clouded

I get paid pretty well fixing bugs and writing code, that stuff you call "just closing Jira tickets" and "throwing code over the wall". It's also enough to fry my brain and leave me exhausted. But it's obviously worth next to nothing in your view. So yeah, I don't care. I can't figure out if you're going to have to find people a lot smarter than me to do what you're looking for, or people a lot dumber than me.

I happily also work on bugs, not just new features. The thing is, bugs and features completely fries my brain. Especially if you want it done right and not introduce bugs somewhere else. Forget devops for a second, what I'm saying is that what I described is _already_ enough to fry me. I'm done. You're getting nothing else out of me. When you hire an electrician to wire your house, ask him to also do the plumbing while he's at it. He should really "own" the entire house stack. Let's see how he takes it.

The point is obviously to pay less people to do more work. What I don't get is when developers themselves are in favor of it like I constantly see with this devops stuff. There's no way they have any kind of life outside of their job. There's no way they have a wife or children, otherwise I simply don't believe for a second they would be in favor of "developers own all the things yay!".

That sounds really fun, because it's not enough to absolutely fry my brain every day fixing obscure bugs or developing new features. I'd like to also fix the infrastructure. I might also be able to handle the responsibilities of a DBA. My wife and newborn son will understand why I can't stop working until at least 7 pm everyday and yell at them because the stress never stops and only seems to be getting worse.

That was wizards and druids. Wizard spires and druid rings. Enchanters made money casting a spell to cause faster mana regen.

I don't know, I work for the kind of companies that have 20 year old Java codebases. In these companies, they are only relatively recently migrating to AWS. They're at different points along this path, but they seem to converge on the same idea to give all their money to Amazon. And if Amazon is selling a product that does something, then they're going to find a way to use it. I mean, the old application still has to keep doing what it's always been doing, just with more cloud, and with some kind of NoSQL database. That part seems especially important. A few more very important buzzwords are terraform, hashicorp, and kubernetes. I don't know what they are, but apparently without those, software isn't possible.

I thought about how to reply to this, but database roles vary so differently from company to company, it's a bit of a rabbit hole to go down. Whether you call what I described being a DBA or not, I don't think it's reasonable that a software developer would now "own" the database and all that entails. It just so happens that the database fits nicely into being "owned" and managed in AWS. And it also may neatly obviate the need for the DBA role. Although, I think that's debatable too.

I can write a Spring Boot app from zero to a fully functional API interface to the database in one day. Really less time, but that includes unit and integration testing. The front end that will consume that API is another matter so I won't pretend I could do that. Obviously getting this to production won't happen in a day or two. Are you saying the nature of Java itself makes this impossible, and something about Typescript makes it doable? The thing is, a REST API is a solved problem. If you let me use what I know, it'll get done quite fast. If I believed you and went all in on your stack, will you be happy then? Can I master it and feel some kind of self worth in what I do for a living, or will it all be thrown out the window when the next Typescript comes along?

The business customer wants the dashboard now. Today. If they could push a button and have it, they would. I assume "I want it now" sounds unreasonable to you. So why does "I want it next week" not sound unreasonable? If you can do it by next week in Typescript, you can stay up an extra hour or two every night and have it in three days. I'm guessing you draw the line somewhere.

Are you saying I can actually get paid for that? Wait, I really am in the wrong field.

This is how I'd like to be, but my personality or my nature constantly fights it. It doesn't want to go with the flow, it wants to push back.

Yes, I thought the NoSQL hype in general peaked around 2015. God no, MongoDB is out there. And they've realized that in fact data does need a schema. And transactions. So they did that. They'll probably just tack on SQL query ability at some point. It's the biggest disgrace to our field I can think of. From the people promoting and selling it by implying that relational databases just aren't good enough anymore to the developers embracing it with open arms, willingly throwing out however many years of SQL knowledge they've built up.

Relational databases are the result of 50+ years of computer science research. They're beautiful, focused, precise. They're pretty damn close to perfect. They are a solved problem. They're one of those few stable tools I was talking about wanting so badly. So what do we do? Throw it away. I'm too disgusted to continue.

That sounds good, though. Do companies exist that will actually let me master my craft in exchange for maintaining their old code bases and not pull the rug out from under me every few years? Those are the companies I thought I worked at, but even they are susceptible to the trends. Or maybe AWS really is proof that god exists and his name is Jeff Bezos, and literally every application written now needs to be in "The Cloud". It's like one day they just say "Hmm, we have this 20 year old code base. Boring, predictable. Makes us the money. I know what's missing. Some cloud. Hey Java guy, you're a cloud developer now, you already know what that is, right? That's what you do now." Then before I finish thinking that maybe our SQL Server or Postgres in AWS is no big deal, they interrupt "No. MongoDB now. For reasons. It's just better, okay?". "Well, I need to figure out how to get Java to work in Lambda and how Spring Boot fits into the pict..." "No. Typescript, it just makes sense and it's easy, you can pick it up in about an hour." "Wait, what is happening."

I kind of accepted and came to terms early on that what we do (most of us?) is basically boring CRUD type stuff. Somehow, I've come to like being able to go into a big, old code base that no one wants to work on and actually learn it and be able to successfully fix a bug or add a feature. Something about it feels like being a plumber or "blue collar" worker of the programmer world. This is probably related to why I like Java, and why I made this post. It feels like a tradeoff I made (only in my mind): "Okay, I'll work on this boring stuff no one wants to do, but at least I'll get to use boring, stable tools that I can become good at and my experience will count for something." This is the lie.

I appreciate the comment. I believe it is mostly a "me" problem as well. I don't think everyone is an idiot. I do think we have a bad tendency to get bored and want to chase new exciting technologies. Sooner or later anyone would just get tired of it. I'm trying to identify if I need to fail fast and move on, if it isn't already too late.