I work mostly with Django at my work. I still choose Lumen / Laravel for my personal projects. Both Django and Laravel are amazing but I'm still more effective with Laravel. It has way more functionality out of the box.
I like to watch this Juice Rap News episode from 2013 about the Australian election, by the end Julian appears from the Ecuadorian embassy and he does some singing (voice-over, but his expressions are priceless): https://youtu.be/QWU6tVxzO1I?t=209
It's very easy to forget the human behind the name in these cases.
Oh I wasn't aware that was purely caused by Unions!! And you chose the EU country with one of, if not THE highest unemployment rate.
Every country has issues. To say that Unions don't work when the EU has a strong union culture, and then scapegoat other issues in random EU countries is intellectually dishonest.
Spain has insane unemployment rates because of generations of poorly thought out policies, not unions. They basically had a similar setup to Greece where tons of people don't pay taxes, and it survives heavily off tourism and produces few other things to make up for the tourism economy. Any country that generates MOST of its economy from tourism is going to have a rough time. We've seen it time and time again.
None of this proves the EU is a hell hole, and it has no inherent relation to unions.
He's largely taking examples from public-sector unions, which have particularly problematic legal framework in the US.
Private unions can be essentialy seen as corporations, very much like any other firm, that sell labor. Such unions can in principle specialize, compete and offer unique advantages. Again – just like any other market firm. It's just that the US law makes that hard by setting them up for a narrow antagonistic role of fighting with labor management for goodies.
No, 3-4 generations is about right. The first generation needs to work hard just to ensure there is enough food for the next. Without enough food everything else is done: intelligence is greatly harmed by not enough food. That Food then lets the next generation work a little smarter, and send their kids to school instead of the kids having to work as well just to ensure there is enough. The kids now have some education to work with, but unless they get scholarships it isn't enough to get ahead, but it is enough to save for their kids scholarships. There you go, 3-4 generations to get out of the hole - assuming everyone all works hard to get out, anyone can drop back (either from laziness or bad luck).
Luck is important too. I read an article about a widow in India being giving a loan for a tractor. 2 months payments on the loan have to amount to about a year of her previous income (note that the other 10 months need to be repaid - this is a loan not a gift). A tractor is such a force multiplier that she is able to make the payments all year and save up enough to dream of sending her son to a good school. This whole thing depends on someone being willing to risk giving someone a loan who clearly doesn't make enough to pay it off.
I post this not really as a rebuttal to your post, or the grandparent, but more of a "here's what success a couple of generations later" actually looks like and what some of its characteristics may be.
I completely agree. Docker, amazing frameworks (Laravel, Django, ReactJS etc.), git, CI, amazing IDEs, etc. It's absolutely magical compared to what we had 15 years ago. Entry level is much higher though for sure, you definitely need to learn and know a lot. But once you do know certain things at a certain level, you become a very powerful individual.
And here it lays the paradox. All the tools you have mentioned have little to do with programming (one individual solving problems by writing code). The tools you mentioned have to do with software engineering (a bunch of individuals solving problems by writing code, plus a bunch of constraints).
The joy is in programming, not in software engineering. At least that's how I interprete the GitHub comment (and all these stories about developers that cannot take it any more and burn out).
I think it's easy to forget that modern tooling (+AWS/GCP/Azure) let's one dev match or exceed the productivity of 15 developers and a couple of PMs in 2005.
It's a laughable claim to say one developer has replaced 15, and obviously not true. The vast majority of code was business logic and still is.
Today's 'process' is no more efficient than, say, deploying rails to heroku in 2007. And even before that, you'd spend half a day writing an automatic deployment script, and then deployments would take a couple of clicks and you'd never think about it again.
That's a very specific meaning, like in terms of scaling maybe? But in terms of actually meaningful problems solved for end users... But there very nature large scale systems aren't very common, but everyone is chasing that unicorn startup which can serve 10 million users; so scalable APIs are more "practical" then simple workflows
Scalability seems overhyped. If you write small efficient systems they can handle a lot of work. If you use big clunky frameworks that convert simple things into map-reduce style problems of course you're going to care about scalability and how much your AWS bill is going to be.
In many technical interviews, they want to talk about "scalability", using fancy big data software for horizontal scalability etc
But I also know from experience that many, many of these problems would be more elegantly solved by more traditional tools like Postgres, especially since servers have gotten more powerful, the cloud service options more plentiful and reliable, and the software more optimized. The "scalable" approach can lead to massive amounts of wasted person hours unless you're sure you really need it. But if you say, "just use RDS or CloudSQL, or maybe BigQuery", you get perceived as a newb by the 24 year old who just got his MS doing Spark work on toy problems.
I spent all day today and Friday just trying to get a Google Cloud Composer project to run locally. I'm still waiting for that increased productivity that modern tooling supposedly grants me.
I don't need to worry about many many trivial things I had to worry about before these tools, and now I can actually work on the problem I'm trying to solve almost immediately.
Is that true tho? I mean, I love programming, but I hate React. I love thinking about data structures and their relationships, but I don't like Docker. I spent hours thinking about how can I solve a problem (just for fun) and I absolutely don't need GCP nor Azure. I like coming up with cool algorithms (or reading about them) but I find Laravel (or Django) really unelegant and not worth my time.
It depends on the problem you're solving of course. All of these tools are built to be able to solve larger, more complex problems more effectively. You are still welcome to ignore all of them and write a cool program for yourself for fun, just don't expect to get paid for it.
Ultimately, we get paid to solve business problems, not to have fun with programming.
This is of course true. But is a particular fashionable technology the best way to solve that business problem, or is yet another layer of fun? I suspect that being able to deliver simple scalable solutions without bandwagon dependencies is going to be a differentiator, in _business terms_
