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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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 makin…

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

LOL - I like that, I'm stealing that line :-)

I disagree with 'was ultimately greenlit...'. Seems like quite a lot of them are greenlit to improve someone's political position within the organization. (often, despite being told it will be a net negative for the organization as a whole)

Things like 'use it or lose it' budgeting, compensation tied to headcount (and not value generated), etc. cause real conflicts of interest at many organizations.

Anyway - thanks for the chuckle - I really love the 'rational actors' line :-) (hopefully, I'm one of the 8 ? :-D )

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is frustrated with flaky and constantly changing tools, silent breaking bugs, poorly documented libraries that change capriciously, and unhelpful IDEs, all connected to and reliant on badly behaving services. Why is game development different? My experiences with the larger or more popular publicly available engines available haven't suggested that.

One paragraph mentioned that, but the thrust of the argument was about burnout. For me, burnout occurs when I feel like I’m putting a lot of time and effort into something but I’m not getting enough back to justify it. Burnout is like a mechanism to get you to stop pouring energy into something that isn’t working. Unfortunately, many managers are bad at giving positive feedback. The only time you hear from them is wh…

I don't disagree with any of this, but I've read OP's comment again and again in light of the discussion in the comments here and I don't see anything in there about process. It's not just one paragraph:

- "Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, that all do things their own way, and everything lives in a totally different place, where it’s hard to monitor what’s going on."

- "I feel like anything can break at any moment and ruin my day. I don’t understand any of the tools well enough to be confident that it’s stable, and the worst problems are the silent ones."

- "All the frameworks/libs I use insist on being too flexible, to the point where I don’t know where to start and how to do things. ... Oh and every 10 minutes there is a new tool that pops up that does things differently."

- "I’d rather fight with my brain than with the tools I use."

- "I wish I could just use an IDE that takes care of all the crap for me"

- "There is no invisible ghost that lives in a separate realm (dev environment) that can ruin your work at any time and leave no trace."

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

#193
post #150

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…

Fun to read this comment, as I'm part of the team that deployed the exact same measure as for your wife: we now shutdown dev environments each day at 8PM. We decided to do so because over the weeks, we saw that a lot of devs "forgot" about their dev envs and they were up & running for 6+ months for absolutely nothing. On the other side, we are constantly requested to reduce infra costs, and dev environments (even unu…

Couldn't this be done by giving the devs some transparency into how it's killing their team's budget and reminders, instead, so that they'd manage this themselves? Because this sounds super frustrating to deal with.

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

#194

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…

"Perceived": profound

Related, distantly:

"The secret to success in the stock market is not predicting which stocks will appreciate but rather anticipating which stocks most investors believe will increase in price."

—John Maynard Keynes, who in addition to writing foundational economic texts became rich as a result of astute investments in the stock market

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

#195
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Hea…

Hilariously, the rates are even better if you have a medical transcriber in the room, taking notes for the doctor so they can focus.

... as long as we can get patients to speak in the normal way they would with a doctor, instead of being inhibited because of the second person in the room.

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

#196

Imagine you want to build a City a. You come to a green empty field. Nothing is done, everything is possible. b. You come to a town. A lot has been built, a lot of space used, but there are still many fields around the town to expand to, and build new things. c. You come to a City. All the space is used. Everything you build must work with has already been built. Some things can be built, but only if it does not inco…

More like, you come to C, rebuild a worse C because reasons.

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

#197

2010: edit html button 1. install ftp/sourcesafe 2. connect to url and authenticate 3. edit button 4. upload 2023: edit html button 1. install git 2. setup git credentials in terminal 3. setup git ssh key in terminal and browsers 4. use internal bootstrap tool to install node 5. macos no longer supports bash, spend 10 mins switching everything to zsh 6. install npm 7. try to clone and install the code with npm i 8. 2…

In other words, set up your dev environment? And if you were just setting up your dev environment your working tree wouldn't be dirty. Your impossibly pessimistic scenario is sadly impossible.

> smug

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

#198
A few scattered thoughts:

1. It doesn't sound like the problem is actually that you're falling out of love with coding. You said, "on avg I spend less than 20% of my time coding or solving problems".

2. I feel ya. Reading stuff like TAOCP and SICP was what initially inspired me to pursue this career. But chasing the money for coming up on two decades has worked me into a position where I'm really efficient at putting different web skins on the same four CRUD operations on a database. The kind of problems that got me into this career, aren't the kinds of problems I'm solving on a day to day basis.

3. Having talked to lots of people in lots of careers, it seems like anything you do as a job is going to be less satisfying than if you do it for its own sake. I love playing guitar, but the reality of playing guitar professionally, even if you're financially successful, is that it isn't all that fun. Some high-level Go player (I think Cho Chikun, but I can't find a source), when asked why he liked Go so much, said "I hate go". People in the adult film industry generally have low satisfaction with their sex lives. Money ruins everything. Once you start basing your ability to eat, clothe yourself, live under a roof, etc. on something you do, you're no longer doing it for fun, and it stops being fun. Put in psychology terms, adding extrinsic motivation to an activity decreases your extrinsic motivation to do it.

4. Because #3 applies to every activity, switching careers may not be the solution you think it is.

5. That said, doing something you are intrinsically motivated to do as your job, does seem to be more enjoyable than doing something you're not intrinsically motivated to do. So finding coding jobs that let you do more of the part of the job you like, the actual coding, might help.

6. JavaScript's ecosystem is the obvious, abjectly terrible result of decades of "move fast and break things". That's a controversial opinion, I'm aware, and I'm not going to argue with people who disagree because no one will be educated or persuaded. It's possible to write good code in any language, but I think it would be difficult to even learn to write good JS, because the culture is all about introducing a massive amount of dependencies on bleeding-edge garbage and antipatterns like global state are the norm, not the exception. The problems you mention, "I feel like anything can break at any moment and ruin my day. I don’t understand any of the tools well enough to be confident that it’s stable, and the worst problems are the silent ones"--that's at least partially a problem specific to JavaScript's ecosystem. You might find better luck in a better ecosystem. But unfortunately the disease has also infected other ecosystems: if you pull all of pip into your Python project and use a bunch of global state you'll run into the same problems.

7. Returning to why you're doing what you're doing--the real, underlying reason--is helpful. I know people who work truly horrible jobs, but feel happy about it because their work lets them provide food, housing, and education for their kids. I'm not saying have kids (I don't have kids) but to some extent being aware of what I'm getting from my work keeps me from being too frustrated when I have to work. And if you can't find a reason, then maybe find ways to work less, until you're only working as much as you need to.

8. The subtext of #7 is that satisfaction probably isn't going to come from your work. Few people dream of doing labor.

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

#199
Find a side project. Something not involving web stacks and Javascript. I recommend one of these platforms, which trade off complexity for power to varying degrees:

* https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

* https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

* https://love2d.org (shameless plug: http://akkartik.name/post/roundup22)

I never work with raw pixels at my day job, and it's been enormously satisfying to take control of a whole app and build things nobody else will ever build.

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

#200
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Hea…

> all this documentation has been shown to literally save lives

The docs saved them.

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