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I no longer build software

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Re: I no longer build software

#451

Post by markbnj »

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 sincerely feel bad for people who have to stay in it.

Truly? Or do you mean you feel bad for people who still have to work for a living? Because if you still have to work for a living I can think of 9000 jobs that suck more than working on software. Btw, I'm turning 60 next month and have been doing this for a living since about 1992, before that I did lots of other things, so I have several points of comparison.

Re: I no longer build software

#452

Post by christiansakai »

jdmoreira wrote: post #445
christiansakai wrote: post #310

The grass is always greener on the other side. Let's see. I have 3 degrees in unrelated field (Industrial Eng, Theology, and CompSci), and worked in on a few careers, white collar jobs like being a sales engineer at a biodiesel company, helping running a cafe for a family business, being a church administrator before the current software engineering. I also worked on low paid labor jobs such as laundry, dry cleaning,…

wait... your software engineering job is stress free? That surprises me.

Yeah it is. Maybe stress is relative for people.

Re: I no longer build software

#453

Post by mcast »

varispeed wrote: post #391
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 "…

> Add me to the woodworking ex-developers (...) I have a lot of time on my hands. Be careful with that table saw...

SawStop for the win!

Re: I no longer build software

#454

Post by derefr »

stan_rogers wrote: post #423
derefr wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or, god forbid, to actually meet friends and not in VR space... These technologies really do solve problems for some people. Ignoring the temporary problem it’s solving for most-everyone right now, VR lets quadriplegics and house-bound invalids go places that aren’t accessible, e.g. the middle of the jungle. And VR is also useful for assisted visualization in the treatment of PTSD and other associated disorders. Th…

Most of that VR and AR stuff, which while being eminently more suitable for people with real accessibility issues (either due to physical disabilities or environmental constraints), is locked up behind almost entirely unaccessible interfaces in a gamers' world. Why? Because you can sell more that way. The technology and the people who can build it certainly exist; the desire to do something useful with it rather than…

Frustrating in the short term, sure; but it might be the optimal strategy for getting VR out to precisely those people, in the long term. Selling more VR headsets means more revenue plowed into R&D, more consumer demand for sanding off sharp edges, and a larger industry-wide push toward gradual commodification of the technology.

The cheaper, more reliable, and easier-to-build VR is, the more likely you’ll see stodgy old companies (of the kind that build and go through FDA-certification for accessibility aids) becoming interested in working with it.

Sort of the same idea as Tesla: sell people a Veblen good (fancy EV cars), to fund the development of a technology (batteries) to drive the commodification of the EV industry, such that everyone non-fancy EV vehicles will become affordable, and such that EV technology will become something “obvious” to even the stodgiest auto-maker.

Or, to put that another way: you’d never have seen a direct evolution from mainframe computers to the modern PC, because the grass-roots demand for doing what a mainframe does on your desktop just wasn’t there (until it was.) The industry needed to start with calculators, evolve those chips up into microcomputers and kit them out to play games, and sell those as whiz-bang consumer electronics. Progress in that game-playing microcomputer space then carried PC technology along for the ride, until they just-so-happened to become able to do what mainframes could do.

Re: I no longer build software

#455

Post by fsloth »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #439
fsloth wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can secure a decent life by programming outside of US - if this is understood as position of comfortable financial independence. I'm a programmer, my income is in the top 10th percentile, but that just means I'm in the upper middle class with the privilege to pay more taxes. I need to work until I get to retirement to secure myself financially.

For now the "trick of the privileged" (like myself, I guess) is to work remotely for an US-based company and get half of US salary, while living in a country where that salary is still 2x what you'd get on your home market. It probably will stop working at some point (as salaries for remote workers reach equilibrium), but for now, it's a good way to live.

Ok, I suppose in that case where you can get as remote a salary far exceeding local market rate the situation is also conducive to an early retirement :)

Re: I no longer build software

#456

Post by postfacto »

varispeed wrote: post #391
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 "…

> Add me to the woodworking ex-developers (...) I have a lot of time on my hands. Be careful with that table saw...

For those transitioning from programming to woodworking, if you don’t understand how to use your table saw, you’re not supposed to design and build your own table saw because you think you can build a better one.

Re: I no longer build software

#457

Post by blueyes »

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…

Those are some beautiful pieces you've made!

Re: I no longer build software

#458

Post by SCNP »

burger_moon wrote: post #412
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 probke…

I also went from residential/commercial framing and remodeling into systems engineering/sysadmin. There are moments that really stand out on both sides, as you said. I distinctly remember packing the tools up one day and thinking about how the second floor of that house wasn't there that morning. It was a good feeling that has stuck with me for 15 years. But I also remember the days our crew was trying to eke out a few hours of work with a hurricane coming in because we needed the money. We had the walls and roof mostly up on a beach house so we could do some interior work without being directly in the rain. However, the end of one of our extension cords, the one running the skil saw, was sitting in a puddle of water that completely encircled the cutting bench. I remember being told to unplug it to pack up and having to move it out of the puddle with the handle of my hammer since it bit me a couple times.

I think what it boils down to is that, generally, software engineers/coders/sysadmins like to build things. When we don't get to build the things we want, the way we want to, it leads to a desire to get into woodworking. It's building things; its success is purely merit-based; and it's building the things that you want to build. I wouldn't recommend anyone go into construction (especially not commercial construction a la Office Space) from coding. It's joy is fleeting and infrequent and it ruins your body.

Re: I no longer build software

#459

Post by 2mol »

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 "…

Welcome to this beautiful hobby! I'm sure you'll love it for a long time to come (as you said, it helps to not _have_ to do it for 40hrs a week).

I want to add to your description and say that the design part of the work can also be hugely satisfying! I found that there is something similar to software engineering: you can make it as simple [1] or complicated as you want, but there is something magical about finding the simplest solution that gets the job done.

Consider posting some photos on the woodworking subreddit if you make something cool!

[1]: a minimalist piece that I'm personally proud of: https://www.juricho.me/zurich-table/

Re: I no longer build software

#460

Post by aarongough »

jlangenauer wrote: post #278
matthewmacleod wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes without saying that your feelings are personal ones, totally valid, and nobody can really question them. I'm 20 years behind you, and I don't know what effect that will have on my views. But I don't really recognise the picture you're painting. Compared to the first steps I took as a developer about 15 years ago, almost everything about software development seems better to me. I find developing software to be…

I think you are right to say that the methods are vastly improved, but the ends to which those methods are applied have become ever more uninteresting (for a lot of people), and often morally suspect. We have built exquisite tools, but we use them to extract profit, to manipulate behaviour and often for no discernable purpose at all. Programming has become joyless. There are ever-shrinking spaces where a developer ge…

Unfortunately I agree with this. A great quote I saw a while ago:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” –Jeff Hammerbacher

Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way involved getting people to click on ads. Either directly making a product where ad click rate is a measured metric, or products that helped people make products where clicking on ads was a metric...

I have usually been able to find a lot of joy in solving the problems in the smaller areas where I was focused, but whenever I took a step back and looked at what I was helping work towards it felt very meaningless.

I think finding a job today where you feel like the work you do does genuine good for the world is an incredibly rare and difficult thing...

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