Why do I get the feeling that this person worked at a Web start-up for three weeks, then decided the entire tech industry was beneath them?
I don’t belong in tech
151–160 of 205 posts
Re: I don’t belong in tech
#152OP posits that industry developers have different values than hers; but how much is it that she's simply learning about the business side of things?
In other words, is her problem really with developer's values, or with business/operations/management?
I feel a bit like she's simplified it a bit by placing everyone in into a "Tech" category (vs her experiences with non-tech).
Are there not inter-company divisions, that are usually in opposition regarding these values (with developers, usually having the least leverage in the business, following business priorities)?
Re: I don’t belong in tech
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where did the author deem anyone a bigot? Your pattern matching algorithm has severe bugs if it identifies this post as deeming families as bigots.
This piece literally begins with a person screaming a racial insult in the middle of Broadway. No logical person would conclude that outburst was free of gender or racial bias.
"I'm not a white man" is not a racial insult. You need to connect a few more dots for us.
Re: I don’t belong in tech
#154This might come down to being a goal oriented person versus a process oriented person.
I got a PhD in theoretical physics. By the end of graduate school I was really unmotivated. I decided to leave physics and do something else, as yet to be determined. In order to go through any of the job interviews through the university you had to first go to a career counsellor. I had absolutely zero expectations, but I of course did it anyway.
When I walked in, the first thing the career counsellor said to me was "You don't look like an academic." I looked like a football player in those days. He continued something to the effect, "Athletes are usually goal oriented people. They can put themselves through a lot of pain because they are interest in reaching an end. Academics are usually process oriented people. They enjoy working a problem and seeing all the angles of it and they are not driven by finishing it."
Granted, this is a generalization and does not apply to all academics or athletes. One of my professors Lenny Susskind, a famous physicist, is also an athletic guy.
I don't think this changed the way I did anything but it was very insightful. You can find problems with both types of people and at the same time they both have their values. For computer programming, particularly in a startup, being goal oriented is very helpful. Someone process oriented would probably be much happier doing something else.
Re: I don’t belong in tech
#155Earlier 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.
You absolutely shouldn't need to do that often in payment processing code. Did you go back and fix it properly later?
Re: I don’t belong in tech
#156Anyone 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.
You're right: it bothered you more than it should. We should leave strangers to their own relationships; they're not for us to litigate.
Re: I don’t belong in tech
#157The author makes some great points that I initially wanted to dismiss, but I think are actually really interesting. Unlike many other types of engineering/craft, most experienced software developers have settled on an aversion to perfectionism. A good carpenter wants to build a solid house even if no one will ever see its frame. Ditto to an auto engineer at BMW, or a hardware engineer at Apple, or a mechanical engine…
I'll have to disagree. I used to be a carpenter and the objective is definitely not to be perfect. Building anything, houses or apps, the objective is to work within tolerances. The modern system of 2x4 framing and drywall allows those tolerances to be very loose without affecting the end product, but I digress. Would you prefer a half-finished house with perfectly cut studs (that you can't see inside the drywall), o…
That's an interesting point. But there's a big difference. Carpentry don't fall over much - at least not unless it's pushed beyond reasonable tolerances by outside forces.
Software falls over all the time, often in very avoidable ways that give the impression of simple laziness and/or incompetence.
E.g. Why do I need to use Safari to log into my bank account? I bank with a household name bank in the UK, but they've failed to make their web portal work with Chrome.
Why does iTunes let me set up a new iPad, but at the end of the process I get a choice between two buttons labelled "Sync" and "Done" - and I still have no idea what either is supposed to do, because sometimes I get a message about syncing to an old backup, or something, and the whole process is utterly counterintuitive.
Why can't operating systems handle paths with spaces or unicode with a standard convention for quoting that ensures consistency? It's 2016, not 1966, and this shouldn't even be a problem. But it is, for a lot of languages and operating systems.
And so on. IMO the author is right. We have a "dog ate my homework" industry made of quick superficial hacks bodged together, when we should have an industry built on solidly professional standards, conventions, and expectations.
Yes, the hacks ship. But if they don't work, how is that a success?
The attitude is built into the culture, and it shouldn't be. It should be impossible for anyone to become a professional dev without some lectures or lessons in domain analysis that forces them to confront a fundamental lesson - the problem is always harder and more complicated than you think it is.
A talent for cute math and logic problems is not the same thing as being able to dive into a novel domain, extract the essential elements, design a workable architecture to represent the elements, and then iterate towards a robust solution that can survive contact with users.
Re: I don’t belong in tech
#158OP posits that industry developers have different values than hers; but how much is it that she's simply learning about the business side of things? In other words, is her problem really with developer's values, or with business/operations/management? I feel a bit like she's simplified it a bit by placing everyone in into a "Tech" category (vs her experiences with non-tech). Are there not inter-company divisions, tha…
It basically sounds like she doesn't want to be a pigeon-holed implementation engineer in a fast paced silicon valley startup.
The traits she described can actually be quite valuable. She just need to find the right role. Or perhaps one day start her own company.
Re: I don’t belong in tech
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a designer, one can live exclusively in "photoshop", ignoring the complexity of the process and the reality of usage. It's not like you can "test" a drawing with a real user. As a programmer, you gotta get all the little details right or the application is not possible to use. There is no way around it, whatever is forgotten will just hit you right in your face. And last but not least. Drawing is dead easy. A prog…
This is such a massive simplification of what a designer does it's actually amazing. You're first and last paragraphs are simply wrong. First of all a designer doesn't get to live exclusively in photoshop or some other tool. They don't get to ignore the "reality of usage". In order to be a competent designer they have to not only completely understand the problem domain, but also the given software solution and how a…
We both agree that there is a difference between a "drawer" and a designer, just like there is a difference between a "code monkey" and a developer.
First paragraph. I could say all the exact same thing about a developer.
Second paragraph. Yes to all your questions. I should clarify that the drag&drop tools I had in mind were for desktop applications, not web, that's a different world.
Re: I don’t belong in tech
#160Maybe 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 f…
> 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.
I don't understand. He studied philosophy but ended up writing a thesis that was only tangentially related to the field?
Or he assumed that "Doctor of Philosophy" was related to the field of philosophy, and was disappointed that he couldn't talk about Plato while writing about physics?