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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?

#181

Post by tabtab »

Yes! Web stacks have grown too convoluted and round-about. I used to do what's now called "full stack development" for small and medium applications. But that's almost impossible to do well and efficiently because web stacks shot YAGNI and KISS bloody dead. It now often takes layer specialist to do it well. Some say we have to burn what desktop IDE's did well to get HTTP-based apps, but I haven't seen any solid proof they are mutually exclusive. It just needs more R&D.

We need new web UI standards that are CRUD-friendly. Social media and e-commerce have been wagging the web UI dog, but CRUD matters: it's not sexy, but runs the world. Standards improvements or addition possibilities include a state-ful GUI markup language (sort of like the best of YAML, XUL, & QML), and/or do something like Java Applets correctly, learning from security and version/package-management mistakes of the past.

Similar opinion: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/r59nzr/i_regret_goi...

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

#182

Post by mclightning »

Programming can be many things. I don't particularly appreciate finding or fixing bugs, or unit tests, incidence response. Very rare breed of programmers do these for a hobby. But you know what many more people program/code for a hobby? Games, graphics development. I love that shit.

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

#183

Post by davidw »

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 think the real "unicorns" are

* Small/medium size companies where you recognize most everyone even if you don't work with them. There are enough people so you don't have to do things you're not qualified for like in the very early days of a startup.

* Steady growth, but not crazy, venture fueled moonshots.

* Selling something that earns enough money to grow the business in a fairly organic way.

I worked in a place like that once and loved it, and did some of my best work there. I wasn't anxious that it would implode like a startup, and there wasn't much bureaucracy.

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

#184

Post by impulser_ »

I would suggest looking for software engineering jobs outside of SV (if that where you are and can) and outside the software industry.

The best thing I did in my career was move the hell out of SV and started working for a manufactoring company building internal tools, scripts and programs.

It will be hard to find the perfect job, but you will probably have a better chance outside of SV where every company tends to be a copy of one other internally.

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

#185

Post by loxs »

I am the opposite. With time I have grown to be rather neutral and maybe slightly negative on the topic of programming and CS, but I love solving real-world problems and producing working solutions. I am content with having to program in order to do that, but would definitely skip the programming step if I could.

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

#186

Post by drewcoo »

barrenko wrote: post #170
mpweiher wrote: post #150

Earlier 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.

I can't tell whether that's supposed to be upper-case or lower-case agile.

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

#188

Post by AJRF »

I feel like I am maybe "lazy" sometime because I avoid doing work because I know how painful it's going to be to get from working to "done". It just often doesn't seem worth the effort.

When I work outside the constraints of my day job, programming is a fun creative pastime that makes the hours fly by. Last night I was up until 4am just hacking on something I was interested in. I honestly didn't notice the time go by (probably not healthy, but hey I was having a lot of fun so it's fine for me)

The engineers I really respect often say similar things. There seems to be a gatekeeping class of software engineer who've been overfed on design patterns and enterprise software dogma that suck the fun out of it in big teams.

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

#189

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

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.

I can almost guarantee your company needs less of the wrong people. You need them to leave. So, ahem, talk to your network.

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

#190

Post by hk1337 »

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…

Things were better before agile / scrum moved from the developers doing it to project managers doing it.
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