It has always frustrated older people when the next generation thinks they’ve discovered something new, because it’s invariably something that has been around forever. Sex is the classic example: no matter how naughty, new, or wild you think you’re being, humanity and the species that predated us have been doing it before. As Bill Hicks observed: look at your family tree and remember that every time the line splits, there’s fucking. And if you ever had any suspicion that Internet porn was responsible for inventing some of the extraordinary perversions that have now become commonplace, just see if you can find some uncensored historical texts. No matter what debasing act you think you’ve discovered, I guarantee that as long as it doesn’t rely on modern engineering techniques, it was done thousands of years ago.
It’s not just sex. In my accidental career of, what is now called, “software engineer” the atmosphere is riddled with the hormones of excitable youthful pricks who believe they have discovered a whole new area of computing. Spending time in an office full of millennial “programmers” (what we used to call ourselves) is the equivalent of walking through the fetid stench of a school gym changing room. They spend their time going to conferences and listening to their peers describing white-hot, bleeding-edge, paradigm-shifting technologies that were actually discovered decades ago. Armed with their new knowledge they return to their jobs and look down on everyone else who doesn’t know the new names for the old technologies they’ve discovered.
One of the tragedies of this situation is that in twenty years time they will feel the same miserable exhaustion that I feel now, but if they have any sense they will have departed the technical path and moved into management by then.
My personal curse is that I have eschewed any kind of management track, or “management bollocks” as I prefer to call it, which means I’m surrounded by these little gits who know everything.
By the way, it’s safe to say they are “little gits” because I was one. In my twenties my brain was faster than now and I thought I knew everything. In fairness I knew a lot more about the technology of the period than some of my peers, but looking back I was an ignorant nobhead. It’s hard to feel I was more ignorant then than I know myself to be now, but it’s surely true; it didn’t take long to learn the vastness of the universe of stuff I don’t know about; a universe that seems to expand exponentially with every article read. This is another significant problem: after twenty or so years of learning how little one knows, one tends to feel beaten down.
The only benefit of this awful, miserable realisation is that stamina combined with a vague interest in new technology is all that’s needed to hang on to your career. If you wait five years, the genuinely good technologies become fashionable again and you can ignore all the nonsense until then. NOSQL is a classic example of this. NOSQL was not originally “NoSQL”, it really meant “Not Only SQL”. This was an interesting development based on the real need for fast, scaleable key-value stores without the complexity of a SQL cluster. The world could have taken two paths at this point:
1) Reinvent database technology.
2) spend more time making SQL databases more scalable.
3) Use both.
Obviously they all happened, but the youthful excitement of new, hot, technology caused the young pioneers to throw away all trace of 2). That was old fart technology!
A few years down the line, the brilliant work of the forefathers is recognised once more as being pretty bloody useful and so relational databases, together with their trusted underlying technology, are about to take over again. Good.
Now, I hate Oracle as much any anyone else on this planet but don’t tell me it can’t outperform MongoDB with billions of rows of data because I’ve done it. Admittedly getting the queries right is an absolute bastard if they’re going to perform well – but compared to the alternatives it’s a piece of piss!
Yeah, there’s a lot more to say here. But it’s time to shut up.
