Those sound like problems specific to big corporations. Maybe you'd better enjoy working for smaller companies.
Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
211–220 of 301 posts
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I apologize; I may have explained poorly.
I was trying to convey that burnout is (IMHO) a result of putting a lot of effort into something and not getting enough back out of it. It’s like a defense mechanism to stop wasting energy. This may be a result of processes, tools, compensation, treatment by co-workers, or any number of other factors.
And my suggestion on how to resolve burnout is to find a way to feel productive and capable again. Personally, game development worked for me. But I also mentioned mobile app development as a possible avenue, but obviously this list isn’t intended to be exhaustive.
Just find something that helps you remember why you loved programming in the first place. You probably haven’t stopped enjoying the act of writing code. It’s just that something at work is making you unhappy, and you’ve started to associate those negative feelings with programming in general.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#213You hate work, not programming.
I left programming as a career, and now use it in support of the website I run. I went from dreading going to work to skipping meals because I can't lift my hands from the keyboard. The passion came back, and it's stronger than ever.
You know what's fun? Just building stuff on our own terms, and going outside when the cafeine wears out. I overengineer or hack together as I goddamn please, and boy howdy does it feel like a million bucks.
Get rid of Agile, meetings, red tape and fixed work hours, and I guarantee you that you'll feel the magic again. But ditch programming and keep every other part of the job, and you'll hate it just the same.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#214> 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.
Sure, but you don't have to do it the way most JS projects do it.
I've made a career writing Django apps. In most cases, the JS I write is limited to vanilla JS with no JS dependencies (the minification is done by a Python library which might depend on JS, but it's abstracted away enough that I don't have to know). There needs to be a serious amount of justification to even install Node/NPM as part of a project.
The vast majority of work is done on the backend, with JS only being used for UX. I used to pull in React+ReactDOM on some projects, but Web components are paving the way for that to no longer be necessary.
As I mentioned elsewhere, it's possible to pull all of pip into a Python project and have all the same problems, but the culture around Python isn't quite as myopic as the JS community, so I've generally been able to keep dependencies more sparse when working on Python teams.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#215> ...spend so much mental bandwidth just to get the permission to code.
Spot on.
Ditto being compelled to lie about everything. What David Graeber calls "justifying" labor.
Breaking out the crayons and finger paste to show PHBs how stuff works, clearing tech debt on the down low, estimates, concocting status reports, performance and peer reviews, etc.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We kind of already have. We built a CLI that allows them to create/update/delete/list all their dev envs, so they have all the tooling needed. Also, we are still a small/medium sized company, so we often had the chance to talk with them to expose this issue, but in the end it never really worked.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#217The 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 think this passes the buck a little. There are a lot of problems created by software engineers and software engineers alone.
There are of course management problems, but that happens in every field. Software isn't special in that regard. My issue with software is that, in general, the software industry is both myopic, clinging to some bygone coding aesthetic of the 80s, and discontented, constantly creating new stuff or wanting to complicate stacks.
Just look at the current status quo of source code management in Git. Management didn't make that decision. Software engineers did. Git is the most overly complicated software ever for its purpose, but it was software engineers who chose it as the standard and decided everyone needed to code as if they're on the Linux kernel team.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#218Get out of javascript and start enjoying life again. A different language would be a different community / different types of jobs.
Out of all of the languages javascript roles has been cargo culted into the daily standup, the 5 layer approval process and the unnecessary meeting. I've never wanted to leave the field until I spent a year in a true javascript role. Happiest for me are full stack roles where you control both ends and have a smaller teams and less demands for meetings.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#219One of the things that bothers me lately is that the "tools" (libraries, frameworks, documentation, toolchains, baked-in enforced brogrammer conventions, questionable service lock-ins, etc.) are usually in many ways poor-quality, poorly-designed, and inferior to what I've used in the past. I won't itemize all the ways here, because I started, and had to delete them, because it would take hours and ruin my day (and so…
> so many open source projects now base much of their communities and support around Discord
I'm guilty of this, and yet I looked at all the available options, and Discord was the least terrible. What's the alternative? Matrix/Element? IRC? I've tried organizing the community with both and ~most people can't/won't use either of them. Gitter I guess?
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#220I work at a small software business run remotely and staffed mostly by older workers (50+), myself included. There are very few processes to speak of. We meet a couple of times a week, we have one application to hand out tickets, and another to clock in hours worked. That's about it. The pace is leisurely, the tech stack is a bit old-fashioned, but we build solid products, and the company stays afloat. And I get lots of freedom to build things the way I like. Not perfect, but good enough.