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I no longer build software

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Re: I no longer build software

#671

Post by hpen »

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…

Have you ever worked as a manual laborer? I spent most of my life working as a lawn keeper, warehouse laborer, retail associate and construction worker. Building software is such a breath of fresh air. Even the bullshit that comes with it is still better than the day to day bullshit of any of those other jobs.

It may not be perfect, but man is it better than what so many people do.

Re: I no longer build software

#672

Post by SahAssar »

dpcan wrote: post #369
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 built a website that pays the bills, and now I have a lot of time on my hands." Okay.... I assume you're not going to talk about this because then you'll have so much competition you won't be able to pay the bills anymore, but do you have any generalized background information about this?

Usually this means dropshipping, but it could be something different.

Re: I no longer build software

#673

Post by crawlcrawler »

treis wrote: post #626
aarongough wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

>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 They're not really though. Ads may be the revenue stream but it's not like the top engineers at Google were on ads. They were building the search engine.

>> were

If you meant to say that Google's top engineers _used to_ work on the search engine but nowadays they work on making people click on ads because that's were the money is, then I wholeheartedly agree with you

Re: I no longer build software

#674

Post by bobbytuck »

Diederich wrote: post #659
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. I'm in my 50s, and I've been getting paid to build software for over 27 years now, and started programming on a near daily basis on a TRS-80 in the 1970s. Please don't feel sorry for me. I still very much enjoy building software. I won't necessarily disagree with the particular challenges you cite. The total complexity is enormous now, but the tools and abstra…

Another TRS-80 fan here. I learned programming by sitting in the back of a Radio Shack where they had a Model I Level II and a Model II with those big 8" drives. This was probably around '81 or so. A year or so later they eventually had a Model III in the front of the store.

Whenever I get burned out on software (in my case, Vue and React) -- and build complexity -- I always remind myself of those TRS-80 days. The only learning references around were the books for sale by the TRS80's -- a couple books on TRS80 graphics, Rodney Zak's 'Z80 Assembly Language', and William Borden's Z80 books. And of course the Tandy version of Zork in the little plastic baggie hanging from a wall hook beside 'Eliza' and 'Dancing Demon' -- and then the wall of brown folders of 'Scripsit' and 'VisiCalc' on TRSDOS 1.3 (?). Maybe the editor/assembler at the time, too -- 'EDTASM'. Don't remember if that was in a baggie on the wall hook or in a Tandy brown TrapperKeeper with the cassette insert and several tapes.

Those were great days -- and everything (for me, at least) was new and exciting. Nothing was ever too daunting or too complex -- even as daunting (and as complex) as Z80 assembly seemed to me -- a 13 year old at the time.

That's a feeling I always try to recapture in very deliberate ways these days. It's good remember how it all started.

Re: I no longer build software

#675

Post by thothamon »

tluyben2 wrote: post #499
jlangenauer wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$50K is kind of cheap actually. I've seen people pay $200K and more for basic CRUD websites with a little extra this or that.

In fairness, if your web app does more than CRUD, or if you expect it will in the future, then PHP and jQuery wouldn't be my first choice. I'm very familiar with how much of a mess an app can become when pursued that way -- a nasty soup of callbacks and conflicting states. As tooling around React improves -- and it's already quite good -- it will be easier to cost-effectively write a React CRUD site.

If you just want a CRUD site that works, and you want it fast, a Rails site with scaffolding will probably give that to you in an hour or two -- with almost the whole hour being spent thinking about your data model.

Re: I no longer build software

#676

Post by christophilus »

knute wrote: post #134
christophilus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just starting pre 2000, but it was not much better. I had to deal with a legacy COBOL system. I had to write C++. VB6 was actually pretty great for doing quick plumbing. And C# + WinForms which succeeded it was also great. But in the end, I’m still solving problems today, just like I was back then. I still enjoy programming as much or more than I did then. Some super tedious things have gotten substantially eas…

In the early 1990s and early 2000s web development was a nightmare. Having to test not just in different browsers, but different versions of different browsers, because they had substantially different behaviors. There was no "Inspect element", JavaScript debuggers were entirely absent or incredibly crude. Getting a decent looking web page to render and function correctly across all the different browsers you support…

Definitely. I generally wrote jscript and didn’t support non-IE. That aspect of things is miles better today.

Re: I no longer build software

#677

Post by neilk »

fxtentacle wrote: post #202
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 believe the main thing that changed is that 10 years ago, "building software" meant you would work with (presumably reasonable) engineers. Nowadays, it means you do web busywork for some newly rich kid chasing a startup lifestyle, who may or may not have any idea about what's easy/difficult possible/impossible. Also, the whole industry has been strongly commercialized. Before, people would share source code on the…

I think you might be experiencing what it's like to have, er, experience.

Like, I could make the exact same complaint except I'd situate it about 10 years earlier, around the first dot-com explosion.

And somewhat earlier than that, I remember grizzled programmers from the 1980s who hand-tuned their C and assembly and who thought we were flagrantly wasting computer resources on garbage platforms like the web.

(However, bringing it back to the 2010s and beyond, you're right that open source development has been completely co-opted.)

Re: I no longer build software

#678

Post by jnsie »

tluyben2 wrote: post #499
jlangenauer wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I recently worked for an org that had quite a large software suite (internal system) that was 99% CRUD. For every single CRUD operation, there was a front-end call, to a back-end service, that called a specific stored procedure. So pretty much 4 stored procedures for any construct stored in the database. No ORM, very little dynamic building of queries, thousands of database tables. Releases were a nightmare, change management for database objects is its own complexity, especially with so many objects. I think people were open to change, but with a decade of existing data structures+data, and a long list of projects, nobody wanted to make a change...

My one regret, with respect to that org, is not driving the necessary change.

Re: I no longer build software

#679

Post by agumonkey »

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 "…

> It's pretty scary to work without an undo button.

sawing wood these days too I cannot keep laughing alone in my beard thinking how software people just don't understand how the world used to be and how much had to be designed to work before trying .. there's no way back, or to be precise, every wrong turns costs dearly.

Re: I no longer build software

#680

Post by [deleted] »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #656
tluyben2 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. And yet now OP is making wood furniture, which has been made before the same thousands of times. Some people need originality some don't. Some just like the work for its-own sake. For those who need originality they should find a job working on s…

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