Really enjoyed this, thanks for sharing!
How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
21–30 of 373 posts
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#22"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not." I guess I wish I felt like that about progra…
I've felt both ways at different times. Both are true. The fact that anything ever works is part of the magic.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#23I would happily write code for free (and do so off-hours, with my kids, and for side projects). I have the luxury of working in a field where my employer pays me not because I hate what I’m doing and would rather not do it all, but just because they need me to focus on solving puzzles they choose instead of puzzles I choose.
This about sums it up for me as well. I feel so absurdly lucky that what I love to do also pays well.
If programming paid like shit, I don't think I would be able to stop myself going down that road anyway, in the same way someone who loves painting can't help but paint.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#24How? By looking at the codebase I'm working with right now, that's how.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#25Strange. For me, programming is an emotionless endeavor and one of the hardest aspects about doing it day in and day out. Sometimes it feels like a higher level form of data entry.
This interests me. What kind of programming do you do?
Emotion is very important to me as a programmer. Often my emotions know when something isn't right before my "rational" mind does, hinting that it's time to slow down and dig deeper. I've found a number of bugs this way over the years.
In fact, my team has long recorded our emotional state with every commit, with a numerical score: "h:1" through "h:5" at the end of each commit message. If you pair on the commit, the lowest individual score prevails. Anything other than a five is a sign that something deserves a little reflection. (Threes or lower are quite rare, happily.) We always said we were going to use these as metrics for defect analysis, but our defect rate is already pretty low. I suspect the main value is just that short pause for reflection before we commit.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#26How? Writing resource hogging code all day to figure out how to best display obtrusive advertisements is a good start.
If you're doing that, then quit. It's not worth it and you'll regret having done this. You'll find another job. Hell, you'll find another job as a programmer. Don't do this to yourself, nor to us.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#27"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not." I guess I wish I felt like that about progra…
The longer I am in this profession (and it's been over 20 years) the less I see my peers as "dicks and idiots" but more as victims of the same broken game. I work with very smart people, to be honest. It's the technology and the employers and the culture of development that's the problem.
Retiring sounds good right about now.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#28> There are lines of code floating around on our computers that haven’t been executed by a machine in years and probably won’t be for another lifetime. Others are the golden threads of this world, holding it together at the seams without no more than a dozen people knowing about it. Remove one of these and it all comes crashing down.
Beautifully said, although I find it rather horrifying.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#29Yesterday I set up a Django server that exposes some tables through an API that's fully queryable and filterable and sortable and paginated. And I wired it right into an antd table component on a Web app. And the whole thing is just so nicely interactive and #%$&ing clean and beautiful and elegant. I felt such joy making it. Then I had a moment of thinking, "wow the CEO and friends are going to be blown away." Until…
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Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#30many MANY reasons
VPs who insist on micro-managing technical decisions even though they really do ignore technical recommendations of highly skilled engineers. (Tom Hamilton, formerly of Digital Guardian)
VPs who refuse to share technical aspects of the business plans/goals (for a small company) with engineering because "well I can't share that with you" Steve Weingart when @ Liant
Anything involving/supervised by Ben Bar-Haim formerly AMD. Ben successfully constructed an incredibly monolithic bureaucracy in AMD - with a huge amount of overhead. Software groups not based in Markham Ontario got Trashed.
So yes, lots of Manager/VP reasons to hate programming
VPs who refuse to share technical aspects of the business plans/goals (for a small company) with engineering because "well I can't share that with you" Steve Weingart when @ Liant
Anything involving/supervised by Ben Bar-Haim formerly AMD. Ben successfully constructed an incredibly monolithic bureaucracy in AMD - with a huge amount of overhead. Software groups not based in Markham Ontario got Trashed.
So yes, lots of Manager/VP reasons to hate programming