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Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#51

Post by francisofascii »

osigurdson wrote: post #9
rr888 wrote: post #4

Sounds 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!

You are probably right, but not nearly as expensive as the 40 users (assuming employees). So if you can double their productivity it is worth it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#52

Post by flatline »

torben-friis wrote: post #25

I am the exact opposite. I mean, I don’t like processes and meetings, but I do like the planning and architecture part much more than I like actually writing code. Usually, if your mind is decently organized, I find that the problem is solved before writing a single line of code. If that happens, then the actual part of writing becomes dull and mechanical - the problem has already been solved. I’ve never understood p…

Early in my career I started out just writing code for every problem. Now I loathe the prospect of writing a line of code unless I’m sure it’s not a waste of time. It can be exploratory code, but I need to know in advance exactly what questions I want it to answer, so even if I throw it away it definitively tells me a path I should not go down.

I think this is a pretty common career progression. Coding can be fun and rewarding but I’ve written hundreds of thousands - possibly millions - of lines of code in a dozen languages and there is very little novelty left for me. The challenges of team organization, project planning, and personnel issues are more attractive right now.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#53

Post by amackera »

icedchai wrote: post #26

Things 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…

Before you did agile, were there ever death marches, slipped deadlines, pissed off clients, or long crunches?

Your comment has the sparkle of nostalgia for glory days gone by.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#54

Post by watters »

The corrupted forms of agile—which are so pervasive that they're now what most folks think agile is—have definitely make the experience of being a software engineer worse.

Some of what you're describing can be found in for-hire firms that build out software to spec for other companies. The risk (for you) there is that, sometimes, you might have to learn or use new tools/tech.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#55

Post by pdntspa »

I love most of the things around writing code but absolutely despise all the people that have popped up around it. Software engineering feels like a jobs program where we let nontechnical freeloaders figure out how to insert themselves into our process. I think that part of the reason that software sucks so much now is that the people designing it don't love software and technology the way we do, and it shows. I think we need to get nontechnical people OUT of our process and encourage more to be obsessive technical "lifers" and not corporate randos with business degrees trying to tell us how to make stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#56

Post by digitalsushi »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #22
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

> I have come to a realization that I don't really enjoy Software Engineering(& the processes that it comes with) but I do love programming & solving problems. I can almost guarantee that you’re just at the wrong company. Some software companies can turn even the simplest tasks into a grueling series of processes, endless meetings, and joint work across a big number of “stakeholders”. These companies will take the jo…

> I can almost guarantee that you’re just at the wrong company. Even if this is true (which it most likely is), there's no guarantee the company you move to (in your quest of finding "the right company") won't either a) also be the wrong company again right off the bat or b) become the wrong company again. I've kind of just given up. I've accepted I'm basically a "technical plumber". Take data from this system/vendor…

Three years ago I was stuck at a huge fortune 100 with all the ceremonies, business language, and paycheck collectors. I started to shop around. I found an amazing place, a company that was a software company not not a company that happened to write some software.

The interviews went amazing, everything was Star Trek utopian future amazing, it was like the fantasy I had about where I wanted to work had manifested. I got a job offer, and took it immediately.

The first day of work, no one on my team was there to let me in, so I hung out in the lobby for several hours waiting for anyone brave enough to get me to the badge people so I could open the door on my own. By five months in, I'd not had a manager check in yet, no one on the team would talk to me, and I realized I was a professional bench warmer. I'd been bamboozled, body-snatched from my boring, process-jammed, low-progress IT job.

Fortunately the fortune 100 took me back. I hadn't burned any bridges on my way out, and my seat was still warm. My cube was still there, my gear all waiting for me to just log right back in 6 months later like I was simply on a long break.

Three years later I'm still here. I'm terrified to go looking again cause I can't have my heart broken twice so soon. I have no idea how to interview well enough to detect a trap. I think my age has a lot to do with it (I'm in my mid 40s and I average about 7 years per company so I don't experiment a lot with this).

I think that your strategy is the same as mine and that you should be rewarded for sticking with it, because there's success in it even if you're not constantly being entertained by solving the big interesting problems. Running a little personal infrastructure to learn the next big platform/language/thing is always a great hobby for people who can do a little more work outside of work, and just having interests that don't earn you anything at all are the most rewarding for finding brief moments of happiness.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#57

Post by kodah »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

> I have come to a realization that I don't really enjoy Software Engineering(& the processes that it comes with) but I do love programming & solving problems. I can almost guarantee that you’re just at the wrong company. Some software companies can turn even the simplest tasks into a grueling series of processes, endless meetings, and joint work across a big number of “stakeholders”. These companies will take the jo…

Agreed, this sounds like OP is in the wrong job. To me, there are two types of companies as an engineer. There are companies that like engineers to focus solely on product. This is the kind of company you'll hear "don't reinvent the wheel" a lot at because their understanding of their core skills probably doesn't branch that deep into engineering. Then there's companies where engineering is core to the product. Some folks hate these kinds of companies, but I tend to enjoy them because even the niche networking stack is related to product delivery somehow.

Product-focused companies also, in my experience, tend to put a lot more emphasis on ritual precision. Agile isn't just a means of organizing, it becomes the way you get things done. These companies also tend to have some culty vibes to them, but again, could just be my experience. At engineering focused companies I've "done Agile" but the emphasis was mainly on giving me tools, systems, and incentives to self-organize more than the rituals themselves. These kind of companies are actually where I learned to love testing a lot more than I used to, but that was because someone took the time to shape how I wrote code so that it was easy to test.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#58

Post by massinstall »

kraig911 wrote: post #19
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

> I have come to a realization that I don't really enjoy Software Engineering(& the processes that it comes with) but I do love programming & solving problems. I can almost guarantee that you’re just at the wrong company. Some software companies can turn even the simplest tasks into a grueling series of processes, endless meetings, and joint work across a big number of “stakeholders”. These companies will take the jo…

1000x times this. It's a weird thing our profession. There's a horrible but apt (misogynistic even) saying. Happily married men are happy husbands - Unhappily married men are great philosophers. I really feel agile has killed the happiness of our industry because it's met with a lot of back and forth, meetings, rituals, and meta-work and not actual productivity (If agile is done well though it can be amazing but that…

Why is this saying misogynistic?

Because it’s a statement about men or because of the implied possibility they could be unhappy in their marriage?

Also, why is it horrible?

It appears this world has become manically trigger-happy to label something as -ist or -istic, when it contains even only a hint of something someone could possibly understand the wrong way.

It would be curious to examine in a psychological study if this reinforced behavior has developed more due to a subtle social reward system for the “labelers”, or due to a punishment system for the “non-labelers”.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#59

Post by Beltalowda »

kraig911 wrote: post #19
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

> I have come to a realization that I don't really enjoy Software Engineering(& the processes that it comes with) but I do love programming & solving problems. I can almost guarantee that you’re just at the wrong company. Some software companies can turn even the simplest tasks into a grueling series of processes, endless meetings, and joint work across a big number of “stakeholders”. These companies will take the jo…

1000x times this. It's a weird thing our profession. There's a horrible but apt (misogynistic even) saying. Happily married men are happy husbands - Unhappily married men are great philosophers. I really feel agile has killed the happiness of our industry because it's met with a lot of back and forth, meetings, rituals, and meta-work and not actual productivity (If agile is done well though it can be amazing but that…

You can just replace "men" with "people" and it still works.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#60

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

A lot of this comes down to managers.

I have been blessed to have really great managers who have been able to insulate the team from all the BS, while allowing us to unleash our creativity and talent in making great and useful software.

Basically, they deal with all the pain so we don't have to, and as a result their teams have really delivered great value for the company.

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