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1087 points smartmic | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.622s | source
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anthomtb ◴[] No.44303941[source]
So many gems in here but this one about microservices is my favorite:

grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too

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jiggawatts ◴[] No.44304390[source]
I keep trying to explain this to tiny dev teams (1-2 people) that will cheerfully take a trivial web app with maybe five forms and split it up into “microservices” that share a database, an API Management layer, a queue for batch jobs to process “huge” volumes (megabytes) of data, an email notification system, an observablity platform (bespoke!) and then… and then… turn the trivial web forms into a SPA app because “that’s easier”.

Now I understand that “architecture” and “patterns” is a jobs program for useless developers. It’s this, or they’d be on the streets holding a sign saying “will write JavaScript for a sandwich”.

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mattmanser ◴[] No.44304575[source]
It's all they've seen. They don't get why they're doing it, because they're junior devs masquerading as architects. There's so many 'senior' or 'architect' level devs in our industry who are utterly useless.

One app I got brought in late on the architect had done some complicated mediator pattern for saving data with a micro service architecture. They'd also semi-implemented DDD.

It was a ten page form. Literally that was what it was supposed to replace. An existing paper, 10 page, form. One of those "domains" was a list of the 1,000 schools in the country. That needed to be updated once a year.

A government spent millions on this thing.

I could have done it on my todd in 3 months. It just needed to use simple forms, with some simple client side logic for hiding sections, and save the data with an ORM.

The funniest bit was when I said that it couldn't handle the load because the architecture had obvious bottlenecks. The load was known and fairly trivial (100k form submissions in one month).

The architect claimed that it wasn't possible as the architecture was all checked and approved by one of the big 5.

So I brought the test server down during the call by making 10 requests at once.

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1. nyarlathotep_ ◴[] No.44305621[source]
> It's all they've seen. They don't get why they're doing it, because they're junior devs masquerading as architects. There's so many 'senior' or 'architect' level devs in our industry who are utterly useless.

This is the real, actual conversation to be had about "AI taking jobs."

I've seen similar things a lot in the private sector.

There's just loads of people just flailing around doing stuff without really having any expertise other than some vague proxy of years of experience.

It's really not even exactly their fault (people have lives that don't revolve around messing about with software systems design, sure, and there's no good exposure to anything outside of these messes in their workplaces).

But, outside of major software firms (think banks, and other non-"tech" F500s; speaking from experience here) there's loads of people that are "Enterprise Architects" or something that basically spend 5 hours a day in meetings and write 11 lines of C# or something a quarter and then just adopt ideas they heard from someone else a few years back.

Software is really an utterly bizarre field where there's really nothing that even acts as valuable credentials or experience without complete understanding of what that "experience" is actually comprised of. I think about this a lot.

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2. rcxdude ◴[] No.44307340[source]
>Software is really an utterly bizarre field where there's really nothing that even acts as valuable credentials or experience without complete understanding of what that "experience" is actually comprised of. I think about this a lot.

Most other fields are similar, frankly.

3. jeltz ◴[] No.44309048[source]
This is in no way unique to software. Virtually all fields I have insight in are the same and managment is one of the worst.