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Surviving Disillusionment

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Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#161

Post by taneq »

claytoneast wrote: post #30

This is spot-on for some of us here. I told my friend last week that I'd like to come work construction with him and will be quitting my decently-paying programming job to go do so in 3 weeks. I'd started to interview at another tech company and realized that I couldn't bear the thought of programming for someone else again. I burned out so hard at my current job I can't conceive of working anywhere as a programmer a…

There's a great deal of satisfaction in a blue-collar career. Some months I live on the edge of one, and just building physical things and using simple tech to solve real problems is fulfilling in a way that some neat code running on a server in relative isolation has never been for me.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#162

Post by pbourke »

fizzyfizz wrote: post #113

I appreciate what Slava has written here. But I noticed something odd about his recommendation. He noticed that doctors can get through the bullshit because they have contact with patients. It's anecdotal of course, but it seems common in caring professions. Why else would anyone be an underpaid grade school teacher? But Slava doesn't come up with an exact parallel for programmers. He suggests studying the history of…

> Unlike doctors and grade school teachers, if programmers had more contact with end users, they'd probably get burned out faster. The things we build rarely make anyone happier.

The one time that this was not the case was a wonderful time in my career. I worked on software for photographers who worked in a studio down the hall from my office. They’d stop by in the morning with a suggestion or bug and I’d walk over at lunch with a solution.

One idea from “agile” that has resonated with me is that programmers should work closely with their customers. The most miserable projects have multiple layers of PMs refracting the idea away into nothingness.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#163

Post by Baeocystin »

jasode wrote: post #10

>I've met many engineers with extraordinary talent who decided to stop making software. They wanted to program computers all their lives. They were born for it. After spending six, eight, ten years in the industry, they quit for good. [...] Something had to have gone wrong for them to abandon their first love. >But sitting at a mandated retrospective or mindlessly gluing APIs together doesn't put me over the moon. It…

iPhones are boring compared to 8- or 16-bit computers, if what you are interested in is how the thing works. Every aspect of the iPhone's design is meant to conceal anything other than exactly what Apple thinks you should be able to do. It's maddening... if you're the type to be fascinated with the nature of systems. That's not age speaking. They are just two fundamentally different things.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#164

Post by Aeolun »

hinkley wrote: post #49
blippage wrote: post #37

I think the author misdiagnosed the problem. It's not Corporate that's the real problem, it's the fact that what you're working on is probably just not that interesting. Plus the fact that you have to keep slugging away with it whether you like it or not. No-one gets excited about writing accounts packages. It reminds me of an anecdote a pro photographer gave to someone thinking of entering the field: if you love pho…

It is amazing to me the classes of software that are still written from scratch by each company instead of using COTS systems instead.

Because no company wants to adjust their processes to whatever system they would use. They want the system to adapt to them.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#165

Post by marcus_holmes »

claytoneast wrote: post #30

This is spot-on for some of us here. I told my friend last week that I'd like to come work construction with him and will be quitting my decently-paying programming job to go do so in 3 weeks. I'd started to interview at another tech company and realized that I couldn't bear the thought of programming for someone else again. I burned out so hard at my current job I can't conceive of working anywhere as a programmer a…

I had an "alternative" start to my coding career. Before that, I worked all sorts of different unskilled jobs. In one of them, warehouse picking in a supermarket chain, I met a guy who had burned out of tech (and this was ~1990). I couldn't believe that someone who had a career writing code, working for IBM, all of that, would just walk away from it to become a warehouse picker.

30 years later, after ~25 years in tech and a major clinical depression, I totally understand why he did that. He seemed happy, too.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#166

Post by WetMinister »

JimboReilly wrote: post #18

> If brewing paid as much as programming, it still wouldn't have been their first choice. Something had to have gone wrong for them to abandon their first love. I found this in bad taste. Believe it or not, you're allowed to enjoy something more than engineering.

Fully agree — growing a tomato from a seed to food or making a brew that makes you feel dizzy is just as ”magical” as fiddling a calculator to display text on a screen.

The attitude that the quoted passage displays is in fact one of the more disheartening aspects of programming for me.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#167

Post by cyberdrunk »

Shacklet0n wrote: post #141

I worked in software for 15 years after graduating B.Sc. engineering (electrical). As a software engineer, I Worked in pharma, aerospace, heavy industry (mining), logistics and some general web development as well. I got so fed up with the industry BS; tool churn for tool churn's sake, brogrammer culture, etc. Particularly sick of BS mantras like "move fast and break things"; the attitude that technology is necessari…

Presumably you could also do a lot of embedded software work that solves similar problems as controls?

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#168

Post by jasode »

Baeocystin wrote: post #163
jasode wrote: post #10

>I've met many engineers with extraordinary talent who decided to stop making software. They wanted to program computers all their lives. They were born for it. After spending six, eight, ten years in the industry, they quit for good. [...] Something had to have gone wrong for them to abandon their first love. >But sitting at a mandated retrospective or mindlessly gluing APIs together doesn't put me over the moon. It…

iPhones are boring compared to 8- or 16-bit computers, if what you are interested in is how the thing works. Every aspect of the iPhone's design is meant to conceal anything other than exactly what Apple thinks you should be able to do. It's maddening... if you're the type to be fascinated with the nature of systems. That's not age speaking. They are just two fundamentally different things.

>iPhones are boring compared to 8- or 16-bit computers, if what you are interested in is how the thing works. [...] That's not age speaking. They are just two fundamentally different things.

The iPhone was just one example. It doesn't matter whether the new thing is Android, or Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or latest FPGA from Xilinx/Altera. Even though all of those can do much more advanced things than the toy computers I used to play with, none of those spark me with the same excitement. I could pass it off as being too worldly-wise (i.e. disillusionment) to play with Raspberry Pi and Arduino -- or I can just admit that the best explanation for my apathy about new tech is that I'm simply older and lost interest.

With a TI-99 toy computer, playing a primitive Space Invaders game and typing BASIC code like "10 PRINT "HELLO"; 20 GOTO 10" to giggle at the "HELLO" infinitely scrolling up the screen was fun. Today, I can type Javascript by pressing F12 in a web browser and it objectively has more power than TI-BASIC but it's not as fun. That contradiction of power-vs-fun just means I simply older. There are lots of folks out there genuinely having fun exploring what Javascript can do and it would be silly for me to claim that I previously had fun because TI-BASIC was "superior" to Javascript.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#169

Post by toomanybeersies »

reikonomusha wrote: post #33

Much to the chagrin of many of my fellow career programmers, I’ve always tried to operate slightly against the grain to keep things interesting. I do so not gratuitously, but because I know I’m in this profession for the marathon, and so I need to compromise instantaneous velocity to maintain {energy, sanity, motivation, ...}. I get made fun of and occasionally lambasted for it, but I also frequently outpace my organ…

I have a hard enough time getting my colleagues to use linters, let alone solve computer science problems on a Monday morning.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#170

Post by fxtentacle »

fizzyfizz wrote: post #113

I appreciate what Slava has written here. But I noticed something odd about his recommendation. He noticed that doctors can get through the bullshit because they have contact with patients. It's anecdotal of course, but it seems common in caring professions. Why else would anyone be an underpaid grade school teacher? But Slava doesn't come up with an exact parallel for programmers. He suggests studying the history of…

I agree that meeting with users will only make people burn out faster.

I mean most web developers nowadays work in a glorified version of manipulating users, spying on them, and / or shoving ads into their face.

I've yet to meet anyone who would feel happy to meet the person that sells them out to advertisers online. I'm sure there are users that love all of their YouTube recommendations and that check their Facebook feed hourly. But those are probably the people that make you question humanity when you meet them...

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