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I no longer build software

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Re: I no longer build software

#781

Post by samatman »

nescioquid wrote: post #497
chpmrc wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Half of those things are simply impossible, as far as our model of physics is concerned.

The other half mostly exist in a century after the 21st, in most Sci Fi.

The nonexistence of tractor beams is no cause for pessimism about immortality drugs, since even when the trope of tractor beams was invented, we knew that physics as we know it allows for no such animal. By the same token, we know of no hard reason why effective immortality isn't in reach.

I don't expect to see it before entropy takes me. But that's just realism, not pessimism.

Re: I no longer build software

#782

Post by shitgoose »

2mol wrote: post #459
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…

"but there is something magical about finding the simplest solution that gets the job done"

if only software were written that way...

Re: I no longer build software

#783

Post by notacoward »

nobody2323 wrote: post #219
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…

Stop building web apps. A terribly wrong turn was taken about two decades ago. Your problem is you're building web applications. Desktop development is the Once And Future King of computer functionality and personal productivity.

FYI, I have built a great many things in my career but not one of them was a web app. Mostly, it has been data storage systems, from single host to few hosts to many hosts to one of the largest three or four such systems in the world. But hey, great guess.

Re: I no longer build software

#784

Post by samatman »

analog31 wrote: post #190
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…

This could just be an outgrowth of complexity. As the number of pieces increases by O(n), the number of relationships between pieces goes as O(n^2). As a result, any endeavor is going to tend towards the majority of people working on connecting pieces. This is true in plenty of occupations. I've seen it in mechanical and electrical design, for instance. With that said, I know a lot of good people who actually enjoy t…

O(m x n), where n is the number of pieces and m is the number of systems it needs to interconnect with. O(n^2) is the asymptotic upper bound, which is never reached, because a piece needn't be connected to itself: m It wouldn't be Hacker News without such ponderous pedantry!

Re: I no longer build software

#785

Post by zerr »

burntoutfire wrote: post #421
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you live in Europe if I may ask that pays well enough for backend dev as not to work until you're 60? Genuinely curious as I'm open to a move.

I'm from Poland. Of course, everything depends on the conditions of the retirement that you're comfortable with. For me, it's 5000 PLN ($1300) a month till I'm 85 years old + paid-off house. The 5k PLN should be very comfortable assuming no children, which I don't want. Assuming ultra-safe investing to only protect the principal (i.e. no return above inflation) and wanting to retire at 40, you'd need around 2,500,000…

You're way underpaid, even by Polish standards. You can easily get a remote job e.g. at German company that pays 70K-90K+ EUR.

Re: I no longer build software

#786

Post by dewey »

cinntaile wrote: post #762
EMM_386 wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price is on this one ... https://www.flickr.com/photos/fuller_craft/49837855711/in/al...

It looks great, it looks like it's priced as art and not furniture. Is this a correct interpretation?

A lot of "designer" furniture is priced in that range so that doesn't seem that unusual especially if you consider all the manual working hours going into a piece.

Re: I no longer build software

#788

Post by samatman »

httpne wrote: post #148
hdjdbtbgwjsn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal trainer is fairly bad for your body and wellbeing as well. Its basically split shifts since clients want training either before or after their work. So sleep is an issue. If work was easy then we wouldn't need to be paid for it.

>If work was easy then we wouldn't need to be paid for it. "work" in its natural sense is indistinguishable from play. Animals play as a way to practice "work". Lions etc play hunt. The problem is that "work" in modern times has little to do with what we are genetically-inclined to want to do.

Given certain passages early in Genesis, it's safe to conclude that work has been a pain in the back since, at least, the dawn of agriculture.

Which, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Re: I no longer build software

#789

Post by Sodman »

tluyben2 wrote: post #686
therealdrag0 wrote: post #656

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. 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…

Sure that is true, but then again I have written many of employee directories, cms’s, erps, social networks, running apps, banking fronts and backends, insurance fronts and backends which were all exactly the same except forced in a different tech because of the taste du-jour. We wrote a massive insurance monolith system in c# and my new client wants it microservice and in TS/node. We will be doing exactly the same a…

> chances are there is a) a perfectly fine version already running in your corp somewhere

You and I have very different experience with big corps :)

My experience is closer to "There's a half-finished version running somewhere that was cut short because of budget/deadline constraints. The team that worked on it is long gone, and it has been maintained by an outsourced team of junior resources for 3 years".

Re-writing a customer-facing system to be closer to the "modern" web experience they're used to on their everyday apps and sites _can_ make a substantial difference to customer experience, and ultimately the bottom line.

Re: I no longer build software

#790

Post by Diederich »

leptons wrote: post #702
Diederich wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm also in my 50s, and I can't imagine ever losing interest in programming. A computer contains practically infinite possibilities, and people who lose interest in that are really just lacking creativity, and maybe some cognitive ability. I don't only program though, I am creative in other ways and I build many things that have nothing to do with computers, but I do often incorporate programming into these creative…

> but I do often incorporate programming into these creative pursuits

I'd love to hear a couple of examples if you have a few moments. (:

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