
Web apps aren't tech. They're “tech” - AlchemistCamp
https://questinglog.com/web-apps-arent-tech
======
ggm
if you studied computer science before 1960 you did maths and electronic
engineering. If you studied computer science after 1970 you probably learned a
subset speciality. All fields change and all work looks different 10 years
later.

Web apps are sufficiently turing-complete that the arrogance of "thats not
tech" is just wrong.

Carmack wouldn't write asm for a device now, in all cases. He might do Verilog
for an FPGA but he might be doing something else.

~~~
jbay808
I think the author's point is that modern toolchains make spinning up a basic
web app more like following a recipe, and as such is free of many (novel)
technical challenges. As technology goes, it's still complex, but so is
building a microwave oven and yet we don't call GE's white goods department a
tech company. It's a challenge that's already been tackled and is well
understood.

If your web app is doing something that's never been done before, which
requires the application of scientific principles and so on, like...
translating baby babbles into English, then it's still technology, but that
would not be _because_ it's a web app.

~~~
ggm
There is a great spanish saying (I got this from historical fiction) "let no
new thing arise"

Vonnegut wrote a course for eng. lit creative writing on the 7 canonical
plotlines of all stories. ever. I thought "goodness whats the point in writing
now" but it hasn't stopped people making good entertaining fiction

All code is variations over abstraction, synthesis, loops, decision forks,
recursion (tail or not) and all data structures iterate back over lists and
arrays, over trees and DAGs.

"never been done before" is pretty rare anywhere.

~~~
tsimionescu
That's not really true. Unless you're specifically following a recipe, chances
are most of what you're doing has never been done before, at least in some
aspects of it.

But I do think it's a bad way of evaluating this. Personally, I would say that
a more important distinction between tech and "tech" is the degree to which
the technology makes or breaks the business.

For example, for Uber, the tech is an enabler, but the business is made or
broken by the cabs, the vetting, the pricing, the number of cabs they can
hire, the salaries and benefits they can avoid etc. Sure, the tech has to
work, but there is no reason that Uber would be falling behind if their tech
went into maintenance mode today - even if their competitors kept investing in
new tech. So, Uber is a "tech" company in my book (even though they have spent
inordinate amounts of money on the tech before).

On the other hand, a company like Cisco must make ever better routers or
Arista or F5 or whoever will quickly steal their lunch. So Cisco is a tech
company, at least on the NEM side.

------
waheoo
> But people don't talk about ancient inventions as "technology", outside of a
> historical context. When we call something technology, we generally mean
> something invented recently

This is rediculous, the whole articles schtick is based on an inline
redefining of the word its about.

Well I guess the sky isn't blue anymore because the word blue doesn't mean
blue anymore, it means red.

I dunno about you all, but when I talk about technology, I am referring to the
accepted definition meaning. Not "recent tech", although a lot of contexts
this can be assumed.

But nobody out there is assuming you mean recent tech when you're talking
about ancient Egyptian technology.

Words mean things, so does context, stop trying to redefine the meaning of
words all the time, it's tiring, and we usually have a word for what you want
to convey already.

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Do you refer to cars, microwaves, refrigerators or light bulbs as "tech"?

~~~
Doxin
yes.

~~~
davidivadavid
They're undoubtedly technologies, but I don't think that in practice people
would call those industries part of "tech".

The whole "tech" label needs to die as it's overstayed its welcome and now
just funnels engineers towards narrower and narrower segments of the economy
where the benefits are less and less clear.

If you estimate the "tech-iness" of a domain by the depth of the tech tree or
the "height" of the leaves people are working on, most "tech" work these days
is working on CRUD apps based on a 20-ish (?) year old paradigm. It's hardly
cutting edge, and probably isn't the most deserving of the label.

~~~
waheoo
Homeware companies refer to their technology divisions all the time.

What you're calling "tech" the rest of the world calls "I.T."

~~~
davidivadavid
I wouldn't mind that re-labeling.

------
bfuclusion
From it's own definitions this article is patently false. Quote: "applying
scientific knowledge for practical purposes" You're doing that when you try to
reduce time to display from 1 second to 1000ms, when trying to chose
algorithms that better match your users real usage of the site, to just plain
moving a button a few pixels so people see it better. It doesn't have to be
the new shiny to make an actual impact.

~~~
aashiq
I 100% agree with you, and to dismiss web apps in this way is to devalue
making thinking easier for people. However, I'm also amused by the Freudian
slip of 1 second to 1000 ms, which would of course be "tech" instead of tech.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
WeWork is a "tech" company in the sense that the actual business is a thin
tech veneer around an established business model (like Regus Group). A huge
number of SaaS services are effectively a thin design layer around a database,
a technology that has been established decades ago. I think that's the real
thrust of the post.

~~~
bfuclusion
I tried writing this three times, and I'm probably going to screw it up
anyways but here's my take on business models and "tech": If the entirety of
your approach is an existing model but "on the internet" and you don't spend
any effort on what "on the internet" really means, then you might be in
"tech". However if you take the time to carefully apply yourself to how the
new environment changes your business model and your relationship with
customers, and exercise sound technical and product focused expertise in so
doing, then you're in tech. Efficiency, expanded markets, better experience,
ease of use, etc are real tangible benefits, even if the whole product is just
a shell around a 1970s COBOL database.

------
tdeck
Aside: When I moved to SF for my first job in 2014 I thought I'd be working in
"software". I was a bit surprised to learn that what I'm actually working in
is "tech" (and that I'm something called a "techie" as well). It seemed to me
that nobody really talked like this in college - you wouldn't say you majored
in "tech", my fellow ACM members weren't "techies". Since we are almost always
talking about software, the label seems a bit odd. I suspect it's the
influence of finance that lumps all these industries together, but the work
and environment is very different in HW vs SW.

------
adrianN
In this thread: heated discussions that boil down to different definitions of
the word "tech".

Since "tech" is mostly a marketing term, this seems fairly pointless. For
suitable definitions, a real-estate company is hot "tech". For other
reasonable definitions anything that is is mass production is not "tech".

~~~
AlchemistCamp
My intents were:

1) Share something I found profoundly encouraging for newcomers trying to make
a dent with their technical skills

2) Explore how conflating two different (but overlapping) things we use the
same word for makes it easy to mistakenly feel like it's "too late" to make a
dent with technical skills.

Given just how many people got upset after interpreting it along entirely
different lines, this piece is clearly going to take some more revision.

~~~
zippy5
I think what you’re really trying to describe is disruptive innovation. The
way new technological development creates new market / business opportunities.

It’s not just about technology itself, but the relationship and timing between
the technology’s capabilities and potential customers.

And you’re right, that technical skills will be invaluable to these businesses
because in many cases, these technologies still have technical challenges to
overcome before it’ll meet the customer needs, i.e. technical risk.

I think it’s great that you expressed your ideas, shipped it and then iterated
on the clarity because many engineers with entrepreneurial ambitions will find
your insights useful.

------
SenHeng
I thought this was going to be another blog about how Javascript isn't a real
programming language and web apps are cancer.

It's not.

It's actually a very nice article about the BAFTA acceptance speech that John
Carmack gave.

> _I do hear sometimes from programmers who are kind of sad that they don 't
> have the opportunity to write game engines from scratch like I did and have
> it matter or make an impact..._

> _here 's where some perspective really helps - I can remember when I was a
> teenager, I thought I had missed the Golden Age of 8-bit Apple 2 gaming,
> that I was never going to be Richard Garriott...time went by, and I got to
> make my own marks in things after that. And, in that time, I also see so
> many opportunities that have come by._

> _The 90s PC wave was great - I was happy to be there, and I 'm glad I took a
> swing and knocked one out of the park with that. But since then, we've seen
> mobile games, and web games, and free-to-play games, the Steam
> revolution...and now virtual reality. And all of these are amazing!_

> _So, yeah, the opportunities that I had aren 't there for people today - but
> there are new and better ones. And personally, I'm more excited about these
> than anything that's come before. So, thank you very much for this honor,
> but I'm just getting started._

> _-John Carmack (BAFTA acceptance speech)_

------
konart
So unless you are building a strong AI or a full-dive VR set you are not
building `tech`?

~~~
AlchemistCamp
If you're doing something that's been widespread for 15 years, you'll likely
have so much competition that it will be about marketing, not technology.

~~~
waheoo
You're confusing innovation and technology.

And the gatekeeping is really unbecoming.

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Gatekeeping? Literally, the entire thrust is encouraging someone just getting
started.

Large companies gatekeep the markets that boomed in the 2000s, but there's
still a lot of open space and there will be more waves to catch.

------
yipbub
In our own spheres of tech, we have a nostalgia for the childhood that we
missed. A childhood where everything was still new and magical. Where fairies
might plausibly be lurking around the corner. Things like realizing that phone
lines were using sounds as control signals let you play in this field more
easily. I imagine living in the era where they were just realizing that you
could define a common interface for different instruction sets that allowed
portability and I wonder how many of those ideas I would have come up with.

That's what I attribute "golden age" talk to. I guess the author's point is
that there are other field of technology that are currently young. I agree,
but it's not exactly the same magic: Computer Tech is uniquely accessible, and
our freedom to explore and play in other fields is limited by the current
economic situation.

However, even if I'd been born earlier, the golden age wouldn't have been as
accessible to me geographically (I'd be in <small-mountain-town>, India).

Also, my current goal _is_ to get myself to a place where I can play in mature
fields and explore younger ones.

------
imtringued
I think the author is reading way too much into the word "tech". Using general
words to abbreviate specific concepts is pretty common in English. Gas usually
refers to a specific fuel used in cars (gasoline) even though it is also
referring to a much broader category that describes a state of matter and any
material in that state. This leads to situations where words Autogas and gas
refer to completely different things.

The word tech has a colloquial meaning which doesn't actually stand for
technology in general. Tech actually stands for a very narrow form of
technology namely information technology. In other languages you see the exact
opposite. Instead of using a broad category to abbreviate a specific meaning
the abbreviation is actually based around the meaning of the word itself.
Information technology isn't "Techno" in German, it's "Informatik". In French
it is "Informatique". In Italian its "Informatica".

This article is primarily a complaint about the English language than about
"tech" itself.

------
duxup
I read that.

I still don't know what the title / that line is supposed to mean.

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Much of what we call "tech" is 10 to 20 old technology. We still call an
interactive website tech, but in reality, they're no more cutting edge now
than CDs were in 2010.

The fact that it's not new technology is part of why there's so much
competition and so much of the market is controlled by established players.

It used to be possible to reach a massive audience with a trivial iPhone app
10 years ago or with a plain text blog a few years before that.

New those spaces are crowded but there are new ones opening up.

~~~
imtringued
I'd say most of what we consider a webapp has been "perfected" around 10 years
ago. There have been some major usability upgrades such as flexbox but again
this is only a productivity booster. It was possible to do everything without
flexbox and the price you had to pay was only the cost of your sanity. Now
that youtube has changed its algorithm I keep seeing videos from 2013 and in
terms of quality they might as well be made in 2020. 1080p has become a well
established standard and Youtube no longer skimps heavily on compression. The
biggest reason why videos look "old" today is that people just compress videos
heavily.

------
donmb
Ok we got it. Websites/Online-Stores and custom coded backends are not "tech"
according to the article (much as CDs/Videos are not tech). But still the ways
of building these things change every day. UX/UI patterns change. Frontend
Frameworks change. Its all about the tech in "tech" in my opinion. The web and
how we perceive content in 10 years will be much different than it is today
and its our job to make this happen.

------
gitgud
Tech as in _technology_ is literally anything that makes a task easier...

If you're working on something that makes a task easier, congratulations
you're working in tech!

