Ask HN: Do you feel the quality of SWE has gone down?

I honestly can't remember a time in my career when I've looked at a codebase and thought to myself "what this dev really needs is a more thorough understanding of CPU pipelines and virtual memory". Ed Yourdon once wrote something like "No project was ever cancelled because the developer couldn't address the serial bus". I'm much more concerned with bootcamp graduates not understanding good class design or appropriate unit testing than I am about any lack in low level mechanics.

I don't know if SWE is getting better or worse, but I do think that most SWE operates on a much higher level of abstraction than it used to, and I think that's good thing.

Because, and your acronyms hint at this: software engineering is not the same as computer science anymore, and really hasn't been for decades now.

Software engineering _relies on_ computer science, but the fundamentals that computer science is concerned with are about as far removed from software engineering as pure maths is removed from physics: no modern software engineer needs to have a deep understanding of the hardware-level behavioural fundamentals underpinning the solutions that CS already gave us to problems associated with that hardware. The work of a modern software engineer instead relies on the solutions to those problems working.

And sure, you can become a specialist, and dive into those subjects if you want to, but progress in any field is made by solving problems to the degree that the next wave can simply rely on the solutions being "a given": yesteryear's software engineers built the tools that today's software engineers rely on, without having to question that those tools get the job done.

And while in exceptional cases, they won't, and you might need a computer scientist to look at the tool and go "ah, that's because: ..." (and that can be the same person, applying a different discipline to the problem), it is that evolution of tooling that necessarily takes us further and further away from what at any point in time is "fundamental". The things you list are still fundamentals, but of a different field entirely by now.

You have a pretty negative take. There are fewer software engineers with the skills you mention. But it's kind of the wrong question. Without these skills, individuals are still capable of offering tremendous value to tech companies. I work at a solid company with a great team. Those with solid CS fundamentals have certainly been profoundly helpful when designing systems that need to be performant and reliable. But other, passionate engineers with liberal arts backgrounds have added insane value to the product as well. It's about curiosity, intelligence, and thinking about what's needed to get the job done.

No, I don't think the quality has gone down. I think this outlook is a way of gatekeeping engineers who don't have a formal CS background. I happen to be one of them.

Most people who go to a bootcamp (I did not, but have hired a developer who did) do not end up working in a role that requires understanding of the 5 topics above you mentioned, with the exception of cache and maybe algorithms. It's just not what most bootcamps are targeted for.

I have seen a lot of terrible code from both sides, and don't believe the quality of the code to be a function of the developer's level of formal education.

Depends on the axis.

In terms of working software that is somewhat dependable, we're probably better than ever before.

In terms of using the system resources efficiently? Unmitigated disaster. So. Much. Bloat. Chat clients should never use gigabytes of RAM

In terms of average talent level? It seems like its getting worse every decade. I was talking to some recent CS grads about Turing completeness and they had no idea what I was talking about. How can you have a CS degree and not know Turing completeness? Also so many developers refuse to understand how their tools work. There are so many developers terrified of C. C is warty, but to be frank, if you can't write some system level code you're going to be a weak developer. If you don't understand how your machine works, and you're unwilling to leave the world of HTML and Javascript, you're always going to be a novice

I have a theory about the "10x developer" thing. I think so many software developers are essentially "expert beginners" (https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th... ) that when someone comes along with experience and competency they look "10x". But in truth, I think its more that the industry has a lot of 1/10th developers so the 1x guys look like rock stars.

I also think in terms of project management we've gone in a really wrong direction, and the rise of the expert beginner is not unrelated. Early agile had the right mindset, but its morphed into a gross ineffective caricature of itself that operates on a factory metaphor. The expert beginners need all the micromanaging that comes from scrum, and the project managers are more than happy to do it, and the people that know what they're doing get dragged down into it because management thinks every programmer is as bad as the average.

I agree that the developers we hire nowadays don’t know as much about virtual memory, CPU pipelines etc. But they don’t need to.

I feel that the Open Source ecosystem has made building software a lot easier.

Also, the sheer number of software engineers have gone up. 20 years ago those who chose to become software engineers where often very passionate about it. Today, it’s like any other trade, you get a larger variety of people.

My last point is that organisations have also matured and know more about what to expect from software engineers. When I started programming professionally I had a lot more time to finish any given feature, today everything needs to get out the door faster.

Overall, I think we are building better software today.

I am not a developer, so take this with a huge grain of salt, but this comment sounds a bit like old school photographers saying iPhone and Instagram are not for “real photographers.”

In 1994, my new boss turned to me and said "I've been despairing that no young people seem to have the hacker spirit any more. No sense of technical adventure."

So I reminded him that Socrates was supposed to have said "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise."

He got over it.

> It feels like a lot engineers now days don't seem to have a good cs background. They don't see to understand things like cache, paging, virtual memory,cpu pipelines, algorithms or other things pretty fundamental to CS.

Yes but nearly every software developer job is web stuff these days and in the web world, they don't need it. (Cue all the HN posters saying "college is a waste of money" and "it's just a piece of paper".) All they need to be able to do is glue together libraries and frameworks created by people who do happen to have good CS backgrounds. You really have to go out of your way to find jobs that actually require knowing "cache, paging, virtual memory, cpu pipelines, algorithms", etc.

> When we have the next industry crash (.com crash) will these people stick around?

It won't crash, because everybody needs a web site these days, but it will become commoditized because the bar to entry keeps getting lower and lower. I've seen some comments already on HN saying that software pay is gradually becoming bimodal.

I've worked with a number of bootcamp graduates and I've found the experience extremely refreshing. There are perspectives, skillsets and domain expertise that can come from having transitioned into an engineering career later or from other fields, that more conventional computer scientists often don't/can't have. Whilst there are situations where pre-requisite CS knowledge is crucial, my experience is that there are equally many where that doesn't factor heavily into your ability to effectively work in a technical role.

I don't mean to be disrespectful (but will risk doing so as I thought the original question was negative), but ironically as an employer I would place preference over the ability communicate effectively and respectfully, unlike the way the question above was asked.

N.b I'm a "vanilla" CS grad (although wouldn't claim to have an in-depth knowledge of the areas you've listed twice).

1. Yeah, people seem to be copy-pasting incoherent difficult-to-read stuff everywhere.

2. No seriously though - what you've written touches on CS and completely ignores designing programs. You can be great at CS and still write crappy programs.

3. Though it's unlikely to have an industry-specific crash, recessions are inevitable and then people (competent or not) lose their jobs.

4. I guess my whole point is - even if these thing were true, so what? Each individual person has the choice to go into whichever field they like. Each person is also free to spend as much time and effort as they want on improving their CS and software-engineering skills. This knowledge isn't somehow exclusive to degree holders - there are so many free resources on CS and SWE. And as I mentioned, the degree doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to create good software.

It hasn't gone down, it has expanded and as a result diluted the general base of knowledge. At the same time, that isn't as much of a problem as you'd think as most 'SWE' isn't really that, isn't more of a cookie cutter basic CRUD/Feed/CMS setting where real in-depth knowledge isn't required to make a product work 'good enough' and keep a job.

There are still plenty of people that actually do know the theory and actually do work on low-level stuff, but at the same time the reality is that the olden days of engineering aren't coming back; they are what is currently often referred to as the '10x engineer' type of work. It doesn't scale, it doesn't work well with others and it doesn't return on investment all that well.

Unless you need someone who works on hardware, kernels, compilers, runtimes or severely constrained constructions (query planners, memory managers, transaction engines etc.) it really doesn't matter as much as it used to.

I'm sure the absolute number of software engineers who have a background in CS is increasing. However, because of the massive increase in developers without a solid background in engineering or CS is increasing, the feeling in the industry matches the OP's sentiment, (which I've shared for a while now.) The ratio of quality developer to unskilled developer is worse than ever. This is what I've been referring to as the Blue-collarization of Software Development. I believe that building software is going to become much more similar to being an auto mechanic in the decades to come. There is absolutely a need and an availability of very skilled software developers, but the day to day work is going to be much more accessible to those without the rigorous CS background that one needed 10 years ago.

I've worked on a lot of old code bases that were built by this previous generation of engineers, and let me tell you, their code was awful. Software engineering has learned a lot over the last decade.

Sure there are some things that aren't emphasised as much but most of them aren't super useful. JavaScript, css, and mobile development are way more useful today than algorithms, cpu pipelines etc...

Most of the last round of unicorns you could build without any of the items you mentioned, but you couldn't even get started without an understanding of modern web or mobile development.

This is coming from someone who is by no means an expert on any of those things but took a bunch of courses on them in college and have only used them a handful of times in the last decade of professional software development to eek out very small performance improvements.

It looks like these things don't matter anymore for a lot of companies or at least they are not valued. Creating something that works somewhat in the smallest amount of time possible to get the customer to pay and that management can check the crosses in the excel sheet.

The Java app at my current company does 23k database queries uncached for a directory listing with 100 files in a folder. There are two devs at work there for years, nobody bothered to look up the rather well documented api docs that just use a single query for that task from the upstream software we use.

Personally I'm frustrated and I'm looking to learning more CS to get a job that values quality over quantity.

I'm not sure quality has gone down as much as the need for programmers has drastically expanded. Now pretty much all businesses have the need for custom software to some degree, and many of those businesses do not have a big budget.

What do you get when you have millions of businesses who need ten million dollars worth of software but can only spend 100k? You get lots of shitty developers coming out of the wood work to meet this demand, and you get what you pay for.

In the 12 years I've been doing this, I've just noticed that all the good software developers are working at the places with big bucks, and all the shitty developers are picking up the scraps.

I would generalize it more: people don’t seem to understand the domains they’re getting into. I know devs who are expected to do a lot of Linux work who flounder on the command line. I know devs who write “services”, but don’t know how to administrate the server their service runs on. I know devs doing database work who can’t write JOINs.

I think this is partially because of how democratized the field has become. Any asshole with a computer and some time can write code. I don’t think this is fundamentally a bad thing. But after a certain point, it stops being a hobby for some, and turns into a job. The line is blurry, but at some point you have hobbyists writing software-as-a-service with no knowledge of things like security. I don’t want to gatekeep, but I also don’t want dilettantes getting my identity pwned because they took a JavaScript course and thought that qualifies them to write a SaaS product.

Admittedly, it never hurts to understand the computer at a fundamental level. I think anyone who does automatically has a leg up on anyone who doesn’t. I expect my mechanic to know how engines work, even if they just change my oil. You certainly can change oil without being a mechanic, but you lose out on some depth of knowledge.

So yes, I think there’s rampant dilettantism in the field right now. Short of licensure and/or some laws with teeth, I don’t know how to prevent it. You can nail a lot of legs to a dog and make it an octopus, and there’s still apparently money to be had there, so the octopus keeps moving.

I've been coding for at least two decades, and possibly a lot longer if I want to stay vague about my age. It's definitely not getting worse imo. First, a CS education is nice to have but being a great engineer and having a degree aren't highly correlated. What makes a great engineer is someone who loves programming, and someone who builds lots of things. You learn by doing. You cannot stop people like that from learning and improving.

There are certainly far more programmers every passing year. Does someone need to be a highly trained engineer to build a small marketing website? Likely no. Is it a bad thing for our industry to have such a high demand for programmers with varying degrees of ability and training? I don't think so. What I envision instead is a future where basic programming is like driving a car. Lots of people will know how to do it.

I follow many great engineers and can even look at their code and learn from them. They are building things the best of us thought would be impossible a couple of decades ago. It's a super easy choice: if I could choose to go back to any point in time in the history of software engineering in order to experience the highest levels of quality, I would choose to be here, now.

Most engineers have always been terrible. Been true for decades.

But perhaps with the demand for engineers really high, and the economy at full employment, and the big tech companies growing and also explicitly optimizing hiring practices for things other than "best SWE skills", more of the not very competent folks are getting into the places you don't expect to find them

Yes, I do and I think a lot of it has been driven by hard and fast (reckless) development of really odd frameworks like react native:

class AnimatedCollapsible extends React.Component { state = {expanded: false}; render() { return ( <View style={{overflow: 'hidden'}}> <TouchableOpacity onPress={() => { LayoutAnimation.configureNext(LayoutAnimation.Presets.spring); this.setState({expanded: !this.state.expanded}); }}> <Text> Press me to {this.state.expanded ? 'collapse' : 'expand'}! </Text> </TouchableOpacity> {this.state.expanded && <Text>I disappear sometimes!</Text>} </View> ); } }

Look at this code. How is this okay? When were framework developers taught that mixing business logic and UI is a good idea? Seriously?

> When we have the next industry crash (.com crash) will these people stick around?

I feel like the people who jumped into boot camps to make a quick buck will move on to the next hot thing

I'd like to think that the people who are in the industry because they actually enjoy the challenges and problem solving will stick around

SW development isn't real engineering as computer scientists are not real engineers. That being said, we do have a generation of coders who are proficient at googling for terms then doing copying/pasting. They hit brick walls when it comes to debugging and testing code.

I strongly disagree with your understanding of software engineering. In my experience, the best engineers adapt as layers of abstraction permit them to no longer be as concerned about the lower level considerations, such as the ones you noted. The engineers most useful to a business are generalists who have an enormous breadth of knowledge and can specialize at will, where and when it becomes necessary. Much of the knowledge you’ve acquired in the past, will and should atrophy as it becomes less useful. You need to stop having a fixed impression of what a software engineer is and realize that the definition is constantly evolving.

Yes. In my last job, most people were self taught with no formal education, it was a real hustle to explain basic concepts. And every discussion didn’t really progress because everything had to be explained in detail because they simply didn’t understand the concept. This was exhausting and draining. Also there were an naive belief that everything on the internet is true.

At my current job, people people have a way better understanding of how things work and a better understanding on how to apply them. Discussions are much more simple and shorter. There’s a huge difference in how the work is done and how you do code reviews because they are much more spot on and not haphazard or random.

There are at least two factors in motion in this question: the exponential growth of abstraction layers and the career trajectory of the observer. Up to a point somewhere in midlife, the observer will have increasing knowledge of more and more of the layers, whereas the average SWE will have knowledge of only the top few. Hence the observation of a quality decline. Wait a few more years until the ever accelerating layers are coming tetris-like too fast for you to handle with your declining brain power and the observation will reverse.

A lot of the things you mentioned are abstracted away from most Software Engineers nowadays. Of course it's good to know how these things work, but for most SWE jobs it is not necessary to have a strong grasp of them. The world of software has grown tremendously, many companies need rather simple software that is built with high level frameworks and tools. On the other hand there are still people building compilers, game engines, routing algorithms or work on embedded systems where all the things you mentioned are much more important.

Backend code has moved a little. Java's popularity might even be waning.

I don't know about anyone else, but must of my time is spent wrangling enormous scripts in tools like CloudFormation to deploy relatively small amounts of code.

What's happened with JavaScript on the frontend is nuts though. I can't follow what those guys are up to anymore and can only assume they have a better understanding of caching, algorithms, etc with the explosion of code there compared with the days before even jQuery.

No. It's never been easier to make high quality software. I can run my own cloud environment, make quality user interfaces, integrate with third party providers to trivially do previously highly messy things like accept payments or send text messages, all as a solo developer.

Not because I'm particularly good but because a lot of the foundational work is now available with `git clone`.

There's a lot of crap around of course, but that's always been the case.

CS has expanded so much that unless you are a genius you can't really know it all, so corners have to be cut. Depending on where you position yourself in the stack, deep understanding of hardware may or may not be important.

As for algorithms: for most of the stuff what people really need is to have a basic grasp of complexity of the common containers and time accesses to various parts of the system but beyond that–just learn on the go.

I think what has gone down is the value of the aforementioned skills. Aside from caching and algos, very few engineers I know at FAANG are using any of these. I have a formal CS background, but in the industry these topics have been abstracted away to the point where you don't need to worry about them 99% of the time.

If you're building extremely complex or expensive systems, then sure, but most businesses aren't.

Just on your last point, I think that when we have the next economic crash some of these people, and also talented engineers as well, won't stick around in software engineering. Careers in technology have stages and not everyone stays a developer their whole career. It will be impossible to measure what exactly percentage what people without "a good CS background" leave.

Only irked about toy projects like terminals on Electron or reinventing the wheel instead of chaining shell commands.

On paging and CPU architectures, these aren't universal or usually supplied with standard libraries. Only serve to obfuscate and concretisize your codebase.

Just optimise your hot paths, let Intel/AMD/whoever make better optimising compilers for what they engineered.

Has quality gone down? No. What you're talking about with people not knowing these various things and going to bootcamps, those are all developers. Developers are not engineers, no matter how many times HR mixes up the terms.

It's like asking if the quality of mechanical engineers has gone down because mechanics don't know x, y, and z.

Recently I had the pleasure of working with people in a project who I (CS background) hired myself, and I now couldn’t care less about how much they know about memory paging. The most important traits to me are:

1. Intrinsic motivation to be productive and solve problems

2. Ability to communicate well, especially via specifications and Slack.

Anything else can be learned in a few months max.

Nah, I don't think so. Software engineering has always been a field where the barrier to entry is quite low, and where a lot of people didn't need a CS background to get started there. And for many of them, they still don't. Web development for instance requires more knowledge of how browsers work rather than the computers they run on.

Even so, the number of mediocre/terrible software engineers and web developers doesn't seem to have changed much overall. We all know of old school desktop software that was incredibly poorly written. We all know examples of games which were incredibly poorly written. There have been badly coded, badly designed websites from people with little experience in the field since the web first became a thing.

Plus people joined because it paid decently back then too. The dotcom boom brought in a lot of people who only cared about the wage slip at the end of each month. The early days of gaming had tons of people jumping on the hype train for money, whether it was the home computer scene in the 80s in the UK or the early console gaming one when Atari was still a big player. Or perhaps for every generation since.

As for whether they'll stick around if it crashes? It depends. It may very well not crash at all. And while a certain percentage will leave if it does, others will stick around and learn more instead.

So no, I don't think the quality has gone down. There have always been people from informal backgrounds, a knowledge of CS hasn't ever been necessary or mainstream overall, and mediocre to terrible programmers and developers have been a thing since the field began.

I'd say it's the quality of SW Engineers has stayed roughly the same, but the quality of SW Engineering has gone up. I worked at eBay back in 2000ish when it was all C++ and there were still plenty of kids that didn't understand pointers very well etc. Now at least they don't have to as much.

The need to do good bold things has gone way down. The need to understand the machine has gone way down.

I'm way more concerned with that. Longer term, how SWE is supposed to maintain itself & train new generations when the field looks so homogenous & we are so well served is a prospect that does keep me up some nights.

Being somewhat proficent at both sides of CS - practical and theoretical requires a lot of effort and no school is going to teach it.

Doing constant progress (learning) both - modern and everyday useful things meanwhile not giving up at things like security, protocols, lower level stuff, hardware requires a lot of discipline.

Things like cache, paging, virtual memory, and cpu pipelines are not important to "CS" or most software development. Based on your list of priorities, I'd guess you have much to learn about what goes into good software engineering. It's not a bunch of facts about CPU's.

Rise of the Expert Beginner [0] https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

>> cache, paging, virtual memory,cpu pipelines, algorithms or other things pretty fundamental to CS

Algorithms is the only thing you mentioned that has anything to do with Computer Science. The other stuff is Computer Engineering.

No, not at all, quite the opposite, actually.

It's also much easier today to write good high quality code than it was when I started professionally, which was ~15 years ago.

However, I never worked with a boot camp grad, only people with degrees.

I havent read anything that could be convincing that it has gone up (no new paradigms, no new architectures, no novel technology just endless horizontal scaling). So , statistically it can only have gone down

What about Ordo notation, complexity theory, context free grammars, type theory, information theory and lambda calculus? Topics that are really important to Computer Science? :p

Can you suggest a product update in the last 8 years that is clearly better than its previous version?

Yes. The quality of software has definitely gone down. Then again, so has the quality of everything else, from engineering to urban planning to infrastructure maintenance. A possible explanation for this phenomena is that the global mean IQ has also fallen quite a bit over the last 50 years and continues to fall[0].

[0]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/IQ/1950-2050/

My feeling is that the quality of software engineering has gone up dramatically in the past decade.

> It feels like a lot engineers now days don't seem to have a good cs background. They don't see to understand things like cache, paging, virtual memory, cpu pipelines, algorithms or other things pretty fundamental to CS.

Pipelines and caches and paging and virtual memory are stupidly complicated in modern processors. If you claim to understand these things and you don't either work at the company or have an NDA with the company so that you can implement drivers, you're probably full of shit.

What I can't stand are the "highly-ranked" schools that introduce students to a very basic and abstract (and outdated) notion of these topics, and students enter the workforce overconfident that they have understood the topic. You haven't understood the topic, and having some rough notion of the topic can often times be worse than if you didn't know anything at all.

tl;dr: Modern processors are proprietary IP and you should be skeptical of anyone who claims to deeply understand it but doesn't work for the company making it. You do not need to understand how one works to be a great software engineer.

https://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf