Software Engineers
saas · 2 signals · 1 source
Evidence
Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers? — I cannot help but wonder, where is our software industry heading? There are overly complicated solutions to simple problems, huge push for moving to fancy stacks just for the sake of moving. Distributed systems? Kubernetes? Rust for CRUD apps? Blockchain, NoSql, crypto, micro-frontends and the list goes on and on. Its gone too extreme to the point where no one is exempt from these things anymore. Couple of years ago, I thought, its fine as long as I am not involved in this complexity, I can turn a blind eye towards it. But now, this unnecessary complexity has seeped in my day job as well. Managers start talking about "micro services", "writing" kubernetes operators in Go, moving away from python (because its too "slow"); someone recently gave a talk in my company, how to make a 500 line python script (which heavily involves in-efficient handling of IO) go faster with Rust. Someone else talks about that we need to move our poly repos into mono-repo because that where the leaders of the industry are moving to. Even recruiters started asking questions like "have u looked at modern languages like Go?"<p>I cannot help but wonder, that we have possibly screwed ourselves pretty bad, and there is no escape from it. The vocal minority tries to push these overly complex solutions down everyone's throats, and management loves this, because it creates "work" for the sake of it, but it doesn't add any real business value.<p>What are your thoughts on this? Will industry move towards simple solutions after experiencing this churn down the line or are we doomed forever?
Ask HN: Senior people, how did your career evolve? — I am a software engineer with about 20 years of experience, and lately I have felt a bit lost about what to do going forward.<p>For the context, I have always been passionate about software engineering, I started very young and have worked in it non stop every since. I mostly worked broadly in web development and have pretty-much mastered all areas and layers of the stack (infra and cloud, databases, backend, network, front-end and even a bit of mobile...). I've also been an indie game dev on my free time ever since.<p>For the last 5~10 years I have not been evolving or learning anymore in my daily job, and feel that I've basically seen everything. It only feels repetitive, and as I've lived through many tech bubbles, I don't get much interested in the major trends because the fundamentals are the same and everything old gets new again.<p>Over the years, I've worked in many companies, from big ones to fresh startups, B2B and B2C, in direct and as a contractor as well as web dev agencies. I've also found out that while I like tech leading and the various design and spec phases of software, I don't like managing people. I do not want to evolve as a CTO either because of those reasons and the endless meetings. But the industry seems to think that the normal path forward is to quit being a developer and manage people instead, which is a totally alien idea to me because it involves completely different skills and knowledge.<p>I am now at a step in my career where I find it impossible to find a company where my knowledge and experience is really valued and useful. I'm often the most senior, more than even the managers and CTOs, but have less power or influence and am just another cog in the machine. I see the mistakes being made and know what it will cost (because I've been there and done that many times), I do my best to explain that and recommend alternatives, but more often than not it still happens anyway.<p>I've long considered switching to game dev professionally since I find that it has a lot more fun and interesting challenge, and I yet have lots of things to learn there. But as a husband and a dad, the reputation of the industry (low salary and crunch time) makes it difficult to seriously consider. I'm now thinking that freelancing my be my best bet going forward, and then explore and build things from here.<p>I know that there are more senior (30, 40+ years...) people around here, so I'm curious to hear your experiences. Did you ever feel the same way, what did you do and how did you finally find a satisfying daily job?