I can't fight the feeling that this is all circling back to the application server stuff that was popular for a time. And, really, I can't tell when those went so wrong. :(
1. Someone has an idea. It's alright. Really good for their use case. Someone else hears about it, likes it, and adapts it to a similar use case. So and so forth until the idea has a large user base
2. Employees of large companies hear about the idea and implement it
3. Marketing gets a hold of the idea, gives it a flashy name, and uses it in promotions
4. A majority of the loudest voices in the industry get on board so everyone starts forcing this idea on every imaginable use case
5. A lot of people realize this is all too much extra work without much benefit so they start looking for more appropriate solutions
6. return to 1
It's happened with mainframes, object oriented programming, services, micro-services, web-all-the-things, blockchain, steaming data (kafka), sql, nosql, containers, agile, VMs, cloud, and many other things.
It's just technology people are the worst at getting caught up today's fad and I wish we could try to not do that as much.
You have a lot of tech companies digging up gold, and a whole lot more selling shovels to the rest of the crowd.
Most of the software tech world is bullshit. Most best practices are bullshit. And, if I were feeling a bit conspiratorial, I'd say the large tech companies do this on purpose. They promote fads that overburden any smaller company with more modest budgets, thus keeping competitors at an arm's length. Resume-driven-development plays a role in this as well.
A lot of companies following the FAANG cargo cult are digging their own grave and don't even know it. They don't realize they don't have the manpower for microservices. Or the calendar time to make it work and still get product out the door before their competitor that doesn't even unit test eats their entire lunch.
There's hope that companies that have to be competitive from poorer countries will push correct technologies. I see it happening in UK, Brazil, Russia etc.
But it's no good to be big company when Whatsapp can be build by one person you missed to hire.
> Marketing gets a hold of the idea, gives it a flashy name, and uses it in promotions
After a half-decade in the industry, I am beginning to realize there is a lot of bad engineering hiding behind marketing and emoji. So many of these web tools have nightmarish interfaces and add complexity that, for most of the industry, is unnecessary. But their docs pages are full of rocket ships and confetti.... I swear, seeing a page with rocket ship emoji has become such a turnoff. Why do we need our engineering handed to us sprinkled with decorations like a cupcake?
And the imposter syndrome that the entire industry seems to share dictates that a large percentage of developers feel like they need to be using these tools as a badge to wear saying, "Yes, I am with it and hireable."
Meanwhile, the technology itself keeps churning because there is now a profession full of people believing that creating and open sourcing the Next Big Thing in ____ Technology is the best way to move their career forward. People keep reinventing wheels because everyone is focused on making a name for themselves with the new; no one notices the person doing mundane maintenance on Rails or whatever.
I think it's been this way since the 70s/80s to some extent, after having done some reading on the history of the profession. I think it's just scaled with the number of programmers and the Internet has applied its intensification effects.
Good news, you can invest in my new startup where we are solving just that issue with a decentralized social technology blockchain oracle that will make and enforce these decisions, reducing tech churn and enhancing developer productivity.
