Tech companies are irrational pop cultures

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/tech-is-a-pop-culture/

by pietroppeter • 4 years ago

228 186 4 years ago

madsbuch5• 4 years ago

It's a shame that this has negative connotations. There is a case that this is essential.

It seems like we are overcoming an AI winter, using the same technologies that was deemed infeasible 20 years ago.

When I did competitive programming 20 years ago. I would somewhat jokingly say that I would want to write and AI to solve all the problems. Our mentor laughed it of clearly not considering it even feasible – today ChatGPT would like outperform a highschool competitive programming competition.

We probably needed to look away from that generations presumptions in order to leap frog on some of these technologies.

yrgulation• 4 years ago

“ today ChatGPT would like outperform a highschool competitive programming competition.”

Google did it first. You input a search string, find results on first or second attempt and then copy and paste the code.

ben_w• 4 years ago

Not even a close comparison.

At best, Googling StackOverflow gets me one function, but only if I know the right keywords and it is short. ChatGPT, I can (and have!) given it example data and said "make a python script to parse this", and it not only gives me code, not only does it work, but when I ask it to extend this to do more or differently, the changes also work coherently with the previous results. For example: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-AI/blob/main/codin...

qu4z-2• 4 years ago

Your highschool must have had pretty terrible programmers...

ibizaman• 4 years ago

A contrary anectdotal exemple. We use MongoDB where I work and the only justification is it was the new fad at the time. Now it bites us because we use it as a relational DB. PostgreSQL would’ve been much more suitable in our case but it wasn’t in vogue.

Traubenfuchs• 4 years ago

Is there any regret in technology selection more widespread and common than having picked MongoDB during its bizarre new hotness phase? That phase where SQL database administrators where crying, thinking they'd lose their jobs tomorrow and many people claimed SQL was now absolutely deprecated.

madsbuch5• 4 years ago

This seems to be a failure outside of fads. This is application of an unviable technology.

Filesystems has been available for much longer than MongoDB. Using that as a database and having requirements changed to a relational database would be the same without anything about the filesystem being a fad.

nisegami• 4 years ago

That's just plain old using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Although, I suppose that part of the rise of any new tool will be trying to figure out which for which jobs it is the right tool, and sometimes the failure cases might live longer than expected.

pmarreck• 4 years ago

This could also be a case of developers not pressing hard enough back on technically-less-competent manager-driven architectural decisions

hot_gril13• 4 years ago

NoSQL fad was the most destructive I can think of. Those had their place as niche tools, but they somehow became the default for a while. Once you pick the wrong DBMS, you're building on quicksand.

rpdillon• 4 years ago

I don't think the notion is that we should be relying entirely on cached results from prior generations. Rather, we need to understand what was tried and what worked and what didn't, and why. With this knowledge, we can see when innovation has invalidated prior assumptions, and we can try again.

madsbuch5• 4 years ago

Yep, as nobody argues we should completely forget previous generations. The question is where to set the needle. The author definitely thinks we do not dwell enough on the past and should spend more time studying it.

k__• 4 years ago

I know it's a hype right now, but I didn't get good results with any AI, be it text or image generation.

It all looked impressive the first few days, but the novelty wore off quite quickly.

poszlem3• 4 years ago

You are looking at a Nokia 3210 generation of AI.The most primitive version of what is to come. So the fact that the novelty has worn off is not really a good indicator of how much this will transform our everyday lives. Wait for the iPhone generation of AI, always in your pocket, interacting with you multiple times a day, changing how you consume news, how you communicate with the outside world, your friends and family.

ajmurmann2• 4 years ago

Have you tried midjourney for image generation? Especially for photography style images, I've gotten some really cool results that I go back to occasionally

dgreensp• 4 years ago

An essay about academia (versus software engineering in industry) would probably make slightly different points. Academics definitely know their history.

Also, when an actual disruptive new technology is first invented, jumping on it and trying to do something with it is both trendy and arguably rational, but this is a relatively rare occurrence.

ad404b8a372f2b9• 4 years ago

The entirety of AI innovation is driven by hardware improvements. Almost all AI research is done at the edge of our compute capabilities, and most of the models which produce results today existed in some form 20 years ago.

We didn't leap-frog our predecessors presumptions, we built exactly what many envisioned but were unable to put to fruition with the computers of their time.

madsbuch5• 4 years ago

The point is that we retried something that was previously deemed infeasible. Had you been too much aware of the history, you might not have done that.

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

It was deemed infeasible because it was infeasible.

It took 2 generations time for computers to improve enough that it became feasible. And also a huge unexpected discovery about 20 years ago, that you can pre-train a neural network and cost your costs by an order of magnitude.

blitzar3• 4 years ago

The symptoms of pop culture: A “disdain for history”. Pop cultures believe history doesn’t have anything to teach them.

This almost completely falls to pieces in the framing ... how does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia that is prevalent in a lot of media? An 80's casio watch is, in some circles, the pinacle of timepiece fashion. Of course there are times where pop culture is a rejection of the prior art, but also there are times when current pop culture icons show deference to the past and their influences.

pif2• 4 years ago

Calling 40 years ago “history” is actually “disdain for history”.

History is not what you can find at an older cousin's place. History is what someone had to make an effort to save for you, and you cannot experience it any more.

edgyquant2• 4 years ago

When I was in 8th grade in 2007 our history book ended with a chapter on 9/11. History is the past and even history forums tend to say anything more than a generation ago is history.

blitzar3• 4 years ago

Here is a perfectly preserved sony walkman from 1987 - maximum effort and all.

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-personal-...

3-cheese-sundae• 4 years ago

There is a lot that occurred 40 years ago that can no longer be experienced, or even known by anyone today. Wouldn't refusing to call it history be disdain for history?

dimitrios1• 4 years ago

History is simply what we chose to remember and how we remember it. There's no minimum length it needs to be in the past. A "historical moment" can happen in the present.

namaria5• 4 years ago

The whole 'history repeats itself' really rang true to me when I was reading on the birth of the roman empire, about when the republic fell (not the last decade, the full history) and I realized much of what we see happening in American politics is not new. The big outrageous personalities, the moral pleas, the manipulation of public opinion, the principled vs the pragmatic. All of that resonates across the centuries.

But, alas, as they say... those who don't know history are condemned to repeat, while those who know are condemned to watch other repeating it.

thewebcount3• 4 years ago

I recently had a conversation with an archeologist. She said that she regularly gets calls from the local government because they're out digging up some ground and have found items that are around 50 years old. Apparently that's the legal cutoff, and they're required to get it checked out by an archeologist if they think it's that age or older. So yeah, history is definitely in that range.

Karawebnetwork2• 4 years ago

Copy the image of versus incorporate the essence of.

We wear a Casio because it looks retro, but we check our phones for the time. We have a cassette player in our house, but we use a Bluetooth cassette to play MP3s on it. We put a 3D-printed Sony Walkman phone case around our iPhones instead of digging out the real thing and enjoying the original media with all its perks and problems.

I would use tea as an example. We can drink a modern aluminum can of iced tea that contains 50 ingredients, none of which is tea, or we can take it slow and do a complete traditional tea ritual. One is loosely inspired by the past, the other is immersing yourself in tradition.

The floppy disk save icon comes to mind.

ghostpepper• 4 years ago

Curious what icon you would replace it with

jasmer• 4 years ago

Casio watches are not 'cool' because they are useful and cheap as they always were - they are fetishized as a 'fashion'.

If we were all just 'wearing them because they made sense' then yes, but they are specifically objectified as thing of adornment. It's mostly not about the past.

That guy who is still wearing the Casio because he always 'just did' - that's not pop culture.

There's nothing wrong with pop culture and it has many positive attributes, change is needed. It'd be boring without change. That said it can obviously be carried away.

Pruning is also healthy for the org in many ways, especially if it allows for adaptation and change. It obviously has some negative externalizations for individuals which is not nice.

rjknight• 4 years ago

Superficial imitation is not the same thing as deep understanding. Nostalgia for the past isn't the same as respect for the lessons that it can teach us. A real understanding of history is one that can teach you something important about the present.

croes• 4 years ago

That's retro fashion.

I doubt that most wearers think the Casio is the superior watch compared to nowadays smartwatches

blitzar3• 4 years ago

It has a better battery, the little solar panel thing means I dont need to put it on a magnet every night. It keeps the time just as well. The metal band is the same one that a premium smart watch comes with, and it also comes with an smart advanced "notifications off" setting - such that it is litterally impossible to get an errant notificaion in the middle of an important meeting.

googlryas2• 4 years ago

The persistent retro mimicry across decades is just an exercise in stereotyping, not born out of any appreciation for history. A Casio in the 80s was cutting edge consumer tech in a sense. A Casio watch today has a totally different vibe.

TheOtherHobbes• 4 years ago

It's like Synthwave, which was never a thing in the 80s.

It's a modern reinvention of how people assume the 80s felt, filtered through a gauzy haze of nostalgia for an imaginary pop culture that never existed in that form.

Which is similar to computing and other tech nostalgia. An Amiga was out there on the edge in the 80s, now it's a source of fond reminiscence. Likewise 1980s music equipment, especially synthesizers.

The modern anti-pop-culture equivalent would be asking what's out on the edge today. And there isn't much, because the vibe of computing - actually the vibe of everything - has changed from excited exploration and boundary breaking with constant invention and surprises, to backward-looking and derivative commoditised corporate consumption and collectorism, and the generation of content and items for same.

The most innovative thing at the moment - AI - is an evolving set of automated systems for summarising what has already been generated, rather than for generating something completely new from out of left field.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

Beside the mimicry there's also a lack of "cultural tension" (as in physical force). A simple thing in the 80s was a magical item from a lot of new ideas and new efforts. Today there's such a gluttony of capabilities that you're drowning and can't feel anything. It's like x-ray.. new improvements happen so fast, they go through you.. with either extremely high emotional response (iphone waiting lines) or very mild one (renew your flagship from 2 years ago). Same goes for music IMO.. people are looking at the past because today's culture is lacking. Some of it is from my generation nostalgia, but a lot of it isn't, I was very surprised to see new filters to imitate VHS tapes or CRT screens being used in new youtube videos, even though everything sold is about 4K, 120fps and whatever.

There's also an anthropological aspect about this.. watching 70s videos, with lots of glare, or halos, probably limitations of optics/film .. but giving some pretty aesthetics. Having more physically correct capture of an event doesn't improve that aspect. People are romantics.

gspencley• 4 years ago

I'm old enough to have seen this as a fashion trend unto itself.

If you go back and watch TV shows from the 80s, you'll see a lot of 50s nostalgia.

In the 90s, it was the 60s that was being fetishized. They even brought back Woodstock, twice. I was in high school in the 90s and "hippie fashion" was very popular. Tie dyed shirts came back etc.

In the 2000s the 70s were in. We had TV shows like That 70s Show etc.

Then it was the 80s, and now 90s nostalgia is starting to come in.

It's the cycle of aging. All the kids and teenagers from those decades are now middle aged and they want to consume nostalgia. If they had kids in their 20s, then those kids are now teenagers and young adults and are becoming curious about their parents lived experiences and all the things that they just missed out on (during the 00s I was very interested in the 70s since that decade happened right before I was born).

But this is a specific exception, not the rule. Middle aged consumers are not the trend-setting hipsters who create new fashion trends (the stuff that they will fetishize when they are middle age).

What's really ironic, though, is that in tech there really isn't much that is new. Even AI/ML was being researched as far back as the 1940s, we had working proof of concepts in the 80s. We knew how to do this stuff ages ago, and had practical applications. We just needed the hardware and data accessibility to catch up so that we have the storage and computing to actually train these things. Every advancement over the last 20 years has been small incremental refinements. The big stuff is not new.

But the industry still fetishizes it like it's new.

"Cloud" is just resource sharing. We're back to mainframes, complete with the vendor lock-in caused by proprietary APIs. And yet it is branded, marketed and fetishized as if it's "new."

OOP is soooo passe. We tried that in the 90s and 00s and there were ... gasp... problems! People wrote buggy and difficult to maintain code. Enter Functional Programming and now this is the way that we do things. It's impossible to write bad code in this paradigm ... right?!

Relational databases are slow and complicated and require DBAs to maintain. In comes NoSQL and key/value doc-stores ... now THIS is the way we do things. You can't develop a bad product using a doc store database ... right?!

Restful APIs require strong collaboration between backend and frontend developers and simple, single-purpose contracts aren't very flexible. In comes GraphQL now ALL web apps need to use it because you can't develop a difficult to maintain application using GraphQL .. .right!?

This is the point of the article and after 25 years in the industry I have a hard time finding the lie.

oscillonoscope• 4 years ago

I think it's better to treat the author's definition as separate from the traditional understanding of pop culture. It seems like they really want to talk about an idea they have and are assigning a new definition to an old term.

p0pcult• 4 years ago

how does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia

The fact that people who were teens in this era are a desirable market segment with a lot of purchasing power, and nostalgia works. If it were anything about the actual historical value, then the 80s references would last. But they won't.

Before the 80s nostalgia it was "That 70s Show."

Prior to that, it was "The Wonder Years" (set in the late 1960s/early 70s)

And before that, it was "Happy Days" (50s/early 60s).

It's all a cash grab, plucking on the heart strings of the people who were at the apex of their earning power.

hot_gril13• 4 years ago

Usually, pop culture means for young people. 80s nostalgia is for people born in the 70s.

satvikpendem8• 4 years ago

Not necessarily. There are movements for 90s nostalgia from people who did not exist in the 90s. It's a sort of fake or retrograde nostalgia, possibly from seeing their parents.

thewebcount3• 4 years ago

I mean Taylor Swift had an album that was titled 1989 (the year she was born), and you can pretty much draw a straight line from Toni Basil's rendition of "Oh Mickey" to "Shake It Off". I think her audience tends to be fairly young, and they ate it up.

totemandtoken• 4 years ago

Respecting the aesthetics of history is not the same thing as having respect for history

poszlem3• 4 years ago

<<A “disdain for history”>>

A common problem in contemporary culture is a disregard for history, which can be seen not only in startup companies and the technology industry, but throughout society as a whole. During times of significant change, it is common for people to believe that they are much more intelligent and advanced than previous generations, who they may view as ignorant or backward. As the consequences of the revolution inevitably become clear, when the revolution turns on its children, people often begin to appreciate the positive aspects of the past and recognize that revolutions are usually not the solution you want (for the exact same reason why you usually don't want to rewrite a huge software project).

Let us hope that the current period of revolution is coming to an end.

pif2• 4 years ago

Let us hope that the current period of revolution is coming to an end.

Let us hope that the current need of revolution is coming to an end. FTFY

valand• 4 years ago

Sometimes people disregard history in a very obvious way.

One time there is a person who wants a system rewritten, because of some perceived complexity. The original builders who built the system from the ground up is still actively maintaining it, but there is no attempt to understand whether the perceived complexity is incidental or essential, which in fact most of them are the latter. Some people just want things to fit their world.

But, on the bright side, there are people who just don't know history, but they would be happy to learn. There's a hopeful number of those people!

fullshark3• 4 years ago

I agree with some of what he is saying, but don't really get the "pop culture" framing. Isn't pop culture just popular cultural artifacts? I'm under the impression they are mostly looked down upon for class reasons more so than any of the intrinsic problems stated.

bluetomcat2• 4 years ago

"Pop culture" is a post-WW2 US phenomenon that creates a shared societal reality through movies, TV shows, household items and brands, etc. As of late, it has infected the whole world through social media "virality". Something new appears, then thousands of outlets, youtubers and "tech" journalists are repeating it and most of society starts talking about it without any historic or technical background whatsoever. It's an overly-expressive culture based on hype and reactivity.

fullshark3• 4 years ago

Not sure you are the author but I don't really think that's what pop culture is considered colloquially. And you're basically just describing any cultural ideas that can be considered "viral." I guess a sufficiently large number of people accepting that viral idea makes it popular but pop culture to me is just music/movies/books etc that are popular.

Basically this piece is just saying "the dominant (read: popular) culture in tech companies is bad" and they all have basically slight variations on this bad culture.

britch• 4 years ago

I agree -- I found the author's definition distracting to the points being made.

The “Pop” in “Pop Culture” stands for “popularity”. If it’s popular then it must be right.

No -- popular culture is simply what is currently popular.

The popular culture could value novelty and uniqueness -- inherently "unpopular" things. That's not the case today, but it fits the definition of pop culture.

4k3aa4• 4 years ago

I think it's easy to mistake the concept of fads within technology with the application of arguably necessary abstractions. Most of what is new and faddish is just another abstraction around some (probably, relatively) archaic system. The abstraction is the new thing, not the technology or the language that it's written in.

lucaw• 4 years ago

Yes, tech companies are building an image of pop cultures, but they are not. For example, layoffs are never "mimicking" what other companies are doing. Pop culture people may think it is, but business people -- who tech CEOs really are -- always tries to make the right decisions.

Zigurd2• 4 years ago

Whoa whoa whoa. Regarding "layoffs are never 'mimicking' what other companies are doing" layoffs are getting hyped like other trends in tech. Tech management is very trend-driven. Over-hiring to lock down talent, swinging to lean to the point of dysfunction, is characteristic of the tech industry. Entrepreneurs managing on the basis of pop management books and gurus is rife in tech.

rcarmo• 4 years ago

Having a lot of exposure to early stage startups, I get that most founders have essentially zero management experience, but the Darwinian process of VCs and go-to-market doesn't seem to favor them actually going out and acquiring some.

SpicyLemonZest3• 4 years ago

Layoffs are in very large part about mimicking what other companies are doing. I have no doubt that most CEOs are honestly trying to make the right decision, but (just like in pop culture!) the mere fact of what everyone else is doing has a substantial impact on the right business decision for you. If layoffs are a big trend this year, that substantially reduces both the reputational cost of doing your own layoff and the number of high performers you can expect to jump ship afterwards.

mempko2• 4 years ago

Then explain the over hiring during easy money after pandemic stimulus. Poor decision making, even if consistent, isn't 'right decision' making.

SpicyLemonZest3• 4 years ago

There was no straightforward way to tell in the post-pandemic environment which changes in the economy would be transient and which ones would be long-term. It's easy to tell a just-so story about how these companies' pandemic boom was obviously because of easy money and they should have known it wouldn't last. But back in 2020, I remember I used to go around telling a similar but wrong story about how remote work won't last.

jrochkind12• 4 years ago

The thing about churn (of developers/contributors) rings so true to me from my career, and I think is really under-appreciated. In "the industry", or just among "people who make things in teams" (including open source).

Constant churn in a software development team, both among the programmers and designers, is absolutely devastating. It is the death knell for a software project. Makes deadlines meaningless. It turns software into a disposable, single-use product like a paper towel. Anything that increases team member churn threatens the very viability of the project and the software it’s creating.

From an essay that is worth reading in full, "Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies": https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/

I think it's exactly right about the importance of "mental models" and "theory building", and if we could keep that in mind we could build better more maintainable software. ("More maintainable" over the long-term I think is almost synonymous with "has easy to grasp mental models that are sufficient to guide your work with the system")

thrwaway011023• 4 years ago

Churn is worse now that we have split everything into microservices that often use their own libraries, frameworks and languages.

That adds a lot of overhead when employees inherit a pet project

ericmcer• 4 years ago

Really true, ownership is a huge part of microservices. I have been on teams that have adopted orphaned services, then been called into meetings to advise on use of a service I am barely aware of.

It is a really easy way to make your employees overwhelmed, but you can always hire someone else to take ownership once they quit.

Pet_Ant• 4 years ago

I feel like microservices are specifically chosen because they work best with lots of churn. You can throw away the code. You only need to learn only the code in your service. It is an architecture (often) chose not for it's technical merits but rather how it works in high-churn environments.

z3t4• 4 years ago

One idea of Micro services is that you can rewrite the entire service. There are more combinations of libraries, frameworks and languages then there are programmers. Most programmers however has a favourite stack that they are 10x more productive in.

dustbitying• 4 years ago

on the other hand, there's a strong incentive for group-organizations, specially profit-driven and "the show MUST go on" kinds of organizations to never depend on a single (or a small sub-group) of people to keep things going; lest somebody important gets hit by the proverbial bus.

IMO, this is also part of the challenges that come with dealing in software (understood as some sort of novel "substance"); in great part we (as a culture/civilization) haven't figured out how to deal with software (and in general, with digital artifacts) in the best way.

jffhn• 4 years ago

Preventing people from being productive by fear of the bus factor, is like throwing them yourself under the bus.

TremendousJudge• 4 years ago

That's a great essay, thank you. I have been thinking this exact same thing for over a year now, it's nice to see it written out so clearly.

simongray• 4 years ago

He paraphrases a classic paper by Peter Naur which is worth reading in its entirety.

hot_gril13• 4 years ago

Unpredictable churn from layoffs is probably bad, but I view churn in general as an almost necessary thing for software dev. Every great thing I've done on a SWE team has been something the previous person in my position wouldn't do, and every bad thing I've done was redone by someone after me. The truly well-designed and maintainable systems survive multiple owners, so there's a trend towards better. And it's a bad sign for a system to rely on someone.

autokad• 4 years ago

is this on the wrong article... if so please delete

jrochkind12• 4 years ago

The quote I quoted is quoted at the end of the very short OP, I took it from there.

lo_zamoyski• 4 years ago

A large part of the value is not the software, but the knowledge built around the software, and that knowledge must be known and understood by someone (the developers). This includes everything from domain knowledge, the history of why things are the way they are, what failed and what succeeded, the technical idiosyncrasies, etc. The software is in a sense secondary, certainly secondary to business goals as its entire purpose is to serve business goals. Software is a means and an instrument, not an end.

But perverse incentives make churn attractive. Switching jobs is often the best way to raise your income, for example.

ozim• 4 years ago

Now we have to take this argument and explain it to people wanting to get rid of developers and use low code or chat gpt.

drewcoo• 4 years ago

They're more like cults.

"a system or group of people who practice excessive devotion to a figure, object, or belief system, typically following a charismatic leader"

https://study.com/learn/lesson/cult-characteristics-types-be...

ChrisMarshallNY2• 4 years ago

older is inherently inferior.

As an “older,” I’ve encountered this exact attitude.

Really uplifting.

As a positive, it pissed me off enough, to “drop out,” and lean into early retirement.

I spent the majority of my career at the antithesis of “pop culture,” which was a 100-year-old Japanese company.

I am grateful for the lessons and habits I got, there.

Plenty of stuff that they did wrong, but they also did a lot of stuff right.

robomartin• 4 years ago

As an “older,” I’ve encountered this exact attitude.

Same here. I was frustrating to watch young engineers insist on ignoring well-established knowledge only to go out and make mistakes that cost the company 6 to 8 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more. And they were warned about the very things that happened during design reviews.

Two examples (without getting into identifiable details):

A complex mechanical assembly intended for challenging thermal and dynamic (vibration) environment. After studying the design I told the 20-something mechanical engineer the approach she took to the distribution of loads would fail instantly. This was done professionally, one-on-one and without any "attitude", to use the term. Her response: "I have a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, I think I know what I am doing.".

Six months later the assembly, quite literally, exploded during the vibration test. Even after that she still refused to listen to my recommendations. This joke easily cost the company a million dollars and six months of wasted effort. If you consider this in the context of the larger project, the cost and delays could have been an order of magnitude greater.

Second example. A EE designing a board to drive a bunch of LEDs. Again, 20-something. If I remember correctly, the board had 15 independent channels. He executed this as what I call "datasheet design". He picked a switched-mode LED driver, used the circuit from the datasheet with little modification and stuffed the board with 15 of these circuit blocks.

The board ends-up having hundreds of components, it bigger than what we wanted and complexity/reliability/RFI were of concern. After studying this I had a meeting with him and explained that we could use an analog circuit with somewhere around four components per channel to drive the LEDs with excellent efficiency. The board would shrink to 1/4 the size, use 80% less components, have a less intense RF signature, etc.

In this particular case, he actually laughed at me and said something like "Are you crazy? Everyone knows linear drive of LEDs is the most inefficient thing you can do". Of course, this is precisely the kind of thing a book-smart engineer who just copies circuits from datasheets would say. Not only is this not true, it is ridiculously easy math to show how you can build efficient LED drivers in the analog domain with just a few components (hint: control the power supply voltage with an efficient switched-mode regulator set to a precise voltage based on the LED string Vf range).

Once again, this design was implemented. It caused untold problems in the context of the greater project, all of which required mitigation in some form.

I don't know what it is. When I was a 20-something engineer I was eager to listen to and work with the older engineers. I learned more this way than I can possibly describe. Not just about engineering, about life.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 4 years ago

I am sorry to hear about that.

At my company, in Tokyo, there were job titles you couldn't get, until you reached a certain chronological age. Would not be possible, here in the US.

Sometimes, I look at some of these Jurassic-scale meltdowns, and ask myself "Were there any adults in the room, when this idea was discussed? Even a minimally-experienced geek could have foreseen most of these problems."

Of course, it's a trick question. The answer is, inevitably, "No."

msarrel• 4 years ago

Startups are pop culture cults.

sanitycheck• 4 years ago

I think there's some rationality.

Let's say as a company you need money. Money comes from investors and/or customers. Customers or (especially) investors may want you to make "modern" software using "modern" technology. Developers (especially the young talented ones you can afford) are also attracted to modern tech for rational ($£€) reasons.

So you can ignore that, and miss out on money and talent and thus maybe success. Or you can take the easier route and do what everyone else is doing.

mempko2• 4 years ago

I mean, it's turtles all the way down isn't it. I would just call that second hand irrationality. Why? Because investors chasing shiny new things because they are new is also irrational.

q845712• 4 years ago

I expected the example at the end to be kubernetes, but instead it's layoffs. I think the article works almost equally as well if you swap in k8s, blockchain, or a few other buzzy buzzwords, which is kind of a testament to the truthiness of the argument.

SpicyLemonZest3• 4 years ago

Everyone I've ever met with experience deploying to heterogeneous environments wholeheartedly endorses Kubernetes.

WFHRenaissance• 4 years ago

If you use a managed version of k8s like AKS/EKS - it's a literal no-brainer for running containerized workloads.

genericacct• 4 years ago

"$bigcompany uses it so we must use it as well" is modern-day cargo cult programming and i've seen it in lots of places.

ajmurmann2• 4 years ago

It's also wishful thinking. Your problem isn't scaling to a hundred million users, your problem is finding simple product/market fit!

kerblang• 4 years ago

Well I think the author got one thing right:

The “Pop” in “Pop Culture” stands for “popularity”. If it’s popular then it must be right.

And that's social media simplified. The internet is filled with pop-seeking garbage because pop was the best metric anyone could fathom. Even now the AI's are struggling to reach for a better version of "right".

But more to the author's point, yes, modern tech startups and their funders are absolutely obsessed with being trendy, even moreso than an 80's teenager (a lot of the big players were 80's teenagers, btw).

entropicdrifter2• 4 years ago

Kind of a nitpick, but AIs mostly don't get to choose what's "right". I mean they're trained with a particular goal in mind already, so either their training data or whatever metric their self-training is set to optimize defines "right" for them in advance.

It's not AIs that are struggling to find a better version of "right", it's people building AIs.

dcow3• 4 years ago

It’s true. People believe you can raise money on having a trendy feeling product idea with very little merit… and sadly they are right. It baffles me.

retrocryptid• 4 years ago

If tech companies are pop cultures, then HN is Teen Beat.

0823498723498722• 4 years ago

I'm looking at https://tigerbeat.com now and wishing I had the 'shop skills to do a HN front page. Buzz are stories, Crush is "Tell HN", and Polls are "Ask HN"; the mapping practically writes itself...

[Edit: and Beauty are the automatic YC front page spots?]

0823498723498722• 4 years ago

  🆃 𝐓𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐁𝐞𝐚𝐭  buzz | music | beauty | style | crush
  1. ▲ Everything we know about 'Outer Banks' Season 2
  2. ▲ Ask TB: Which New Song Off 'Sour' is Your Favorite?
  3. ▲ Pick a Yearbook Superlative and We'll Tell You...

(Style transfer in the other direction was a bit easier)

marban• 4 years ago

Tech is a 24/7 popularity contest where everybody can have their 15 minutes of fame. Enjoy the ride.

renewiltord• 4 years ago

There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better"

The former is a little Lindy. The latter is ready for paradigm shifts. Ideal is if you don't choose based on age.

But I'll say something contrary: neither of these things matter in technology. The layoffs are good for the firms that 2xed in the pandemic. The kubernetes is survivable or beneficial.

mjw1007• 4 years ago

I think some programmers need to hear the advice "don't assume that newer is necessarily better", and others need to hear "don't dismiss new things as being created by a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers".

Maybe the author of this article is meeting more of the first kind, but it's dangerous to issue advice that amounts to "wherever you are on this balance, move further East".

zackmorris• 4 years ago

A better way to state this is that the problems we're facing today are due to the whims of capital owners and management, not labor.

We could have a system where companies don't do layoffs, and workers sit on 50% of board seats, and democracy in the workplace is standard.

I wonder how many majority shareholders truly want the billions of dollars in stock that comes with that, knowing that their wealth deprives countless thousands/millions of people of their opportunity. Would they be ok with a different kind of corporate structure? Something like a cooperative where management and the CEO are elected by workers, and difference in pay doesn't exceed perhaps 10:1?

gerbilly5• 4 years ago

This article echoes a few of my most unpopular opinions.

* The current generation could not invent the internet. They don't have the attention span or the culture for it.

* People who spurn well thought out technologies like SQL or relational databases, are doomed to re-invent them, badly.

kortilla6• 4 years ago

The current generation could not invent the internet. They don't have the attention span or the culture for it.

You vastly underestimate how much thought went into the internet. Look at:

- TCP delayed acks + Nagle’s algorithm

- IPv4 address size (Vincent said 32-bits was roughly as likely as 24 or 48).

- the 7 layer OSI

- class-based (A, B, C, …) routing

- most of the options in IPv4 headers

The Internet was as much hacks and a playground as other layers of the stack are today. The good stuff is still in use but there is a vast graveyard of bad ideas that didn’t pan out because they were security nightmares, couldn’t scale, etc.

The same applies to core protocols like BGP. BGP hijacking is still possible today.

betaby• 4 years ago

BGP hijacking is still possible today.

.. in the same sense as http hijacking is possible today, i.e. without httpS. For BGP we have RPKI ROA for a quite a while, and ASPA is coming.

LarryMullins2• 4 years ago

> Old thing was hard, too hard for this generation
You're vastly underestimating how hard the old thing was

Sounds like you're agreeing with him, if anything. Where is gerbilly's 'underestimation'?

hot_gril13• 4 years ago

I've seen the second thing happen department-wide where I work, three times now, with databases in particular.

_xnmw2• 4 years ago

Absolutely agree. And let me add:

* 99.99% of modern software startups could be built, maintained, and scaled in production by a single dedicated programmer and served on a single machine. Yes, even with tens of millions of users.

* Most tech companies hire for the prestige and to not feel lonely, not because they need to hire. (And to have pretty young interns walking around the office).

* YCombinator has deviated far from the original vision of Paul Graham and his essays. Nowadays all of the startups coming out of YC batches are just trash, and the YC panel has suffered "death by committee", i.e. bland risk-averse pop conformism riding the trends with no deep understanding of anything.

penjelly• 4 years ago

served on a single machine. Yes, even with tens of millions of users

i don't understand how this would work

frodowtf• 4 years ago

They don't have the attention span or the culture for it.

Meanwhile $GENERATION is inventing general AI. Your so-called unpopular opinion is basically "old man yells at younger people", but with even less foundation.

gerbilly5• 4 years ago

Yeah sure. ChatGPT confabulates constantly and has no understanding of what it's saying. I think it fails the 'I' part of 'AI.'

I've had it confidently invent URLs when challenged to show the sources for an obviously false claim. It invented a URL which has never existed.

I mean it's impressive, but it has a long way to go to become intelligent.

bakugo• 4 years ago

Meanwhile $GENERATION is inventing general AI

They're not inventing anything, they're just taking the concept of machine learning that has been around for ages and throwing more data and hardware at it. Underneath it all, it's still just an algorithm that finds and repeats patterns and nothing more, the patterns are just getting more complex. It's not in any way comparable to the invention of the internet in terms of innovation.

hagbarth• 4 years ago

People saying AGI is right around the corner are just as wrong as people saying full self driving was right around the corner 5 years ago.

Not saying current generative ai will not have a huge impact. It will.

satvikpendem8• 4 years ago

Not sure about that, there are always smart people abound. The guy who made SerenityOS, the CommaAI founder, etc.

This simply reads to me like a "kids these days" type of old-man argument, which has, as we know, existed since time immemorial.

gerbilly5• 4 years ago

This simply reads to me like a "kids these days" type of old-man argument, which has, as we know, existed since time immemorial.

And this counterargument has existed since time immemorial + 1. It proves nothing.

mattgreenrocks2• 4 years ago

To be fair: current generation does not exist in a time where inventing the Internet is necessary. And there probably are some big ideas out there incubating in obscurity that will only show themselves to be important much later.

Do we lack the vision for such big projects? Absolutely. Is it only the current generation's fault? Absolutely not. This is very widespread.

They don't have the attention span or the culture for it.

I'd argue there is almost _no_ technical culture whatsoever. It is basically "trending on HN" and comment section discourse. This is a massive problem and contributes to the shoddy state of a lot of software nowadays.

jklinger410• 4 years ago

Please don't forget that every accusation lobbied at the next generation is an implicit admission that the previous generation created an unsuitable environment for raising children. Or that those people were failures as parents individually.

Or you could just not make broad generalizations about different generations. Which is preferable.

carapace• 4 years ago

I think you're making a good point in general, but in this case I think we arguably did create an unsuitable environment for raising children, first with television and then the Internet itself.

I don't blame anyone, every step down this path has seemed like a good idea at the time, eh?

hot_gril13• 4 years ago

This article has a broad title but focuses on layoffs. I've seen the theory thrown around that it's a form of big tech collusion: They can't collude openly, but if one huge player makes a move like layoffs, it sends a signal to the others. Pandemic and work-from-home gave employees a lot more bargaining power, with the ability to get competing job offers without leaving their desks, so companies want to take that back.

I don't see enough evidence to call it, but I wouldn't put it past them, given how several big players including AAPL and GOOG were caught and fined for making no-cold-call agreements several years ago. And it does seem like the tech scene has been less competitive lately on the consumer side.

vehemenz• 4 years ago

I regularly wonder how much of the "tooling" in modern development stems from not knowing or making an attempt to understand what GNU applications from 30+ years ago offer out of the box.

Tech companies are irrational pop cultures

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