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Many software companies are a joke

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Re: Many software companies are a joke

#51

Post by onion2k »

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 People writing essays about software that are bound to get outdated and will nev…

People writing essays about software that are bound to get outdated and will never be read by anyone.

I write a lot of documentation entirely with the awareness that no one else will read it. I write it for myself. I don't want to have to remember the intricacies of a system. I want to write things down, then move on immediately, and have the security of something I can refer back to if I need it when I revisit the system.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#52

Post by mellavora »

reallscoliosoi wrote: post #45

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…

Interesting observation. I wonder how much of the difference is between high physical activity, where often the work requires multiple people manipulating the same physical object (I hold the door, you attach the hinge),

vs

low physical activity, where often the work requires multiple people manipulating highly abstract concepts with purely imaginary connections (I write the API, you write the caller).

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#53

Post by watwut »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #41
sshine wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

And still, working in company that does not document what the system does, it sux massively more.

Because end result is that no one knows how to use our own software. You dont know what it is supposed to do, so it is impossible to keep that stuff working. It takes ridiculous amount of time to configure anything or reproduce bugs, because you need multiple calls to find the one person who barely remembers.

Also agile manifesto is 20 years old. Agile is literally what most large dysfunctional companies do these days. It does not have no new solutions to actual real problems of companies, because it is old.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#54

Post by reallscoliosoi »

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.

It is funny because people who are unemployed are shamed for being "unproductive members of society", yet when you get out into the real world, you see all of these people doing nothing and getting paid lots of money, which is even worse than being unemployed in that context.

Anyway, it seems there is just a lot of money to go around and political and social favours dominate a lot of the decisions.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#55

Post by onion2k »

rxhernandez wrote: post #39
ano88888 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I think the author fails to understand that coding is only a small part of the process of writing production software.

Do you think that sw engineers at startups aren't largely writing code for most of their job?

I think sw engineers at startups very often write way too much code rather than spending time thinking about, and talking about, what to write.

As the old saying goes, "you can save hours of planning by doing weeks of coding."

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#56

Post by agounaris »

I was expecting to find some interesting thoughts on this one, but its the usual rant of the "freelancer" who does not understand what production means!

Yes big companies have productivity issues, however they have to create software which will outlive most engineers working at the business. You cannot reach the SLOs of google by hacking something together in 2 months!

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#57

Post by reallscoliosoi »

lurker531 wrote: post #42

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

I agree. Actually, I have never met anyone who has liked writing code. How much code do any of these high profile programmers even write anymore? Linus, etc? If the leaders of the industry don't even write code, it says a lot.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#58

Post by amitport »

ethbr0 wrote: post #38
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…

Author is every software engineer I hate to work with. One who thinks that code is the only truly important part of a project. It's not. "Delivering a product that solves end user needs and is as maintainable and reliable as possible" is the only truly important thing, and only some of that is code. Meetings generally aren't for developers. They're to keep everyone else involved with the project sync'd up. Do I and e…

I would even add that sometimes "maintainable and reliable" are overrated.

Sometimes being quick to market is more important then having to maintain the product. Sometimes providing a bad product is only relative to the competition (which may have a worse product). Sometimes having a good customer service is more important than the reliability of the product. etc.,.

I do agree with solving the end user needs... if a client does not need your product you really can't run a company for long.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#59

Post by akvadrako »

fy20 wrote: post #15
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.

How do I get in on this? For the 10 years I've been in this industry I've never been in a job where I felt like I had it easy. It's always been a rush to get one project done then there's always something else in the pipeline. Whether those projects are actually worth doing is a different question...

Become a contractor or even more so a consultant. You'll often find yourself on dysfunctional teams where management barely knows what they want and things often never get done.

I wouldn't recommend it though since it's soul crushing.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#60

Post by ZephyrBlu »

I was reading https://danluu.com/sounds-easy again today, and when reading this article I was reminded of a particular section:

"Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and see latencies in the microsecond to millisecond range. When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years"

Dan goes on to say: "When people imagine how long it should take to build something, they're often imagining a team that works perfectly and spends 100% of its time coding. But that's impossible to scale up. The question isn't whether or not there will inefficiencies, but how much inefficiency. A company that could eliminate organizational inefficiency would be a larger innovation than any tech startup, ever."

Communication scales extremely poorly compared to code and large organizations require a very different skillset than small companies. The author seems like someone who just loves writing code as opposed to wanting to deliver maximum business value (As defined by the company), so it makes sense he dislikes big companies.

There are also good and bad big and small companies. A well run big company is still going to have a large amount of communication overhead vs a small company.

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