HACKER Q&A
📣 erlend_sh

How much could we get done with a 2 year moratorium on 'frameworks' dev?


I pose this hypothetical as relentless app-framework/engine producer (jMonkeyEngine, Amethyst engine, Bones engine, Leaf protocol..) who would kinda love to just be told from up high: “no more middleware polishing, make the app/game!”.

I’m the guy who’s telling everyone ‘make a game, not an engine’ while relentlessly churning out all engines and no completed games/apps :D

And we the guys (non-gendered) are legion. There’s so many of us developing tools primarily made for other developers, sometimes I wonder if we’ve gotten way too spoiled by the glut of capital in our industry. Are we getting the Job to Done?

I’d give us (all techies) a D+ right now. Still so much toy-making rather than tool-making. So much goofing around when we’ve got so little time left to build more preparedness and robustness into our systems before resources start getting more scarce.

So just as a thought exercise, as admissions or roasts etc., can you imagine the amount of Very Useful Right Now stuff we could get done?

  👤 codingdave Accepted Answer ✓
Stuff is getting done. Every day. By the legions of coders who do not work in SV, who churn out boring LOB CRUD apps in corporations across the world, day after day. The hourly consultant working for gigantor IT firms, one 6 month coding gig at a time, doing the same thing as last time. The ones whose jobs many HN users would never want, but who are living their lives just fine going to work and slinging some code.

HN shows a slice of the industry. And people caught in the startup and FAANG worlds sometimes forget that is all it is - a slice. An interesting slice where people do creative things and sometimes make bank doing it, but just a slice nonetheless.

So it is fine that this slice of the industry keeps trying new things - that is how innovation happens, and over the long run it benefits the large silent mass of software folks who are out there just doing their jobs.