Liking software but hating software engineering is kind of like enjoying the platonic and hating reality.
We're all in agreement that the real world is messy and stressful to deal with. That's life!
Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
171–180 of 733 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#172Things 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…
> 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 informal check ins.
Planning meeting, ad hoc meeting doing the work then weekly/bi-weekly show and tells to show progress. Sounds like...some version of agile?
Remember agile and the XP movement that preceded it was invented by software makers, who had observed the pattern you describe and decided to be self-conscious about it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
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> most people stuck in unhappy marriages are men
If we are counting only heterosexual and 2 people marriages, wouldn't the number of people stuck in unhappy marriages be exactly 50% men and 50% women?
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#174You don't like jobs not software engineering.
Valid point.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#175Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
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Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#177I (Mostly) agree with you here:
> Finding and fixing bugs is a lot of fun. Incidence response is a lot of fun. Hacking on new projects is a lot of fun. Writing unit tests is fun too.
I'd agree on the first three, I'm not a huge fan of unit tests though. They seem like something a "good programmer" should do but to me it's in in the CYA lane, not programming.
> Refactoring, rewriting, sprint, agile, rearchitecting things etc aren't that fun.
I actually like refactoring code. To me it's like pruning a garden, moving stuff around to fit better. It also helps me on longer running projects to fix up crap that I wrote months/years ago. I'm always growing as a developer, and fixing foundations so they don't end up a cobbled mess is actually a pride point for me.
Agile / Sprints / Pre-Future proofing / API contract writing? Pure overhead for me. My current job is a ridiculous amount of meetings. I get like 15-20 hours of meetings weekly in my position.
This really boils down to being at a company that doesn't have technically knowledgeable management, and being on projects without a dedicated architect.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#178> 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.
The trick is finding a company that's not wrong.
Early-stage startups typically qualify, but they're also typically short-lived; they usually either go under or else grow into the same sort of "wrong company" one's trying to avoid.
A small business that's been around awhile, with a stable customer base and no ambitions for growth, is probably ideal - but good luck getting such a company to hire you. You might have better luck picking up multiple such companies as an independent consultant.
A different ideal (or so I've found) would be a company that's large but dysfunctional, or to be an "analyst" or somesuch in a department that's sufficiently large and autonomous to get away with having "shadow IT" (and a lax enough corporate IT department to not interfere).
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#179Earlier 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.
Imagine each of those people is an employee at the same company, and they each command a salary of say 100k. How much more productive do you need to make them for it to become worth it? If you 3x their productivity, they are now doing the job of 3 people, you just saved 200k _per year_.
To tie that back to your comment -- imagine its for a team of 40 users but the company would ideally like them to be a team of 400 users. Yet because of the software being created, those 40 people are doing the work of 400.
You can extend that line of thinking pretty far -- and going down that line of thought is when I realized how valuable programming is. When you build the right things you are literally creating value with everything you ship, and it adds up over time.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> agile has killed the happiness...meetings...rituals...meta-work...not actual productivity. All of that isn't actual agile. It's Fauxgile and has nothing to do with what agile is about, which is about removing impediments to productivity, removing meetings (why were there standups? Because they shouldn't exist in the first place, and if you absolutely positively can't avoid them then at least make them as short as p…
Agile is like socialism at times.
Agile is like capitalism at times.