It’s going to sound a bit harsh, but what you hate is engineering discipline. Every engineer I know absolutely hates it but it’s like being an adult. There’s a ton of things that suck but it’s important to do in order to survive. Most process suck and some are even bloated. But they’re there usually for a reason (mostly good). No good product is sustainable without engineers with good discipline.
Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
81–90 of 733 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#82Earlier 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…
> 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 sort…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#83Earlier 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…
I’m really confused. What was the motivation of the hiring company here?
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#84Sounds 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!
Oh that's nothing. I worked on a project at a fortune 500 footwear company with dozens of developers, FTEs and contract, that worked over a year on just an update to a software package that was used by maybe 5 people at the company. Granted, these 5 people were the folks actually designing and figuring out how to manufacture their shoes, but still. At least 20% of the contractors were just warming their chairs, and more than one were what I call net negative producers: anything they wrote had to be corrected by someone else before it could be called done.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#85An attitude recalibration may be helpful in this case. Software engineering is merely your "profession", and you perform it in exchange for other people providing you with clean water, cheap goods, security, etc. (Whether that's a fair trade is a different discussion). Unless you're an owner or a shareholder you're essentially a skilled laborer. Clock in, ply your trade, clock out. If they're jerking you around on ho…
Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls - http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivit...
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#86The process that comes with it is there to organize the work and align it with the organization's goals. It can be agile, kanban, waterfall with big upfront design, it doesn't really matter what methodology is used, its there to organize the work. For large and/or existing systems, without that glue there would be programmers running amok solving problems they like to solve with whatever shiny things they want to use…
That's called code review, you don't need any "agile" for it. Agile is used to micromanage engineers to push out crap features, optimizing for the two week return, with poor results in the longer term. The people running amok are layman "agile coaches", "business analysts" and "product owners". While poor engineers are prevented from doing necessary non-feature work.
You can get benefits from small-a agile in the sense of organizing the work in small chunks that can be put into production when ready using CI/CD. If done right, you end up not doing work on things that aren't needed vs. in a waterfall model with large specification docs you end up with feature bloat in a product. Forced two-week cadence and preventing non-feature work indicates poor management.
I don't like SiverBulletCo coming in with tools and trainings and This Is The Only Way™ bullshit either. Maybe lean development is a better wording than agile? Its more about small work chunks and deploying them when ready vs months long projects with Gantt charts. Kanban seems to be the best way to organize work to me. However, letting a team of people align on what process they want to use with what makes sense plucking concepts from agile is fine.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#87> 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 dunno, I think OP may be right. I was in the same boat: I thought I hated programming, then one day I realized I just hated the industry wrapper around it. I recognize some of that process stuff can be valuable, but it's hard to disentangle the good stuff from the trash. Much of it is cargo cult, article-driven thinking that does nobody any good. A few years ago I switched to design, and now I just program in my spare time for fun. And it is fun when you do it right.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#88Earlier 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…
> 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 sort…
I have the same issue. I hate leetcode, am a good communicator and want to always connect what I build to the value it delivers to customers. But the companies that care about this the most are startups, and I've had some really bad experiences.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#89Things 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.
Seriously. I think people are looking back at "no process" companies with rose-tinted glasses. Software doesn't just leap from the developers' fingertips onto store shelves. I've worked as recently as 2010 at a company with no software engineering process, no release process, no qa process, no feature intake process, no planning process, no bug tracker (!), no source control (!!), and so on. It was a total clown show. Highlight reel:
Nobody knew what bugs existed or what features were needed until someone in sales who talked to a customer ran downstairs and recapped their last customer call.
Builds were not reproducible. How we decided what we released to the world was we'd poll the room. Who could actually compile the software today without errors? That person would build whatever was on his workstation, debug symbols and all (because the release builds crashed), and package it up for the customer.
How did we know what we were releasing works? There was one QA guy, who worked on the assembly line. They'd flash the software onto a single device, and make sure it still booted. Ship it!
How did we plan what we were doing for the next N weeks and months? This one's easy--we didn't! The CEO or someone in sales would run downstairs and tell us "We just sold XYZ feature to a customer. We need everyone to drop everything and make this by the date we also negotiated with the customer!"
I think "no process" software development only works for a single developer, or for a very small (less than 3 person) team of absolute experts. Mix a single junior person into the team or add more than 3 or so developers, and it's going to be chaos.