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Comment by MrMcCall | Hacker News Reader

Rant accepted :-)

One thing that certainly has changed, over these years, is that the size of applications is much, much larger now.

And, certainly, we never had to think about security in the 90's, for regular-degular business apps, anyway. Now, the security dimension is it own barrel of worms, both affecting our software design and requiring network security specialists as well, configuring our boxen. I doubt very many of us are working on pure intranet apps.

So, yeah, the roots are the same, but the trunk is much larger, higher and much more expansively bushy, and its environment is considerably more dangerous.

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It's definitely harder, as you say. Not only do you have to think about technical aspects of security and privacy, but also the legal requirements for those things, and how they differ across countries.

But the complexity is not so much worse than it was in 2016, and yet in 2016 we could manage it.

The type of things I see in the FAANG world lately would not be happening 10 years ago: CI that randomly fails 5% of the time because everybody knows React, but nobody knows how to set up a Linux machine. The fact that USB drivers on M1 macs are still broken and nobody at Apple knows how to fix them, or that Apple seems to have no one on staff who knows what EDID is.

We're not failing because of new complexity, it's the stuff we put up to manage the old complexity that we can no longer service. And that won't get better until we accept that the answer is not "rebuild it from scratch, but this time let's have new grads do it with no training."

> I doubt very many of us are working on pure intranet apps.

I think this is part of the problem. The reason why your Mac will kernel panic if you plug in two external screens from the same production run is because nobody is working on "purely intranet apps" like the display driver.

I don't want to sound like I believe we were somehow smarter 10 years ago. But you had relatively solid foundations to build on and people were incentivized and given mentorship to attain mastery. We need to bring that back.

Yes to all that, but the blame -- as always -- belongs to the money people. They are the ones chasing shiny new sh_t instead of fixing what their existing systems are f_cking up royally. It bears remembering that those money folks are the ones choosing the CTOs, which is less likely to do with their technical solidity, but more likely to be because they will fall in line. But that's just my educated guess, by understanding money-centric folks and how they almost always operate. The love of money has corrupted and is corrupting so many branches of modern life.

> t bears remembering that those money folks are the ones choosing the CTOs, which is less likely to do with their technical solidity, but more likely to be because they will fall in line.

Wish somebody told me that 25 years ago. I woke up to this reality way too late in my life and career. Now I started getting that it's about emitting the right signals: mostly that you are meek and malleable, if you want to get hired at certain places.

I of course refused to do that, many times, to the detriment of my career. Though maybe it was just shitty luck 7-8 times in a row, who knows. Also Eastern Europe is far from a good environment, so...

Same here, but I never sold my soul to them, so, while not having nearly as much money, I have my self respect. I hope you feel good about fighting the good fight, even if you did so by remaining in your natural, more innocent, state.

Peace be with you.

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