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Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

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Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#341

Post by sage76 »

jokoon wrote: post #247

I have depression issues, and have been coding for 10 years now. I don't know if I'm bad at programming, or if it's because I lack a degree, or because I have been chronically unemployed and lack experience, or because I'm too selective with the jobs I apply on (I can't bear php or js stuff like angular), or because I live in france or in the wrong city. I may have an atypical profile. Programming has not been very g…

> I don't see it applying to me.

It only applies to a small set of people from top unis or those who have the FAANG brand names on their resumes.

Otherwise, I know several people who tried for months to switch jobs and finally gave up due to exhaustion.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#342

Post by sgift »

te_chris wrote: post #312
lelanthran wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. This is actually quite interesting as I was just talking to a few other professionals about this in a social setting. I was the only one in software development. I mentioned how stand-ups work briefl…

Have you seen how lawyers, accountants etc actually work though? It's a shit show, there's little to no project management and stress everywhere. Talk to any lawyer under 40 about their work practices and your mouth will drop. There's no autonomy, just endless pressure, confusing directions and last minute reactivity. Trello and a standup among teams would immeasurably improve things. (Source: I know a bunch of big f…

> There's no autonomy, just endless pressure, confusing directions and last minute reactivity.

So, software development in a nutshell? Maybe I only have seen bad examples, but I've never seen the agile/scrum/whatever-of-the-day stop these things from happening. You have these things and at some point they add the process on top cause "we sure do need a process".

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#343

Post by JumpCrisscross »

OJFord wrote: post #334
ggm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report *to their peers* on their progress Doctors do something not far removed. It's really important to them to caucus on case management. I think other professions may do the same.

Are you referring to patient rounds? It seems pretty different to me - that's (usually/when well-staffed) multiple doctors (at various stages of training) working on a single bug (pun very much intended) before moving onto the next one. And it's (for all patients considered together) a significant chunk of the day: what's left of it is used to do the work that arose from the discussion (with some of that left to whoe…

> Are you referring to patient rounds?

I think it’s a reference to the Mayo Clinic team-based model [1].

For simple stuff, a single doctor executing a textbook is fine. For complex cases, doctors of different disciplines meet to discuss, create and keep track of a care plan. The analogy being most problems a programmer is tackling are assumed to be novel cases.

[1] https://catedradecronicidad.es/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Ma...

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#344

Post by OJFord »

hkt wrote: post #323
LAC-Tech wrote: post #176

I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all. We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. If anyone has read Developer Hegemony , I'm fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, a…

Amen - I tried I convince a group of people I'd been contracting with to set up a partnership model along these lines, specifically so we could carve out that kind of control. No such luck, people were happy because day rates in the UK were (and are) ludicrously high.

Why does the height of day rates affect it? (Honest question.)

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#345

Post by Dave3of5 »

rand49an wrote: post #309
Dave3of5 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For non-tech people the code should be a black box they shouldn't know the internal details. In terms of refactoring there is no way to give a Cost Benefit analysis as that's too subjective. This should be a maintenance cost that's factored into the project at a high level. So you would say there a X days per year (normally about 20%) of the working days of the year spent on maintenance. Company I'm at has this and i…

An MOT is a bad example because they don't do any maintenance at all. An MOT is essentially a safety certificate to make sure you aren't driving around in a car that's due to fall apart and injure yourself and others. How you attain that certificate (by ongoing maintenance) doesn't matter.

No it's not. The MOT is a test that you have performed maintenance so the example stands. You can do 0 maintenance and still get your MOT. likewise in software you can do zero maintenance and still have a good well working product that follows best practice.

In the case I gave it's hours book on the maintenance project that is the test but you could very well have other measures and I've seen these in many projects. Things like linters, dependency bots, unit tests, e2e tests, code coverage, Cyclomatic complexity ...etc.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#346

Post by OJFord »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #343
OJFord wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to patient rounds? It seems pretty different to me - that's (usually/when well-staffed) multiple doctors (at various stages of training) working on a single bug (pun very much intended) before moving onto the next one. And it's (for all patients considered together) a significant chunk of the day: what's left of it is used to do the work that arose from the discussion (with some of that left to whoe…

> Are you referring to patient rounds? I think it’s a reference to the Mayo Clinic team-based model [1]. For simple stuff, a single doctor executing a textbook is fine. For complex cases, doctors of different disciplines meet to discuss, create and keep track of a care plan. The analogy being most problems a programmer is tackling are assumed to be novel cases. [1] https://catedradecronicidad.es/wp-content/uploads/20…

Sure. I still think I'd make the same argument: that's a team working on one problem, not discussing/managing the one of them working on each of multiple different problems.

Otherwise we can say any team sport discusses tactics for a game and this is a daily stand-up and it works for them so why not software.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#347

Post by Dave3of5 »

logifail wrote: post #332
Dave3of5 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DSU shouldn't be for non-technical people. They literally should not speak at all during this daily meeting if they are even there. It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked and they are communicating what they are working on. In my last company the non-tech people weren't allowed and the DSU was only for engineering. It is not a daily status meeting! If it has turned into this then it should be scrapp…

> It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked[..] If in the course of one's work one becomes blocked, would one really wait until the following day's stand-up to tell anyone about this? If so then I think both the worker and the company have bigger issues than whether the stand-up itself is a good use of time. The mind boggles.

I hate DSU to be honest for this exact reason there's no way I'd way a whole day. I feel compelled to explain though that at the very least there is a definition of what you should be using it for and few companies I'm work with have ever used it for that. It's mostly used as a status meeting and becomes a micromanagers daily meeting to beat people up about poor progress.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#348

Post by Dave3of5 »

iSnow wrote: post #315
Dave3of5 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DSU shouldn't be for non-technical people. They literally should not speak at all during this daily meeting if they are even there. It's for Devs only to make sure they are not blocked and they are communicating what they are working on. In my last company the non-tech people weren't allowed and the DSU was only for engineering. It is not a daily status meeting! If it has turned into this then it should be scrapp…

I wish I could get this across to my PMs, bosses and other non-technical stake-holders. Current PM is an nice guy but first of all, he absolutely loves to talk and second, he believes the "daily status meeting" format is what Scrum is all about.

Send him this link:

https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-a-daily-scrum

From the horses mouth:

"The Daily Scrum is Not a Status Meeting"

Or maybe see about getting him certified.

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#349

Post by mihaigalos »

jollybean wrote: post #38

Everyone in the US or a wealthy country pushing for 'remote work' is outsourcing themselves, ultimately. In the short term we get 'remote work' which some see as a benefit. In the medium term, absent the apparent advantage/willingness of people to be 'on prem' (in the minds of employers), it's just as easy to hire someone at 3/4 price from Europe, 1/2 price from E. Europe, 1/4 the price from India. While 'language an…

Sure, go ahead and do that. Meanwhile: https://medium.com/@dodiyadharmik/boeings-737-max-software-o...

Re: Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?

#350

Post by JumpCrisscross »

OJFord wrote: post #346
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you referring to patient rounds? I think it’s a reference to the Mayo Clinic team-based model [1]. For simple stuff, a single doctor executing a textbook is fine. For complex cases, doctors of different disciplines meet to discuss, create and keep track of a care plan. The analogy being most problems a programmer is tackling are assumed to be novel cases. [1] https://catedradecronicidad.es/wp-content/uploads/20…

Sure. I still think I'd make the same argument: that's a team working on one problem, not discussing/managing the one of them working on each of multiple different problems. Otherwise we can say any team sport discusses tactics for a game and this is a daily stand-up and it works for them so why not software.

> that's a team working on one problem, not discussing/managing the one of them working on each of multiple different problems

Pursuing a common goal. But working on different problems. (Is it a blood pathology? Is the immune system misbehaving?) If a team doing a stand-up isn’t working on any sense of a common problem, they aren’t a team and aren’t working efficiently.

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