| I feel like there is some true observation you've made, but I can not figure out what it is from this text. 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. |
Sure, I hear you and I've experienced this too. I've been on nightmare ASP.net spaghetti code projects that would be good fodder for programming sites. VB projects that are a stitched-together set of tools with a frontend full of a million buttons, etc.
But on the flip side, have you never worked at a company full of Ruby/PHP/Python engineers that have trouble getting their software to build and run correctly? People with billions of dollars who find the prospect of putting something on a web page—for a business model that has existed for a century—challenging? I have many times, and it's a reflection of how insular that segment of the industry is that they don't find anything weird about this.
In contrast, there's an army of JVM engineers out there that don't spend any time on HN because the JVM solved the problems HN talks about 20 years ago. They don't need to talk about it or consider it "news" because it isn't. For instance, the technical level of InfoQ is whole echelons higher than here. This is not to disparage the very real benefits that the "Hacker" mentality has provided to the world. SV are accomplished business and product people, and they've managed to impress the world with the type of organizational scale they can deliver. But technical it ain't.