Yikes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always been this way to some extent - not enough people who can look into a problem and understand what is happening to make many things actually work correctly, so iterate with new shiny thing.
It seems like the last 4-5 years though have really made
it super common again. Bubble maybe?
Huge horde of newbs?
Maybe I’m getting crustier.
I remember it was SUPER bad before the dot-com crash, all the fake it ‘til you make it too. I even had someone claim 10 years of Java experience who couldn’t write out a basic class on a whiteboard at all, and tons of folks starting that literally couldn’t write a hello world in the language they claimed experience in, and this was before decent GUI IDEs.
> It seems like the last 4-5 years though have really made it super common again. Bubble maybe?
Cloud providers have successfully redefined the baseline performance of a server in the minds of a lot of developers. Many people don't understand just how powerful (and at the same time cheap) a single physical machine can be when all they've used is shitty overpriced AWS instances, so no wonder they have no confidence in putting a standard RDBMS in there when anything above 4GB of RAM will cost you an arm and a leg, therefore they're looking for "magic" workarounds, which the business often accepts - it's easier to get them to pay lots of $$$$ for running a "web-scale" DB than paying the same amount for a Postgres instance, or God forbid, actually opting for a bare-metal server outside of the cloud.
In my career I've seen significant amount of time & effort being wasted on workarounds such as deferring very trivial tasks onto queues or building an insanely-distributed system where the proper solution would've been to throw more hardware at it (even expensive AWS instances would've been cost-effective if you count the amount of developer time spent working around the problem).
Just to give a reference for those that don't know, I rent a dedicated server that has 128gb of ram and 16 core processor (32 threads) and 2tb of local SSD storage and virtually unlimited traffic for $265 USD a month. A comparable VM on AWS would be around $750 a month (if you reserve it long term) and then of course you will pay out the nose for traffic.
It seems like the last 4-5 years though have really made it super common again. Bubble maybe?
Huge horde of newbs?
Maybe I’m getting crustier.
I remember it was SUPER bad before the dot-com crash, all the fake it ‘til you make it too. I even had someone claim 10 years of Java experience who couldn’t write out a basic class on a whiteboard at all, and tons of folks starting that literally couldn’t write a hello world in the language they claimed experience in, and this was before decent GUI IDEs.