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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?

#71

Post by spacemadness »

watters wrote: post #54

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.

So many folks have tried to guide the industry to better processes, but in the end the anxiety ridden micromanagers and control freaks win the battle at most companies. I think the problem is in the structure of businesses and its internal incentives to management and demands from stakeholders coupled with software being hard to understand and estimate. Every process will devolve into micromanagement and control.

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

#72

Post by moris_borris »

Not an answer to your question, but some perspective from my own experience.

I worked with a bunch of people like yourself at a fast-paced adtech startup. Clean code and even sustainability were not a priority, and the company had a money printer in the basement. Has the front-end gotten so messy it's unmaintainable? No problem, let's make a new one from scratch! I loved that we were given so much time to solve interesting problems with bleeding-edge tech, but I hated the filth of the code, particularly trying to read other hackers' code. And yes, so extreme was the priority of haste that these engineers were more hackers than anything else. That wasn't really my style, so I left.

Now I work with people who are the opposite. They love fussing about the `describe` blocks in their unit tests, will draw up Excel sheets to supplement the JIRA board, and spend an afternoon arguing about whether that 100% test coverage is really covering all functionality. The codebase is a textbook of how to write beautifully maintainable, readable code. Pull requests are genuinely enjoyable. But ask them to learn a technology from the last 8 years and they just start refining their refactoring tickets.

Perhaps I will find a happy medium between these two extremes.

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

#73

Post by stitched2gethr »

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…

Seconded. And might I suggest a smaller company. Smaller companies (like startups) are about about solving the problems at hand quickly. As companies grow there is a larger risk that any one mistake can lose the company money, which will generally continue to flow if they do nothing, and so they intentionally put in a lot of road blocks.

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

#74

Post by kodah »

digitalsushi wrote: post #56
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ageism does occur in this industry, but I've mostly heard it around associating various levels with age or years of experience. For instance, at a financial product company I worked for I saw a man who went on to become a Googler get cut from our interview because he "had too much experience to be a senior". For context, most of his background had been in contracting and he'd only recently really invested himself in DS&A knowledge (the kind larger firms look for). The kind of companies he had worked for put his skills cumulatively around Senior but he'd been in the industry a long time.

There's "innocent sounding" explanation for the managers decision to cut the interview, but they're all tainted with some form of ageism.

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

#75

Post by _aqmj »

> Refactoring, rewriting, sprint, agile, rearchitecting things etc aren't that fun.

Well you might not be aware but refactoring and rewriting are essential to any good codebase. No software is perfect because we aren't, and if you don't constantly keep fixing things (refactoring is fixing bad design), you will end up with a bunch of garbage to collect (pun!). Regarding methodologies and frameworks like agile and scrum (which includes sprints), you need some way to organize shit in an organization, real world problems cost the companies a lot of money, which in turn needs to be controlled as best as possible, agile & scrum are one of the ways we handle such things. I myself am not a fan of "trying to control the world" but it's necessary, I gotta suck it up and keep myself in harmony with others.

> I'd rather get to value now by making something that just works(and is adequately tested) than engineer something thats future proof but takes longer to get out.

This right here is why people argue over tests. So you believe you don't like rigorous testing, which is your opinion and it could/couldn't be valid based on the situation. If you are developing a program that controls airplanes, you need to make that as flawless as possible, otherwise you'll endanger lives. But yeah, if you're building a website for a small sweatshop, you can ignore tests and risk the occasional bad user experience that might happen due to your bugs.

All this being said, to answer "What are some good jobs for a person like this?", I can assure you, you can find lots of jobs you will like if you understand why these things exist. I have worked on a project that management preferred to avoid tests and keep things flowing quickly, so your "getting shit done" mentality might be satisfied easily. Try figuring out exactly what you dislike and WHY you dislike them, only then you can figure out what kind of company (maybe smaller-sized ones) will best match your liking.

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

#76

Post by pydry »

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…

>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's another topic to me)

All that stuff you hate isnt unique to software. It's just capitalism.

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

#77

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> in your quest of finding "the right company"...basically just a technical plumber

I've come to a sort of depressing realization, 30 years into this career: the kind of companies that _will hire me_ are usually not the "right" company. I'm not even a plucky bootcamp self-motivator, I'm a state-school CS grad who's never worked for Google, Facebook or Amazon. The hiring processes that don't filter me out are the sorts of employment processes that demand hour-by-hour status updates in the form of up-front-estimate timesheets and 24/7 on-call. Oh, well, I might actually make enough money to retire some day.

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

#78

Post by schrodinger »

massinstall wrote: post #58
kraig911 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a slight implication because it only covers men that women are the source of unhappiness (e.g. the nagging wife trope), but I agree it's trivial and likely unintentional. Agree with sibling, just as applicable as "happy married people are happy partners, unhappily married people are great philosophers".

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

#80

Post by cratermoon »

flatline wrote: post #52
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…

> I think this is a pretty common career progression

You'd think that, but I worked with a guy going on 20 years of experience who seemed to be the embodiment of code first, ask questions later. He coded quickly and abundantly, but man it was crap code. He'd get assigned a story and go off and do what he thought it said but more often than not missed the real point of what the request was.

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