Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

deirdre.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 93 posts

Re: Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

#71

Post by blisterpeanuts »

gozo wrote: post #56
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #9

First world problems :) I'm grateful for the opportunity to work from home, support my family comfortably, be in a field with lots of employment opportunities to fall back on, and be constantly learning new stuff. Sorry it didn't work out for you, but it sounds like you found other interests to occupy you and (hopefully) support you, e.g. fantasy/scifi writing.

Yes, you and everyone else. That's why I don't do that much software anymore either. People are happy with a paycheck rather than to do good work and be proud over that. Then they sit on HN and criticize every other field they know even less about.

"People are happy with a paycheck..."

Hm, a rather cynical comment. It seems to me there are lots of highly enthusiastic participants on HN, and I'm blown away by how knowledgeable they are in many other fields as well--the sciences, culinary arts, music, sports....

It's quite a diverse crowd. It's safest to not generalize... ;)

Re: Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

#72

Post by dang »

maximaker wrote: post #63
maximaker wrote: post #2

And stay out!

Please don't down vote me because you don't agree with my opinion. People like the OP make the rest of us miserable with their constant complaining. Glad she wised up, but wow, took long enough.

That wasn't an "opinion", that was a serious breach of the HN guidelines. Please read and follow them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Re: Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

#73

Post by blisterpeanuts »

outworlder wrote: post #27
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #9

First world problems :) I'm grateful for the opportunity to work from home, support my family comfortably, be in a field with lots of employment opportunities to fall back on, and be constantly learning new stuff. Sorry it didn't work out for you, but it sounds like you found other interests to occupy you and (hopefully) support you, e.g. fantasy/scifi writing.

> Sorry it didn't work out for you What? The author was in the field for THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS!

Unless I missed it, she didn't say for how many of those 38 years that programming sucked, though. Her examples of suckiness were all from just a few years ago.

Anyway, that's a potentially long time to be doing something you don't enjoy.

Re: Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

#74

Post by dredmorbius »

dean wrote: post #67

This article made me angry. Why does she care that cnn.com has 349 errors that can only be found by running a validator? The web is a huge place. Does anyone really expect that every single site out there is going to be perfect? And you're going to be depressed to find out that it isn't. And change careers. Give me a break. Her complaints are akin to a writer whining about grammar, and quitting their job because ther…

The "HTML is an error condition" quip was actually what lead me to that piece. And the fact that you need a specific validator to actually check the source is actually a pretty strong indicator of the magnitude of the problem. Browsers simply don't care, or worse, have to not care, that what they're getting is valid HTML. Rather, it's that they will, and pretty much must, render pretty much any random crap.

See my recent comment about Web fonts, and additional discussions about Web accessibility for the disabled (a very good friend has exceptionally limited vision), and think over how a truly semantically constructed Web document might be just slightly easier to parse by assisting software or systems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10326649

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/f6mP6XqH...

A rigorous document structure, strict adherance to it, and penalties (e.g., lower SERP ranking) for invalid / poorly constructed pages would help.

As for Saoirse Moen, her (last) day job was in fact working on a Web browser. Dealing with crap HTML, JS, CSS, etc., etc., etc.

Re: Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

#75

Post by dredmorbius »

jordanlev wrote: post #43

I totally get burning out or losing your passion etc. But I'm not sure how other people's web pages being of poor quality affects one's own work -- if anything, it motivates me to do a better job (and gives me a competitive advantage, or at least a reputation which attracts the right kinds of clients/customers).

The author mentions working on Safari. Perhaps writing code to deal with other people's crap has something to do with her views.

Re: Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

#76

Post by dredmorbius »

SlashmanX wrote: post #6

I have no idea how the middle section of this post is relevant to the rest of it. It just seems like the author needed to flesh out another rant or justify a choice no one questioned them on and decided to find any reason to diss the web. An error in the W3 validator is not really an 'error', especially considering the type of errors that are included in those 600 odd (Most of them are about missing spaces). EDIT: Ju…

Among her later projects was Apple's Safari.

Writing code that must absolutely positively do the right thing ... with other people's unvalidated crap ... might just colour your views slightly.

Re: Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

#77

Post by icewater0 »

Echoing some of the sentiment elsewhere in comments, I liked programming a lot more when I was more of a one-man show, instead of a team member with other people doing business analysis, project management, client contact, and basically everything except pulling predefined stories off a scrum board and delivering them.

I'm sure it's more efficient and effective, but it feels like factory work now.

Re: Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

#78

Post by deirdresm »

icewater0 wrote: post #77

Echoing some of the sentiment elsewhere in comments, I liked programming a lot more when I was more of a one-man show, instead of a team member with other people doing business analysis, project management, client contact, and basically everything except pulling predefined stories off a scrum board and delivering them. I'm sure it's more efficient and effective, but it feels like factory work now.

Like you, I did enjoy it more when I was contracted to do the 1.0 version of something and where I was basically working alone to a spec.

Though I prefer the modern tools.

Re: Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

#79

Post by deirdresm »

jevgeni wrote: post #25

Wow, I'd expect people here to be more empathic towards a person having a career in software engineering longer than most of the lifetimes of the HN crowd (assuming the article is truthful). Instead one gets a bunch of dismissive, I-know-better-then-all-of-you BS. And they say bankers are arrogant.

Thank you.

Re: Programming Sucks and Why I Quit (2014)

#80

Post by deirdresm »

biggio wrote: post #44

https://github.com/deirdresm Maybe you haven't started programming at all?

Actually, I deleted my github account while I was a software engineer at Apple. Here, have a photo of my Steve Jobs engraved iPad I got while working on the Safari team:

http://deirdre.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/SJ-engraved-iP...

Presence or absence of a github account isn't meaningful. Plenty of really great programmers have never had them, and there's plenty of crap code on github. (And the inverse is also true, of course.)

Post reply on HN