241–250 of 350 posts
Yes, the problem with industry is, there's no industrial standard ! Joke, there're many industrial standards for you to follow, and it causes the issues.
I agree that organizations that have endless meetings are organizations with too many unintelligent people: don't work for them.
But wtf? You "love building and working" and you're "forever building my own side projects as I love it" so who are you to criticize "devs that go out of their way to work weekends without being asked"? Have you considered that they might love their job also?
Stop whining. Apply to higher quality teams. (And watch out for your written communication giving a bad impression -- I think you're a native English speaker but you're confusing "bear" and "bare".)
Absolutely yes. I've been developing professionally for almost 30 years. I still love making software and I'm good at it. When I started in this industry, being able to do it at all was the barrier to entry. The processes were light; "here's what we need it to do, go figure it out." Responsibility (and impact) were both high. Somewhere along the line that changed. Teams blew up to be dozens of people. Process fads we…
I remember at one time I ended up as the sole developer at a university, serving about 30k students and >500 faculty. We needed to migrate to another software due to end of support in the previous, which would go down in a matter of weeks. I had to code an interim replacement by myself in the meantime. It ended up being simple looking, but it did only what was needed, and I was able to finish. Teachers added grades, students could see them and enroll on courses. No social features, notifications, no gamification, no material design, looked as simple as it could. Worked fine for 2 years until the permanent system was installed (and students had to suffer because the multi-million system that costed thousands of billable hours to setup was riddled with bugs).
Contrast with today: at my previous company we had 500 devs to make an e commerce website whose homepage “couldn’t” be changed for two years. With scrum we supposedly have “self managed teams” but there was so much micromanagement. Sometimes I felt as if I had 20 different bosses, controlling my time and my tasks: POs, PMs, designers, management, upper management, support. There was no time to dogfood the app, to do maintenance, to study, to have ideas.
Unlike most people I don’t really blame Scrum or Agile. The people making it suck are the ones not following it: designers have a “dual track” where they plan months ahead of work (aka waterfall). POs and PMs absolutely hate iterative work, so we gotta refine during PR reviews. Management is too worried about catering to them to listen to us. At least we make money to make terrible software.
Like a lot of people recommended above I also joined a smaller company where things are saner than anything else.
I feel exactly the same. Programming professionally for a decade sucked all the joy out of it. My personal hypothesis is that we’re increasingly being treated like assembly line workers. We’re not paid to think but to implement the poorly thought out hare brained schemes from the higher ups who have no clue about programming. This externalizes all the cost of poor quality software onto the developers (unmaintainable…
What is wrong with that?
We get paid a ton of money to sit and read and type. Things could be much worse.
For me it’s the insane hazing ritual of the tech interview process that makes me want to leave the industry. I’m going through it again now, and honestly am pretty miserable. It has a large negative impact on the rest of my life and my mental health. When I was younger it was manageable, but the fact you have to do this even mid or late career every few years is insane to me. Wish I had gone into literally any other…
I'm there too, but trying to take a different mindset. For one, the requirements are utterly clear so you CAN systematically prepare and do well even if you lack the exact years of experience they're asking for. Two, the payoff is massive if you're in the US. I mean.. if you land at a FANGetc, you can literally put your feet up, buy a house anywhere, send all your kids to Harvard, and retire before your parents ever…
Sometimes I want to say fuck it all and program enterprise systems in gambas or love2d, cause that seems to be much more adequate choice of a platform.
I would love the good old days back too. I think now it's only vestiges left in some niche shops. Definitely not faang of course, small shops and that doesn't mean startups. Problem is those kinds of solid productive non-parasite business model, staff treated like humans shops nowadays just get sold by the retiring owner to one of the suck holes.
Maybe it will come back around after a while, after enough people suffer long enough for some of them to become the new bosses here & there and try to run their shops with at least a little dignity.