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  • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldtoProgramming@programming.devSoftware Disenchantment
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    9 months ago

    That’s not the problem.

    Software used to be an artisan job, a skilled engineer carefully sculpts a solution for a problem.

    Management didn’t have much to add there, or visibility, this was a world-breaking problem for them, where was their value?

    The solution was issue-tracking, make every line of code a bureaucratic nightmare, ensure panopticon-like visibility for everything, that guaranteed the manager was always in control.

    Progress slowed to a crawl, that’s fine, you just need to hire more developers, hundreds, they scale, right?

    Good programmers stick to startups because large companies are just well-paying torture firms. I wouldn’t go back to Google for any amount of money, but I’ll do a startup almost for free, because they let me write code.





  • This has been a problem forever, the googleization of CS where everything is assumed to scale to gigabytes and therefore all that matters is big-O.

    In systems that’s meaningless, what really matters is memory locality, loop placement, caching/lookaside and other features.

    The JDk is an excellent example of both large scale and small scale optimization, the GC systems and much of the low-level features like locking use microoptimizations while the higher order data structure features use algorithmic optimizations.