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Many software companies are a joke

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Re: Many software companies are a joke

#41

Post by mytailorisrich »

sshine wrote: post #35
batiudrami wrote: post #7

Astonishing to me that someone with 20 years' experience in any industry could have so little perspective. Obviously there are inefficiencies with big companies, but complaining about needing to do documentation, or basic project management? The writing is smug and shows no self awareness - it seems to me that the author cannot recognise that there may be other priorities than exactly what is in front of them and the…

> complaining about needing to do documentation The article's formulation: > You will be asked to write a 50-page documentation for some little code you wrote. The author does not complain just about writing documentation, but about writing an unproportionate amount of it that presumably isn't being read by anyone. I've seen that happen. People writing essays about software that are bound to get outdated and will nev…

> The author does not complain just about writing documentation, but about writing an unproportionate amount of it that presumably isn't being read by anyone. I've seen that happen. People writing essays about software that are bound to get outdated and will never be read by anyone. In systems that are disconnected from the source code.

This has been the norm more often than not in most companies, especially larger ones. Hence the Agile Manifesto, written by people who've been there again and again.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#42

Post by lurker531 »

Imagine actually caring, my aim is to get away with as little work as I can while still earning good money. ‘No nonsense coding and learning’ cringe, imagine actually liking to write software. After 11 years of embedded dev, I can safely say I rather not write a single line of code ever again. This whole industry is 99% bullshit. Thankfully I could exploit it for a lot of monetary gains

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#43

Post by EdwardDiego »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #6

The sad thing is that it’s a joke that many people don’t seem to be in on. You get all these defenders coming out of the woodwork when people wonder what the hell all the programmers at say, Twitter, are doing. Supposedly you puny mind can’t comprehend the challenges of developing a website “at scale” The real answer is, almost nothing. People are being paid very high salaries to do nothing.

There's scale, and then there's _scale_. And I can happily believe that Twitter is working at the latter.

It's like something like AWS or Azure. You can provision and deploy a K8s cluster? Awesome! Now, can you do that consistently for the next 100 thousand K8s clusters you're selling to your clients?

It's a very different kettle of fish.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#44

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #6

The sad thing is that it’s a joke that many people don’t seem to be in on. You get all these defenders coming out of the woodwork when people wonder what the hell all the programmers at say, Twitter, are doing. Supposedly you puny mind can’t comprehend the challenges of developing a website “at scale” The real answer is, almost nothing. People are being paid very high salaries to do nothing.

That's what I am thinking. E.g. I am looking at lichess which has a massive user base and is developed by one full time developer and a few dozens volunteers. Twitter is obviously bigger, but I simply don't buy that you need more than 7000 people to run that site.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#45

Post by reallscoliosoi »

Every company I have worked at has been the same - very depressed people who have no enthusiasm for anything slowly dying as they sit there staring at the computer. It is in stark contrast to the physical labour jobs I have had, which have been very lively and happy places to work.

I think the assumption that these people want to program for more than 2 hours per day is probably wrong, and you will just burn yourself out trying to do 8 hours of programming every day. In fact, many of these people burnt out long ago and just try to find anything other than programming to do.

I wonder though, it is true that these companies are very inefficient, yet they never get taken over or superseded. Why can't the group of rogue programmers that are more productive take over any of these companies?

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#46

Post by bowsamic »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #6

The sad thing is that it’s a joke that many people don’t seem to be in on. You get all these defenders coming out of the woodwork when people wonder what the hell all the programmers at say, Twitter, are doing. Supposedly you puny mind can’t comprehend the challenges of developing a website “at scale” The real answer is, almost nothing. People are being paid very high salaries to do nothing.

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Re: Many software companies are a joke

#47

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

batiudrami wrote: post #7

Astonishing to me that someone with 20 years' experience in any industry could have so little perspective. Obviously there are inefficiencies with big companies, but complaining about needing to do documentation, or basic project management? The writing is smug and shows no self awareness - it seems to me that the author cannot recognise that there may be other priorities than exactly what is in front of them and the…

> The writing is smug and shows no self awareness

Definitely. This style of writing immediately put me off the rest of the piece. I've worked with software engineers like this, and it's no fun.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#48

Post by mihaaly »

Software engineering is a group effort with lots of components other than coding. It is very very seldom a lone operation and all those are tiny products with tiny scope (if results in a viable product at all!). Deciding upon the features, figuring out what is the best to do in a plethora of criteria involving finance, technology, organization takes much longer than the actual coding and involves the communication (spoken, written, presented, etc.), no suprise there.

Management could many times done better of course, managers are as lazy or incompetent as other people, if not more.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#49

Post by ethbr0 »

a_square_peg wrote: post #13

I tend to think most of engineering is rather mundane but potentially very rewarding. I hate meetings and overly complicated project coordination just as much the next person but there is also danger in wanting to do ‘cool stuff’ - imagine a dentist who is passionate about pulling teeth out. A project that I quite enjoyed involved months of investigation work, finally solved by tweaking a single software parameter th…

> imagine a dentist who is passionate about pulling teeth out

That's a great metaphor for code-before-you-know developers.

> finally solved by tweaking a single software parameter that dictated how far a release mechanism moved

I think of this type of work as programming by other means. The problem couldn't have been "fixed" without all the discovery meetings and understanding. The "fix" couldn't have made it to production without political agreement.

Is that computer code? No. Is it building a solution to interact with a complex system (of people), using the primitives available to you (less than VP-style "Just do it"), to realize a desired outcome? Yes.

Others may be different, but I find hacking obtuse process problems and corporate political structures just as fun and rewarding as a nice piece of code.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#50

Post by gray_50 »

I've worked at all company sizes from big tech, scale ups, and early stage startups. From my experience, I've learnt the most and done a lot of interesting work when the company size was smaller. Although a lot of people seem to care most about what I did at the big tech company and get surprised when I tell them I spent the whole sprint fixing some line on some sub menu.
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