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Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

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Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#151
post #95

This reads much like "I like welding, but I hate working on an assembly line". Those things you find annoying are things that help make the process streamlined, trackable, repeatable, and you fungible. Of course things are more fun when you are guided by your own flow and direction... but how does that scale to hundreds of employees? It's the independent flow of programming that I fell in love with, and that I now re…

Assembly lines are for robots/automation...if you need more time to organize the assebly line then to weld...well better then dont use a assembliline.

Over all your example is flawed.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#152

Hello mate. I learned to code at 13 like 20 years ago as hobby. 15 years ago I started building digital product/startups but sadly no one took of the ground. 10 years ago I started my first job in software development and yesterday was my first day as pizzaiolo. It was a hard take, my income is now cut by at least 5 times but my happiness is higher than ever before. I closed down the door no to coding but working on…

I feel so happy reading this. I hope you enjoy the new job and find contentment!

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#153
I feel the same and think that globally no industry is the same even compared to 5 years ago. But most importantly programming became from a niche job to a mainstream one which translates to more bureaucracy, less freedom, less ideation, more following the rules. At the same time dev tools became new business niches so rather than following standards its now a commodity.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#154

The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…

There is no value in constant-surveillance antivirus software on a modern Mac — if your IT requires this, run far, far away

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#155

The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…

Programming isn't the only career that is having its soul crushed by red tape. My wife is a doctor and these days about half of her time is spent filling out forms and jumping through bureaucratic hoops instead of actually serving her patients. It is amazing how many nurses, admins, and others around her are constantly trying to figure out how to navigate the system to get any real work done. Every profession needs t…

> about half of her time is spent filling out forms and jumping through bureaucratic hoops

I was reading research on this recently because I’m working on an EHR software. The cited study concluded that physicians spend about 15% of their time face-to-face with patients and about 17% filling out documentation. For interns it’s worse with 11% time with patients and 22% writing things down.

This was in Principles of Health Interoperability, a book from ~2016.

On the bright side, all this documentation has been shown to literally save lives. Not sure it’s doing as much for us coders.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#156
Have you tried consulting? There are tradeoffs but when you get to make your own decisions about the tech being used it at least lets you have a sense of agency and control, and you can pick whatever makes you happy and gets the job done.

I feel you though, it seems more and more frequent that I dream of moving to Montana and living on a farm.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#157

The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…

There is no value in constant-surveillance antivirus software on a modern Mac — if your IT requires this, run far, far away

For many companies it's just a checkbox towards compliance of some sort. You can argue and be right until you're blue in the face, but in the end it's the approval of, and certification by external auditors that matter.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#158

This is exactly why I can't work at a job in the industry. I work on my own code ([1], comments at [2]), and it is exactly why I do this; I wouldn't enjoy it otherwise. For me, I just decided to forego jobs and work on my code the way I want to until I eventually make a business out of it. Or to keep it as a hobby and do something else as a job. (I have a CDL for this reason.) I don't know if that will work for you.…

How do you sustain yourself in the meantime? Or do you already have a business?

From his comment it sounds like he does jobs driving commercial vehicles (such as trucks or passenger transport). I got this from the mention of a "CDL", commercial driving license.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#159
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me wonder whether companies should consider hiring more people dedicated to dealing with the red tape to unblock engineers. I suppose managers to a certain extent are the ones doing this work, but in many cases it's not enough, how about a new role that is dedicated to cutting the red tape?

Their called PMs (with P being Project, or Product, or Planning or whaterver) They tend to be people who couldn't cut it as actual engineers, and so they end up in administrative roles, the ones that OP lambasted as writing stories to write stories, and causing more work, because they need things explained to them slowly and with crayons, and that takes more time, because the engineers just want to be left alone mean…

This is absolutely a mis-characterization of the average PM, in my experience. If the PMs in your organization act like this you've got bad PM management. The PMs I work with are professional cat-herders and bullshit-filters (both engineer bullshit and management bullshit). They keep projects pushing in the right direction, ask insightful questions to help remove blockers, and are overall a force multiplier.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#160
I feel you on the pain of coding. It's a big reason I shifted to management. And it turns out, after a few years of getting my feet under me, I quite enjoy it.

The reality is that in many businesses, the job of software engineering past the entry level is a lot more than just coding.

This isn't a dynamic that is limited to software engineering. I'm renovating my house, and it has been extremely frustrating at times to work with my architect. It occurs to me that those frustrations are typically around the aspects of her job that aren't design oriented, and I can see how those other things probably dominate her work.

Coding is very creative, and I suspect that's what drives many of us to get into the career. But the deeper you get, the more you find that the highest value things you can do from a business are bridging your creative work to all of the systems and processes. This is how you can create a business that harnesses the work of hundreds of producers to meet coherent goals. And unfortunately, this can't be completely externalized to all of the administrative people, like PMs and managers.

What you wrote also speaks to another dynamic, which is that over time, there is a divergence between the platform and the real business needs. More and more time gets spent working around that mismatch. There is no silver bullet solution for this. You can shrink the platform (e.g. microservices) but then you will feel the pain in increasingly complex integration and operations.

But the good news is that platforms are constantly improving, and I think we're getting closer to the point where we stop solving all the wrong problems. For instance, server-side rendering is having a renaissance, getting us away from all of the emergent complexity of client-side frameworks. Tools like Temporal, Airplane.dev, Trigger.dev, Patterns.app, etc. are creating platforms for writing operations and automation tooling with far less operational overhead.

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