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I don’t belong in tech

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Re: I don’t belong in tech

#121

Post by angersock »

wycats wrote: post #102
dunkelheit wrote: post #7

Maybe she should quit doing user-facing stuff and try getting into systems programming for a change. Or some other area where sloppy solutions lead to tangible reduction of business value and thus are not tolerated. Tech is big, no need to quit all of it.

There is plenty of place for polish and deep understanding in the user-facing sphere. Apple is renowned for their work in this area. My company's product, Skylight, has made a virtue out of "all the little things" - understanding problems deeply and solving them well. I think it's reasonable for people to wish that more of user-facing software worked this way, even though it's out of sync with how Silicon Valley and…

> Apple is renowned for their work in this area.

Apple is renowned for their draconian policies and, more importantly, massive marketing apparatus that brainwashes customers.

Their actual expertise in development, as exhibited in the last few years of buggy software and gimped hardware, are not that great.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#122

Post by thesimpsons1022 »

briansteffens wrote: post #97
d0100 wrote: post #82

Anyone else bothered by her phrasing of "he’s trying to be helpful" followed by "Bless his little heart"? Why would anyone publicly address their SO in such a patronizing way? This just bothered me more than it should.

Also "Sometimes he says wrong things, and then I have to explain why those things are wrong.." Sounds more like she just lectures him rather than having actual conversations.

yeah and what does that have to do with the article at all? not sure why she included it. imagine if a man said that stuff about a woman. i'd hear sexism and mansplaining nonstop.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#123

Post by matt_wulfeck »

user5994461 wrote: post #85
rokhayakebe wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead, you sat on a mountain and meditated upon your code, until you understood it well enough to fix the problem and try again. :)

And it was the most productive time of your life. Never, at any point in your meditation or mountain ascension, did you introduce a single bug or provoked any issue to any user =)

And the snow-white sheet of paper did remain pure and chaste for ever -- pure and chaste -- and empty.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#124

Post by Veen »

jimmywanger wrote: post #45

This post is horribly verbose. It constantly brings gender and race into it, then disavows it a couple paragraphs later. This is a textbook definition of a first world problem. Don't like tech? Don't do it. Nobody has a gun to your head. The worst part is having a job, "hating" it, and spewing your hatred of it across your social circles. That does nobody any good. You're not a slave. Either you dislike not having mo…

> Don't like tech? Don't do it.

Alternatively: love tech but don't like how it's built and the incentives in the industry? Try to change things for the better.

Your way, nothing ever improves. Her way, things might get a little better for some people. At the very least, there's a benefit to highlighting the issue and generating some conversation.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#125

Post by matt_wulfeck »

onion2k wrote: post #51
morgante wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legacy codebases make money. The engineer anxiety about them is myopic and ignorant of business realities. If you can code something quickly and well enough that it doesn't immediately collapse under its own weight, you have succeeded. The fact that a codebase has existed long enough to become "legacy" means it did a good enough job to stay alive.

The engineer anxiety about them is myopic and ignorant of business realities. I don't think that's fair to a large number of engineers. We know that code gets loaded with technical debt and we know that we can't spend time fixing it because of "business realities". That doesn't mean it isn't a problem for us though. Anyone whose had to maintain a codebase that's years old and riddled with undocumented and untested "f…

Can you name a single trade where that's not also true? Keeping any mechanical thing running for years takes a lot of monkey-patching and duct tape. Technical debt in software engineering is not the exception. It's typical.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#126

Post by [deleted] »

vdnkh wrote: post #44

> Sometimes he says wrong things, and then I have to explain why those things are wrong >please sit tight while I take a moment to roll my eyes >You failed fast and broke my heart. >Maybe I will change It's hard to learn if you never accept that you're wrong. Admitting defeat is not accepting you're wrong.

[deleted]

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#127

Post by etblg »

wycats wrote: post #98

This post is not about perfection, but rather about a deep, legitimate frustration that the tech community spends so little time really understanding the problems it sets out to solve. Here's a key paragraph: > I am not solution-oriented. I don’t see a problem and get giddy at the idea of solving it, patching it up and sending it on its merry way. I want to poke it and ask it questions. Where did it come from, what i…

I was just about to say how weird it was that almost all of the projects you named were worked on by Yehuda Katz and then I noticed who posted it...

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#128

Post by kalmi10 »

Illniyar wrote: post #41
Slartie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally seconding this. Just trying to "quick fix" apparent bugs, without having understood the complex problem in its entirety beforehand, is a pretty bad approach in quite some areas of the tech world. This is true for most server-side work, for example - you just can't put a band-aid type solution on a problem created by a weird race condition between different requests processed in parallel, because you most like…

"You just can't put a band-aid type solution on a problem created by a weird race condition" Oh yes you can, and do, often, in payment processing code. I've done it (with a simple sleep for x seconds I think), and I can assure you the higher ups couldn't have been happier.

I always wondered why cards get processed so slowly in some countries...

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#129

Post by pjmorris »

dunkelheit wrote: post #7

Maybe she should quit doing user-facing stuff and try getting into systems programming for a change. Or some other area where sloppy solutions lead to tangible reduction of business value and thus are not tolerated. Tech is big, no need to quit all of it.

> Tech is big, no need to quit all of it.

“Well if no one out there understands, start your own revolution and cut out the middle man” - Billy Bragg, Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

Bragg was writing about the tension between being a musician and being a political activist rather than the tension between problem understanding and problem solving, but the tension seems to be everywhere. I've got a friend who was frustrated about how little his PhD had to do with philosophy because there was no time for that, only time to publish. Alan Kay said something of the ilk in the epic Ask HN thread a few months ago, referring to how hard it's been to get funding to do good research for something like the last 35 years or so. Hopefully the author can find her 'birds of a feather', it's not like we lack problems that need understanding.

Re: I don’t belong in tech

#130

Post by dcole2929 »

chris_wot wrote: post #62
Slartie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally seconding this. Just trying to "quick fix" apparent bugs, without having understood the complex problem in its entirety beforehand, is a pretty bad approach in quite some areas of the tech world. This is true for most server-side work, for example - you just can't put a band-aid type solution on a problem created by a weird race condition between different requests processed in parallel, because you most like…

I'm not entirely sure that she's right in tarring the whole industry with the same brush. Taking a bug out to tea is fantastic, because it really is about understanding the problem. But she conflates maintenance coding and program writing. There is a lot of half-baked software out there, but to say that this isn't like any other industry - like journalism - is really patently absurd. Despite best intentions, journali…

I think the difference is in how the two industries she are comparing here fundamentally treat mistakes. In journalism, you might not get fired immediately for a mistake like that but certainly you're going to get reprimanded and told how unacceptable that is. Your company is absolutely going to run a correction at the first opportunity they get. Any mistake is treated as a major embarrassment by staff of a respectable news company. The viewers/readers might not notice/care but the company does.

This is totally not how things work in tech though. First of all there are a lot more mistakes/bugs, and because of that how bugs are handled is completely different. If you're not doing something where lives/money are at stake, it's ok to release with bugs so long as they aren't showstoppers. When I write something that has a bug in it, I don't even get talked to. We just write it up and toss it in the list with all the other bugs.

There are of course situations in both industries where things are different but I think in general there is definitely a major difference in how tech treats mistakes as compare to how pretty much every other industry.

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