Hi Greg, Bring back dumb terminals and vt100s when life was easy and predictable. Many of us have had the same experience as you what you have expressed.
Perhaps after a nice break of constant weed killing you might get a new lease on life and comeback to do some development as a new framework to beat all frameworks is magically invented (but requires rewrite of all existing working systems). Kind Regards, Steven Parish Software Architect [signature_656824960] BusinessCraft Pty Ltd | www.businesscraft.com.au<http://www.businesscraft.com.au/> | M: 0417 688 599| T:02 4965 5555 | Level 1, 418-422 Hunter Street, Newcastle, NSW 2300 From: Dr Greg Low via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Date: Monday, 7 October 2024 at 1:10 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Cc: Greg Keogh <gfke...@gmail.com>, David Burstin <david.burs...@gmail.com>, kirsten greed <kirsten.gr...@gmail.com>, Dr Greg Low <g...@sqldownunder.com> Subject: RE: Approaching obsolescence Good luck with it, Greg. I will miss your emails here. I read your email below and can relate to 99% of it. In particular, it’s ridiculous what now passes for software engineering. The engineering aspect seems long gone. “Oops something went wrong” is now standard error handling. I also learned to use systems in the days where, when something went wrong, people wanted to know why, and they fixed it. It’s probably increasing complexity that’s stopped real exploration of issues. And the dependency pain is also beyond crazy. Every time I open a VS project that I haven’t opened for 3 months, I know I’m going to spend hours, just trying to get back to where I was last time I opened it. I had one recently that I just couldn’t solve. After 4 hours, I felt I was further from where I started. It was just endless circular dependencies in libraries that I didn’t write, and that the authors had used “to save time”. Initial development time is always the metric, never ongoing maintenance and development. The other big aspect is the churn. You mentioned web apps. I’ve watched those teams constantly rebuilding what they already had, endlessly for over 20 years. It’s interesting to imagine where we could have been if they’d just kept moving forward instead of in a constant rebuilding mindset. I’m just glad that I’ve been spending most of my time in data and analytics, but sadly, those teams are now affected by the same illness. Regards, Greg Dr Greg Low 1300SQLSQL (1300 775 775) office | +61 419201410 mobile SQL Down Under | Web: https://sqldownunder.com<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sqldownunder.com_&d=DwMFAg&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=2rgtwrXggQFZiZbisdwDooYFalucb-vLhjG0McaanBZKn0UVuognuHqfHnjp2AVc&m=I23jyX4AKIv9q2x7A3CQAer9PGCjq8R6DwW7BE1IAhZ1JbigKMrMPRCjs6AqW7h3&s=o3oFliHztOF8D9Nbqaa7KQdqC-zkQNXWl4IqnEG58Wc&e=> | About Greg: https://about.me/greg.low<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__about.me_greg.low&d=DwMFAg&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=2rgtwrXggQFZiZbisdwDooYFalucb-vLhjG0McaanBZKn0UVuognuHqfHnjp2AVc&m=I23jyX4AKIv9q2x7A3CQAer9PGCjq8R6DwW7BE1IAhZ1JbigKMrMPRCjs6AqW7h3&s=NsAibgiqfCxsyc8m2DBKogKQcs3OqE3mkyCjmpoYxTk&e=> From: kirsten greed via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Sent: Monday, 7 October 2024 12:49 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Cc: Greg Keogh <gfke...@gmail.com>; David Burstin <david.burs...@gmail.com>; kirsten greed <kirsten.gr...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Approaching obsolescence Indeed. Who is going to pick up the batton of being so eloquently pissed off? On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 12:30, David Burstin via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>> wrote: I will very much miss you Greg. Your anger at the things you mentioned acted as a proxy for mine, so I didn't have to get angry myself. Whenever I was frustrated, I knew I wasn't alone. Thank you for always taking the time to list your trevails. I learnt quite a few things along the way. Good luck with all you do and I genuinely hope you enjoy your time in the garden. Cheers Dave On Mon, 7 Oct 2024, 12:09 Greg Keogh via ozdotnet, <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>> wrote: Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you. I’m easing into retirement. Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out. Why? I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked. Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”. Overall, what has burnt me out is complexity and instability. I’ll break those topics down a bit. Everything in modern IT is complicated and fragile. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all. That leads naturally to the problem of dependencies. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on. I often hit incomprehensible blocker problems for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right. The Web -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight. Git -- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun. Fads -- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon. Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head. * Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. * I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. * I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. * My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). * Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. * Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. * My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary. In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned. I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came. Greg Keogh -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/ -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/ Disclaimer The information contained in this e-mail and any attachments are strictly private and confidential. This e-mail should only be read by the intended addressee. If you are not the intended addressee, you are strictly prohibited from using, reproducing, disclosing, or distributing the information contained herein and any attached files and/or documents. Unless stated otherwise, this email represents only the views of the sender and not the views of BusinessCraft. Before opening or using any files and/or attachments, we recommend you run your own virus protection, as although we will not knowingly transmit a virus, BusinessCraft accepts no liability for virus transmission
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