the other way around
Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
31–40 of 733 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#32Being too reliant on Atlassian products ruins the fun. Blindly following patterns aren't necessarily fun either.
Personally I think I enjoy solving problems with just enough tech. I roll my eyes when I see hyped tech/practices tossed in with everything. I know somebody that works in a hospital as a unit clerk, and they supposedly use JIRA and are Agile.
In short, there's a lot of fake work.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#33To me it's a mix of passion and reality.
I am passionate about programming, even the parts you don't enjoy like rearchitecting and refactoring, those mean "applying knowledge to solve a problem" which I really enjoy.
I detest the bureaucracy around these (teams, requirements, deadlines, etc.), but those come as either life requirements (a company must make money in a reasonable manner), or the current status quo of your entire project and its teams.
The latter at least can be resolved by leaving your company.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#34Sounds like most of us you like developing but dont like working in other people's code and design. Corporate work has a bad reputation but lots of upsides. I work in a small team of 5 people on a system that has about 40 users. Its amazingly better when you can talk to everyone, know what all the users want, dont have to worry about constant uptime or scalability. Flexibility and budget to pay for good platforms. Ju…
>> 5 people on a system that has about 40 users Gosh, that is expensive software!
Every company needs internal software of some description, and sometimes you're doing unique stuff that can't simply be purchased off the shelf.
I mean the extreme case is a developer writing scripts they only use themselves, which would be a 1:1 ratio.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#35I hate IT. I hate dealing with many developers in a professional setting. They're too busy trying to look good and move up a ladder. A lot also don't even really want to do actual work. If there are two solutions and one is clearly superior but a bit harder to do most people want to wimp out and do the easy solution and deal with a bunch of pain for 6 months that could have been avoided if they spent an extra 2 weeks doing the original development work.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 5 people on a system that has about 40 users Gosh, that is expensive software!
Seriously. It’s hard to imagine a group of 40 people that would need a sufficient velocity of changes/new features to warrant 5 full time engineers.
Massive corporate HR Dept with custom rolled software.
Bank team with software for compliance.
Endless possibilities...
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#37Absolutely.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#38Scaling things- i love hacking away at my own ideas and my own little projects that only I will use.
The requirements to make things scale- Being part of a team with procedures and processes kills the fun for me.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#39Not everything in life has to be "fun". Sometimes important things aren't fun to do, but we do them because they are important.
Seeking endless fun is vain and meaningless. Doing meaningful work requires discipline and perseverance, it won't always be fun but it'll be more satisfying.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#40Things were better before agile / scrum / annoying processes took over. Not all companies were waterfall, they kind of just "did things" without any well defined process. This was how things were until roughly the early 2010's. I remember working for weeks, after a couple of whiteboard sessions. You'd meet about what you were going to do, work on it, and come back a week or two later. Occasionally there would be info…
> Things were better before agile / scrum
I don’t necessarily agree that things were better - but “agile” was supposed to fix the things that were bad back then but has since somehow managed to morph into exactly the same problems that it was originally purported to solve.