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Why your programmers just want to code

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Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#101

Post by send_computers »

jdowner wrote: post #42

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man below says: "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and…

At the heart of it though there is a good point, the culture of a workplace can determine how developers operate. That's it but the full picture is: The culture of a workplace determines how everyone operates.

Managers do not 'set' the culture and drive workers with amateur psychology, although they might like to think they do. Whenever I see the attempts to control how I operate in the workplace, I play along and go back to work... worked out so far.

In saying that I have worked in places with culture that I liked and places with a culture I disliked, my work has always been the same, but my attitude differs.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#102

Post by whack »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #70
whack wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've missed the context and the point of the article. The author is specifically speaking about employees who are full of ideas at the outset, but withdraw into their shells after a couple months. The problem the author is trying to address, is that of would-be enthusiastic employees becoming disengaged because their ideas are not given a fair-hearing. This really resonated with me, because even as someone who's mo…

I'm not sure if my comment is that orthogonal - the core point of the author may be what you described, but the article exemplifies some pretty pathological issues too. As for the issue of "would-be enthusiastic employees becoming disengaged because their ideas are not given a fair-hearing", I do agree. This also affects communities, and even interpersonal relationships. There's hardly a better way to destroy someone…

I liked the way you described displaying enthusiasm as a form of vulnerability. I never thought of it that way, but it's very true. It takes courage to openly display enthusiasm, and it's so easy to deflate it by making snarky comments or stonewalling.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#103

Post by hobs »

forgottenpass wrote: post #98
hobs wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you should start a business. You absolutely have a stake in terms of your paycheck, is it as great a stake as you would like? No. Are plenty of people happy with that kind of stake? Absolutely. Do you need to get paid in stock to get paid well? No, in fact in many cases its gambling with market forces you simply cannot control. I dont mean to say you should burn your life for a business, but if you simply…

You absolutely have a stake in terms of your paycheck [...] Are plenty of people happy with that kind of stake? Absolutely. That "stake" is a product of how good the employer is relative to others, how hard it is to find another job and the job market for the position in general. I don't begrudge people for being happy with that. I am one of them. But a first order approximation of this "stake" can be summed up as "n…

First of all equity doesnt mean stake, you can absolutely trade equity for cash, and your payroll can absolutely be a large stake in the business.

What it does mean is that your stake is not directly 1:1 tied to the business success. This goes back to gambling, if you are the house and take money on every deal, you have a stake in deals continuing to happen.

You are right that your pay is based on many factors, and so would your equity.

So I disagree with your summation, and I think its improper to pretend that equity is the best way to get paid and to care about what you are building (especially when you believe in a product but risk is high.)

To your second point, you can argue (and I think successfully) that having more of a direct stake in a business will increase your personal investment, but that is literally the concept of ownership.

If you think the current practices are bullshit I do believe starting your own highly successful business is the correct approach; you get what you want and if you are successful enough, the industry will change behind you.

I did not say "you should work as if you have a greater investment than you do" during any part of my comments, simply that if you dont care about the product you will not produce quality work.

If someone isnt paying you what you are worth, you are not going to produce quality work.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#105

Post by humanrebar »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #99
humanrebar wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Will this feature be profitable if it requires X more engineers per Y users?" If the answer is yes, then I guess it's fine.

Until the code base becomes so intractable, such a dinosaur of brittle features and run-on code that nothing significant can be done without exhaustive debugging. Then no group is large enough to make good progress. Loose wads of code with random dependencies make the effort grow geometrically. No growth in team membership can keep up with that for long. The only solution is to tightly control dependencies, write goo…

> Until the code base becomes so intractable, such a dinosaur of brittle features and run-on code that nothing significant can be done without exhaustive debugging.

Yes. And that gets at the point of OP. "Let me replace subsystem A so we can free up B resources per year" is a big, if it works. To throw it on the backlog for "when we get time" is self destructive in the long run.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#106

Post by dgreensp »

paulhilbert wrote: post #23
ndh2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, wow. Care to elaborate? I found the entire article so relatable that I even thought about registering on Medium to be able to clap.

I spent most of my day coding. Except for some fresh air breaks and occasional discussions on how to collaborate I actually spend every second doing it. And I love it. The article suggests in its whole premise that this is wrong. For me and for the business. Yet it lacks any evidence on why I should want to do more than that - in fact I would even call it blindly dogmatic in that regard. But at least in my work conte…

Let me know where I can find a company like this! It’s obvious to me that engineering quality is precisely what engineers should be worried about — the “how” as opposed to the “what” or the “why”. Like chefs should be focused on the food.

When you take the responsibility for building the right thing for the market, etc and smear it across all the engineers, some will step up and become informal managers, organically acquiring power in response to the responsibility put on them, while others who are too busy programming or not interested in taking on other jobs will realize they have responsibility that is out of line with their power.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#107

Post by quesera »

notyourday wrote: post #91
firepoet wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say 40% of the time of my career I've been in a place where my ideas were valued and I felt like "part of the team" as a programmer, and later as a programmer/manager. Those places I stayed the longest. They make up 15% of the number of companies I've worked for (my résumé has a lot of places on it..ha!). The rest of the places I was beaten down, much like the programmer in this story. Unlike that developer, thou…

... which is why my position is HTTP 402 "PAY ME AND I WILL SCREW A LIGHT BULB"

Reviewer feedback (high priority):

    @@ -1 +1 @@
    -I WILL SCREW A LIGHT BULB
    +I WILL SCREW IN A LIGHT BULB

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#108

Post by marktangotango »

jdowner wrote: post #42

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man below says: "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and…

his “team-friendly” interactions were usually sarcastic. He often talked about technical debt, our lack of innovation, and the “stupid” decisions holding us back. An irritating “I told you so” sentiment plagued his comments and feedback.

The easily missed point here is that Jamie, on some level, still cares. The ones this author doesn't recognize are the ones who don't give any outward sign of annoyance, because they genuinely don't care. They'll participate in your "chaos is a process" and roll with your shifting requirements by doing the bare minimum at all times. Maybe they'll throw in some stuff occasionally to wow everyone, usually not. They'll just plug along, keeping their ideas and improvements to themselvse, watching you fail. Because they've seen this all before. Rare is the organization that knows what they want, and have structures in place to effectively build and grow products. I've personally seen it exactly once.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#109

Post by wffurr »

hobs wrote: post #87
wffurr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a job is not even close to a "stake in the business". If you want me to act like I have a stake in the business, give me a stake in the business . To be clear, that's stock with dividends and voting rights. Something like democratic control over the workplace would do wonders for morale. Then managers answer to the body of employees as a whole, not the "boss."

Sounds like you should start a business. You absolutely have a stake in terms of your paycheck, is it as great a stake as you would like? No. Are plenty of people happy with that kind of stake? Absolutely. Do you need to get paid in stock to get paid well? No, in fact in many cases its gambling with market forces you simply cannot control. I dont mean to say you should burn your life for a business, but if you simply…

The point of the stock isn't selling it for cash, it's having a share in the profits and more importantly voting rights at the company level. Are plenty of people "happy" being wage labor? Maybe. Certainly compared to some of the alternatives - unemployment, welfare, homelessness, lack of health care access. Is it really anyone's heart's desire to sell their labor for a paycheck, though?

Start a business... I've thought about it. If only it were so easy. Even if I did, that solves the problem for me, but not anyone else.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#110

Post by notyourday »

quesera wrote: post #107
notyourday wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... which is why my position is HTTP 402 "PAY ME AND I WILL SCREW A LIGHT BULB"

Reviewer feedback (high priority): @@ -1 +1 @@ -I WILL SCREW A LIGHT BULB +I WILL SCREW IN A LIGHT BULB

It is just a question of price.
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