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Comment by ry_ry | Hacker News Reader

Warm fuzzy nostalgia aside, this article seems to amount to "Learn everything, read everything, do everything, don't bandwagon, Apple is pretty cool. The other stuff is OK too, if you like that sort of thing. Learn Node. PS. Don't harrass people".

It's an amalgamation of every Medium tech-post ever.

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I guess the real message is: believe whatever the mainstream audience believes at the time. You can't really go wrong with always agreeing with whatever the current thought bubble agrees with - and be quick to change your opinions if the herd is moving. When the author saw the derision against Steve Ballmer, and the favor Apple was getting, he made the clear choice to jump ship. And because he was part of that popular herd jumping ship, it worked very well. Follow the wind.

It's actually a pretty good point and is a decent way to always remain relevant. You can't be left behind if you're always on top of the latest thought trends.

EDIT: A missing piece the author points out too: don't be an early adopter of a thought trend (Point 1: Forget the hype). Only jump in when it becomes mainstream. If you adopt something before it becomes mainstream, there's a chance it can fail. If you wait until it is mainstream, but get in just as it becomes mainstream, you get the benefit of being an early adopter and the benefit of never being on the unpopular viewpoint.

So your always going to be playing catch up - back in 94 when i had been playing with the www I volunteered to go to Edinburgh for a month to work on a cutting edge RAD/DSDM Project.

Basically I told my then boss see you after Christmas - If I have followed that advice I would have stuck with Oracle and Java or spent my career in Mainframes

> I would have stuck with Oracle and Java or spent my career in Mainframes

And last I heard, there are tons of job openings asking for experts in Oracle and Java.

So how exactly would that have been terrible in terms of getting a steady income?

Well enough if you want a traditional 9-5 job (which is fine if it suits you) - pity Java is such a PITA to work with though and Oracle do charge a lot! for there product.

Trouble is if your company pivots and you have been doing Mainframe COBOL for 20 years - you might find transitioning to a new language hard.

I would happily go back to mainframes if given the opportunity. I miss the days of the "priesthood of the computer". I sorely miss linear languages like COBOL and PL. Yes, yes, I'm old fashioned, but man, were those the days. I miss programming on my 8-bit Commodore 64, praying I wouldn't run out of space on my floppy drive. Anyone remember Creative Computing magazine. I wrote every program in every issue for quite some time.

Now? I'm stuck working for a salary in a job that pays the bills. I live in Texas (I know, I know) where IT salaries are already low. Texas has that "right to work" mentality. My bosses are not real IT guys in the sense that they love IT. They're in it for the salary, whereas I'm in it because I still love it after a span of pushing bits over three decades. I would retire only if I won the lottery, but if I did that, I would likely buy a Z-Series mainframe and spend my days playing.

I get some of that "praying I [won't] run out of space" with programming microcontrollers for home projects.

> Trouble is if your company pivots and you have been doing Mainframe COBOL for 20 years - you might find transitioning to a new language hard.

Then you are not following the advice discussed.

Well there was a period when it looked like the mainstream was going to switch away from Java, but then Android was released. Java is heavily mainstream still. If you're optimizing, it's still a good bet to stick with. But be ready to jump off if Android switches languages away from Java which may pull enough mind share to make Java a 'niche'.

At least, that's my interpretation of the article's logic mixed with what appears mainstream to me. There's a lot of room for subjectivity, but it's difficult to argue that Java/Android isn't an extremely mainstream direction.

> It's an amalgamation of every Medium tech-post ever.

Very well summarized.

While I enjoyed this post somehow, maybe because I was thinking of the good old times, I didn't feel comfortable reading: I found his views having a touch of an ubiquitous negativity and slight frustration. I disagree with many of his points. And I miss one clear message.

Yet, your sarcastic summary is a breath of fresh air in the HN comments...

I wouldn't call it sarcasm. I had the same feeling while reading.

The OP contains a lot of opinions about a lot of different subjects. An amalgamation.

I don't think amalgamation means what you think it means (obligatory reference to 'The Princess Bride' ;)).

And if you mean by amalgamating that he united or tied together a lot of different opinions on a lot of different things, how is that unpleasant?

He is talking about daring bets on technologies with a potential. Then insists you learn Node.js. If anything my bet is that JS is not worth learning at all because future is all about WebAssembly (and LLVM effectively - he is right about that).

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