All software sucks because deadline >>> functionality/usablity/accuracy. No matter how hard management insists that this isn't the case. In fact, the more they insist that it isn't the case, the more you can be sure that it is.
Many software companies are a joke
321–330 of 377 posts
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not what the article says, however. You misquoted in order to leave out the fact that the documentation is 50 pages, and some of the tests are useless, and arguing with colleagues is not always productive.
I removed the obvious exxagerations. of course nobody ask you 50 pages, so why is it relevant for the discussion? and who decides for how much documentation is needed anyway? the producer, or who pays for it? also, you don't know which tests are and arent useless beforehand. code coverage may not be the perfect metric, but correctness is is semi-decidable anyway, so if one claims before hand that some coverage test i…
Sorry but you are wrong. Useless documentation, useless tests and useless arguing definitely exist, period, and they are tautologically bad. Maybe you haven't had the experience of working in such an environment where those things happen, but claiming they don't exist and twisting someone's words is absurd. Also, those wild uncharitable and provocative interpretations are also against the HN guidelines.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#323The 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.
Yup i recently worked at a company that had a lot of their base technology already built out. They hired a lot of new expensive talent and the talent was pretty bored so they made a big project to re-do all the existing technology that already worked pretty well.
The results are less than good..
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#324The 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...
It might sound exciting but its actually super depressing. You get paid mad $$ and in ur head ur think "what the ef are these idiots paying us for?". I ended up leaving just because it made me feel so useless i couldn't handle it anymore.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#325All these meetings, reports, plans and apparently useless things, provide insurance to the different stakeholders of the project. Projects fail in many ways, and you need everyone to feel safe. That's why you need to document things a lot, in order to say “this was explained in section 3.2.1 of the manual” when the other team doesn't correctly use your tools. And this is true for everyone, the finance guys, the produ…
>> The funding bodies want us to detail all expenses and justify all the changes in the plan, because they don't want people to say that the public funds are mismanaged. This is just an example. We also write tons of useless papers, to justify that we are productive with this money. See how the solution is causing a different form of the problem it's trying to solve? I agree with your premise, but sometimes I think h…
> multiple efforts in parallel and letting many fail
I actually worked for a company that did this for a while and the results were amazing. There were multiple tasks, each task being a way to improve or cost-reduce a part of the machine we built. Each task had 3 teams attempting to solve it a different way. We met back 6 months later to compare/contrast the outcomes. I've never seen so much innovation in such a short time. The job was a blast for those 6 months because you were only limited by budget (we had to build hardware) and imagination.
And then, of course, since it was a multi-billion dollar company, the entire thing got shut down and we went back to business as usual. But at least I still remember it 10 years later :-)
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#326I 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…
I was having a discussion with one of the people higher up in the org chart about why we need to move beyond a pizza-box development model. Currently what happens is that the CEO (small org, 10 people, he's effectively the CTO) makes small-talk with a dev about a feature that needs to be developed. The dev then goes and builds the thing based on the discussion (a week-10 day sprint), takes the resulting work to the C…
> a week-10 day sprint
A week-10 day sprint on _one feature_? They haven't drunk the scrum kool-aid yet. Just wait until they do - then every feature will be a "story", and no individual story will be allowed to be assigned more than 8 "story points" (which for some reason means "one day"). If you think a "story" will take more than 8 "story points", you'll be asked to break it down into "subtasks" of no more than 8 "story points" each (you'll be asked to do this accurately in a few minutes in a standup meeting). Trust me, if you tell a higher-up non-programmer that there's anything wrong with the development model, they'll hear "we need to move to the 'scrum' everything-is-mandated-to-take-less-than-a-day development model".
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#327The 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.
> People are being paid very high salaries to do nothing.
People are being paid very high salaries to be frustrated by explicit prohibitions on doing anything. Nobody gets to being good enough to be hired by a company like Twitter if they don't actually want to do real software development - management exists to crush that desire and ensure that nothing ever gets done.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#328The 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...
> a job where I felt like I had it easy
They don't have it easy either. They have to demonstrate at least once a year that they've "accomplished" something in spite of an entire organization of gates that make accomplishing anything nearly impossible. But they still have to figure out a way to do it, and it still has to be somehow represent enough to justify their pay.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#329Imagine 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
> imagine actually liking to write software
I assumed you were being sarcastic, but re-reading your post and looking at the replies, I guess you're being serious here - I do actually like writing software. I'm not pretending or fooling myself - besides playing music and raising vegetables it's one of the few SFW activities I actually enjoy. I tolerate meetings because they're part of the price to get to write software and actually get paid to do it. What I don't enjoy are the unreasonable expectations around how long things ought to take or how predictable software development ought to be.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#330All these meetings, reports, plans and apparently useless things, provide insurance to the different stakeholders of the project. Projects fail in many ways, and you need everyone to feel safe. That's why you need to document things a lot, in order to say “this was explained in section 3.2.1 of the manual” when the other team doesn't correctly use your tools. And this is true for everyone, the finance guys, the produ…
I don't think it's about safety and stability at all, given how CEOs everywhere are _begging_ for their employees to innovate, be accountable and take risks. All this insurance is required because large organisations tend to devolve into "cover your ass" culture. People get automatically promoted by staying, so avoiding getting ousted by being someone's else scapegoat is the safest bet.
>CEOs everywhere are _begging_ for their employees to innovate, be accountable and take risks
Executives like to say these things, but what they say and what they mean often diverge. The nail that sticks out gets beat down.