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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

#291

Post by cnity »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #277
cnity wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any Go WASM solution will come with big performance costs and complexity that are worth considering: 1. Since WASM doesn't yet expose a feature to share GC with the host, the GC functionality with necessarily be bundled with your outputted code, making your WASM size larger than ideal. 2. All calls from WASM have to go through a JS layer in order to interact with the Web APIs anyway, so now you actually have _two_ GC…

I'm not bothered about GC's - the size is a problem, but I've never had to worry about GC performance issues yet. Everything else is spot on, that's the pain!

You probably know about this, but it might be worth trying TinyGo[0] for WASM, given that WASM is basically an embedded environment.

0: https://tinygo.org/

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

#292

Post by bartread »

bmitc wrote: post #217
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 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 stu…

> Git is the most overly complicated software ever for its purpose

Sorry, but I call bullshit on this.

Git has a lot of features. Most people probably don't use or need most of those features. Maybe it's like Microsoft Word, where the quip is that people only use 20% of the features, but it's a different 20% for each person. That's not relevant.

What is relevant is that to use Git effectively for most projects you don't need to know that much, you don't need to get into the "advanced" features, and in fact can learn everything you do need to know by reading only the first 3 chapters of the manual, and knowledge of the "git flow" workflow (you can of course modify this to your needs).

It is not harder to effectively version control your software with Git as compared to any other VCS/SCM I've used and, in fact, branching and merging is excellent, and makes life a lot easier for everyone involved. Pull requests also make life very easy as compared to other systems.

Switching to Git, within a few days it was apparent to me that it was better and easier than CVS, SourceSafe (!), Subversion, Sourcegear Vault, Perforce, and AccuRev (I can't speak to others because I haven't been exposed to them).

Of course, you can make Git complicated - or perhaps I should say more complicated than you need to for your use case - but that's optional and entirely on you (or other devs you work with - in either case, Git isn't your problem).

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

#293

Post by bartread »

> I feel like I have to jump so many hoops and spend so much mental bandwidth just to get the permission to code.

This comment speaks to me very deeply.

It isn't like this where I work now, but I've worked a couple of larger enterprises that were exactly like this. Everything was set up to prevent developers from sitting down and coding. I haven't worked enough different places to know if there's a clear pattern here, but in neither of these companies was tech their core business. One was an tech-based offshoot of a financial services company, and the other was a very large retailer.

Not everywhere I've worked where tech isn't core business has been like this, so that's why I hesitate to draw a general pattern. However, I've worked at four different software/tech companies over the years and, whilst they all had their flaws, in none of them did I ever feel like I had to get permission to code. Actually, that's not quite true: I did work at one for a number of years where latterly it did start to feel like that, and it was one of many reasons I left. But it definitely wasn't the norm for the majority of the time I was there.

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

#294

Post by jeremychone »

It might be good to decouple the work coding environment vs. the coding activity itself.

Secure the income stream by doing what is expected of you, and use your personal creativity on side projects with a potentially new language (e.g., Rust, ...)

On a personal note, the older I get, the more I code, so it was those work environments that made me doubt.

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

#295

Post by mattgreenrocks »

the_only_law wrote: post #260
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #44

I'd argue the current culture is set up to create this very scenario. You've realized that your work is stripped of many elements of creativity in the name of making you replaceable. Of course, we can't say that last part, so we instead talk up how great tooling is, and how quickly we can onboard people (Nobody asks why there is such a need to onboard people so often, or so quickly.) When your pursuit of mastery is t…

> Now contemplating specializing in another domain to spice things up again. How do you get in? Basically any domain that’s not just enterprise line of business crap, and SaaS apps seems to only ever hire seniors/staff/whatever developers with 10 years of of hyper-specific domain knowledge or new grads they managed to source a [State University] Recruiting Event. Hell I’ve been rejected in otherwise normal web dev jo…

You have to put the study time in to be competent enough to do an entry-level-ish in said domain and luck into the right opportunity.

It's hard and partially driven by forces outside of your control. All you can do is be as ready as possible when something comes along.

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

#296

Post by bmitc »

bartread wrote: post #292
bmitc wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stu…

> Git is the most overly complicated software ever for its purpose Sorry, but I call bullshit on this. Git has a lot of features. Most people probably don't use or need most of those features. Maybe it's like Microsoft Word, where the quip is that people only use 20% of the features, but it's a different 20% for each person. That's not relevant. What is relevant is that to use Git effectively for most projects you do…

Git is complicated. I or others didn't make it so. The fact that someone didn't tip-toe around Git's complexity in just the right way isn't on them. It's on Git.

I also didn't name Git's commands, like the unfortunate `blame`, or design its interface such that there are several examples of `git --` doing something wildly different than `git `.

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

#297

Post by kostarelo »

I remember vividly the times when I was so much impressed of every single line of code I've written that day. I would stay up late at nights just to make the perfect piece of code, the perfect UI, the perfect architecture diagram, etc etc. To me, that feeling was life-giving.

Nowadays and after lots of years of experience mainly in early-stage startup environments, I don't even care about the code or the low level stuff.

I'm trying to embody my self to the mission. I'm looking for the right metrics to watch and when these metrics are impacted by my actions (or my teams' actions because these environments tend to be very team-driven) thats when I get the same feeling as when I was writing those Visual Studio LoCs and was building those grey UIs with MS Access for data storage.

With the right mission and metrics, comes a problem. With the right problem that will motivate you and excite you, comes the solution. And the solution will be a package of the right code, the right UI, the right line of communication, the right team policies.

I've stopped using the term software engineer for my self, I prefer the term product engineer. And building the right product is my mission.

If you haven't explored that path, of changing your perspective of what gives you that feeling, maybe it would be helpful before deciding to go live in a farm. :) All the best.

I would also like to hear from people that went through that path and where that lead them because I'm still early in my career (in my 30s now).

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

#298

Post by jodrellblank »

trumbitta2 wrote: post #289
jodrellblank wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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…

I'm quite positive ChatGPT wrote this to troll us.

r/confidentlyincorrect

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

#299

Post by bhasi »

tluyben2 wrote: post #77
boredemployee wrote: post #29

It happens in ALL industries and fields, from art (music, design, painting) to software development.

I don’t think so; these things you name but also physical jobs like electrician etc don’t have this ‘new shit to learn every day’ while it doesn’t actually help getting anything more done (the opposite actually). There are plenty industries and fields including art where you can do your job with the same tools (physically the same tools even) you were using 40 years ago. In software I am getting berated by strangers…

Came here after searching for threads related to anxiety in the software development field. I feel this way too. In most professions, after you learn the specific number of things you need to learn while starting out, you just tend to improve upon them with time. And just like you said, a woodworker could get back to a project years later and he would feel right at home, unlike the SW field where things move so quickly. I battle impostor's syndrome daily.

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

#300

Post by kirso »

It seems like the type of coding you do at work is the problem.

Why not try and hack something on the side in your own way? Experiment with new stack, build something that solves your own problem? Thats what fun coding is about?

I see a lot of my friends being disgusted by their jobs because it took their permission to be playful. In the end code can be creative (based on your ideas and obviously with some constraints).

I started learning a few months back but I never plan to make it a job. I learn slower as I don't practice it on a daily basis, but I really love it and love building small things.

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