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The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work

2023-11-24 17:08:51.357773+01 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work

For example, one pitch in particular was for a product which promised to remove the need for me to write SQL in exchange for being able to set up all my dependencies from a drag-and-drop editor, with the sales pitch consisting of "You can get rid of thousands of lines of all that SQL you hate!" - no I can't, fucko, because your application is still connecting to Postgres so it's just writing the SQL for me with another layer of licensed abstraction on top of it. Why would I pay to have more abstractions designed for you to sell software to multiple clients, you blue-suited dementor? Eight times out of ten, I want to pay you to remove them from my codebase.

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#Comment Re: The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work made: 2023-11-26 00:50:08.839711+01 by: meuon

I love my SQL. It's where real work is done. Well... at least if you are doing it right. Server Side Scripting Language (for me, PHP mostly) and client side (JavaScript) is for UX/UI.

#Comment Re: The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work made: 2023-11-26 00:51:19.096041+01 by: meuon

And my point was.. I like writing it and don't want some boilerplate bs framework with all the phat assumptions.

#Comment Re: The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work made: 2023-11-27 04:12:14.688475+01 by: spc476 [edit history]

SQL was designed so that non-programmers could query the database, and well, non-programmers didn't want that, so left it to the programmers to write SQL. Now this, and again, the non-programmers don't want anything to do with it. Face it, non-programmers don't like telling a computer how to do things, which is why they always fail. Also, see COBOL.

#Comment Re: The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work made: 2023-11-27 16:38:49.29411+01 by: markd

They do enjoy Excel, though.

#Comment Re: The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work made: 2023-11-27 23:46:14.396347+01 by: spc476

But Exec isn't sold as "programming for non-programmers."

#Comment Re: The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work made: 2023-11-29 20:29:22.034483+01 by: markd

I don't think how it's been sold really matters for "non-programmers don't like telling a computer how to do things" - they're non programmers, telling a computer how to do things, and the weirdos I know enjoy using it.

#Comment Re: The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work made: 2023-12-01 16:24:52.343912+01 by: meuon

I used to work with a guy that was insanely good at Excel, with large complex data sets. What he did with it was as much programming as any programmer I've known

And yes, the Excel weirdo's enjoy it. and I'm an SQL weirdo that enjoys it. Was once kinda famous for doing complex electrical engineering/billing (demand peak, power factor.. etc) calculations in SQL. Most proud of taking a 6+hr report that Oracle barfed on (lots of joins and tables) into a sub minute report on same data in MySQL. I abused a lot of temporary tables, and then did joins and crosstabs (coded crosstabs). The telecom stuff I do now is so so so basic and easy.

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