The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions

186 points - yesterday at 11:12 PM

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keiferski today at 9:12 AM
I hope I don’t come across as too harsh here, but I think a lot of developers are finally being forced to understand that their high salaries and above-average job security were fundamentally predicated on business models that largely didn’t have a ton of competition. In that kind of environment, there is space for a focus on the actual fundamentals, the things-in-themselves, the theory behind the action. Most of this stuff is good and it was a beneficial situation to have that buffer space to allow it.

But ultimately business reality has changed, largely because achieving business goals is dramatically easier with AI tools. This undercuts a lot of the focus on building solid fundamentals, and in a lot of cases that’ll come back to bite the business. But in many scenarios it won’t, and the industry will rumble on.

Those of us working in marketing or journalism or education have already been forced to accept this new reality decades ago, largely because of inventions by software developers. Now devs are just late to their own party.

ClawsOnPaws today at 1:46 AM
I'm in a similar position to the OP, unemployed for about 10 months, with tons and tons of applications sent both remote and local, and yeah not sure where this is gonna go or what I'm supposed to do. Also disabled, my eyes don't work so that automatically removes many, many non-software jobs I'd otherwise do from the equation.

Don't even really have anything else to say other than that, but maybe commenting it somewhere helps someone else realize they're not alone. I don't know how that helps you or me, but that's what I got. Maybe there's still something for us somewhere, but it is very difficult to stay motivated, and I don't have an answer.

AdieuToLogic today at 4:43 AM
From the well-written article:

  I have spent months adjusting my resume, applying for all 
  jobs where my skill set may be of use, building 
  proof-of-concepts using Claude, and doing cold outreach to 
  anyone who may be interested in my potential products or my 
  services. The well has gone dry. 
A major quandary companies are finding themselves in is "resume fraud", which can be defined here as being inundated with applicants only to find 99%+ have used GenAI to produce a bogus work history tuned to satisfy the job posting. To the point where many companies simply give up trying to identify "real" applicants via online submissions.

It is analogous to email spam in the 90's, before anti-spam technology was mature.

pjmlp today at 10:15 AM
I feel the pain, and if I get unemployed now on my 50's, most likely I will do something else outside computing.

Everyone that praises how they get more productive always forgets that means big corp now needs less of us.

I work on enterprise consulting, and have watched how the change into managed cloud infrastructure, followed by low-code/no-code tooling, has had an impact on team sizes, meaning less devs for the same outcome.

AI driven development is reducing those team sizes even further.

In many European countries, gettting jobs at a later age is really an almost impossible task, the easiest solutions end up trying to get early retirement status, or go self employed, which also isn't without its own set of complications.

arkt8 yesterday at 11:46 PM
More than ever is time to be stoic. Have things but live as having nothing. But as obvious as the author says it was predictable too.

By now... I see in my country high prices for laptops with only 4Gb of Ram and Celerons.

It could do wonderful things if in 2000s people didn't buy the argument that hardware is so cheap so lets write unefficient code. Same hardware that could play an Youtube video in 2000s today cannot even open the website. Electron send hugs...

Now people are mad about AI until when? Oceans be drought like in Oblivion movie?

And professionals? The generation of specialists will pass... and people will blindly depend on Ai soon if the course of things doesn't stop or at least be corrected.

I think the author could have brighter days in future (and still thing in present in some hidden niches) as knowledge will always precious.

The main lesson I have is buy less TI and every buzz promises and find the place where knoledge and craft walk side by side.

donatj yesterday at 11:55 PM
I've come to the conclusion in the last couple years that being the guy who understands how the abstraction works under the hood is treated by companies as more of a liability than a virtue.

More and more places just want Jira tickets done fast instead of someone that's going to push back or question if this is the best way to build some thing. They want the thing, they don't care if it works well. They don't care if it's efficient. They want it now.

We've been moving to React, replacing an internal framework that's worked wonders for us we've been using for over a decade. The biggest part of the move is "hiring".

My general sense is that nobody understands how React works under the hood. The answer I get when I ask questions is generally just "don't worry about it".

Everything is giant overbuilt and terrible because most people never bothered to learn even a single level up from where they do most of their work. The people that do become unhirable. Everything takes hundreds or thousands more cycles and electricity it should because people can't be bothered to understand what they're doing.

alper today at 10:05 AM
Premature abstraction is the root of all evil.
oxag3n today at 12:39 AM
"Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many layers of indirection." Bjarne Stroustrup

That's why you see hundred level call stacks, polymorphism with a single implementation and still errors are hidden or root causes hidden behind "exception caught".

hamasho yesterday at 11:55 PM

  ā€œDuplication is far cheaper than wrong abstraction."
myst today at 8:40 AM
> In the world of computing, we tend to abstract away complexity. Doing so seems liberating. It enables us to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fidelity of our understanding often decreases. We sometimes end up blinding ourselves.

Some ā€œJava in the 90sā€ understanding of abstraction. Proper abstractions break complexity into composable elements. Hence, fidelity of our understanding increases.

dragochat today at 6:32 AM
> I have spent months adjusting my resume

just share the damn thing, someone may have something for you ;)

...I've kind of rarely seen these ppl complaining about work actually sharing their resume or a condensed description of their skills, knowledge and experience

soopypoos today at 4:50 AM

  I spoke a million words
  They didn't mean that much to me
  They rang around my head
  Like empty tuneless harmonies
  Love's great abstraction mine
discardable_dan today at 6:37 AM
You should link to your resume
AussieWog93 today at 4:27 AM
Can't offer you any work unfortunately, but have an updoot. Hope this gets to the top and helps you provide for your son.
slopinthebag today at 5:26 AM
It's not just tech, other industries are experiencing the same hiring woes. I think the economy is deeply broken, it shouldn't work like this and it doesn't seem like there is any hope in fixing it - governments just continue to run up debt as if they can just keep kicking the can down the road indefinitely. eventually the can becomes a brick and you break your foot.

there will be a reset at some point, and software developers will be needed. especially when every piece of software stops working. idk if that will happen before or after an economic collapse tho.

i have no idea where things will go in the future, but i doubt it will be much fun

shadowgovt yesterday at 11:40 PM
Oof. There are two pieces to this story. One is great and one his heartbreaking.

The fact that modern tech has disintermediated people with problems to solve from the need for a "priest class" to commune with the machine to solve the problem is a great thing. It's the goal. The more we do it the better we are making the world for humans.

... the fact that people need to work to eat or provide anything above a subsistence quality of life is not only tragic, it's increasingly abhorrent in a world where automation and simplification via machines has freed up this much raw resource and free time.

If we're pitting LLMs against people's ability to provide for their families, we have lost the thread on why we're doing any of this.

deleted today at 10:10 AM
dividendflow today at 9:21 AM
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alex1sa today at 10:19 AM
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SadErn today at 4:41 AM
I may be missing something, but this doesn't read to me like an abstraction or AI-related problem.

It sounds more like a packaging issue. I know he's attempted to edit his resume, but there's missing information here that OP may not even be aware of.

For instance, I recently became the last of two candidates interviewing for a great opportunity that I sadly lost. When I received feedback, it turned out the hiring committee had a completely different sense of one aspect of my work than I had attempted to convey. I'm glad I got the feedback, but it was frustrating to lose after so many interviews.

Then just recently, I interviewed a candidate at my current company who reminded me of OP. Laid off worker, very nice guy, but he had no idea how to portray himself as a dev at the level he was applying for.

I wanted to call him up and coach him, but it didn't seem appropriate, especially since he didn't ask for feedback.

If you are in this position, find a free coaching program that can help you revamp and resell what you have to offer.

It's not fair to have to do that just to get a chance to be paid a fair wage. But companies get thousands of resumes a month and do dozens of interviews.

We try to give candidates a chance to show us who they are, but if what they are showing us doesn’t line up with the role, or their strengths are buried, there’s only so much we can infer. It sucks, because the resume and interview are not the job. But they are the gate you have to get through before anyone sees the work.