I no longer build software • Hacker News Board

Re: I no longer build software

#411

Post by tootie » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #125

Totally on board with not building software any more. In fact, at 55 this is my last week of it. For real. Basically, everything sucks more about building software nowadays more than I remember it sucking before, from the mere mechanics of navigating through an obscenely large pseudo-object-oriented codebase to the WRONG constructs/idioms people use to build distributed systems to the way software is packaged and dep…

I've been doing this for over 20 years and feel the exact opposite. The process for getting an idea turned into working software is faster, easier and better than ever. You are looking at it from the inside. All the mechanics have changed from how you were trained and now the process is no longer bottlenecked by the kind of problems you are used to solving. From a higher-level perspective, businesses are 100x smarter about how to think about digital problems and solutions, what kind of talent they need to execute and how much it costs. Nothing will stop executives from trying to squeeze budgets and timelines, but that's human nature. But now there's a chorus of experienced people who can speak the truth, who know when to build vs buy, who know what quality looks like, who know that user experience is paramount. Software development has become commoditized which sucks for developers, but it's great for software.

Re: I no longer build software

#412

Post by burger_moon » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #75

Add me to the woodworking ex-developers. I built a website that pays the bills, and now I have a lot of time on my hands. I am finishing my first piece of furniture today. It's pretty scary to work without an undo button. The physical world isn't just instructions, but movements. A little twitch can ruin a cut. A clumsy movement can dent a piece of wood you spent an hour sanding. You truly experience the meaning of "…

I went the other way into programming from the trades.

Sometimes, especially when I read about people leaving this industry to go work in the trades it makes me nostalgic and miss working with my hands and building real things.

But I also have enough bad memories of shitty work conditions and waking up sore day after day to give me a gut check to stay put for a little longer.

> I don't think programming is the probkem. Anything you do 40 hours a week for other people will get to you just the same. Programming is a pretty sweet gig, all things considered.

Turning my hobbies in jobs killed off a lot of fun I used to have. I think it's pretty universal and why it should probably be more common to switch industries a couple times at least through your career to keep things fun and not stay in a burned out mentality forever.

Re: I no longer build software

#413

Post by falcolas » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

ClikeX wrote: post #320

coldtea wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we've mostly solved trivial non-problems if/not regressions? People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to call a travel agency to get a ticket, or, god forbid, to actually meet friends and not in VR space... I'll give you "self driving cars" -- well, I would if they could work today, which they don't...

Yeah, that argument gets used any time new technology arrises. Sure it wasn't hard, doesn't mean you need to stop working on making it even simpler. > So we've mostly solved trivial non-problems if/not regressions? While I agree some developments have worsened the experience of particular things. What developments would you rather have seen? By the way. VR was already a thing in the 80's. It's hardly new, only improv…

Two thoughts.

For one, advances in VR have come from hardware advances, not software.

For two - cell phones are not so much useful because they're phones, but because they're miniature computers with (near) worldwide connectivity to the internet.

Re: I no longer build software

#414

Post by martinhath » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #330

notacoward wrote: post #125

Totally on board with not building software any more. In fact, at 55 this is my last week of it. For real. Basically, everything sucks more about building software nowadays more than I remember it sucking before, from the mere mechanics of navigating through an obscenely large pseudo-object-oriented codebase to the WRONG constructs/idioms people use to build distributed systems to the way software is packaged and dep…

After having read the article Built to Last [1] from the latest issue of Logic Magazine over my morning coffee, and spending breakfast pondering my coming day of figuring out if we can disentangle some stuff I'm working on from the increasingly complex and inscrutable Big Data ecosystem, and if it's even going to be possible to get management to approve it when the requests to stick RSS feeds into DBMSes are forever…

In case anyone is inclined to go read the article, let me (potentially) save you a click with the following excerpts from it:

> the last thing many male computer scientists entering the field wanted was to make the field easier to enter or code easier to read, which might undermine their claims to professional and “scientific” expertise.

> Take the C programming language: it was created in 1972, but as one of the current COBOL programmers I interviewed pointed out, nobody makes fun of it or calls it an “old dead language”

> There’s an old joke among programmers: “If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.”

> it’s perhaps no wonder that a committee-designed language meant to be easier to learn and use

And, of course, the quote from the comment to which I'm replying:

> many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers.

If any of these quotes even resembles something you _might_ think about this field, maybe you'll get something out of reading the whole article. Personally, these quotes are so backwards to me that the author could just as well have written "Programmers can breathe under water" or "grass is the cornerstone of a well balanced diet".

Re: I no longer build software

#415

Post by freewilly1040 » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #347

gfxgirl wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience. I used to buy the new Thomas Guide (the 1 inch thick paper map book to find my way around Los Angeles). Having Google Maps on my phone has massively changed that. In the middle we had Nav systems but even then I now live somewhere where public transportation is the norm and being able to ask Google Maps how to get somewhere as been a life changing experience. As one concrete example, from 2000-2010…

Like I said, “getting directions” used to be a service. Specifically, back then—and still today, in many places!—you’d be expected to retain the services of a guide when you were in a foreign city/country. Who would often double as your translator, and potentially as your driver as well. Machine directions are still not as good as the service a good guide provides in navigating an unfamiliar city. Especially, no navi…

The value add is not that the machine guide is better than the human, it’s that the machine guide is available to everyone, at all times.

Re: I no longer build software

#416

Post by hombre_fatal » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #63

jb1991 wrote: post #20

Amen. Modern software development is frankly kinda sucky. The old days pre-2000 were arguably a lot more enjoyable. Today it's just digital plumbing and dealing with all sorts of issues that are not creative. The sheer complexity is frankly absurd as well. I've thought about moving on from software many times, and I know many who have. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's best way to spend your short l…

I think a lot of the pre-2000 programming was a bit more enjoyable because most of us were not programming for the web and actually using platforms that were designed for application development. The web is a very poor fit for what most people want designed.

Application development on the web is much more pleasant than what we were doing on any pre-web platform, and possibly even now.

I've wanted one-way data flow (React, Elm) forever.

We just have rose colored glasses because we were younger, dabbling, all tech was new and non-web tech was just what was available. And we confuse that for some sort of obvious tech superiority. I'd say those were the worst times for application development, not the best. Makes me wonder how many people actually worked on a production client application back then.

Re: I no longer build software

#417

Post by gigatexal » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

mauvehaus wrote: post #123

Holy shit, this is me! A couple things to clarify: I posted the original issue as a minor complaint about the docker cli and promptly forgot about it. I never expected it to get any traction or follow-up. At the time I posted it, I was working as a contractor for my former full time employer. I had left full-time work there in early 2017 to attend the full-time program at the (sadly now-defunct) Furniture Institute o…

Kudos to you for having the wherewithal to make such a choice for your quality of life. The rest of us should take this opportunity to think how our requests and demands on OSS maintainers are perceived and be more empathetic: if you aren't paying for something you can't demand anything get done, this after all, is a collective effort of hackers working toward some community good. If you or a company directly benefits from a project monetarily think about supporting those projects -- but even then you don't get to demand anything. ... something something, honey vs vinegar or the however the saying goes.

Re: I no longer build software

#418

Post by kps » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

“I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.” — Tom West quoted in Tracy Kidder The Soul of a New Machine

Re: I no longer build software

#419

Post by one2know » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

I started doing similar changes because software became a shitshow. Corporate software shops are just a bunch of IT people trying to get their friend's products in use in the company for kickbacks. So what you have are multiple IT teams with more power than developers trying to tell everyone which tools they MUST use. Developers at the last place I worked had no access to production, could not deploy code at all, could not test their own code, could not even push code, could not see other team's code, etc, etc. But, the company had a devops team, a team called "app ops", a "SRE" team, an IT team, an "infra" team, and a security team that strangely was dictating which tools were used to deploy code. NONE of these teams did anything remotely close to what their team name did. They would do visibility projects which, oddly, sometimes involved developing software but not the kind that generates revenue. "dev ops" would deploy software to production, if they had time between their projects. "app ops" was supposed to handle support incidents, if they had time between their projects, etc...

It is useless to try to build software in this environment. It is far easier to build a hunk of wood and say, "here you fucking go, take it or leave it" than to deal with dozens and dozens of people trying to extract money from the development process while suffocating the company.

Re: I no longer build software

#420

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #386

TeMPOraL wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ~23 years behind GP, and I feel the same way as them already. Goes to say, this may be a matter of personality. There were few and brief moments in my career as a software developer when I was truly happy at my work. Most of those involved implementing an architecture or algorithm I figured out from scratch, or took from scientific literature - either as prototype or directly in the product. Sometimes as "hold my…

> who doesn't like their own Rube Goldberg machines? Love that. Yes, the 1% (of which I've been a part) often get to control both the structure and rate of change for a large codebase, and in perfecting the fit to themselves they almost inevitably make the experience worse for everyone else.

Right. And I'm not angry at the person who drives the shape of the codebase; working with code designed around a different philosophy than your own is something that one can get used to. But I do feel that the large codebases I've been dealing with were often way too large for what they're doing - even though I couldn't always pinpoint what was superfluous. It's probably just entropy at work, but I can't stop thinking - there must be a better way!