At the risk of alienating myself from the development community at large, I want to rant a bit about why I believe developers are fucking retards. As someone in the tech industry for 16+ years and someone who’s been coding for even longer, I’ve seen things go in circles that I had hoped would lead to something profound. Instead, I’ve come to realize that instead of moving forward constantly a lot of the industry goes through it’s Dark Age periods and with the web and mobile, it’s probably at it’s lowest point.
First, despite the fact that there’s tons of tech jobs and technology on a wholistic scale has improved, the developer community itself constantly faces this general lack of direction because of not sharing a unified front. Part of the issue is that as good as the Open Source community has been for all of our careers, it equally has caused other forms of disruption due to constant moving targets and it’s inability to resolve some fundamental problems.
One of the most fundamental problems in software is structure. What I’ve seen evolve over the years has been the embracing of design patterns and frameworks, which many people want to be the silver bullets to corporate dilemmas. While the high level idea of design patterns and frameworks solve basic issues of general structure, the real problem emerges when one group of developers disagrees with another group of developers. In turn, rather than trying to amend the problem with a particular framework, the group that disagrees with the other group often branch out then build a new framework that is nothing more than a delta where the disagreements are concerned.
Really what was needed was to examine the inefficiencies of the original framework and attempt to fix them as well as have a migration plan to allow older systems that depended upon the framework to work flawlessly (case in point Angular). I often feel the frustrations of businesses who might’ve invested a huge amount to hire specialists to be able to handle whatever the founding developers decided to start the tech stack with and then be left holding a maintenance nightmare that is akin to Cobol around Y2K. But that’s essentially what you’re looking at.
Right now, the biggest issue I’m seeing is the movement towards a pure Javascript stack with server side rendering. Really? Didn’t we just move away from this to have a heavy client side for responsiveness? Not to mention server side Javascript has always been around, just not widely supported nor known. And some of the stuff we’re seeing in ES6 is becoming more Java-like. Why didn’t we just stick with something like Java and make it more script-like? Oh, wait we did. Look at newer versions of Java and it’s attempts to become more script-like. WTF?
Do you see the issue here? One group copies from another group because the other group’s ideas seem good. But then the group they’re copying from copies the ideas of the group that they got copied from. Yes, recursion in programming. But rather than divide and conquer, developers have just divided the problem into a lot more problems than they can solve.
But let me continue because the fun doesn’t end here. Another toxin that enters into the picture is developer greed. Yes, developers decided they could be rockstars because a movie made them look cool and we’re back to 1999 where shares are high and we’re all making money. But the thing is we’re not cool. In fact, we suck because we actually make our own lives far more difficult due to what I’ve stated before as well as our own egos (yes, I have a god complex too).
So how does a developer get money and become famous? By somehow doing something special and standing out of course! These days due to our entitlement culture nurtured from our failing educating system that dictates everyone must be special, my definition of special means the Special Ed bus. Anyway, the thing is that developers have to create that thing to make them stand out whether it’s at their local office, among peers, their own technology, etc. If not that, then they have to keep on the so-called bleeding edge, adapting whatever the untested method flavor of the month is without really evaluating if that thing is worth something in the long run. That way, these kids can be with the “cool crowd.”
Those that decide to create their own thing once in a while manage to pull something off that changes things for good. Stuff like AJAX, jQuery, Hibernate, Rails were good for the industry because of the ideas they managed to pull off. But I really don’t get something like a Zend 2 which decides to overcomplicate an architecture that was fine to begin with. Oh, we need dependency injection because other systems have it and we want to be cool just like them. Those systems like Spring might need it because Java isn’t dynamic and requires more organization. Worse yet, you get a tech piece being built by some kiddie in his garage/mom’s basement thinking that they’ll eventually be hired by Google/Facebook because they did something technical. Pfffftttt….
But the greed thing is just reprehensible because it’s just developers pursuing the latest trends to get another 10k or whatever. So the net result is promoting whatever flavor of the month framework for a few months until something comes along to replace it. I’m guilty of that myself. I remember trying to learn EJBs/J2EE back in 2001 because that’s what all these job descriptions wanted. So I put so much effort learning Sun’s enterprise design patterns and JBoss (since most J2EE containers were not free/downloadable). In the end, I wasted a ton of time that I could’ve used getting drunk in Tokyo and meeting hot grillz. It’s funny because that all went away in favor of something simpler (Hibernate). But of course, future generations continue to do this so they can bolster their resume and get whatever job can pay them the best. I can understand the intent but it’s just plain wrong.
And this constant re-aligning of technology has made the overall market really schizophrenic for figuring out where to place our skills, hiring and long term investments. The hiring part is really bad because some companies rely too much on buzzword compliance and focus on just raw skills rather than engineering. Other companies realize that buzzword tech is worthless and good engineers are necessary. Unfortunately, in the latter case, the only way those companies end up being able to hire is putting forth college level tests, which are great for recent graduates, but the bane of existence for people who have worked in the industry (especially the web) and are braindead from doing stupid marketing/ecommerce CRUD sites. There’s never a happy medium when it comes to this and recruiters add their own cancer into the mix as if the aidz isn’t bad enough. The core problem of just getting someone reasonable enough to do the work immediately never gets solved and the team working on the problem end up suffering because they overextend themselves trying to find the candidates while being too busy with their own tasks.
There’s an old parody article where the creator of C++ is “interviewed” by someone. It basically elicits a bunch of issues that are inherent in C++ that C could readily solve. One of the best punchlines in the “interview” is that C++ is just a way to provide job security for developers because everything has to be re-written.
Is that what this industry is all about? Was that article wrong about the mentality of new languages and in some way association frameworks that have come out over the years? Have developers just managed to con every business in sight to keep our jobs by constantly going back and forth between client-server computing?
I know some companies make a business out of this. Take a look at Apple and what they’ve done with Objective-C and later Swift. I distinctly recall one of the selling points of the iPad being “all the new applications developers could make with the iPad.” In reality, the iPad was just an enlarged iPhone. So why not just improve the size of the application? Yet I guess a lot of developer prostitutes took Tim Cook’s words to heart as new applications did come out for the iPad.
Yet the funnier thing is that you have stuff like React Native or other frameworks that attempt to bridge the gap on mobile devices in an attempt to create the silver bullet developers and companies so desperately idealize.
In reality, we don’t do anything special. Just take some crappy data from spot A and place it into spot B. That’s it. How this gets handled can either be like fucking the hottest woman on earth or having a dominatrix give you a handjob via sandpaper. The truth is that most times it’s the dom not just handjobbing you with sandpaper but you sucking some dude’s cock and drinking AIDS filled semen. We dig our own graves.
Yes, I’m frustrated but I’m sad more than anything. I’m sad that developers like to believe they’re really smart people who can do all these tricks that everyone else are impressed at. But the other day I was watching two early 20-somethings go through Twitch Drama and get banned. Then when one guy had his ban lifted, he started streaming and was getting anywhere between $5-10 per second just for talking about the drama. I’ve worked my ass off in this ungrateful industry and I thought I was earning a lot for what I had hoped would be things that improved lives. Instead, I have to sell my soul on a daily basis so that a diabetes selling FDA approved company can get a few baby boomers to misclick on ads or whatever. Yes, I consider myself fortunate enough to have carved a career out taking input and dumping it some place else in a prettier form. But at the same time I’ve come to realize that 75% of what I’ve been doing is pointless and just wasting my time.
I’m hoping that the industry wakes up and stops this circular jerk motion that’s been going on forever. Part of the problem is lack of control. Yes, because we no longer have a single technical monopoloy (Microsoft) we have the freedom to do more and have provided innovation that has benefited the consumer. At the same time, we also have created a highly toxic and self-masturbatory environment that has no vision and is just frustrating. Outside of my usual idea of gathering up all said people involved (minus myself) into an active volcano, I really don’t have any solution outside of unionizing tech. Maybe it’s time for some level of regulation to step in but not governed by a physical location (meaning country) so that there is a more unified front and helps us from constantly going around in circles.