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I no longer build software

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Re: I no longer build software

#491

Post by jfim »

ativzzz wrote: post #463
matthewmacleod wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ever-shrinking spaces where a developer gets to build something novel I think it might be possible to say that relative to the entire industry the space for novel or interesting work is shrinking – possibly. But I don't think that actually means there's less interesting stuff to work on. If anything, the spaces for that are growing – maybe more routine work is growing faster, but I can't really say. I'd wag…

I agree. Though because of the growth of the industry, these spots where actual cutting edge work is happening are insanely competitive, and I would bet that many of the programmers (not all of course) who worked on the cool stuff 20 years ago would not make the cut for the cutting edge today, or are simply not interested in the particular niche of that edge.

How much of it is actual competitiveness and how much of it is the artificial barriers people put in the form of technical interviews?

There's a big gap between software craftsmanship and the algorithmic trivia interview expectations nowadays, and it seems to keep widening.

Re: I no longer build software

#492

Post by luord »

My last full time job made me consider leaving too. Alas, since I have no other marketable skills (or any type of skills) beyond software development, for now[1], and I realized I just disliked that particular project and its process, not software in general, I'll continue for a few years more.

[1]: I'm learning and practicing creative writing, hoping to publish books some day.

Re: I no longer build software

#493

Post by aprdm »

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 think for some people building software became about making the most amount of money they can possibly make, it became about grinding leetcode to get that sweet package at FAANG.

Startups became about flipping crud apps that try to get users addicted to them.

There are still cool and honest jobs out there! Work in a space you care about and have fun, filter out anything with VC money or FAANG. Usually older companies can be more rewarding from a career perspective, you also get to work in bigger projects with more responsibilities as well as you aren’t competing against 50k’s of software engineers to climb the ladder.

Re: I no longer build software

#494

Post by resonious »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #420
notacoward wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thinkin…

I definitely agree. It's quite easy to look at a large codebase and feel like it's way more complex than it needs to be. That line of thinking often leads to rewrites, and in my experience rewrites often lead to newfound understanding of why the codebase was complex in the first place.

Re: I no longer build software

#495

Post by devilduck »

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…

You are an inspiration

Re: I no longer build software

#496

Post by cptskippy »

dcolkitt wrote: post #323
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #168

It seems like nowadays you just can't make money building interesting things anymore. Most of the available programming work is really just writing glue code to make big software systems work as intended, to the point where it can feel more like writing configuration files than actual programming. Put simply, 98% of programming these days is scripting. On the other hand, you have lots of fun things one can do with co…

20+ years ago, a sizable chunk of the software workforce was dedicated to converting legacy systems from 2 digit year codes into 4 digits. The notion that all the interesting work was done in yesteryear is just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. At any time in history most software work was glue code. Because the low-hanging fruit is always going to be taking existing systems and applying small tweaks…

20 years ago I was writing one of the first online endorsement engines for producers (independent insurance agents) to allow them to make endorsements on insurance policies over the internet rather than having to speak to an underwriter on the phone. We built a single web front end that was to be used by both the underwriters and the producers.

I remember showing off the role based permissions structure we had in place to allow an admin to control what sort of endorsements users could make. I quipped something like "this is so granular that we could even allow insureds to make endorsements to the policy." The response I got from the head underwriter was "we will never allow insureds to make endorsements on policies".

When was the last time you had to speak to an agent or underwriter on the phone to make changes to your insurance policy?

20 years ago was a very exciting time as many businesses were going online for the very first time. We were getting away from writing websites in C with CGI and using higher level languages like Perl, PHP, and ASP.

Re: I no longer build software

#497

Post by nescioquid »

chpmrc wrote: post #208
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #168

It seems like nowadays you just can't make money building interesting things anymore. Most of the available programming work is really just writing glue code to make big software systems work as intended, to the point where it can feel more like writing configuration files than actual programming. Put simply, 98% of programming these days is scripting. On the other hand, you have lots of fun things one can do with co…

I can order a comfy car anywhere I am with the tap of a button. I can order food from hundreds of restaurants and have it delivered in less than 30 mins with the tap of a button. I can book flights and hotels with the tap of a button. I can play with friends in virtual reality and actually sweat. I can watch a live stream of SpaceX launching reusable rockets in space. I could buy a car that is almost fully "self driv…

Reading this litany of technologically-enabled consumer achievements, I thought of David Graeber who visited the disappointment we sometimes feel for how things actually went from mid-century to now.

"[...]Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?" (https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...)

Kinda makes your list seem like an indictment. Today's world is the world capital wants to make. When you do open your awareness to the scale of effort and the broadest results, technological optimism in the future is deflated.

Re: I no longer build software

#498

Post by fsociety »

intotheabyss wrote: post #143

I'm a mechanical engineer in aerospace looking to move to software. I like the idea of setting up an office at home and working for myself. Is software really this bad, as all of the comments here suggest? Should I make the jump to software from a career in which I have a decade of experience? I just find aerospace boring, unimaginative, stressful and low paying, and if I could work on just building code for web apps…

Nope it’s good. Think about musicians, when they are junior everything is fun and interesting.

Once you train your ears and learn scales suddenly you start to hear music in terms of theory.

Do this long enough to become “senior” and suddenly a whole class of music is boring - like glue-code.

You need to find outlets for your experience and not just maintain open source projects - which are highly valuable but a huge pain in the ass.

Re: I no longer build software

#499

Post by tluyben2 »

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…

Not to mention that those CRUD apps have been done, exactly the same, 10000s of times before and 10000s of people are doing the same work you are doing now at this moment.

Everyone thinks they are productive but value is being burned all day, every day in most companies all over the world. The level of reuse is depressing and people, especially here, firmly believe we need to use the latest frontend and backend crap to rebuild what was working perfectly fine before.

More and more everything appears resume driven and to extract more hours billed or even higher LoC or commits per day. It is a nightmare and I refuse to play more and more. The over architecting for shit one off projects burning 10000$s a month ‘in the cloud’ so it probably, maybe it won’t crash with the 5 users per day it has using it.

Yes the tooling is better but the drive to use every latest tool and tech really makes no sense for almost any project.

Fitting anecdote; a company from LA was contracted to build a crud app for a big corp; they used react, typescript, node, express, aws, aws lambda, redis, dynamo and rds. For a crud app. They got $50k for it. For a crud app. Costs were through the roof running it as you need actual good people to run it. It failed a lot of times for such a setup as it was all the latest of the latest architecting wise. Brittle as hell even with all the tests and resume driven busywork. I rewrote it 1 php + bootstrap and jquery file in 1 day with a perl script to migrate the data and running on a 1.99$/mo server. Cheap, easy and no worries; handles a lot of traffic for the cost of a cup of coffee, does not need devops and they paid $2k for it to me. This is not the only story; microservices + serverless + the cloud really are excellent for making money, but as you say, no fun and in my experience, no benefit. Just added complexity.

Re: I no longer build software

#500

Post by SQueeeeeL »

genidoi wrote: post #405
lmarcos wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here it lays the paradox. All the tools you have mentioned have little to do with programming (one individual solving problems by writing code). The tools you mentioned have to do with software engineering (a bunch of individuals solving problems by writing code, plus a bunch of constraints). The joy is in programming, not in software engineering. At least that's how I interprete the GitHub comment (and all these…

I think it's easy to forget that modern tooling (+AWS/GCP/Azure) let's one dev match or exceed the productivity of 15 developers and a couple of PMs in 2005.

That's a very specific meaning, like in terms of scaling maybe? But in terms of actually meaningful problems solved for end users... But there very nature large scale systems aren't very common, but everyone is chasing that unicorn startup which can serve 10 million users; so scalable APIs are more "practical" then simple workflows
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