I disagree as well. The violence is an unintended consequence, but it's also a known consequence, and has to be taken into account. You can't separate the good and bad consequences of a decision and wave off the negative ones because they manifest themselves indirectly.
That sounds more like a hypothesis than an opinion.
In the less testable world of opinions (over, say, business strategy) it isn't always possible to settle things by experiment, making it more difficult to let those opinions go.
I suspect that's meant to be rhetorical, but from a business perspective, was stable good enough? Sometimes what works now won't be competitive in the near future.
Its just text and pictures on a web page. The new york times re-invented a database out of kafka to power theirs (mind bogglingly stupid)
The Guardian re-wrote their CMS at least 4 times, at a cost of well over 50 million, if not more. Thats before they got to re-doing the layout.
The FT spent 6(!) years rebuilding their entire stack, (150 tech staff for 6 years. a good percentage contractors. > £70million)
All of it is just fucking text on a fucking web page. All that effort to add fancy gizmos for hosting, optimising for framework x, which has a half life of 6 months, adding animation to drop downs. Just a spectacular waste. They are still re-platforming every 9 months, each of the 5 major teams.
All of that money could have been put into content, advertising for customers, collaborations & events.
Most news sites can get away with a static, highly cached system (I mean look at the Daily mail, the page is slow, static and looks like shit, yet its the biggest new paper site online)
So form a business perceptive, its spaffing money up the wall for no real gain.
I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. At the end of the day, it's all ego driven development. Nobody wants to think that their job has already been solved, and what's left is mundane and boring [engineering wise]. And so the business ends up with using a distributed log to handle a data set that could fit on a big thumb drive.
can confirm. media companies spent the last decade alternating between redesigns and cms migrations in a circular path that went nowhere while fb & goog ate not just their lunch but their breakfast and dinner too. the vast majority of it was driven by engineering-management-career resume-building and was actively detrimental to the editorial/content-production/journalism side of the house.
> [T]he vast majority of it was driven by engineering-management-career resume-building and was actively detrimental to the editorial/content-production/journalism side of the house.
Why didn't the non-technology side prevent this if it was so clearly detrimental? I can't imagine that the technology side of a media concern has that much influence over the company's overall priorities.
I've tried to reply to this three times and its hard to without writing a book.
The shortest possible answer is that investors/owners/boards were watching what happened to sites like reddit/huffpo/bi/instagram/tumblr and salivating out of control at the word "billion". They believed that if they starved their editorial operations and bet most of the cashflow on growing their tech teams that "user generated content" would make up the difference. It was very simple math that said "media companies are valued at 10x profits, tech companies are valued at 10x revenue, lets do whatever we can to give the appearance of being a tech company not a media one".
Within those companies tech departments it became open season for CTOs, VPEngs, DevOps Directors and sr/lead/architect devs to engage in a peer-to-peer-ddos of architectural and tech-fad-chasing ones-up-manship. Because the only penalty for it all turning out to be too much was having to grow your headcount.
In 2016/2017 it all finally collapsed. Most of the companies have faded to layoffs and/or acquisitions. Many have basically frozen and given up on their tech stacks in-place. A large number have abandoned ship to wordpress (where imho they should have been all along).
Sometimes I wonder what the general state of "the media" or "journalism" would be now if 80% of that money had gone to hiring content creators, or even just paying the same number of content creators the 30% more it would take for it to be an adult job not a early-20-something job. An awful lot of the salaciousness and outrage-stoking in media right now is a byproduct of the actual jobs being very young people sitting in place all day garnering all their information from social media feeds and trying to hit their 2 - 5 posts (sorry 'articles') a day quota. We all think we're critiquing journalistic institutions when we point it out but really we're just yelling at kids. Blaming them for not being able to achieve the standards we're used to with 3 hour to deadline in their permalance gig, when what we got used to was written by mid-career people with benefits who had all day and sometimes week.
Media isn't stoking outrage culture, its clinging to it as the last source of pennies left before the nothing.
> Sometimes what works now won't be competitive in the near future.
What do you mean by that? I can understand in terms of hiring devs, this is true, but any other reason I would be curious about. Because I work with/in many companies, I see a lot of different tech and competitive is usually just what the team knows best. So unless you are making a new team, I cannot phantom why you would switch.
Java with Servlets/Spring and C# with asp.net have been competitive for almost 2 decades; maybe some people can shave off a few minutes here and there but in the grand scheme of a serious company with a serious project (500k loc+) it is not going to matter. There are exceptions as for instance machine learning but those gaps close and this was about web frameworks.
Perhaps he means that you won’t be able to attract great talent. A lot of extremely talented engineers don’t want to work on code bases and technologies that are 15 years old.
Definitely would like a source for this because I feel like I hear it a lot and I don't believe it's true.
You can be talented and not care what you work on. And if all you care about is what tech is new and shiny, how talented can you be? I don't want you rewriting my product every year so you can use the next framework du jour.
Maybe talent means something else when nothing is at stake, but I'd argue that a talented engineer knows that when a product works and makes money, and the tech stack isn't prohibitive of those goals, it doesn't really matter what it's written in. In fact, I see trend-chasing developers as liabilities, because they're the ones who will replace everything every six months while you bleed money.
The issue is rarely the age of the codebase or the tech stack, but rather the maintainability and quality of the code.
Due to many factors, the age of the codebase is normally inversely proportional to its code quality. Especially codebases in fields where trends change fast, like web technology.
Therefore, if you're a talented engineer able to work in multiple technologies you'll certainly prefer to work on something that has less chances of making you want to tear your hair out.
> the age of the codebase is normally inversely proportional to its code quality.
What??? You are saying that simply because a code base is old, it is of poor quality. There are numerous public examples contradicting this: Linux, many Apache projects such as httpd, etc.
I emphatically disagree and would like to know why you think that.
I said "normally". I don't think anyone considers Linux or httpd "old tech", neither they are "legacy software" that experienced developers are running away from. C might be old as a language, but there are still modern things being built with it. I also said that the issue is not the age itself or the tech stack.
True, but I don't think the average person back then had much idle time either. And a lot of those who did were willing (or perhaps did not have a choice) to have much lower standards of living. I don't mean all the modern conveniences - I mean things like consistent roof on head, consistent food on table, etc.
I reckon if one is willing to sacrifice those two today, they could have much idle time. I knew at least one chronically homeless person for whom I think this is a barrier to getting back to a normal life. Idle time is addictive. I don't think he became homeless decades ago to gain more idle time, but he did get accustomed to it.
> True, but I don't think the average person back then had much idle time either.
I think this gets to the heart of it. The people hanging out in the cages in the article were not the average person. They were almost invariably well-to-do people who didn't need to work for a living. Free time and some security from harm against potential failures (or wastes of time) are two ingredients for innovation. The majority of our technological innovators come from priveleged backgrounds, for that reason (in addition to money granting them access to the right education, networks and technology).
Do the Duluth trousers "anchor the bottom of the pocket bag to the side seam" as well? To me this seems like a clever solution that I haven't seen before.
The reductio ad absurdum where any mention of a color is considered harmful is based in the assumption that the issue is with mentioning color. It might be useful to distinguish when a color is just a color (e.g. red/black trees), and when a metaphor is borrowed from an actual crime against humanity (e.g. master/slave).
> It's easy to use Monte Carlo methods and find that when n is large, the average cluster size is approximately 2.15013
It never occurred to me before, but running simulations and looking up the result in a dictionary of constants might be a helpful learning approach for people who are more adept at going from practice to theory.
I solve a lot of problems this way, thanks to OEIS.
How many fromblaz of size N are there? lets count them for N=1 ... N=8 or whatever is tractable to count using naive methods then hope a useful result shows up in OEIS.
OEIS will also return equations for simple linear integer expressions without an OEIS entry.
Unfortunately, the tools for single constants are significantly less good than OEIS.
The problem with this approach is that to get enough decimal places to be able to look things up in a dictionary of constants can require a very long simulation.
