
Why programmers can’t make any money: dimensionality and the Eternal Haskell Tax - gu
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/why-programmers-cant-make-any-money-dimensionality-and-the-eternal-haskell-tax/
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PaulHoule
Oh yeah, but it even affects Java programmers.

If you want a job working with Lucene 3.6, it is easy. There is always some
recruiter who knows these guys who have an opening because the last programmer
burned out and they need you in a hurry because the product was supposed to
hit the market 2 weeks ago.

It doesn't take great interviewing skills to win this job because everybody
involved wants to stop putting out fires and if you can avoid sexually
harassing somebody or making a jewish joke in front of somebody named Cohen
you can get the job.

If you are so foolish to accept the mission you'll get issued a bottom-of-the-
line "business" laptop from Dell which is a hand-me-down from a salesman who
couldn't sell anything. You'll find the servers are bursting at the seams even
though the system isn't in production yet. And then you'll find that your team
has smashed Lucene 3.6 in ways that devastate performance and that are very
hard to maintain. You can't get a straight answer from the lead developer as
to how to build the system, never mind anything else.

Now Lucene 4 uses half the memory of Lucene 3 because it avoids the UCS-16
tax. Many operations are sped up up to hundreds of times. The code base is
easier to work with and wouldn't have required to have the violence done
against it that had been done against Lucene 3.

If search performance matters, they'll get smoked by a competitor who uses
Lucene 4, so I feel it is malpractice to work on Lucene 3 projects.

