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Ask HN: How correct are geohot's opinions on CRUD developers?

by tr1ll10nb1ll on 11/16/20, 7:00 AM with 11 comments

Geohot once said in his streams that CRUD developers ( people working on frameworks like Ruby on Rails, React or something similar ( I'm assuming Django as well ) ) aren't even real developers. They are mere translators and that bootcamps basically just teach you these frameworks that make you a translator between `input -> system -> output`, a job that'll be replaced to some extent by AI in the future. He also compared CRUD devs to those who wrote news by hand before the printing press.

How correct are these opinions? My recent work includes a large Django project with multiple components for an SaaS I'm building and that got me thinking, is this even real coding? Idk Geohot took a toll on me I suppose. I mean I'm not particularly restricted to a framework per se, I just like to use whatever the right tool/technology is to get an objective done.

Either way, would love to have some opinions flowing.

  • by adamnemecek on 11/16/20, 7:05 AM

    Why do you care?

  • by phendrenad2 on 11/16/20, 7:09 AM

    He's wrong. There's no such thing as a CRUD developer. No one would pay someone just to make essentially GUIs for the database tables. Also CRUD is ancient history, webapps are all interactive react now. CSS is hard. Also AI-generated CRUD or even CSS would be hilarious, I want to see that.

  • by raihansaputra on 11/16/20, 7:58 AM

    Half true, I guess? I'm definitely in the camp of the CRUD developers. I do accept that I don't do lower level work (even making plugins/affecting how the framework works) in my day to day job. And it's fine. Evidently these skills are worth paying for and create value (monetary or otherwise) in the world.

    An interesting take on this and the wider topic of how to write software is DHH's keynote from 2014[0]. He states that he himself is more interested in the 'Information System' parts instead of the 'Computer Science' part. I think there's space for more specialized titles to differentiate these jobs/skillsets.

    0: https://youtu.be/9LfmrkyP81M