throwaway189262

I'm of the opinion that any large project will eventually take as long as devs will tolerate. About a half hour.

We run mostly Java backend and JS frontend, same story.

Tons of opportunities for optimization but company doesn't want to spend the time and devs appreciate the extra fuckoff time

> As of a few years ago you can choose which rides you take without penalty.

That wasn't there before and I have no reason to believe it now without evidence. Turning down rides always had negative effects such as less rides being assigned to you.

> The back-to-back ride thing has nothing to do with having the Lyft app installed or not

You should look this up in older news articles. AFAIK that's just not true. Maybe it's changed, but at one point Uber was changing their app behavior when you had Lyft driver app installed.

> If you drive when it's busy the incentives don't matter.

So you're implicitly agreeing with me that the incentives are perverse and encourage you to drive during peak times?

> I don't know any Uber drivers in my city who lease their cars from Uber. Never heard of this happening.

Then I encourage you to read about this. There's a large fraction of people who don't believe anything unless it's happened to them or their friends personally. And I think this is a shame given how available information is with today's internet. This definitely 1000% happens. I've seen it with my own eyes.

That was rude especially for HN, my apologies. I'm a big Java fan but you're right about verbosity and ceremony about startup. There's ways around it but not stuff you would read in a book. Tribal knowledge really like starting a project using a maven archetype and using lombok judiciously.

Java gets a bad rap which bothers me because it's really a good choice for backend work even today. Sometimes it bothers me enough that I lash out needlessly.

I'm a wage slave, but years ago I helped a struggling consulting agency blow up.

It's usually marketing. That's probably why revenues are low too. Once we had marketing sorted out we had more work coming in than we knew what do do with. So we promptly raised our rates and became small but profitable.

Don't quit your day job until you have too much work to do it.

I don't want to dump a rant (but I did anyways) but start online and start local. Do geofenced ads on Google and Facebook. Put in your ads that you're close by. Even in online age companies they can drive by and see have a huge edge, so this is best place to start with ads, you will have a solid handicap against powerful national ad campaigns. Know your market, for instance, we discovered a lot of older guys running small businesses listen to certain AM radio stations and ads there are super cheap. Some of them still read newspapers too. Lots of little insights like that eventually give you an edge. Marketing is all a big competition for eyeballs at the lowest price.

Another plus was partnering with an IT company. We gave them IT work, and they gave us software dev work when there wasn't an off the shelf fix. After years of this the owners merged the two companies for good profit.

Organic reach is just as important as ads, if not more. Figure out what problems you could solve for clients and start writing articles about them. Don't outsource this to ad agencies. They write fluffball articles with no substance and Google will deepsix you. Find the most knowledgeable person on the subject that doesn't want a fortune or even who wants to promote their own shit that doesn't compete with you. Humble-brag but I have some articles related to my specialty that still rank #1 on Google for our targeted keywords a decade after leaving that place. At one point 20 articles that I wrote brought in 70% of traffic. No idea what their metrics look like now, but I'm sure they still bring in tons of traffic to this day. TLDR: organic reach is super important because unlike ads, it's free.

Your best bet early on is copying successful competitors. There's a lot of services out there to monitor competitors ad campaigns and website organic reach/links. Mimic your competitors at first, leaning on closer physical distance to make up for worse targeting until you got your beat then rise up against them or find your own niche.

Again small advantages build up. One of our biggest local competitors used a help widget on every site they wrote. I eventually found all of their clients from this using DNS and we systematically called them all and took a good fraction that had issues with their hosting.

I am convinced it's all marketing. Software consulting is a generic business like a restaurant unless you specialize in military guidance systems or Fortran or something. Just like a restaurant, the food matters but marketing is what makes or breaks you

Multi threading has zero overhead in normal Java web frameworks. It's thread-per-request so you don't need to worry about thread safety any more than you do in JS. That you didn't know that implies you haven't worked with many Java web frameworks.

JS has become a huge language, just as big as Java. So is the runtime, V8 is gigantic, comparable to JVM. I use both every day.

Vert.X is nearly identical to Express JS including all the callback stuff. And that's one of the harder Java frameworks to use

I don't think an ask thread is a good spot for a rant, but the JVM languages have changed a lot over the years.

You imply that Java is big and heavy when JS/Node Python and Ruby use more ram and run slower than Java in basically every benchmark. And V8 runtime and JS language complexity is just as big as Java these days.

Java is very scalable. If I was force to work on a million+ line project I would pray it was Java or C#.

Java ain't going to win any beauty pageants but it's a solid all rounder. The guy you keep on roster because he can fill any position, not because he's the star hitter.

DropWizard is great. Spring Boot was based off it.

It's a nice mix of simplicity and effectiveness.

If you want performance above all else, Vert.X isn't too hard to use. But the async API's are a PITA, much like ExpressJS.

I heard it years ago, can't find a source either. I believe it was something related to a court case. Some legal argument that could apply if total employees was over 50% contractors.

I have also never heard of a contractor for big tech being hired full time. Ever.

It's similar to McConnells recent "My advice for corporations is stay out of politics. Not including contributions of course"

The hypocrisy level continually reaches new heights

The irony is that Republicans caused this. More specifically, the Senate leader Mitch McConnell.

He was instrumental in the Citizens United supreme court decision that gave free speech and unlimited campaign contributions to corporations as if they were people. Of course other Republicans hailed this decision at the time.

Well, now that corporations are saying and doing things they don't like I bet they're having second thoughts about their shameless loyalty to corporations over people.

Republicans of old would never fine corporations for enforcing their own community rules. But the Republican party of today is something else. Something darker, or much whiter, maybe both.

Let us remember that big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook generally have 49.9% of their employees contractors.

Why nearly 50%? Because that the highest amount you can have without additional liability. If they could get away with it, far more than 50% would be contractors.

The gig loophole benefits only super rich corporations. It's crazy to see so many people defending it. The sole purpose is undermining a century of worker protections.

Technology has made it easy to tweak jobs just enough so they fall under contractor status. When these laws were written nobody could imagine systems where work is reassigned in seconds. The rules about flexible schedules etc we made for a different time.

I've driven for rideshare. It's not like freelancing at all. You can't turn down rides. Can't set your prices. Can't choose your clients. Can't do your own advertising. You can only drive certain models and years of cars. There's rules about modifications you can do and how you treat customers. You have little to no control once you "sign on". It's a regular job with flexible hours

As someone that's forced to write C occasionally Rust is a godsend. I prefer high level languages but when I need the performance it's nice to have something that doesn't feel like it's from the 80's.

C is extremely painful. C++ is a shitshow. Rust is glorious in comparison.

Rust, or something like it, will definitely replace C/C++ someday. And rust has way more traction than anything else

It won't replace JVM/CLR. Rust community is pretty against GC and even though lifetimes are wayyyy better than C memory management they're not nearly as convenient as GC.

If Rust ever gets a good GC it might very well replace VM languages. But even if they started now, it would take years.

Rust also has long compile times. Java and C# projects, even huge ones, build in a couple seconds because compilation is done in JIT. Go is AOT but sacrifices some performance for fast compilation too. It's important for a general purpose language where performance is not #1 concern but maybe #2 or #3. Same story as GC. Sacrifice a small amount of performance for convenience. That's not what Rust is designed for.

Rust is positioned as a systems language to replace C dialects and it that I think it will be wildly successful