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Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

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Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#131

Post by lexicality »

overthemoon wrote: post #97

Is mobbing really better than pairing? I've never done it. Sounds awful. I got into this game to have long stretches of solitary work, that's when I'm at my best. Not entirely obviously, I still work on a team. Anyway, pairing can work well under the right circumstances, curious to hear anyone's take on whether mobbing works or not.

I've done it, it's significantly better in terms of software robustness and having a good time.

You definitely get less code written than you would individually, but at the end of it everyone involved understands how the code works and why it conforms to the requirements which keeps your team's general knowledge high and turbocharges training for juniors.

It's also just pleasant to do a genuine team activity and have a laugh with people.

This is all coming from someone who greatly prefers working on their own to doing paring etc btw. It is nothing like the joy of getting your mind spinning at exactly the right speed, becoming one with the problem and smashing out a solution - so don't mentally compare it to that. It's much more like hanging out and brainstorming stupid ideas with your friends on the couch.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#133

Post by Mezzie »

dpeck wrote: post #87
WhompingWindows wrote: post #74

My Own Addition: 14. Those who code for a living make good money. I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are mak…

You’re not wrong, but I’ll say the part about not going into it for the money is becoming less and less true all the time. For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Their parents, advisors, etc saw how much mo…

Agreed. I spend a lot of time on TikTok (my main interests tech-wise are HCI, digital discovery, and social computing so it's like catnip) and a LOT of younger people are going into tech for the money.

I'm 33 and I started programming in the 90s (I was raised by two geek parents a la Larry Page who were supportive), so I'm sort of in-between the two 'generations'. At age 37 and above, pretty much everybody is either a career switcher (in which case they've considered things that aren't money) or started before developing got big. I say 37 because that was old enough to already be coding and brought INTO the money with job offers in the dot com era. (I had a couple of offers from people who didn't believe I was 11/12, and I knew some people who were 16-19 who were leaving school to take REALLY well paying jobs none of us ever expected.)

After that, it was well known that coding could lead to a lot of money, and as the sector continues to grow and other opportunities to escape poverty shrink, it's pretty inevitable that people end up in coding for the money. Especially since that's how we teach them: All the tech courses are about employment, not playing. Kids don't learn tech as a joy or a tool to make their lives better, it's just another corporate hoop.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#134

Post by Chris2048 »

mojuba wrote: post #3

No. 13 is gold: > We’re never going to get the broader SE culture to care about things like performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, or privacy, at least not without legal regulations that are enforced. And regulations are written in blood, so we’ll only get enforced legal regulations after a lack of accessibility kills people. Sorry, can't help but blame capitalism for saying "fuck performance, compatibi…

The problem with blaming capitalism, is that these things are by no means unique to capitalism. People are as self-serving in communistic "utopias" as in capitalist ones. Plus many economies are a mix of both capitalist/socialist elements - people cherry-pick things they like/dislike according to what they want to prove; but the US is by no mean more/less "capitalistic" than any other nation. Some capitalistic value could just as well be described as conservative.

Fostering co-operative communities has less to do with the political/control system, and more to do with how it is implemented - and the mindset of the population. I could just as well blame multi-culturalism, or globalism, or lack of religion, or metropolitan lifestyle on lack of social cohesion.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#135

Post by Chris2048 »

akavel wrote: post #10

Re. 3 & 5: my theory is that a language with gradual typing, gradual error handling enforcement, and "gradual proving" that is seamlessly embedded in it (see e.g. the https://nim-lang.org/docs/drnim.html experiment) could hopefully actually work here. And as to dynamic typing, I found it useful when prototyping, to quickly PoC/MVP the "happy path" of an idea/design, and see if it is worth investing any bigger effort,…

Is that enso software related to the software launcher by Aza Raskin?

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#136

Post by Chris2048 »

akavel wrote: post #10

Re. 3 & 5: my theory is that a language with gradual typing, gradual error handling enforcement, and "gradual proving" that is seamlessly embedded in it (see e.g. the https://nim-lang.org/docs/drnim.html experiment) could hopefully actually work here. And as to dynamic typing, I found it useful when prototyping, to quickly PoC/MVP the "happy path" of an idea/design, and see if it is worth investing any bigger effort,…

The problem isn't best case scenario, but possibility of abuse.

gradual typing is an easy way to acquire more tech debt once tickets are closed and no-one comes back to add more types.

Corps like a simple plan->code->test->done without any "return" to code considered "done".

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#137

Post by lexicality »

dagw wrote: post #59
mrfusion wrote: post #11

I’d never heard of mobbing. That’s an awesome idea.

"Mobbing" means "bullying" in Swedish, which initially confused me greatly.

It's not really a positive term in English either, I think the name's supposed to be a joke

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#138

Post by emteycz »

jhgb wrote: post #121
emteycz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby had a huge hype, then its growth slowed down and now it's falling behind quickly. Yeah it's big, but other frameworks that chose a different path w.r.t. metaprogramming seem to be the more popular (and growing) choice today.

That's a category error. Ruby is not a framework.

Doesn't matter, almost nobody uses Ruby without Rails. And my statement holds true for any Ruby framework.

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#139

Post by DerArzt »

merpnderp wrote: post #68
mojuba wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is not charity but it's a responsibility. As probably the most innocent example, when you ship an app that drains a user's battery you betray your users. But then how about an app that sneakily collects data knowing that users won't even understand what you are doing or why? You can be a responsible business which unfortunately won't necessarily be appreciated. Or you can be a typical business that exploits…

If you don't like our current system that lets users decide what they can put up with or not then are you proposing some sort of centralized authority to enforce this? Like the government? The same governments of the world that produce the crappiest, most insecure, user hating software with some of the most ridiculous rules and regulations or else 10 layers of subcontractors making the price per line of code outrageo…

Case in point the Governor of Missouri in the US claiming that a report was hacking[1] when they hit F12 and viewed a website's HTML which contained Social Security Numbers.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/us/missouri-st-louis-post...

Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

#140

Post by cm2012 »

pc86 wrote: post #122
WhompingWindows wrote: post #74

My Own Addition: 14. Those who code for a living make good money. I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are mak…

There has never been a 1:1 relationship between how essential a job is, nor how difficult it is, and the pay. It's mostly about a) the barriers to entry, which can be academic (law, medicine), regulatory (law, medicine, probably finance?), institutional (finance, tier 1 law), or just how grueling it is to get through (definitely medicine outside of some specialties like family med or peds, probably tier 1 finance/IB…

For most non stem teachers, teaching is the best paid job they could possibly get once you account for pension, etc
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