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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

#171

Post by saulpw »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #127
ricardobayes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish there were more non-web dev remote coding jobs. Web development is never-ending and super thankless. Plus there seems to be a brand new language popping up every 2 years now. With C I just needed to study the Kernighan-Ritchie book and that was it. I think my quality of life was a lot higher as an embedded dev, web stuff is just too easy to get into in order for companies not to treat you as disposable.

Yep. Once you start getting to intermediate-level dev, I really think more devs should think about specializing if only to start accumulating leverage by virtue of expertise and authority on a subject. If your career is made to be safe and as similar to everyone else, it is much harder to gain leverage. You can't trust capital to take care of you.

Specialization is a trap though too. You can make it work (and lucratively!) for 10-15 years, but that's nowhere near a full career, and then at some point you wake up to find out you've specialized in OS/2 or Smalltalk and the only jobs around are in defense or gambling kiosks.

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

#172

Post by mech422 »

quacked wrote: post #106
digitalsushi wrote: post #58

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…

A lot of programmers don't realize that there's a difference between and . All of the bizarre decisions by higher-ups--red tape, bad hiring, conflicting goals, ridiculous security policies--it all boils down to "what do we report on the financials, and how can we manipulate investors to continue to buy and hold"? It doesn't even matter what's actually profitable, just what's perceived as increasing real or potential…

That seems to assume organizations are 'rational actors'... Which sadly is the minority of organizations I've worked for.

The premise ignores the layers of people in-between the 'C' levels trying to get that return, and the engineers trying to build stuff. It seems lots of these people are mostly interested in politicking and justifying their position. (which I think accounts for some of the WFH resistance. If people can get stuff done with less supervision, it might lead to less managers :-P )

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

#173

Post by domador »

300bps wrote: post #126
time0ut wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds so much like my company. Add in that management will make commitments to customers without having any idea what it will take to execute, schedule 20 hours of meetings per week, expect us to work a total of 60-80 hours a week to meet the arbitrary schedule, and also change priorities seemingly at random based on which customer is making the most noise. The best part is HR regularly talks about how we are a…

schedule 20 hours of meetings per week Have had this problem so much. The problem is managers and analysts are productive through meetings. Software Engineers are productive in blocks of 4-6 hours of focused concentration. Many managers don't realize this and forward FYI meeting invites to developers all day long.

A relevant essay: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

(It's by Paul Graham, but I won't assume everyone on Hacker News has read it.)

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

#174

Post by dgb23 »

zikero wrote: post #34
kardianos wrote: post #15

> Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, I was just skimming and read that, and I thought "he is working in Javascript" and yep, later on that's it. I stay away from the Javascript/TS ecosystem (npm et al). I program mostly in Go, but also quite a bit in Typescript. I would learn/use (even if for personal projects) more boring tech stacks, like Java/C#/Go/PL-SQL/T-SQL…

No viable alternative to JS/TS for web (client side) unfortunately.

You can make interactive web sites with a minimal amount of JS (et al).

For example the mentioned Go has a HTML templating package in the std library.

You could use something like htmx (the creator is a regular on here) which is a very small, very convenient library that gets you 80% of the way for your typical web application.

For the rest, you can always just stick with plain old DOM manipulation or write web components if you want something that's more re-usable and general. No build step or transpilation shenanigans required here.

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

#175

Post by arvinsim »

digitalsushi wrote: post #58

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…

I was strongly against coding outside work. But now I spend some after hours coding just to keep the spark going. Main job is working in legacy code. It is fine most times but sometimes it is just soul crushing to work on such a restrictive paradigm.

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

#176

Post by leetrout »

Something shifted in the last ~5 years in a big way and devs are infantilized in a big way. Product and project managers trying to over plan and over control has been something I have dealt with.

Yes the ecosystem is unstable in all languages but I accept the technical challenges willingly over being shoved into a "work tickets and dont think" box.

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

#177

Post by twh270 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #165
digitalsushi wrote: post #58

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…

> " All of this, to dabble in code " I'm not a professional programmer, and when my laptop takes 10 minutes to start moving the mouse cursor smoothly after waking from a weekend suspend (today!), I'm pointing fingers at you all, the professional "dabblers" who don't understand computers, don't understand firewalls, don't understand databases, don't understand algorithms, don't understand garbage collectors, don't und…

Very reactionary take here. Blaming developers for everything that's wrong is just as bad-wrong as blaming everything on management, the C-suite, capitalism, or anything else.

I've worked with some very ignorant, lazy, incompetent, individuals. Some had 'programmer' or 'developer' in their title, others were managers or product owners or QA, etc. etc.

I do agree with your last point. I expect the real-world consequences of Bad Software to become more serious and common, and that will result in more regulation of the industry.

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

#178

Post by michaelt »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #79
digitalsushi wrote: post #58

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…

A lot of this sounds like big company stuff, perhaps in financial services? The issue with places like that is that risk is prioritised higher than delivery speed, which is arguably fair enough when there is a risk of large regulatory scrutiny and reputational risk. They are also set up to scale to thousands of engineers, so need consistency in technologies, reporting and ways of working. I didn't enjoy working in th…

> The issue with places like that is that risk is prioritised higher than delivery speed,

I don't think most organisations actually make such decisions knowingly.

I don't believe the CEO ever says "This endpoint management system will remove 20 minutes of productivity per person per day, but it's worth it, let's deploy it"

More likely the organisation salami-sliced away productivity 2 minutes at a time, the bosses have don't see the problem because they use macbooks, and the endpoint management team all love endpoint management so they ignore the problem.

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

#179

Post by quacked »

mech422 wrote: post #172
quacked wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of programmers don't realize that there's a difference between and . All of the bizarre decisions by higher-ups--red tape, bad hiring, conflicting goals, ridiculous security policies--it all boils down to "what do we report on the financials, and how can we manipulate investors to continue to buy and hold"? It doesn't even matter what's actually profitable, just what's perceived as increasing real or potential…

That seems to assume organizations are 'rational actors'... Which sadly is the minority of organizations I've worked for. The premise ignores the layers of people in-between the 'C' levels trying to get that return, and the engineers trying to build stuff. It seems lots of these people are mostly interested in politicking and justifying their position. (which I think accounts for some of the WFH resistance. If people…

I've never met an organization staffed with rational actors that had more than like 8 people in it, so you're not wrong.

I think what I'm getting is that ultimately every edict that flows downward into the layers of management and engineers is centered around increasing perceived profit for shareholders. Any department, project, etc. at large enough organizations was ultimately greenlit for the sake of possibly making more money (not for improving the product at a cost to the company or improving society, etc.)

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

#180

Post by jimbokun »

kneebonian wrote: post #128
dom96 wrote: 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…

I am extremely grateful for the product manager I work with most often. He saves me a lot of time by organizing communication with other people in the organization that I now don't have to.
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