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

vaghetti.dev

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

#511

Post by gregkerzhner »

lelanthran wrote: post #258
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…

> 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…

Daily standups can be useful when its a small group of people (3 or 4) working on the same project. In such meetings participants actually have the context to make meaningful suggestions based on other's updates "oh.. have you considered this? you should try this!"

Standups with more people working on separate projects are useless*.

My most recent standup with a group of 8 who were working on many separate projects spread across mobile, front-end and server. In this meeting, even if I did share some details about what I was doing, no-one else would have the context to help me. Also, it feels disrespectful to go into detail about something highly specific to my work while 6 other faces stare blankly as I waste their time. Ive heard stories from a friend's company of a standup with 30+ people across product, engineering and management. Could you imagine going into detail about your choice between an abstract class and interface on the call?

In such standups, the only sane action is to give a quick, high level update and mute yourself and go back to work. Standups like this should be ruthlessly dived down into several smaller meetings of people actually working together.

*Interestingly though, most people on my team love the standup for another reason - human interaction. Folks simply want to tune in and say hi to their team. In my opinion though, this isn't a good enough reason to keep unproductive standups, and the meeting would be better replaced with an optional 15 minute "coffee and chat" meeting. If folks want to tune in and chit chat, great - let them do it! But no need to waste people's time with mandatory "agile" ceremony.

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

#512

Post by blaser-waffle »

bluGill wrote: post #434
logifail wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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? There is hard block and soft block. Hard block means you have no clue how to continue and so of course you should get help right away. Soft block means you have ideas and are working on it, but - unknown to you - someone else on the team knows exactly how to solve that problem and…

Never heard those defined before. Is there a source, or is this just a pearl of wisdom?

edit: to be clear, I think they're good definitions, just never heard a definition

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

#513

Post by k__ »

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…

Non-developers are losig ground and they know it.

So, they try to pidgeonhole devs into non-business directions and infantilize them with stuff like pingpong tables.

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

#514

Post by rossdavidh »

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…

So, my guess is that non-developers seeing Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Brin & Page, and other developers start business that then rewrote large parts of how society functioned, without much caring about what non-developers thought of this, would disagree. Developers are already perceived by many as acting in a high-handed manner to reshape society without caring about the opinion of that society. More use of "leverage" is not what seems called for.

Now if you're the dev stuck in a bad corporate hierarchy, sure, it looks very different. But programmers as a group have used their leverage plenty, just maybe not in the ways that would always be helpful to other members of their group.

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

#515

Post by 300bps »

JohnBooty wrote: post #74
tupac_speedrap wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is not touching a programming language until college a bad thing? Some people just want to make a living out of software engineering and then go home and they aren't sweating over Web 4.0 or whatever we are on now.

There are exceptions to the rule. I know good engineers who started quite late in life. But in general, I don't see a deluge of kids eager to become developers. Still seems very niche just like it always has been.

I know good engineers who started quite late in life.

My experience matches yours exactly. Almost all of the good engineers that started late in life in my experience are just plain extremely smart and would excel at anything they did.

One friend that comes to mind wrote his PhD thesis in chemical engineering and then switched to being a software engineer. He is too motivated and too smart to fail at it even though he doesn't have what I consider that intrinsic spark that led him pursue computers at an early age.

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

#516

Post by JohnBooty »

jug wrote: post #268
JohnBooty wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, I remember people saying that about SQL a long time ago. People wouldn't need database engineers any more. Same with Visual Basic. No more application developers. Just drag and drop! You might ask yourself why VB6 or Delphi didn't simply rule the world forever. We had those ~25 years ago and with those tools, non-engineers could drag and drop their client/server database-CRUD apps together. Hell, you could d…

Yes, at least at scale, BASIC is hard! It's a wolf in disguise due to all the "easy" English words, words that of course need to be put in the correct, often grammar-violating order so that nothing is won anyway, for the compiler to make sense of the instructions and intent. You end up getting a language design that places more importance on a bastardized form of English like a text-based adventure game, rather than…

Yeah. I cannot believe that the "describe things to the computer in English" fantasy exists in 2022. At least from folks within the industry; it makes sense for laypeople to ponder it.

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

#517

Post by spelunker »

gwbas1c wrote: post #451
biztos wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day... I think this has a lot to do with the office culture of software being figured out at the same time as the professionalization of Management and the trend of "methodologies" to give a veneer of objectivity to the managerial class. Combined with FOMO about the fortunes being made at certain other companies, whose whims and…

> For example the extended hazing ritual by which we mint medical doctors in the USA is completely insane and would not be tolerated by doctors in most other countries I married a doctor. The "hazing" is slowly going out of fashion as older doctors retire. What they do have is a very nice licensing procedure. Yes, it's annoying, but it works a lot better when a doctor needs to get a job, because their interview proce…

I have a wife who is a licensed nurse, and I was just blown away when I heard how the interview process goes for medical professionals. What, they trust your credentials at face value? You don't have to do procedures live in front of the interviewers? The interview is mostly _them_ trying to get you to work there?

What a concept.

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

#518

Post by wilde »

lelanthran wrote: post #258
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…

> 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…

What? In medicine it’s called “rounds” and it happens every shift.

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

#519

Post by blaser-waffle »

jghn wrote: post #478
bluGill wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? There is hard block and soft block. Hard block means you have no clue how to continue and so of course you should get help right away. Soft block means you have ideas and are working on it, but - unknown to you - someone else on the team knows exactly how to solve that problem and…

Right. This sort of blockage and spotting unnecessary/undesired rabbit holes are the value of DSU. It should be a pure dev experience. However 99% of the time what I see in Real Life is even when it's just devs talking they aren't offering up enough information for either of those to happen. Either imposter syndrome kicks in and they don't want to look stupid in front of their peers, or they're just annoyed at having…

> Either imposter syndrome kicks in and they don't want to look stupid in front of their peers

This to a T. An awful lot of stuff coulda gotten crushed, quickly, if I'd just asked for help ASAP instead of siting on it and feeling dumb.

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

#520

Post by wilde »

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…

Your point on leverage feels true. I just wish we’d use it to finally move away from the Google model of interviewing. Rather than having people do useless exercises on whiteboards we could do a 30m “are you a jerk” interview and then let the first year of job performance speak for itself.
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