| > From what I can see Microsoft stack is used mostly by enterprises that are not engineering centric. I'm going to counter this anecdote with my anecdote. I have spent roughly half of my time in the boring world and half in the HN "sexy" tech world. 25 years of programming experience and have had immense failures and some pretty good successes. Unquestionably, the sexy tech people were—and to this day are—worse technologists than the boring enterprise software people. I have worked at two unicorns. One of things I believe to be true (and which is probably offensive but here goes) is that the sexy work is a direct result of over-financialization of the sector. It's a form of signaling: "Hey, our business model is so successful we can afford this shitty niche technology and hiring too many people." There is a direct correlation between people using trendy yet mediocre technology and comments like "let's be practical" and explaining why your software can be worse than it is, because those companies don't actually need technology. As well, the people that manage those organizations are not particularly impressive because they need large groups of people to scale. (It's also why people like a16z can have the gall to claim 10x devs is not a thing, because if it were, the SV model of get-big-quick and hiring huge amount of devs with big capital and unsustainable unit economics would not be a successful proposition.) Since the late 90s, the governing model has been: "Hey, that's cool what you do. But have you thought about putting it on The Internet?". It's the Portlandia bird sketch but with Put a Web On It. Apply this to Big Data or ML etc. This model has been very good for growth, but it requires absolutely minimal technical expertise. |
I absolutely agree with your opening statement about the flashy new operations usually being crap engineers, but cannot follow any of the rest or see ho it supports that assertion.
Or what little I can parse, seems backwards from my own experience.
For instance, the most I hear the word "practical" is to justify doing something inefficient but safe, ie use a microsoft product or service and accept it's limitations and cost, or some other safe inefficient choice like vmware before azure was a thing, etc.
So it doesn't support the idea that it's something the ignorant kids say, OR the opposite that the better engineers say it, it's just sort of a non-sequiter or something.
Personally I've grown to hate the word even though of course one has to use it and it's a valid concept to be practical. I just see it way over used to justify predictability over goodness.
The manager types don't really care about advancing anything. They do lip service to the idea of making more money by making something more efficient, but really any change at all is worse than any promised gain. Really they would love nothing better than to just keep cranking the machine they have now exactly the same way forever. They only change by force when the machine stops producing.