Comment by eschaton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eschaton | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

No, nobody _says_ this. An enormous number of people make statements that imply they believe this.

Honestly, that’s one of the common criticisms I see of HN: That it’s full of people who believe they’re doing something new when they’re just recreating something old, but because theirs is new it’s better, usually because of why it’s new. (Blank but in Rust, Blank but in Go, blank but in JavaScript…)

In my own experience, this was demonstrated most starkly by how suddenly Subversion became “terrible” when everyone decided to switch to git, while many of the same people considered it great when they were switching to Subversion from CVS. And the same for the SCCS+clones to CVS transition.

Upvote for mentioning Subversion.

Back in 2016 I briefly worked at a old, large corporation that was still using CVS.

During that time management decided that company policy was now to be hip with the younger generation. One very senior manager actually used the expression "we must strive to be the Uber of [our industry]"

This also led to a mandate that we should switch to Git because it was new and shiny.

You can just imagine the how steep the learning curve was for all the old hands, especially as some of them joined the company in the previous century as COBOL programmers.

We were also pulled in to team building sessions where we were encouraged to "think outside of the box" and be "innovative". During one of those sessions I suggested that "you know, we should just use SVN instead" and was promptly shot down.

I feel like I'm the only person who thinks Git is terrible. I hate using it.

You're not the only person. I know a handful of devs who heartily agree with you, and most devs I know don't really love or hate it. It's just the tool they have to use.

I don't hate git, but I do like subversion more. That said, I completely understand why someone would hate git.

> One very senior manager actually used the expression "we must strive to be the Uber of [our industry]"

Oh, boy. That's a very bright signal to run, don't walk, away from that company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com