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Discussion on: Is software developer fatigue a thing?

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snaidamast profile image
snaidamast

The fact that the author has chosen to write this kind of article is an indication of the stresses, strains, and weariness that is now infesting the software profession.

The ideas that innovation is great and change is a good thing are complete nonsense as both concepts are merely buzzwords for vendors and individuals to hype their latest developments.

The problem our profession has today is that it has way too much of a good thing because it has become so easy to develop new tools and frameworks and as a result, everyone is now doing it. This has taken a sever toll on the professionals involved in our work.

It all began with the Open Source movement, and though a good thing, basically "commoditized" software development into something that should be given away freely. This in turn destroyed the flourishing "cottage business" of professional development that allowed us software developers and engineers to create new products and make a reasonable living off of them.

What do you have now? Because of Open Source, the major vendors now control who gets to make money.

Open Source paved the way for what this author is writing about where the profession has too many tools, too many frameworks, and too many languages.

There is really very little need for more than handful of languages that provide the overwhelming majority of capabilities today that application development requires. Such languages would include C\C++, Java, C#, and the venerable VB.NET. There is nothing that cannot be written with these languages and this includes everything from artificial intelligence to games alongside the massive development requirements for business as well as those for consumers. And all these languages can be used for every platform now available today.

So why do we need so many other languages, very few that will ever attain the massive community support that these aforementioned languages all have?

Human Stupidity for the most part...

Today's world, especially in the United States, is all about "ME"! How do I feel better about myself? How can I create something that I will be proud of? How will doing so affect my presence in the world? ME! ME! ME!

And it follows consequently, to our profession as well. This has been all brought about as a result of the maturing Open Source Movement and the "junk technologies" that infest everyone's daily lives; from smart-phones to smart refrigerators. Not a single decision needs to any longer be made using simply one's own brains; we have technology for that.

This social devolution plays out quite seriously on the pathetic social networking platforms where everyone is allowed to expose themselves to their heart's desires while demanding of all things that the platform vendors for these stupid tools provide privacy for everyone's exposures.

Human Stupidity at its most paradoxical.

The outgrowth of all this has been the constant barrage of new languages and tools to promote a microcosmic society within our own profession that is all about the disjointedness that all the previous creations mentioned have developed for the world today.

It is no longer "cool" to turn to a standard 3rd generation language for our work. We now need some new, "cool" language that has a unique feature or two to create our next great, development effort. We need a myriad of tools and frameworks so we have a variety of choice to decide, which one would be the best for the job. And yet, who any longer really does any in depth analysis as to the feasibility of so many tools? No one really.

Instead, we have JavaScript and its many foundations flushed into the profession as some type of "go to" resort for just about anything that can be produced for the web.

And yet at the same time, people scream for performance. How is that supposed to work when using interpretive JavaScript in an application infrastructure that doesn't even have proper and compartmentalized tiers implemented.

In addition to this, our profession stuffs everything it can on the Internet, whether it needs to go there or not. To develop an efficient client-server application is almost taboo since it is not "cool" as it is not on the web with all its interdependent complexities.

After 42+ years in the profession, from which I retired from in 2014 to continue with my own development efforts, I saw what was once the "crown jewel" of the US economy spiral down into nothing more than a profession flooded with "gibberish" replacing hard won knowledge bases with levels of standardization that were implemented by the vendors to a good degree to what we have now where there seems to be nothing but buzzword terminology to replace hard-core understandings as to how high quality applications are to be built. We have Agile, Scrum, DevOps, design patterns, and god knows what else to push any rational decision processing into the realms of fantasy since all the necessary design foundations were already there founded upon decades of research and experimentation that proved their worth.

This is not the first piece to ask such questions about the realities of our profession and most certainly will not be the last.

And will be up to the younger professionals to determine what type of profession they really want. One that is continuously flooded with junk technologies each and every day or one that has a sense of sanity and purpose that is encompassed by a standardized set of practices and tools so that quality application development can be produced instead of what is good for "ME"!

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arnebab profile image
Arne Babenhauserheide

I think one of the reasons for these problems is the way information flows: Via talks and advertisements instead of via investigating options in depth.