reminder, the entry-level tech job market is still totally cooked, like 4.0's from Berkeley are getting 0 job offers pic.twitter.com/LT5cmlGCc9
— alz (@alz_zyd_) September 26, 2024
Is the well running dry?
tech/science swag. 
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Can some codecel tell a codelet exactly why we need so much code being written? Nothing seems to be really changing over the 2020s, the technical infrastructure has all been built from what I can tell. All the chatting apps are years old at this point and stable, the doordash food apps are built and stable. I don't know what's going on in business but I'm willing to bet it's similar to the consumer side, not much shit is changing. It's not like 1990-2017 where literally every 3 years was a total advance and everyone had to play catch up. Even the internet and online space seems to have experienced technological stagnation from what I can gather.
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Why?
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Most companies are still built around Excel spreadsheets. Most major industries are built on ancient infrastructure. There's always coding to be done.
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Doesn't the fact that it can be duplicated mean that's not true? It's not like being an electrican where there's a new building to wire, or a goyslop cook when there's another Nicocado to deathfat
. Surely one day, in ten, twenty, thirty years time it'll be like "that's enough, shit's good enough now".
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It's currently exactly like putting the wires in a new building because software isn't generic over business rules
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Coding isn't at the stage yet where drag and drop works for most solutions. You still need the monkeys to glue it together. Maybe in the future
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Ancient infrastructure is a funny one because I know people with lackluster codecel-adjacent degrees who got into programs to maintain that code. You'll get training for like 3 months on how to write code for 40 year old linear accelerators and shit in COBOL.
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Not everything is consumer facing. B2B is huge but you'll never see it unless you've worked in the industry. There's huge pressure to iterate quickly, automate processes, find engineers who can maintain these systems
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Stuff just breaks over time - standing still is just falling backwards, incurring tech debt. Even maintaining a functioning project for the next API version, browser issue, react upgrade, mobile OS version, etc. take quite a lot of man-hours.
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lol this is one of the biggest memes in the computing industry. stuff doesn't "just break".
new bugs, by definition cannot be created unless there are changes to code (generally the additon of features).
What you're describing is the same except the features are added by a dependency.
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Or updates from windows, SQL database, and web browsers.
Insurance companies require all hardware to be modern in order to be covered.
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Because software companies like microsoft and mozilla do not just fix bugs, they fix bugs while adding new features in the same update, forcing users to constantly jump to the next.
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So annoying. Patching is a constant thing here along with switching out hardware every 4-5 years. Everything needs a support contract but management doesn't understand how open source works so they think there aren't support contracts for things like postgres.
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requirements change all the time, it's adapt or die.
your UI sucks
an exploit was found
security issues
PII laws changed
user demands changed
you're making less money than before
a new technology or methodology was invented
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Your UI doesn't suck. If you make a good UI in the first place, it is timeless. this is largely copium from designers. Once the UI design reaches a certain level, any changes you make decrease its quality. UI changes largely have to do with appealing to "fashionable" design trends.
Holy frick you are a genius. Where do you think vulnerabilities come from? If you have a static piece of code and you don't add any features to it, do you really think you can just keep finding vulnerabilities in it forever? If you just patch vulnerabilities eventually you will reach a bug-free state (although it will be impossible to know when you've reached it).
There is a difference between discovering/adding new bugs and discovering latent bugs. and the fact that developers dont intuitively understand this is insane, its like the doublethink that holds up the whole industry
how often are we experiencing 2070 paradigm shifts really to justify constantly updating software to be more complex
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Have you seen the state of security in Windows XP?
How's this for timeless design?
Time and hardware constraints, consumer expectations. Time to market. I don't think you realize the number of cogs needed to bring a product to market or ensure its relevance. There's a reason Encarta and Netscape exited the public lexicon a generation ago and no one cared. Adapt or die.
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Win95 had great UI, they actually put thought into its design and recognized contrast is a thing. I have to use 11 for work and it is a usability nightmare, literal slop churned out with no regard for consistency or readability. Something as simple as saving an Excel file is a fugly maze of big icons. If you're going to copy MacOS at least make it look good Microshaft.
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So you're saying that if microsoft had hired you twenty years ago, windows would be better today?
But also there is no reason to hire codecels
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r-slurred reply, servers get hit with bot traffic and ooms- it breaks
log files don't get cleaned up and servers fill up
hardware starts failing and needs migration
Database runs at 99% CPU because there's more users and very inefficient query
Sure, changes are the main reason, but shit breaks on its on all the time.
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None of that is "just breaking", you wrote and deployed broken things.
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And I'll do it again
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Flaws of the client-server model.
If hardware fails, replace it so what. has nothing to do with software development.
A bit-flip is not the same thing as a bug. You don't pay developers to solve one-off issues, you pay them to solve systematic issues. And you cannot solve systematic issues forever without constantly changing the system.
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A big thing these days is swapping over to microservices. That's a whole lot of code. My company still uses a computer from the 80s as their database server
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My employer still leases an A/S 400. theyve been "getting off it" for 4+ yeats
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Lmbo, microservices are a meme and most places shouldn't bother. Same with k8s and shit.
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On the business side, not much shit is changing but lots and lots of stuff is still done in a really archaic way. My current job is software to replace paper forms and lots of companies still using the paper version. Or even companies that still use Excel for everything rather than using bespoke software that's better integrated/easier to use. There's so many old business practices that can be digitized and improved upon.
Code itself hasn't advanced much but it doesn't have to, if we were still using C there'd still be plenty of software to write.
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Whats wrong with excel?
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It sucks for syncing data, it's slow in comparison to a database, etc.
Some people are moving to database-backed sheets multiple people can work on and software can query.
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It never even began for excels
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Archaic as frick. It's a step above pen and paper but that's it. Native support sucks for any sort of data analysis or sharing data or cleaning, or really anything more advanced than a high school level. Atm, that's good enough in 70% of industries because management might as well have a high school education, but boomers are finally aging out.
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He don't know
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Excel gets you super far until it doesn't.
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At least from an embedded perspective, hardware is still advancing and that typically needs new code to support it. Greater power efficiency might mean a new scheduler is needed, newer/faster devices means new drivers, all that good stuff. There's a lot of stuff going on up the stack that sometimes obfuscates this from the end user unfortunately, so it isn't immediately obvious to a lot of people.
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