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Comment by rmnclmnt | Hacker News Reader

And then there is the manager in the middle that had a previous tech background from 10 years ago but never took the opportunity to keep up.

This type of guy tries to explain to you the task at hand used to be done in a matter of hours when he was still coding himself, and does not understand why it can’t be the same now.

Yead grandpa, I know, I’m stupid. So here you go, here is the keyboard, show me your skill so I can learn from the best!

(Actually the best manager I ever had was really technical and was showing and teaching me stuff in a peer programming fashion!)

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It's a valid and interesting question though why the same task implemented in a 'professional environment' today sometimes (often?) takes many times longer with worse results than 20 or 30 years ago in a small team and with development tools that were much more primitive than what we have today.

Why can't it be the same now, indeed?

Everything should be faster and easier in modern programming languages, frameworks and tools, but very often it isn't. Why?

To be fair, some of the "bloat" can be the fault of developers who wants to use the latest framework that requires a lot of time to learn how to use correctly. New frameworks also often has bugs, issues and poor 3rd party support.

I'm not against learning new tech as part of the job, as it can be a motivating factor for the developers. At the same time we can't ignore that for a startup, it is probably better to use a known technology so that they don't end up fighting the framework as their needs grow beyond the basic tutorial/blog post

Here's a suggestion: If someone finds themselves sending multiple patches to the framework or implementing missing database libraries, they may have chosen the wrong framework/language. It can be very motivating, but the time could have been spent on improving the product.

Usually the answer is that it's not actually the same task.

I ask that myself often.

new things are not always better, and inexperienced devs just use the hype-of-the-month framework to build stuff that miserably fails- see the articles from today about Event Sourcing and CQRS for example...

Absolutely the worst and most of them drove me out of the company due to their incompetence.

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