$. Consultants will fight for it to use the newest and greatest since it may increased development time $$$.

tdeck• 4 years ago

This is a false dichotomy though. Your comment makes it sound like the only options are to keep using the same tech stack for 30 years or to "race" to adopt the "newest fad". What about switching from a moribund 30 year old technology to a mature 5-10 year old technology every now and then, based on an assessment of the very real drawbacks of living in the past. Security is one of the biggest problems with outdated software that many people are only too happy to ignore.

flarg• 4 years ago

Curious? Hell yes. Happy to keep quiet for as long as the money keeps coming? Hell yes.

nonrandomstring2• 4 years ago

Fair play. Eyes on the road keep driving isn't a bad way. At least in your mind you're thinking about what next and where to turn the wheel.

treis2• 4 years ago

It happens at the company level too. You end up with a lot of decisions being made by the minority that (1) feels strongly and (2) is willing to speak up.

It's an interesting dynamic. I've been on both sides in my career. Silent is much easier but doesn't get you recognition & promotions.

ejb999• 4 years ago

>You end up with a lot of decisions being made by the minority that (1) feels strongly and (2) is willing to speak up.

...and don't forget to include the wonderboy/girl from the overpaid consulting firms that come in and tell the CEO they are doing everything wrong and should move everything to: (pick the latest technology fad)

and then 2-3 years later they come back and convince upper management to move to the next big thing...

jongjong5• 4 years ago

I used to be part of the silent majority of software developers but that changed after I became disillusioned about the direction of the industry. Nowadays, I'm basically forced to use certain inefficient tools in order to get a job because a bunch of highly vocal junior devs who got their way.

It's a bit like in politics; when times are good for the majority, most normal people aren't interested in politics; they have better things to do; this apathy makes it easier for freaks to get power and start messing with things... Until it gets so bad that regular people start noticing and begrudgingly getting involved in politics.

donatj4• 4 years ago

I am regularly up at night in a cold sweat worrying about how if I suddenly needed to find a new job I’d have to learn some sort of front end JavaScript framework.

pjerem• 4 years ago

Could be worse.

I am regularly up at night in a cold sweat worrying about how if I suddenly find a technically fulfilling job, realizing I forgot everything about computers after a decade on working on meaningless front end JavaScript framework.

nvarsj3• 4 years ago

Honestly that's why I swapped from front-end at the beginning of my career. Back end and infra moves much slower, jobs tend to be more secure and specialized, and pay seems higher overall. Learning Java back in the 00s was one of my best career moves.

camgunz• 4 years ago

While I admit to enjoying some of the debate aerobics on HN, this is the prime reason I try and give my voice to some of the discussion here. I kind of view it similarly to voting: you have to make your opinions known.

It's had the pleasant side effect of also educating me on quite a lot--mixing in with people with different experiences and values has enriched my life, so I think it's a win-win. I just try and be careful to not get too wound up: that's the failure case haha (I'm not saying constantly check your blood pressure while using HN, but I'm not not saying it).

ChrisMarshallNY3• 4 years ago

One of the [few] advantages of becoming a crusty old fart™, is that we tend to waste a lot less time, worrying about what others think of us, and just do what we need to do, to get the job done.

I was just talking about this, to someone, yesterday.

I'm often accused of being a "killjoy," or a "dreamkiller," by today's yutes. This is because I say 'orrible things, like "Have you considered what happens if..?" or "We tried that, a couple of years ago. It didn't work out, and here's why...".

In actual point of fact, I'm exactly the opposite. It's my job to Make Things Happen. I plan to ship everything that I do, and my work is generally focused around the endless practicalities and compromises, necessary to get products out the door.

This has often resulted in me being called every name in the book, as I try to avoid chasing shiny, and keep the eye on the ball. In my days of yute, this would keep me awake at night, worrying whether or not I had made the right decision, if I was an unintended, out-of-wedlock child, or if I really was a goose-stepping fascist.

But I have been getting stuff out the door, for pretty much my entire adult life.

These days, I sleep like a baby.

Existenceblinks4• 4 years ago

Yeah. This is happening, look around job board. A lot of job description look really dumb, tech stack doesn't make sense for their business at all.

jongjong5• 4 years ago

It's so frustrating to find a nice job advert, then you read through the (very specific) list of requirements and you're thinking to yourself "JavaScript: Check, Node.js: Check, Postgres: Check, Docker: Check, REST: Check, WebSockets: Check, Redis: Check, RabbitMQ: Check, Distributed systems: Check, nginx: Check, Kubernetes: Check, GraphQL: DAMN IT! This was almost a match..."

goodpoint5• 4 years ago

Same here. Many popular and needlessly complex tools, especially around devops... used only because they are popular.

Even worse, people don't even bother to look at other options even if it's just to learn from them.

Compare the new hip thing with a different one and people get defensive.

kaba0• 4 years ago

Strangely enough I feel that we tell ourselves again and again that this problem is not as hard, the previous iteration of programs trying to solve it were just written by incompetent people. It can be made so much easier - the program gets built but in the process the developers realize that it has plenty of edge cases not solved by this easier version and the same complexity gets bolted on later.

The fact is, there is an essential complexity that simply can not ever be reduced. But we should also strive to not get blinded by the n+1 failed, bad attempt because true, novel approaches do turn up from time to time, e.g. nix actually solves the dependency hell problem.

tempodox2• 4 years ago

Agreed, fashion-driven development is shockingly pervasive.

azemetre• 4 years ago

Would you mind sharing some things that juniors have forced that you think are bad?

I’ve recently switched jobs and my team doesn’t write integration tests for our services but rather manually test them with postman. It’s definitely odd and very inefficient.

chrischattin3• 4 years ago

Not OP, but front end JavaScript frameworks are the first thing that comes to mind as an inefficient antipattern that was forced into the dev mindshare by (effective) mega-cap marketing and jr devs who didn’t know any better.

wainstead3• 4 years ago

Would you mind sharing some things that juniors have forced that you think are bad?

Nested ternary operators... though, because of how TypeScript does constants, I saw why they used this way of doing things so often.

specialist2• 4 years ago

FWIW, every generation feels this way.

Older me is now super embarrassed by my prior enthusiasm for object oriented programming and misc methodologies. I have very vivid memories of grey beards dismissing my naivety and me thinking "they just didn't get it." [0]

If there's any kind of karma, today's noobs will live long enough to be mocked by even younger noobs.

Small solace, I know.

[0] I always remember criticisms. I've got the voice of doubt in the back of my head always wondering what I'm missing, what if they're right, etc. It's a serious bummer.

wainstead3• 4 years ago

I've got the voice of doubt in the back of my head always wondering what I'm missing, what if they're right, etc. It's a serious bummer.

There's probably a saying somewhere along the lines of "There are two kinds of programmers: those who admit they get Imposter's Syndrome, and those who are too afraid to admit it."

We all have those doubts. I've been in this since... what, 1994 professionally I suppose, and I still have doubts. It's totally normal. IS is not limited to software development either.

mkl95• 4 years ago

But let’s be straight, that’s like 1% of all of the developers out there — the rest of them are just lurking and coding with their language of choice and being content with it. Be it Fortran, COBOL, Perl, or PHP.

Assuming all developers who are using something like COBOL or Perl are content with it is hilarious. It doesn't really get much worse than something like COBOL or Perl in terms of ergonomics and ease of use.

biztos• 4 years ago

As a once and, who knows, maybe future Perl dev I find it a weird choice of grouping, no disrespect to Fortran, but I also think there are probably quite a few mature Perl codebases tended by mature Perl programmers who have their ergonomics and ease of use very dialed-in.

Whether you would enjoy it is a different question, but my impression from years of doing Perl is that the most committed hackers tuned their environments and organized their projects just so, and would laugh at anybody else’s idea of “ergonomics.”

dan-robertson2• 4 years ago

Php had pretty good docs online. COBOL presumably has good docs (though I think it’s a bad example and not used much). Perl used to have a thriving online community so it seems pretty conceivable to me that people could like the language. And CPAN still exists and is full of reasonably practical packages for doing lots of reasonable things, as well as packages like marpa which don’t really have equivalents outside of Perl.

msla• 4 years ago

I like Perl for small codebases heavily focused on manipulating text. It has first-class support for regular expressions, which means you can make them more readable in addition to doing more things with them more conveniently, and it largely stays out of my way.

COBOL, on the other hand, is a domain-specific language for a domain most people here have no experience with: Software involving fixed-format input and fixed-point numerical calculations. It would be amazing if some language integrated a clear way to describe modern, recursively-defined input formats with the same degree of language support COBOL has for its data definition language. Go is still too verbose, sadly.

Fortran suffers from FORTRAN, by which I mean if you mention Fortran to people they think of 1960s-era mainframe software with no string support, column-oriented fixed formatting, and GOTO use by people who'd never even heard of Dijkstra. Modern Fortran is not like that; sadly, much like Lisp, they never changed the name, so old ideas linger. (This is also true of Cobol.)

donatj4• 4 years ago

Sometimes I’ve seen Pull Requests from empty accounts with a brief explanation of what was implemented. They just submit bug fixes, no drama.

Over half my coworkers including some very talented developers have no public repos. As someone with almost 200 that always blows my mind.

How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest question on my part. I want to understand.

pavlov• 4 years ago

Great salespeople aren’t expected to run lemonade stands after work. “You’re so good at sales, how come you don’t want to sell something in the evening? There must be something you’re itching to sell to your neighbors.”

Software engineers seem unique among professionals that you’re expected to maintain a hobbyist body of work that’s also your professional calling card.

donatj4• 4 years ago

I think that applies to a lot of creative industries. Certainly when I was looking to be a designer some 20 years ago you were expected to maintain a portfolio.

I don’t even mean in that sense though, I just don’t understand having a skill like that and not using it for fun.

For what it’s worth, the best salespeople I know have almost no purely home life and are taking calls and making deals all hours of the day.

Transfinity2• 4 years ago

I will occasionally file bug reports or even submit fixes to open source projects as part of doing my job. As an engineer, one of my responsibilities is to maintain the commons - without it I would be much less productive. On the other hand I have a lot of autonomy in my work, a chill boss and a team that doesn't need to crunch. If someone I report to got grumpy I would stop, and I definitely don't do this on my own time.

cubancigar11• 4 years ago

Because they have no love for the job. They are doing it for something else and so are only interested in working on things that have a visible and clear return.

These people are also good at politics. There is a reason bill gates is rich and rms isn't.

galoisgirl• 4 years ago

Not necessarily. I love my job, and I keep a work-life balance to keep it that way.

Love does not mean spending every waking hour on something.

I love my spouse, yet I need to socialize with other people, as well as alone time.

citizenkeen• 4 years ago

This is the viewpoint of somebody who doesn’t have any other loves in their life.

I love my job. A lot. I also love my wife, my kids, my friends, my community, and a wide variety of time intensive hobbies.

yamtaddle• 4 years ago

There's nothing—nothing—I would love to do 40ish hours per week, every single week, 48-50ish weeks per year. Nothing.

A full-time programming job fills up maybe 200% of the time I want to spend on that in a year.

tehCorner2• 4 years ago

Because there are a great bunch of developers who just code for work and want to maximize leisure/family time (including me). Sometimes I also do that _fun script_ you were thinking about over the week, or play with some random programming language, but I let those cases be the exception not the norm.

gernb2• 4 years ago

There's nothing wrong with either path.

For me, I like coding, just like I like eating and I like socializing. The fact that I eat and socialize at work doesn't mean I try to avoid eating and socializing outside of work. Similarly the fact that I use a computer at work and or code at work doesn't mean I try to avoid using a computer and or code outside of work.

My working on whatever my company wants me to work on is not the same as me pursuing a hobby even if they overlap in the activities required to do both.

Also, some people just really enjoy it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32593135

yourapostasy• 4 years ago

I found repos a good conversation starter, but I'm far more interested in how one troubleshoots and works together in teams than code creation. Code creation is table stakes, and I can ascertain that in a variety of ways and repos are just a partially sufficient but not necessary signal.

Karrot_Kream2• 4 years ago

Just because you write code doesn't mean it ends up in a public place. I have lots of friends who like writing web scrapers and their code never sees the light of day. I write hundreds of programs and scripts for my house (media sorting programs, programs to help my friends and I choose restaurants, MILP programs for optimizing game actions, Bayesian models, etc, etc.) and only a small fraction end up online.

barnabee• 4 years ago

Most of the code I ever wrote in my spare time never made it to a public repo. Usually because I either didn't finish it (I enjoy experimenting and prototyping the most), it was incredibly specific and hardcoded to my personal environment, or I just couldn't be bothered to go make sure I removed all the hardcoded secrets, implement environment variables instead, etc. I'm slowly trying to do better (and I did at least start a company that publishes pretty much everything it does).

It's surprising (and awesome!) to me how much open source repos have become a part of many people's CV/resumé.

never_inline• 4 years ago

how much open source repos have become a part of many people's CV/resumé.

This is also possible because of competition. I am a student. All my peers grind much more Leetcode than me. So I put at least some code on GitHub and add that to resume. Not necessarily useful for others, but experiments I did etc.. included.

gettingitdone2• 4 years ago

How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill

That's not the right conclusion to make. There are lots of developers who code in their spare time, but don't make their code public on Github.

I have had several side projects, but I am not inclined to share my code on Github. Either because I intend to make money off them, or because I don't have time to manage an open source project. Part of it is also caused by "imposter syndrome", where I don't have time to make the code good enough for public view.

You have over 200 public repos, which means you have a different view. But that doesn't mean that your coworkers don't do things on their spare time.

To be honest, I feel this attitude is beginning to spread to potential employers. Now we are expected to publish and be rated on our public repos, and it will just lead to lots of burned out developers in a few years that feel pressured to publish OSS and practice leetcode.

dan_mctree• 4 years ago

I spend significant time outside work on programming, and have no real usable public repos. The public repo route only works if what you want to build is something that's shareable. I build random experimental image processing software or physics simulations that are held together with hardcoded ducktape. There's nothing there that's usable for anyone else so I don't share it

Theodores• 4 years ago

If you do your day job for your employer with total dedication then you are not likely to 'need' to post public repos or get involved in slagging off different programming trends. Plus you have already heard what people have to say about your toolset and you know they know little about your domain expertise.

No word of a lie, a few years ago a 'crypto' person told me that all the code I was working exceptionally hard at was a complete waste of time. Blockchain technology would solve everything. I just had to wait. And I am still waiting!

I have a lot to show for the work I have done since that conversation with buttons I have put online getting clicked millions of times with nobody personally thanking me. It is 'silent majority' code. No idea where the 'crypto' person got, I stick to my own lane and I don't need to rubber-neck.

Although it is good to share one's work so nobody else has to reinvent the wheel, if I have a better solution and I have developed it in the context of dedication to the day job, then that software gives a commercial advantage to my employer. Even if the core of the idea is mine and that I developed it in my own time, I 'bat' for my employer, and, if it is in their interests to keep the repo private, then I will.

There is also the matter of peer review. My colleagues are too busy to spend time on my pet projects.

The 'crypto' person has one of those LinkedIn profiles where they have more than the maximum amount of connections, with all kinds of grand job titles and the rest of it. I am just a programmer and I do not need a job title. I don't even need LinkedIn and I do not spend time inventing a grander version of myself online.

For code samples I can share the code that I worked on, albeit removing any business logic that is not mine to share. In my niche, with recruiters that know me, this 'just show me the code' works fine.

What if everyone worked like me? There would be no fine repos to plunder!!! Well, there are a few pull requests I have put into public repos and the majority of the population cannot say that. Plus, if I spend two decades silently writing code, then, one day, post a repo, it is going to be good.

To be honest the code I was writing two years ago makes me cringe with shame at how naive it is, so I doubt that my efforts from before that would have been for the wider public good, even if they did fix a business problem at the time. I have sometimes had to get working code rather than beautifully refactored code, then onto the next project.

fassssst• 4 years ago

I’m generally averse to offering my skilled labor for free, so I spend the same effort fixing stuff on internal things and coaching coworkers. This has paid off big time for my career.

I also have a lot of hobbies that scratch the same itch, like making music. In fact, making music feels like more of a whole brain workout than programming, so I’d much rather spend more of my limited time on Earth doing that than writing more code.

wnolens7• 4 years ago

I'm literally paid not to.

astura3• 4 years ago

How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest question on my part. I want to understand.

Because most people (myself included, 16 yrs professional experience) don't want to do unpaid work outside of work hours. How do you not understand that?

innocentoldguy2• 4 years ago

I don’t have any public repos because I’d much rather spend my personal time with my family doing non-work things. I think it just comes down to what you value in your personal time. For some people, it is coding. For others, it isn’t. Neither is good or bad.

dceddia• 4 years ago

It sounds like you're starting with the assumption that if someone writes software to fill a hole of theirs, that they would almost certainly make it public. I don't think that's true for everyone.

gettingitdone2• 4 years ago

I am probably part of the silent majority, at least until this comment. Be aware that my comment is focused on business. What you do as a hobby or a side project is out of scope.

The debate around languages often focus on syntax differences, as if they alone would make a huge difference. We need to consider the eco system as a whole.

Many have probably read the "blub paradox". The context of that article is his experience from building a product in the late nineties, when the eco system was so much smaller than what we have today. In a world where you have to invent your own frameworks and libraries to get things done, the article makes sense. I don't doubt that you will benefit from a powerful language, when you need to make something truly novel.

Today we are in a completely different solution where 90% of web startups should use one of the existing frameworks and libraries to build upon, rather than making your own. It's basic "plumbing" compared to what we used to do 20 years ago. For the remaining 10% where they need to (re)invent a database or framework, a powerful language may have advantages when your product is mostly code.

Another tendency caused by the bubble effect of HN/Reddit, is that many move on to different languages and is left with their impression of a language as it was years ago when they last used it.

One good example of this is Java. If you asked me 10 years ago, I would say that Java had stagnated. If you ask me today, I will tell you of all the improvements that have been made and many more planned. A lot of the arguments against Java is based on old articles and experiences that are no longer valid.

I am also wondering if some of the dislike is also caused by many learning it in school in an environment that has little to do with real work, but that is a different rant.

I'm not saying Java is the coolest language out there, but the massive amount of open source and battle tested frameworks like Quarkus and Spring is a differentiator. I would argue that the "Blub paradox" of yesterday should be replaced with a "Bubble paradox", where the real work is done by pragmatic developers who use an ok language with an excellent eco system.

It is sometimes frustrating to read articles about startups who clearly should have chosen better. Everything is fine in the beginning, and they write blog posts about the success they had which is circulated within the bubble. After some time they need to scale up and implement functionality that is not supported well in their eco system. They then spend time on solving problems that seem novel to them, but is basically a solved problem in a more mature eco system. Instead of growing the product, they are forced to spend time on the "glue".

To paraphrase Breaking Bad: Are we in the money business, or the programming business?

If I have to bet on two startups, where one uses the latest bubble language and the other Java, I would bet on Java in 90% of the cases. I know that they will get things done. Perhaps even modern PHP would be preferable.

orwin3• 4 years ago

I disagree only on your last paragraph. It heavily depends on what the startup is selling and it's customers.

I would only take Java for a B2B onprem app. For anything else, I'd go with other languages.

kefir• 4 years ago

only take Java for a B2B onprem app

What's your reasoning?

Java has one of the best ecosystems with lots of libraries and frameworks, especially for high-perf distributed applications (see Hadoop, Kafka, Ignite, Cassandra, etc). And there are plenty of developers to hire. So it is a good choice for most backends.

As a developer I prefer C# (IMO the best general purpose language these days), but from the business perspective Java may be a better choice in some cases.

kkfx2• 4 years ago

Well... Silent majority also means the mass of people who do not contribute to the society except for they use as meat-based weapons in politics, religion... Yes they have a value, for some it's the same value of a flock of cows: munging meat, milk etc. For some a hope or absence thereof for the humanity. IN history unfortunately the former tend to win all the time...

eh2beifhe2• 4 years ago

So how does this apply to software then? Why are silent people in the software industry "meat based weapons" and what for?

kkfx2• 4 years ago

"software" does not means only developers, PMs and code monkeys, but also "moderators" for GAFAM and their Chinese/Russian counterparts, who normally happen to be very stressed and little paid censors, i.e. meat-based weapons against their own co-Citizens. But also those who act a bit like code monkeys to develop common crapware so many use, mostly in web and business crapware etc. They all contribute to DESTROY IT and civilization together.

I just only suggest a thought: did you noticed how many now can't use pen&papers properly for instance to write something a bit more long and complex than a quick few words note? Well, there is nothing wrong in that IF they know to do the same with some other mean... The issue is that they do not equally know how to do on a computer. Actually we have even lawyers unable to format a decent letter without a template on a computer or by pen&paper. I call them skilled illiterate... And that's not only about a letter, for diagrams, simple drawing it's the same. Most can't even IMAGING doing something like humans have done on paper 10+ years ago with a software, they can't imaging having in a unique documents some text, formulas, a plot, an email etc. They are so trained that you need a different program for anything (because that's good for business) that they feel the WOW effect just seeing a modern limited and limiting "notebook UI". Some colleagues (sysadmins and some devs) have a similar effects seeing me with Emacs, many at first demo act like children in front of something new that seem magic to their eyes. That's is.

Existenceblinks4• 4 years ago

Indeed silence. During market research, looking for potential developers who would use our developer tools is difficult. Keep asking myself where are these guys? Tech twitter is literally javascript thingy echo chamber. Reddit is newbie marketplace with a lot of bias advice for beginners. HN is like ok boomer who don't buy anything. This is my perception.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

It's not just that they are silent, most of them don't even speak English that well; or at all. And they build a lot of software. And they are all over the world. Any tech stack that ever mattered, there are still countless of people using working with that on a daily basis.

There are a lot of developers out there, tens of millions. That little bubble of users actually commenting on HN is tiny in comparison. So, yes it's good to be aware of that and appreciate the world is bigger than that. At the same time, like with politics, just because they are silent does not mean they don't have opinions. And they vote. With their feet. They'll adopt practices, tools, and technology they like or need and walk away from other things.

etothepii• 4 years ago

First of all, when you're vocal, you're more likely to be heard.

Why is being heard a good thing? When I was at school I was the insufferable kid who always put their hand up as I knew the answer. Thinking somehow that the teacher wanted to know the answer. What I learned as I grew up is a lesson learned is better than a lesson told.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

made me think of a thread here recently, can't remember which one exactly, that had the general tone of "who even develops on Windows?". People in the .Net ecosystem at least it seems like are very underrepresented here given how large of a platform that is.

raxxorraxor• 4 years ago

There are "arcane" development communities that are far less engaged in "social programming". The Basic Community is quite large as well and I think I have never met a developer on the net. .net is even larger but increasingly the community seems to withdraw as well. As someone who formerly developed on that platform I wonder where they exchange themselves nowadays.

I know quite a few companies that develop on .net, mainly in C# instead of Basic of course. But I rarely see any discussions about it. Wouldn't know where to ask in-depth technical questions.

wizofaus• 4 years ago

Stackoverflow (and its offshoots) is pretty .NET heavy, perhaps unsurprisingly given its heritage.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 4 years ago

Reminds me of a story that was linked from here, a few years ago[0].

Places like this, get caught up in “shiny,” and that doesn’t always reflect reality.

For example, it is fashionable, hereabout, to throw shade on PHP.

I present Exhibit A, the “Fishtank Graph”[1].

We were just discussing something similar, yesterday, in the SwiftUI thread[2].

[0] https://vickiboykis.com/2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/

[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32631219

mikewarot• 4 years ago

There is a tendency towards proactive change here on HN, which is fine with this old retired programmer. I'm all for making new systems that utilize all that's been learned since the 1960s.

What I'm NOT in favor of is the disrespect of legacy. There are millions of systems out there in the world in manufacturing environments. These systems are ancient, I worked in a shop making gears for 5 years. The CNC lathe we used had a GE computer running it from 1970, and it used mylar punched tape to store programs. It was a huge investment when it was purchased, and there was an old guy (about 70) who they called for repairs on it and much of the other ancient hardware. This shop had 6 employees, including me. At it's peak, there were 50 or so, during and after the Viet Nam war.

That hardware was sooooo old, but it still worked, reliably turning out the same few types of shafts and other parts we need to turn into gears and splines and other gear shaped objects (like turbine blades).

The programmer in me desperately wanted to keep the lathe, the motor, and just replace the control system with GRBL, but even if that was free, and worked the first time, the risk that an upgrade represented was completely unacceptable.

When you're in a job shop, there are parts you've been making for a generation in small quantities (less than 500). Those parts are relied upon by other businesses as part of their product. If you "upgrade" any part of your process, you risk producing a part which doesn't work somewhere down the supply chain. If you make that happen too many times, you'll lose your customers.

It's also important to know that gear cutting was only a step in the production chain... we didn't start from raw materials most of the time, we were given a "blank" on which to cut teeth, that already had many operations performed on it. It was almost never just a matter of sawing off a new piece of metal and starting over. You had to respect the work already put into a gear blank, or shaft to cut splines on.

The incentives in manufacturing are strongly against any type of change. However, they aren't blindly obeyed. If there are new jobs, then it's reasonable to try out the new machines or new systems in those cases. If something can cut the cost of a part by half, then it might be worth the risk, if the customer approves a change.

Please don't think that those in the silent majority of the world are un-reflective of the needs for security and other patches... but if things break every Wednesday, they'll disable Windows Updates forever, for very good reason.

heisenbit• 4 years ago

Being vocal or silent - does this matter as long as one does not listen first?

3pt14159• 4 years ago

Some things I'm silent about, other things I'm not.

Articles like this often fail to differentiate that there usually isn't one large blob of people that are chatty about all the things all the time. Usually individuals have their own specific issues that they're interested in and passionate about and will default to the consensus or be fine with any option for the rest of it.

keithalewis• 4 years ago

"There are so many articles and comments by people whose level of enthusiasm doesn't match their experience."

Bingo!

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

It’s surprising to me that the Silent Majority is still brought up with such a connection to Nixon considering

- WaterGate

- The reputation of the Vietnam War

- The good things that came out of the counterculture like the Civil Rights Movement

ksec• 4 years ago

While browsing HackerNews, I sometimes get the feeling that every developer out there is working for FAANG

Bubbles on HN;

Entry level Web Developers are getting $200K per year working in FAANG or Big Tech. Non-FANNG are getting $150K anyway.

Ruby may be dead, but PHP is even more dead.

Java may rule the enterprise, but you should not mention Java.

No one uses Oracle or MySQL, why would you want that? Postgres is the only DB forward.

Everything should be Remote. Communication should always be Async.

Oh, Ada is the second Forbidden Fruit on HN.

Facebook is...... OK I guess we shouldn't go there.

USB-C will solve all cabling problems. Everything should be USB-C.

5G is useless.

AV1 and AVIF. The video and image standard to rule them all.

Nothing should be centralised. Everything should be distributed.

Finally, The unwritten rule of HN. You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet.

jollybean2• 4 years ago

You generally don't need to use Oracle though ...

marcosdumay6• 4 years ago

How else can you spend thousands of dollars an year to get an horrible programmer experience at the expense of performance and data safety?

Plenty of people are stuck with Oracle, but starting with it nowadays is something else.

stopyellingatme• 4 years ago

Nailed it.

temphnaccount• 4 years ago

These are still non controversial. Controversial bubbles on HN are:

* Everything should be free and open source. Just because small portion of the HN can donate to their favorite projects, everyone should run on donations. Ads are forbidden on the internet. No internet business should be a profitable company.

* Tiring and useless interview process designed by FAANG etc is no way a farce and a totally justified practice (some version of Stockholm syndrome there)

* Private companies should not interfere in the politics/internal matter of another country. (This view quickly changes when they see the negative effect of same companies in their own country)

* YC is the best and the most exclusive startup accelerator/incubator in the world. If you got accepted in YC, you have won in life.

CSMastermind• 4 years ago

* Tiring and useless interview process designed by FAANG etc is no way a farce and a totally justified practice (some version of Stockholm syndrome there)

I'd say it's the opposite. The view you're expressing: that the standard software interview process is somehow "useless" strikes me as a bubble here.

I'd wager most people not on hackernews don't hold your view.

kelseyfrog• 4 years ago

* Technology is value-neutral

fezfight6• 4 years ago

The problem isnt the ads (I have an ad blocker), it's that the ad companies think they should be allowed to build a profile on me everywhere I go. No thanks.

wbsss44122• 4 years ago

I was with you until the 5G one. The only bubble I’m aware of related to 5G is the telecom people who keep hyping it.

I have never ran into anyone anywhere, cyberspace nor meatspace, who has claimed that 5G was actually useful for something.

recursive• 4 years ago

I don't pay any attention to cellular network stuff. I always assumed it was just faster than the previous one. (4G, right?) How is that not useful?

innocentoldguy2• 4 years ago

Almost dead on. You just forgot to mention the unwritten rule of not criticizing all the “Blah blah blah in Go” posts.

5cott0• 4 years ago

every website has to be strictly vanilla javascript and no greater than 15kb

n4bz0r• 4 years ago

*rolls eyes*

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32587740

hintymad• 4 years ago

Entry level Web Developers are getting $200K per year working in FAANG or Big Tec

What inflated most in the past 3 years is the ego of engineers. :-) On blind and job-seeking forums/groups, people incessantly flaunted their packages: $500K with 3-year experience. > $1M for an L7 applied scientists, getting promoted to staff engineer 3 years after graduating, and etc.

I think it all started after 2020.03. The market dipped, and then bounced back, and there was a talent war, thanks to an influx of cheap capital. I remember that my Amazon friends were very happy for a $600K package for their L7 positions, but all of sudden that number seemed normal after the great package inflation since 2020.

Banana699• 4 years ago

I will review your perceptions of HN bubbles.

Entry level Web Developers are getting $200K per year working in FAANG or Big Tech. Non-FANNG are getting $150K anyway.

I don't browse job threads much and I don't pay attention to people mentioning salaries so I can't say.

Ruby may be dead, but PHP is even more dead.
Java may rule the enterprise, but you should not mention Java.

For PHP and Java, there is a very strong case to be made that "dead" means "utterly flawed and completely uninteresting and somewhat ugly\repulsive and only worth writing if the money is very very good", which is (in my very humble opinion) trivially true. It doesn't matter how much they are written, they are dead branches on the PL evolutionary tree, they won't have progeny or nostalgic mind share rooting for them as languages.

I don't know what people declaring Ruby "dead" mean, perhaps its about Rails falling off the hype train or Python eating a lot of its potential mind share and market niche. But Ruby is definitely nowhere close to Java or PHP in bad design, it's a descendent of Smalltalk (which Java aped badly) and Perl (which PHP aped badly), the union is very fruitful and the language is delightful.

And for what it's worth, I remember 2 times I was pretty heavily downvoted because I criticized java. Same goes for C++ and JS. I don't remember seeing anyone downvoted for hating PHP, but also none for defending them. Seeing bubbles is very correlated with what your own biases are.

No one uses Oracle or MySQL, why would you want that? Postgres is the only DB forward.

Maybe Oracle Bad, that's real and very popular here on HN, for good reasons. I don't remember anyone seriously saying you can't use MySQL or only use Postgres.

Everything should be Remote.

God no, that's aweful. This position has fierce opposition, including me.

Communication should always be Async

Maaaybe ? I see plenty of opposition to this. My personal opinion is that good comm is not sync or async, it's exactly what it needs to be to get the message across.

Oh, Ada is the second Forbidden Fruit on HN.

Not really, it doesn't get mentioned alot because it has miniscule online resources but whenever it's mentioned (e.g. in the context of formal verification with Ada\Spark) there is broad enthusiasm and interest.

Facebook is...... OK I guess we shouldn't go there.

Haha, yes. Very true. But (like Oracle) also for very good reasons. But I agree that Apple, Amazon or Google aren't angels either, and it rarely get mentioned. In fact, if I can choose a single FAANG company to destory overnight, it would be Apple, their way of treating customers disgust me so much.

USB-C will solve all cabling problems. Everything should be USB-C.
5G is useless.
AV1 and AVIF. The video and image standard to rule them all.

Interesting, I never even saw those opinions expressed once, and I'm fairly addicted to HN. I'm beginning to suspect there are "Meta-Bubbles", bubbles where your perception of what things are bubbles is itself bubble-like.

Nothing should be centralised. Everything should be distributed.

Hmmm No ? There is an HN bubble against cryptocurrency, which should be impossible if what you're saying is true.

You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet

True-ish, especially Rust. But there is plenty of aweful criticisms of Rust that always go something like "Everything the Rust compiler can do my own custom home-grown linter tool can also do, nobody needs memory safety if we just be careful also smart pointers and RAII". There is plenty of bad things to say about Rust, none of it leaves C and C++ in good light.

roeles• 4 years ago

I wonder... in a world where everybody talks... Who is listening?

It's not as if the world lacks ideas or opinions. If anything, we lack wisdom.

devmunchies2• 4 years ago

Thanks for the article.

I do feel like engineers who put themselves out there and engage on HN, Github, Chat groups, etc, get "polished" and get better as engineers, assuming that association in these forums causes them to read more code or think about paradigms.

If "silent" are mostly keeping to themselves, they might have some of their own innovations independent from mainstream engineering, but lack common knowledge, which can be accounted for by reading a lot of programming books, release notes, docs, etc.

Unrelated, some unsolicited feedback for bloggers, I like to click on images to zoom in (quicker than ctrl+equal 5 times). So at the very least please wrap the images in a link to the image src. a humble request.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th3• 4 years ago

It's possible to read on the internet without engaging in arguments.

devmunchies2• 4 years ago

I know :). That's why I was unambiguously grateful for the article and polite in my humble request.

kixiQu• 4 years ago

Unrelated, some unsolicited feedback for bloggers, I like to click on images to zoom in (quicker than ctrl+equal 5 times). So at the very least please wrap the images in a link to the image src. a humble request.

I suggest using a TamperMonkey script to accomplish this on your end; outside of thumbnail galleries, it runs against common expectations, so you'll have better luck taking control yourself.

googlryas• 4 years ago

Don't forget the silent majority in FANGs either. A lot of us aren't working on crazy machine learning models, were just copying protobufs from one form to another.

fragmede• 4 years ago

Could be worse, could be GCL or borgmon.

politelemon2• 4 years ago

I'm surprised no mention of this very topic from ten years ago. Dark matter developers.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

ttgurney• 4 years ago

They do not participate in controversial discussions about Visual Basic or Pascal — they just do their work in those languages without even knowing that there’s so much controversy surrounding their language of choice.

Serious question: are these languages actually controversial? Doesn't "controversy" usually mean people holding strong opinions and frequently disagreeing? I rarely hear anything at all about Pascal or Visual Basic. Maybe they were controversial in the 1990s? Now I'd call them merely unfashionable.

wainstead3• 4 years ago

Perhaps OP meant Pascal programmers arguing among themselves, rather than arguing with anti-Pascal programmers? I'd expect such a smallish community of developers to find plenty of common grown in such a stable technology, so no need to throw stones.

kasajian• 4 years ago

"Visual Basic or Pascal"? Is this written in early 90s?

heywire• 4 years ago

I work for a large financial services company who still maintains software written in both VB (6) and Pascal (well, Delphi).

wenbin• 4 years ago

* Making money from your own project is bad. You shouldn't put ads or charge a SaaS fee from your own project / startup / small business. But it's okay to be well paid by a FAANG as an employee.

* "I can build this over a weekend." - when someone posts their own project here

* "I don't understand why they need to hire so many people" - when learning that a tiny app (e.g., Twitter, Uber) has thousands employees.

The silent majority in software

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