Hacker News Search

kitsunesoba 4y ago

I think the post-OS-X Mac dev experience varies a good deal depending on the type of software you're making. Are you building a Mac-first app using the most blessed toolkit (Cocoa)? You're probably fine, so long as you're not looking to toss out a binary and forget about it for 5+ years (periodically recompiling with newer SDKs and such). Even 20 years down the road getting old FOSS Cocoa projects building and running again isn't too hard, because even though there are a lot of deprecations the deprecated stuff largely still works. On the other hand if you're building lowest common denominator cross platform desktop apps, yeah life might be harder. Same for games. That said I think the bulk of this pain comes from making assumptions that an unavoidably changing world will remain static — the sort of backwards compatibility provided by Microsoft is really the exception not the rule, and even there it's starting to flake away likely because the teams at MS are growing tired of having nearly unbounded backwards compatibility act as a ball and chain on OS development. For running apps that were created without their devs' intent of long-term maintenance I think the best thing is probably third party compatibility layers like WINE, which allow for a pinned API target without locking OS vendors into decades old decisions and emergences.

hot_gril 4y ago
Many devs don't maintain their software the way you describe. I don't think they should need to. If you look at what most software does, it's pretty static. Like you're telling the OS to draw windows with buttons and run your code in response to inputs. More complex with games, but still. The Mac user interface doesn't change much over time. The software should be a lot safer from OS changes. Microsoft showed that it's possible, and they even did it with third-party hardware. Same with the web. If Apple wanted compatibility with less burden, they could've provided better abstractions to devs. "Do things this one sanctioned way, and it won't break." Mac OS was not good for games in the end. It was common for a minor OS release to break a good portion of your game library, sometimes permanently. If I understand correctly, Apple even intentionally let OpenGL go stale to push Metal instead. This was all on top of DirectX being Windows-only. Relying on WINE for an official software release is a kludge, and despite the common claim that it comes at no performance cost, somehow things tended to be much slower in it (not from the WINE translation layer itself but some other consequence of semi-incompatibility).

streblo 4y ago

> Ask where the documentation is. I've had a reasonably long career and worked at a number of companies at this point, and I've never seen this 'documentation' that engineers are supposedly producing.

Aperocky 4y ago
We really have the opposite problem, there are lots of documentations but they are not exactly organized or all up to date. Much easier to fix than not having any of them I would guess.
- baby 4y ago
  I feel like having too much doc is not really a problem :)
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  Welcome to health care. We produce a ton of documents that then disappear into a terrible document management system to never be found again.
gorjusborg 4y ago
I think existence of documentation is a poor metric, personally.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  Compare the quality in the documenation from lawyers and engineers in the company. True experts tend to be excellent communicators. SJ adequately described the short comings of Flash the phoneys pushed back against without merit.
- sfink 4y ago
  I think a better metric is to ask why the documentation isn't better. Nobody is ever happy with their documentation, whether they have too little or too much. But if the engineers think it's because they're being pushed too hard and there's no slack time available to write docs? Red flag. They have explicitly considered the question and realized that the effort to write the docs, compounded by the need to keep them up to date and/or the cost of allowing them to be out of date, is not worth it in their particular situation? Good sign. They feel kind of bad and guilty about the state of the docs? Too normal to be much of a sign, but still positive.
  - streblo 4y ago
    These questions are ultimately just asking what the work culture is like, they don't really have anything to do with documentation. And in that sense they're good questions to ask during an interview. As you allude to though, I don't think you're going to get good information if you just ask surface level questions about docs.
- chestervonwinch 4y ago
  The meat of the question is, "where do you go when don't know how to do a thing?". The answer could potentially be "the docs", but that's not necessarily sufficient like you point out. However, you could ask follow-ups, e.g., whether the docs have multiple facets like user guides in addition to low-level API guides. OTOH, where you go when don't know how to do something doesn't necessarily have to be the docs, and info here can still be valuable to understand. E.g., are questions typically discussed in public forums or is it discussed in private DMs? The former is typically a better signal in my experience.

n4bz0r 4y ago

I would assume there is no one thing to put a finger on. But there are some signs one can take a note of. Generally speaking, to name a few: - The ability and willingness of the management to invest time and resources into development of proper work processes and infrustructure (imagine having to code without version control in a team) - Understanding that things aren't always done the moment they appear to be done - Realization that many things are done to lower the cognitive load exclusively (why do we have to spend 20 hours refactoring the thing if it already works?) - Understanding why it is important to lower the cognitive load - And dozens more These are merely signs, though. One can put 'dnd' signs on doors, but what difference does that make if the same people who introduce the signs still disturb the people behind the doors whenever they feel like it. (no pun intended, couldn't word it better) It comes down to understanding the nuances, and mutual respect, I think?

gorjusborg 4y ago
> It comes down to understanding the nuances, and mutual respect, I think? I think that's a great summary. Look out for companies that try to manage what they don't understand. It can lead to the 'car mechanic phenomenon'. I call it that because it's like the feeling some get when they get the bill from the car mechanic. They can't fix it themselves, so how do they know if someone's pulling one over on them?
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  100%. The companies and programs I've been a part of that failed, this is why. I've been meetings and made what to most engineers would be a truism, and been told by leaders that didn't have even a basic understanding of what we were trying to make "you don't know that, that's not true". In similar situations in successful management lead to "ok, I trust you" and then success. If an organization spends too much of its valuable resources on internal mistrust and convincing people who don't know, it's doomed.
quickthrower2 4y ago
If people have to enter time spent into any system then thats an no from me. Which means I cannot work for consulting companies :-).

jimt1234 4y ago

I had a friend interview at "Big Nameless Corp" a few years ago. He said when he saw that the engineers interviewing him all had Windows laptops, he knew immediately it wasn't an engineer-friendly culture. I always thought that was funny.

prepend 4y ago
I try to stay pretty open, but I work on an org with a lot of windows developers. It’s kind of interesting how it’s a totally separate world and the windows devs have their own equivalents to dot files and stuff. The problem is when they insisted that everyone else must use windows and Mac and Linux machines weren’t allowed.
Tijdreiziger 4y ago
I don’t really see how that’s relevant given that WSL exists.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  WSL is a business checkmark used to keep engineers quiet. It's not a pleasant surrounding ecosystem and the implementation isn't as high fidelity is the real thing.
  - mindentropy 4y ago
    Exactly. It is painful in Windows 10. Nothing beats running natively.
- mindentropy 4y ago
  WSL in Windows 10 is almost useless. Also for embedded and people working on kernels etc it is really painful.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
FpUser 4y ago
>"He said when he saw that the engineers interviewing him all had Windows laptops, he knew immediately it wasn't an engineer-friendly culture." "Friend" should have his head examined. This kind of snobbery attitude does not do any good
- mindentropy 4y ago
  It is not snobbery and you are taking it the wrong way. It is more about having plenty of mature developer tools at your finger tips to get the job done with lots of automation. Also having source of everything allows you to check how something is architected and designed and also improves your own code. It is very painful to work on Windows laptops when you don't have access to proper dev tools which is the case in most of the corporate setups where they want to uniformity of images to make administration easy.
hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago
I work at a BigCorp. A sister team develops client software for Windows. Can you guess what kind of laptops the engineers have?

hinkley 4y ago

Right before that era I worked on Mosaic for Windows, and the Mac developers sat across the stairwell from us. The Mac guys had a very love hate relationship with Macs. On the one hand the lead was infinitely proud of being able to have 2 (or was it three?) monitors on his desk, big CRTs on a desk designed during the Cold War, by a designer who had nightmares about nuclear blasts and wanted someplace safe to duck and cover. You could do that with Macs but not quite yet with Windows. If memory serves, Linux got that ability before Windows did but don't quote me on that. On the other hand they were writing what is ostensibly a concurrent application on an operating system with no protected memory and no pre-emptive multitasking, so the whole thing was using hand-rolled cooperative multitasking via C longjumps. It's no wonder the Windows team had an easier time keeping up with Netscape for that golden year. They were from what I understand cross compiling, and the Windows team could just do Windowsy things with a fifth of the staff. So my experience of this era, through that lens, through learning to hate Macs at the hands of Mathematica, and also through rumor mills, was that a lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. It was very weird watching subsequent Palm models start to bump up against the same ceiling that NextStep was helping Apple route around. I told my Mac loving friends to talk to me when Apple had a modern OS. So when NextStep merged my ears pricked up. My first Mac ended up being an anomaly. Apple briefly produced a 13" Mac with a discrete video card, which they haven't since. I had been struggling to get Linux drivers for a Fujitsu LightBook, which was ridiculously small, but was practically obsolete by the time I got everything working. That device is the sole time I've contributed to Linux, which was cool but exhausting. So I ran to a pretty UI, works out of the box, but ships with /bin/bash with open arms and never looked back. You could still see the bones of NextStep in OS X for some time. The university ended up with upward of 60 NeXT machines (which I later learned is a lot for one college), in 2 labs when I started, eventually in 3 that I knew of, one of which I ended up with after hours access to. On many occasions they were the only open machines. I had helped too many people who lost their papers to faulty disk drives and learned that the best way to write a paper was to keep my Unix account empty and mail myself copies, so it hardly mattered that I didn't have a floppy for the NeXTs. It didn't hurt that they never figured out how to meter the NeXT laser printer, so while it wasn't the best or fastest printer on campus, it was the only free one. "Your printah is out of paypah."

duskwuff 4y ago
> So my experience of this era, through that lens, through learning to hate Macs at the hands of Mathematica, and also through rumor mills, was that a lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. Not just making the same tradeoffs, but making a lot of the same software -- early PalmOS was effectively a handheld remake of Mac OS. Same CPU architecture, very similar OS design. Some of the A-traps even had similar or identical names.
aasasd 4y ago
> A lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. It was very weird watching subsequent Palm models start to bump up against the same ceiling. Didn't know about this. This is before ‘webOS’, right? What kind of OS problems are we talking here?
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  A long time ago now, but I vaguely recall that the original PalmPilot OS chose to replicate the mistakes of the original Mac. Data structures exposed all over the place, apps had to implement the basics of event handling rather than have most of it handled for them.
  - aasasd 4y ago
    I'm not sure what services PalmOS provided to the apps, but to my limited knowledge the apps themselves were non-multitasking, and had a standardized database per each app instead of the filesystem (i.e. something like proto-IndexedDB, but more oriented to documents or blobs). So it's kinda difficult to imagine them having the problems of quasi-multitasking and more complex MacOS. But perhaps things became involved by PalmOS 5. Though the event handling part sounds like DOS' raw approach, versus Win95's abstraction—and I guess could plague any kind of a system.
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  I think he talks about a very different era
- wvenable 4y ago
  Palm OS was designed for the hardware of the time. It was very simple but ran well. Compared to Microsoft's approach of building a stripped down clone of Windows NT that barely ran on the hardware of the era. But in the long term Microsoft's approach was more successful because as hardware improved they had an OS ready to take advantage of it. Of course, what Microsoft wasn't ready for was the hardware getting so good that Apple could just port their existing desktop OS and software over.
spfzero 4y ago
> "Your printah is out of paypah." Oh man that brings back memories!
ylee 4y ago
>On the other hand they were writing what is ostensibly a concurrent application on an operating system with no protected memory and no pre-emptive multitasking, so the whole thing was using hand-rolled cooperative multitasking via C longjumps. It's no wonder the Windows team had an easier time keeping up with Netscape for that golden year. As one among your customer base for both versions, indeed. People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much worse. >a lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. That makes sense, both from an attractive-new-startup view (I'm sure many within Apple c. 1997 was pushing for a small, inexpensive Apple PDA to respond to Palm), and from a familiar-feeling-OS view. >So I ran to a pretty UI, works out of the box, but ships with /bin/bash with open arms and never looked back. I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it (as mentioned above), but OS X was a revelation. I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period. (I wrote the above on Slashdot ten years ago <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>. I see no need for changes.) >The university ended up with upward of 60 NeXT machines (which I later learned is a lot for one college) I don't think my college ever deployed NeXTs in public student labs the way it did deploy HP workstations <https://np.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/ludshu/macintosh_application_environment_for_solaris/gp62hp4/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/ludshu/macinto...>, but I did use them in college as well. I still think NeXTStep did UI better than MacOS pre- or post-Unix.
- wmf 4y ago
  System 7 came out in 1991 while Windows 3.1 wasn't even released until 1992. Apple had a huge lead but they squandered it on failed rewrites.

hot_gril 4y ago

Your description of 1997 Apple sounds uncomfortably close to modern Google. I miss working for startups.

chubot 4y ago
That was also echoing through my brain while reading through the comment (worked there awhile ago) It would be crazy if someone just shook up the whole company top to bottom, but google is still making money and apple wasn’t So I think it will never happen
- mooreds 4y ago
  Nothing is forever.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  Good point, it's not a good comparison. > it will never happen I can see it happening. They have just one cash cow in advertising, and it's not terribly secure. TikTok is already a serious threat to YouTube. If this became a crisis, it wouldn't sink the company, but it'd certainly shake it up.
  - kypro 4y ago
    The "TikTok threat" is so overblown. It's not activity competing with any existing social or video platform. It's competing for time, but that's about it. No one is using TikTok to stay in touch with their Grandmother or watching 2 hour Podcasts on it. They invented a new type of video entertainment which has a social element, that's it - it's neither a YouTube or a social network competitor. I'd argue Snapchat is probably their most direct competitor, but Snapchat's DAU is still growing fine, because even in Snapchat's case I think you can argue they're used differently. Snapchat seems to be used primarily to stay in touch with friends where as TikTok seems to be used to find/share short-form video content with strangers.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      It directly competes for some use cases, for time, and for ads. One person's total time spent watching videos doesn't grow just because there's a new platform on the block. Kids even use TikTok as an alternative to Google searches for knowledge. I'm not saying TikTok alone can wreck Google, but YouTube at least felt threatened enough to make something similar called Shorts. IDK about the social network side. Google doesn't really have one, so it's whatever.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - cma 4y ago
        > Kids even use TikTok as an alternative to Google searches for knowledge Is that why Google search heavily forces tons of Youtube results to the top now even when it is barely relevant?
        hot_gril 4y ago
        Maybe not cause of TikTok directly but because subtitled videos in general are an easier format on a phone compared to scrolling around search results and dealing with 2-5 popups (including the cookies agreement) on every site. Web browsing is much easier on a PC, but that's the minority use case.
        cma 4y ago
        > compared to scrolling around search results and dealing with 2-5 popups Queue the four minute youtube ad.
        hot_gril 4y ago
        Yeah there's that too. I think TikTok simply has fewer ads. One of my friends described tech platforms as following a cycle where they're popular while they're loss-leading, but eventually they try to reel in profits that are actually proportional to their valuation, and everyone switches to the next thing. This implies that later investors are duped into holding the bag for something that's not worth the investment. Idk if he's right, but given the tendency for tech to ride bubbles, he could be.
pvg 4y ago
It's very much apples to goggles - google is gigantic, mature company with some problems and one that makes occasional missteps. It still makes many things people like, including truckfuls of money. 1997 Apple had a very enthusiastic userbase, small and dwindling market share, mostly terrible products and was teetering on the edge of extinction.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  It's more how I feel about the SWE culture, not the company's fate. You're right that they're very different scenarios, including the fact that it's not 1997 anymore.
  - pvg 4y ago
    It's just a fundamentally different thing to be working for a company that is not a burning shipwreck. It influences culture and everything else much more strongly than some of the organizational parallels (although I think these are pretty weak as well). Imagine what working at Google would be like if Google was a losing search engine company.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      Depends how it's losing. Could be like Yahoo! who just accepted its fate and sank as gracefully as possible, or could be like Apple who fought back.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hk1337 4y ago
Maybe even modern Apple, as if Apple just sort of reverted after Steve Jobs passed away.
hot_gril 4y ago
Hmm, doesn't feel good having such a negative comment rise up this much.

tester756 4y ago

You guys were creating Java? > ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year. 9K classes in a year sounds crazy as hell

adastra22 4y ago
The 90’s were a weird time.
Aperocky 4y ago
Sounds about right for Java..
- hot_gril 4y ago
  I disagree with what I call Java's OOP obsession, but I have to admire the drive behind that ecosystem.
  - Aperocky 4y ago
    I'm disgusted by it, but admire the ability for the system to run in spite of the mess that the pattern generate.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      At least with lambdas and `var`, they yielded a bit on the old ways.
- origin_path 4y ago
  How many classes do you think it should have, ballpark, given the same feature set? GUI toolkits alone can produce thousands of classes because there are thousands of concepts that make sense to model, then add on security, collections, many utilities, XML handling, multiple RPC systems and so on. It's hard to over-state how large the Java standard library is. And it's not like other ecosystems do better. The standard complaint about JS is that you try to do something basic in that ecosystem and discover you have 10,000 modules in node_modules. Not so different, really, except that the Java stuff comes from a single team with a relatively coherent design philosophy.
  - Aperocky 4y ago
    If it is necessary to have that many classes, then there should be so many classes. but in Java everything is a class, main function? in a class. a library of static functions? in a class.
    - mypalmike 4y ago
      Sure, classes act as namespaces in that case. What pain point does it cause?
    - origin_path 4y ago
      With an alternative design you'd need to have some other code container concept, but it'd be almost exactly the same as a class file. If the JVM also had a separate notion of a non-class file, just hold to hold static methods, then it'd boil down to duplicating the format. Most languages decide to make the source file the first-class container concept, or in native languages, the DLL/.so, but this isn't obviously better and comes with its own downsides. Orienting the VM around classes has a bunch of upsides that contribute to Java being successful. The real complaint here is more about the syntax boilerplate involved in writing top level functions in Java that map to classes with static methods. Kotlin shows there's no deep reason why the Java language has to be written this way, it's just notation. They picked it to avoid complicating the language with special cases, but I can easily agree that smarter syntax is more important than the Java guys have historically believed. Kotlin is proving this at the moment.
- silisili 4y ago
  Sounds like a typical enterprise Java hello world type application.
- georgemcbay 4y ago
  Does the AbstractFactoryFactoryInterface and AbstractFactoryFactoryImpl count as two different classes...? Kidding aside, I always found Java as a core language (and the basic standard library for it) to be mostly fine, but the weird architecture astronaut cult that hovered around it and infected many of the commonly used libraries to be a real problem. Maybe things are different now for the language, I haven't touched it in many years at this point.
  - ngc248 4y ago
    Yeah it was never the language or the core libs which were the problem, it was mostly some of the frameworks which had the FactoryFactory problem
StevePerkins 4y ago
A typical well-designed class will usually be a few hundred lines of code, tops. Often less than 100 lines. 9k classes * 100-300 == 900k-2.7m LOC Not TOO crazy for the most complete standard library ever developed, for a language meant from the beginning to take over enterprise business computing. How many LOC are in whatever meme language is hype this year? Hell, I feel like I see nearly that many lines of console output, when I run NPM to pull in dependencies, lol.
- killjoywashere 4y ago
  This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. That's a powerful insight on work estimation.
- tester756 4y ago
  That's 36 classes per *day* (900/250 workdays) I don't know how many people were working on that but when developing standard library you do not really want to rush designs. You want to be very, very careful about it. Here's a book about it from one of the most experienced people in API/Standard lib design on the planet https://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design-Guidelines-Conventions-Addison-Wesley/dp/0135896460 https://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design-Guidelines-Conventio...
  - StevePerkins 4y ago
    I can't speak for grandparent commenter. However, I can point out that the standard library for Java 17 has a TOTAL of 4,388 classes. TODAY. A quarter-century after the timeframe that they're talking about: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/allclasses-index.html https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/allclasse... So if ~10k classes were really written in a year, then I can only assume that most of that was the compiler or virtual machine runtime (i.e. C++ code) rather than the standard library Java code. Regardless of how anyone feels about "verbosity" or "design patterns" in Java application code, the underlying JDK is pretty inarguably one of the most solid and impressive pieces of tech ever developed. I'm not throwing any rocks at that codebase.
layer8 4y ago
Creating new classes is easy. Keeping the number down while still restricting them to a well-defined responsibility each is actually hard.

par 4y ago

> Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. Sounds a lot like a lot of FAANG companies today.

spaetzleesser 4y ago
Probably like every large organization.
abxytg 4y ago
[]
- msoad 4y ago
  can you elaborate?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - sswaner 4y ago
    abxytg made a list of their experiences at Apple, but that list is empty.
duxup 4y ago
Sadly just sounds like ... human organizations often get.
- bhawks 4y ago
  The iron law of bureaucracy: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    Thank you for posting this, I hadn't heard of it but it jives with my experience in very large companies.
  - dmix 4y ago
    I've always wondered what the Iron Solution to Bureaucracy looks like. Usually it's smaller companies eating the big companies lunch via competition. But that usually takes a very long time (or competition is crushed by 'good intentions' aka gov policy). I know 'intrapenuership' and spawning isolated startups internally, where teams that are walled off from the middle managers of the larger company, was pushed by Clayton M. Christensen. But the two areas that seem to be in a death grip with this problem are: modern western governments and monopolies (usually with market position enforced by said governments). Whenever people push for reducing bureaucracy in gov they get accused of only wanting to help the rich or get crushed by the benefactors (lobbyists/NIMBYs/'local jobs' protection rackets/etc). And monopolies survive even when they are an organizational disaster internally, because where else can customers go?
    - Rury 4y ago
      Some degree of bureaucracy is necessary and inevitable in any organization, as it's basically the glue that makes a group of people an organization. Imagine how difficult it'd be to collaborate on a project with even just one other person, if you didn't meet / pass notes / info on what each you were doing on the project, at least once. That process of passing info, is what constitutes bureaucracy, and bureaucrats act as the gatekeepers of such processes. So unfortunately, there isn't really an "Iron" solution to bureaucracy (depending on what you mean by "Iron"). The best you can do is work to minimize the amount of it (akin to optimizing an algorithm so that it's more efficient), but some level or amount will always remain, and that amount is largely related to how large the organization is.
      - iancmceachern 4y ago
        Alas, like so many things in life we can't "solve" it, we can only minimize the negative, better ourselves, and learn to cope with it.
nr2x 4y ago
Can confirm.

mradek 4y ago

I wish companies would be run in a way that removes insane leveling completely. In my current company there are 7 or 8 levels (depending how you look at it) for ICs. Why? IME it has led to so much “talk” and bloat, and useless meetings led by people trying to prove something who go on and on about things that make no sense. No execution, only flattery and BS. IMO, the only levels you need should be Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, and Software Architect. The architects should be rare, and there should be a healthy mix of seniors and juniors focused on building and supporting products internal and customer facing. Why do we have several layers of managers? Out of a dozen managers only two have been good. They’re also the first ones fired. It just seems stupid, even if it’s purposefully done that way (that’s even dumber to consider). Have lean teams with a lead, and a manager who manages several teams, and a director for each product offering who reports to a CTO or something. VP, SVP, EVP. Why? I’m on a team where people waste so much time and yet I see those same people get promoted, while I’m told I’m disengaged because I don’t turn on my camera in bullshit meetings (to plan future meetings or ramble). On the other hand, my team consistently delivers on time or sooner, while those teams take forever. It’s sad, really.

brhsagain 4y ago
I agree with you that promo culture is pretty much the root of modern big company rot, but under your system, how do you propose an industrious, ambitious IC move up, whatever that means? Even if you think the status is fake and dumb (and I would agree), how do you make more money as an IC?
- jordanbeiber 4y ago
  Exactly - what does it mean? You work on stimulating things and get paid what you accept. You’ll have a yearly review where you have your say, and pay can be increased if employer think it’s worth it. Titles are problematic in teams working to produce good stuff! We should compare ourselves to athletes more than the MBA powerpoint version of a company. I hear Tom Brady is a legend - is he an S10 quarterback? Senior quarterback? Or just a quarterback with high a salary based on performance? I believe levels are instruments for managers not employees.
  - nostrebored 4y ago
    Everyone who cares about Brady is watching him and knows how he is performing. This is not true of engineers.
    - jordanbeiber 4y ago
      This is why I’m stating it’s a management tool. Poor management requires boxes. Better management actually care and help employees perform and improve. In the end it’s about culture.
  - brhsagain 4y ago
    I agree with you that a level system creates bad incentives for everyone. But what they do provide is a rubric for the ambitious 23 year old who wants to climb to the top of whatever group he’s in. If you get rid of levels, what’s the new hierarchy for him to climb? If you don’t specify a hierarchy, one is going to form anyway, and then it’s even more out of your control. If you’re going to say the hierarchy should be based on people doing real work, well I agree, but that is pretty much impossible to measure in groups beyond a certain size. This groups beyond a certain size problem is the root of the problem, not levels, which are just a stopgap measure to slow the brakes on the deterioration and degeneracy that you find in any gigantic group of people.
- mradek 4y ago
  Impact? Someone could be an amazing mentor and mediocre at actual output, but their impact could lead to a bunch of people being able to stay leveled up and think more efficiently that lets the team ship more with less bugs. Maybe there’s a senior engineer who can consistently crank out high quality code and identify optimizations that save money. Some sort of holistic 360 reviews by peers where others can vouch for you could work. What’s the big deal with having one senior paid 180k and another 350k if their impacts are considerably different? I have personally dealt with BS like “we can’t promote you rn but also can’t give you a raise because you’re at the upper limit of your salary band”. That’s not fair, imo.
  - brhsagain 4y ago
    How do you stop the measurement of impact from degenerating into exactly the same situation we have now? In fact, I’m pretty sure at many bigcos “impact” is already the official metric for promo. The real thing you’re getting at is that people should only be paid and promoted for real work, and not for bullshit work, but that’s basically impossible to measure once organizations grow beyond a certain size. Also, in orgs beyond a certain size, “holistic” peer review based evals make bullshit promo culture worse, not better. It basically ends up meaning how much people like you, and accelerates the shift toward a culture where people optimize for that instead of doing real work. And then you’re back at square one.
smugma 4y ago
The IC leveling at Apple is similar to what you have described. ICT 3/4/5 roughly maps to what you have. The problem with this is that while it's relatively easy to go from a 3 to a 4 after a few years, it's a huge jump from 4 to 5, and then after that you've basically peaked for life. If you just care about building great things, it can work, but for many people, feeling like there's growth and not stagnation is a problem. It also creates a problem for managers having to temper those expectations. Limiting IC layers doesn't remove all the other politics.
- gajjanag 4y ago
  Not really true anymore unfortunately, and the system is converging with other large organizations. For example, to keep compensation in line with market and reduce attrition, there were definitely more people who got promoted to ICT5 last year and the designation has thus been diluted. Furthermore, candidates coming in from other large companies expect the title/leveling prestige in many cases, and ICT5 is a tough sell while trying to hire a Google L7/8. So Apple does have a fair number of ICT6 from that. I also think limiting IC layers and keeping the above politics minimal can work - Netflix did that for a long time and was very successful as a company with their approach. Most IC at Netflix were simply titled "senior software engineer", with pay being a wide band dependent on market value. They no longer do that for some reasons, and have adopted the standard large level hierarchy.
  - smugma 4y ago
    Fair number of ICT6… would you say more than 250 out of what, 25K engineers?
fardo 4y ago
> In my current company there are 7 or 8 levels (depending how you look at it) for ICs. Why? Promotions tend to represent some combination of four things to most companies: • more expected impact and workload, • more status, • more money, and • more expected industry experience and seniority The three level system you propose might work if the company using it is in fact actually flatter in its internal hierarchy on those traits - but if it’s not, from the perspectives of the workers, all you’ve done is intentionally obscured the mechanics of the actual hierarchy you’re using in a way that even further obscures pay disparities, denies workers who are motivated by externally visible status a route to progression, equates high performing “just below architect” and “barely above software engineer” workloads in a way likely to incentivize many seniors to coast, and surrenders an easy tool for gauging performance by measuring how successfully someone is progressing at the company and in the field based on their level vs. years of experience.
starik36 4y ago
> The architects should be rare This reminded me of my time at iHeartMedia. The company had an entire department of non-coding architects. They produced so many Visio diagrams that the company had to purchase a product that indexed these documents so that they could be searched. The amount of busywork that was produced still takes my breath away.
aljfds3 4y ago
At Palantir, there are no levels at all, everyone is just a simple software engineer. It's their relevant experience that gives an engineer leverage on a project.
- shanusmagnus 4y ago
  I worked at a place like that before. A lot of people were grumpy that they were not progressing. Some of them were probably right; some were probably wrong. But it was clear to me that having a concrete thing to aim for (a new title) mattered. A lot. I take it that wasn't the case at Palantir. Since I'm convinced that all humans are status-seeking, I'm curious how Palantir satisfied that urge, if not w/ title differentiation.
  - solardev 4y ago
    Is it bad to discourage status-seeking behavior, such that the people are just that way... look elsewhere?
    - zwaps 4y ago
      Can you, as a business, afford it?
      - solardev 4y ago
        Probably? Is it really the ladder climbers or the everyday folks doing the grunt work?
    - shanusmagnus 4y ago
      I don't believe in good or bad wrt stuff like this. You're welcome to try to discourage it, but success would depend crucially on how many people really are not "that way." I don't think I'd take that bet, personally, but it's possible I've lived in a strange sub-world and have met unusual people.
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
dilyevsky 4y ago
> In my current company there are 7 or 8 levels (depending how you look at it) for ICs. Why? Probably same reason hn has points count beyond 500
m463 4y ago
I remember finding out some companies had SO many VPs. how can you have that many VPs? isn't it like making everyone a senior engineer?
- FabHK 4y ago
  In investment banking, that's just a mid-level title. The usual progression is Analyst, Associate, VP, Director, Managing Director. Not everyone becomes MD, but you definitely become VP by sticking around for a few years.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  At my current job between the CEO and me the reporting chain had one SVP and three VPs.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Vice President right? Weird naming considering it makes it sound like there should be 1 and they are in position #2 of all people.

agloeregrets 4y ago

> More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve. You know, this is actually a rather good thing. So many companies are just bloated with projects that they want to see through just to see them through and they make zero sense in the grand scheme of the company. If you have a single person responsible for everything that can just make the hard choices and be the bad guy it is much more healthy for the whole....assuming that person cuts the right things and makes the right choices.

nr2x 4y ago
This is why Sundar is a nice guy but shit CEO.
- cloudking 4y ago
  Well he did cut Stadia, which had a sizable team working on it.
  - seabrookmx 4y ago
    The fact that Stadia even launched was a failure. The most basic of market research would tell you that in gaming, content is king. And with Google's track record of cancelling products, nobody would trust what they offered even if it was vastly technically superior.
    - tobyjsullivan 4y ago
      Honestly, I don't know if that's a totally fair take. I purchased exactly one game on stadia and have zero regrets (particularly since I'm apparently getting a refund - but that's a bonus, really). I was definitely the target market and it was, in theory, the perfect product for me. The only problem is I may have been the only person in the target market so that wasn't going to work financially... And even I was going to have an exceptionally low LTV at maybe one game purchase per year (or less). And if they charged a monthly subscription, I'd never do it. So, yeah, terrible business. But Google's track record wasn't a showstopper for me on a toy. It's different for business stuff like GCP.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Not only content, go check GDC talks from Google. While other platform vendors have technical stuff, some of it deep dives into their technology stack, Google's ones are mostly about Play Store, KPIs, and when technical, very superficial, where a blog post would be enough. How can a studio thrust such company into having what it matters to launch a AAA tile, while being asked to rewrite for their platform.
  - nr2x 4y ago
    Stadia should either not have been released, or vastly better supported. Sundar took the middle route of saying yes to the idea, then letting the accountants run it into the ground. Worst of all worlds.
- ksec 4y ago
  >This is why Sundar is a nice guy but shit CEO. Sadly this was not the sentiment at the time when Google announced their new CEO.
  - nr2x 4y ago
    He’s a ghost, the company has zero vision. Meta is a shitshow, but I’ll give Zuck credit for at least have A vision of *something*. Sundars vision is to keep Larry and Sergei’s money machine humming along. That’s it. That’s the goal, cover the costs of the founders private islands by letting the CFO make all the real decisions

mbesto 4y ago

> The guy had a vision that seems unparalleled. Yet, he asked a group of software developers to paint a data center rack mount because "it wasn't acceptable" and made people work until 3am (even though numerous studies state that this doesn't make people more productive). One can call him "visionary" all they want, but the work environment he created doesn't sound exactly utopian. Do the ends really justify the means?

mlindner 4y ago
I've never worked in such an environment myself but I imagine it feels something like soldiers feel following a leader who feels like he knows what he's doing. It's the feeling of shared hardship and shared experience and it creates culture of driving to follow the leader. I imagine Elon Musk (at least used to, not sure if he still does) cause the same experience in employees. That's the sense you get when you read books like "Liftoff" that document the early days of SpaceX.
- MaintenanceMode 4y ago
  For many of it was a life long dream to work at Apple, and to work with Jobs, but it didn’t take long to see it was not healthy.
- mc32 4y ago
  Yep, Alexander and Genghis conquered huge ands because of their leadership, not because they were nice guys.
  - hajimuz 4y ago
    Genghis is a bad example here… He conquered for what?
- maxbond 4y ago
  I don't think people spray painting parts no one in the public will ever see feel like their leader is on the ball. They probably feel like they're at the whims of an unreasonable narcissist who can erase their weekend and generally make them miserable for no reason whatsoever.
  - ksec 4y ago
    “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
    - maxbond 4y ago
      You're suggesting asking people to work into the night to make an aesthetic change that will benefit no customers, that will not make the workplace friendlier or more productive, and that you may never even lay eyes on again, is craftsmanship? I would suggest its authoritarian control for it's own sake. To make people work to your arbitrary and unknowable criteria for no other reason than to exercise your power over them and to make them understand that that is your arrangement together. Additionally silver brackets aren't inferior, like plywood. This is more like the craftsman chewed you out for using Phillips screws instead of flatheads for your table, because the craftsman feels that Phillips are for bookcases and flatheads are for tables.
MaintenanceMode 4y ago
Hey, you don’t have to tell me, I quit immediately after the project, after bouts of both verbal and physical violence. I left likely tens of millions of future earnings behind as a result. But there’s simply no question that the guy was a visionary. I personally saw many other examples of crazy abusive behavior and I don’t believe the ends justify the means.
- Aleksdev 4y ago
  I just have to ask. What were some of the crazy things you have seen? Please don’t leave us hanging.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Whoa physical violence?
  - MaintenanceMode 4y ago
    Throwing heavy objects.
dev_tty01 4y ago
Well, it can be looked at in more ways than one. Maybe he was just a jerk, or perhaps he was giving an object lesson. Details matter and the boss was paying attention. You decide.
- mbesto 4y ago
  > You decide. I did. Steve Jobs is survivorship bias at its finest. I've met and interviewed plenty of "detail orientated" bosses and not all of them create trillion dollar entities. > Maybe he was just a jerk, or perhaps he was giving an object lesson. 1. There is no legitimate reason to make a server rack a different color. 2. Making people work until 3am isn't a lesson. It ignores all studies that suggest that depriving people of sleep makes them less productive. Moving an icon 10 pixels...okay maybe I get it. There is some practical utility in that for an end-user and it teaches development teams the importance of why the details matter. However this is probably my biggest gripes with the stories about Jobs. My interpretation is that he was inconsistently diligent and was only detail orientated for "details matter" sake, but not always the right details.
  - dev_tty01 4y ago
    Well, moving an icon a few pixels is also a purely aesthetic choice, just like changing the color of your house, the thickness of a header bar on a web page, the color of your office walls, or the color of a server rack. As with all aesthetic choices, there is someone who will think there is "no legitimate reason" to make those changes. There is someone else who will disagree. And yes, many detail oriented bosses are not successful, but Jobs actually did create a trillion dollar entity so I think this is more than just a survivorship bias. But he's controversial, so I get it if you disagree.
    - mbesto 4y ago
      > moving an icon a few pixels is also a purely aesthetic choice It's not. Aesthetics are actually a design principle: "Beautiful products/objects are perceived as easier to use and more valuable than ugly ones. Even if it is not true!" Since no one is actively looking at server racks there is no opportunity for the color to even play a factor. > And yes, many detail oriented bosses are not successful, but Jobs actually did create a trillion dollar entity so I think this is more than just a survivorship bias. Huh? You literally just defined survivorship bias. If only one party (Jobs) survives a large party ("many detailed oriented bosses"), then that's a survivor, and you're bias to thinking that would led that party to success is because of the same characteristics as the others that didn't. [0] - https://uxdesign.cc/design-principle-aesthetics-af926f8f86fe https://uxdesign.cc/design-principle-aesthetics-af926f8f86fe

garyrob 4y ago

Buried deep in this thread, ksec quoted Jobs: "When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” It's also analogous to a batter who doesn't stop his swing right after the moment he hits (or misses) the ball; he follows through. Because having the attitude of always following through, even when it seemingly no longer matters, increases the number and range of hits. In response to the ksec's Jobs quote, maxbond said: "You're suggesting asking people to work into the night to make an aesthetic change that will benefit no customers, that will not make the workplace friendlier or more productive, and that you may never even lay eyes on again, is craftsmanship? I would suggest its authoritarian control for it's own sake." The proof is in the pudding. Jobs exhibited extremely unusual, 1-in-10,000, seemingly odd, useless behavior in making the painting demand. Is it really nothing but pure coincidence that the same individual had the extremely unusual, 1-in-10,000 achievement of taking a company that was on its deathbed, arguably in its last throes, and turning it into one of the largest, most successful and influential companies in the world? No, it is not. That doesn't mean it's worth it to the individual workers who had to do that work. Clearly, in many cases, including ksec's, it was not. But was it was worth it to the company and its shareholders? Yes.

MaintenanceMode 4y ago
Very well summarized. This really captures the dilemma. Did I mention every single Ethernet cable had to be cut to length and if any server moved all the cables had to be remade ? Lol. They finally hired a wiring company to do all that work because I think we all protested to programming during the night and cutting cables during the day or vice versa.
ksec 4y ago
Object Lessons. In his first public appearance after revealing he had surgery to remove a tumor from his pancreas in 2004, Jobs met with a handful of reporters at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, Calif. to unveil a new 750-square-foot "mini" store design. Half the size of the typical Apple retail stores of the time, the mini design featured an all-white ceiling, lit from behind; Japanese-made stainless-steel walls, with holes around the top for ventilation that mimicked the design of the PowerMac G5; and a shiny, seamless white floor made with "material used in aircraft hangars," Jobs said at the time. Before the gigantic curtain draped across the storefront came down, though, Jobs was having a meltdown, refusing in the minutes before the unveiling to step outside and greet reporters. Why? Because the store design that looked so great on paper didn't stand up to real-world use. The walls showed off every handprint and the floors were marred by black scuff marks from the handful of people readying the store for the big reveal. Jobs was ultimately convinced to step outside, and the curtain was drawn before the small gathering of reporters. When I saw the floor, I immediately turned to Jobs, standing next to me, and asked if he had been involved in every aspect of the design. He said yes. "It was obvious that whoever designed the store had never cleaned a floor in their life," I told him. He narrowed his eyes at me and stepped inside. A few months later an Apple executive told me that Jobs had all of the designers return to the store after it opened on Saturday, and spend the night on their hands and knees cleaning the white surface. After that, Apple switched the floors to the stone tiles now prevalent in its designs.
- MaintenanceMode 4y ago
  What a nightmare. Ick.

scroot 4y ago
ATG sounds like it was an incredibly creative little group, and it's a shame such a thing was more or less disbanded (along with letting HyperCard die, etc). SK8 in particular looks like it was very interesting. Someone needs to write a full retrospective of that group!
- diskzero 4y ago
  I agree. Larry Tesler is no longer around to write such a retrospective. I am not sure who else might be able to do it. One of my favorite ATG project was the Dylan[1] programming language. Larry was working a lot on what would become Stagecast.[2] There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. As I said above, it wasn't at all clear that Apple would end up turing into the Apple we have today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecast_Creator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecast_Creator
  - rasz 4y ago
    ATG pushed Apple to the forefront of computer Video. They came out with Road Apple Video codec (Road Pizza) in 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Video Look up S3TC/DXTC texture compression, S3 copied Apple video codec verbatim and patented it for 3D graphics use. Somehow Apple missed that and didnt fight initial patent, result was losing couple iphone court cases 10 years later and purging S3TC from mobile. Avid Media Composer was born and grew up on Mac hardware. Same goes for Adobe Premiere, all thanks to ATG work. https://computerhistory.org/blog/quicktime-and-the-rise-of-multimedia/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/quicktime-and-the-rise-of-m... ATG might of saved Apple from going bankrupt in late nineties - Microsoft fucked up getting caught conspiring with Intel, paying third party contractor to steal QuickTime code https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_150m/ https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_... Thats the origin of the infamous "Microsoft saved Apple in the nineties" myth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5TdqfNE1QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5TdqfNE1QU In reality: >David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million. Oral History of Larry Tesler part 1 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZUhobpe6XA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZUhobpe6XA Oral History of Larry Tesler Part 2 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OloLXE4I5fw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OloLXE4I5fw Oral History of Larry Tesler Part 3 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJKW7A2rC4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJKW7A2rC4s Oral History of Andy Grignon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_VtQBIEb6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_VtQBIEb6I Quicktime 1995-1998, iPod, iPhone https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-andy-grignon-apples-ipod-f-kchop-2012-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-andy-grignon-apples-ipo... Currently Walmart of all places.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    > There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. I think I disagree, but I am pretty Steve-cynical. It seemed to follow a pattern of Steve shutting down things that he wasn't in charge of, or that smacked of Sculley-era Apple? IL4 used to have a technical library — and a kind museum of Apple products (including a Lisa) that you could play with. My manager let us know one day we might pop over to the library and "check out a few books" - a little bird had told him that we might not have to return them as the library was going bye bye. And so it did. Eventually I think I donated my Foley and Van-Dam to a library for their book sale.
    - diskzero 4y ago
      The loss of that library was sad, but didn't all the books go to the Stanford Apple archive? I also grabbed a book on parsers. I know some people from ATG found places to stay if they really, really wanted to, but unless you could directly related your work to something on Steve's agenda, you were gone. Kim stayed and worked on voice recognition, Larry Yaeger stayed and worked on InkWell, Jerome stayed and worked on latent semantics analysis for email spam detection, etc.
      - JKCalhoun 4y ago
        Relating your work to something on Steve's agenda is kind of what I was describing. As another pointed out, there were some amazing technologies that came out of ATG. It is impossible to know if they would have been interesting to Jobs though at the time.
        diskzero 4y ago
        Right. If I have to be honest, I don't think I have recovered from the PTSD caused by all of those Thursday Steve UX meetings. Oh the stories that could be told...
        concinds 4y ago
        I do hope you'll tell them one day. Mind sharing one or two that stand out?
E39M5S62 4y ago
I had a PowerPC Mac in ~1998 and I put BeOS R4.5 on it. What a HUGE change from MacOS ... I couldn't believe a computer could actually act and respond like that! I jumped ship to Intel hardware to stick with BeOS. I'm very curious what you worked on at Be - the development team wasn't that large, was it?
- diskzero 4y ago
  The development team was very small. I worked on audio mixing code, capturing video encoded from Bt848 cards, audio and video codecs, anything related to audio and video timing. Several great programmers were there and continue to do amazing things at other companies big and small. I ended up working with many of them at Apple. At some point, it seems many had to choose between Google or Apple.
  - E39M5S62 4y ago
    Very neat. I bought a cheap Bt848 card in '99. I used my BeOS machine to watch TV in my first college dorm. Thanks for all of the memories!
    - diskzero 4y ago
      The first version of the driver was written by Be's VP of Engineering, Steve Sakoman. Steve started the "Big Newton" project at Apple and his experience with the AT&T processor was the reason the first BeBox prototypes used AT&T Hobbit CPUs. Steve returned to Apple as VP of CoreOS or something like that. I was super happy when he came back. I think he is living in the rain forests of Hawaii now, clad only in palm leaves.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Thank you for your service
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> and the political shenanigans began And a lot of coat-tail riding. Kind of the beginning of the end of the good times as an engineer (as far as I was concerned).

Communitivity 4y ago

I think much of the maligning Java gets is either due to people looking at badly written Java (2k LOC classes, factories of factories of factories, 15 arg methods, import * everywhere, etc.), or claims in error because they are not based on modern Java (claiming bad parallelism a la Hensen, citing a lack of modules, noting no functional support). I think Java is a good language if your problem space is ok with the GC and some other quirks. The problem space I've been in has issues with GC, so C++ or Rust are the main choices there (Go too, but not my preference).

ComputerGuru 4y ago
Java has long been crippled beyond the regular GC limitations by lack of value types, but that’s finally, finally going away.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Explains why there are no production Java applications...
  - programmer_dude 4y ago
    FTFY... Explains why there are no high performance production Java applications...
    - abraxas 4y ago
      Yeah, other than Kafka, Spark, Cassandra, Flink, Hadoop, Elasticsearch what has Java ever done for us!
    - reverend_gonzo 4y ago
      Given there are hft firms built on Java…
StevePerkins 4y ago
I read comments like this all the time on HN and Reddit. But it's hard for me to separate real professional experience at day jobs, from hobbyist wishful thinking in personal side projects. All I know is that I attend a lot of Java conferences and meetups, and I'm STILL waiting to encounter a flesh-and-blood human in real life whose employer really wavers between Java and Rust. That's like choosing between a Humvee and a submarine, their optimal problem spaces barely overlap.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >That's like choosing between a Humvee and a submarine, their optimal problem spaces barely overlap. You'd be surprised. For a lot of stuff Rust is a good fit, aside drivers and OSes, Java is too. There are succesful full text search engines written in Java (Lucene, and Elasticsearch on top of it), there are succesful event streaming platforms written in Java (Kafka), there are succesful distributed data processing tools written in Java (Hadoop, Spark), databases (Cassandra), and very very high performance trading engines (LMAX), very high performing servers (rapidoid, smart-servlet), and other such things besides, all categories of which have been quite big domains for C/C++ (and thus something like Rust).
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  Seeing a company (as opposed to a person) choose between Java and Rust would paint a very bleak picture for their future. To me it's an indication that programmers are getting to run wild past the technical domain, after all trying to hire for a Java codebase vs a Rust codebase is enough to kill a company depending on the space due to salary expectations and availability alone.
- Communitivity 4y ago
  Where I work some teams are using Java, and some are just starting to use Rust. Different problem spaces entirely though, as you said. I've seen Java used here for ETL work, Modeling & Sim work, web apps, and Android. I've seen Rust on two projects, both were real-time or near-real-time efforts. The competition I am starting to see is between C++ and Rust, with the few teams looking at Rust loving it. I did recently help write a RFP response that noted software will be written in C++ and Rust, and the RFP was awarded to us. I am in a different world though, as I am a contractor for the DOD. It's more like a lot of small to medium sized companies than one big company, which is why some groups can use Java and others C++ and others Rust. I have the same problem of differentiating between hobbyists and professional experience, both on HN and when interviewing. I had someone tell me they knew Java, then found out they had done maybe 5 months of Java work and didn't know some of the most basic things. As for myself, in terms of writing professional software for clients, I've done the following, in order of amounts worked: Java, C++, Python, Javascript, Erlang, R, Ruby, Clojure, C, Scala, and C#. I've done Rust and Elixir in personal projects, but not yet for clients. I plan to transition to a full-time Rust project in the coming years.