Quite the opposite. My happy place these days is working with higher level problems surrounding architecture, planning and the people behind the code.
That's why I switched to management.
Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
211–220 of 733 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#212The strangest thing is that I love refactoring, and I sort of assume that it's another one of those things that programmers love to do, but managers keep pushing us to limit our time and move on to things that are visible to customers. But now I'm wondering if that's not the case. Or maybe it's just the sort of programmer who loves abstractions and is cast as a "perfectionist". I'm currently getting my footing now as…
The guy who will clean up your code base isn't a viable role because then the team that works on the code day to day will have to re-learn where everything is. It can work when a company is acquiring new code to refactor during integration, since the refactor catches bugs and makes engineers become familiar with it, but that would be done by people staying with the code base as well.
Probably the closest things to that are test writer, technical documenter and build engineer.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't upvote this enough times. Time and time again you see this: people say "I hate agile because of X, Y and Z" where X, Y, and Z - at best - are orthogonal to the idea of Agile, and at worst (and perhaps even "ordinarily") are complete anathema to the spirit of Agile. Sorry, but anybody who thinks Agile is about velocity, story points, planning poker, standups, retrospectives, backlog grooming, etc. has been sold…
But if you are joining an Agile shop what do you get on average?
Fauxgile.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#214Earlier 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".
[flagged]
Language is lovely because you can find so many ways to express creativity! I don't think
"Those happily married make great partners, while those unhappily married make great philosophers!"
is any less colorful than the original.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#215Software development in a research setting might suffer from too little process, but I imagine would be a breath of fresh air to you. It has been to me.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#216I 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 thin…
Totally agree. I have some hope that the current high-profile layoffs makes (at least some) non-technical people to leave the industry. I have even started seeing more and more developers that have 0 interest in programming and are in it for the money, and it shows.
The great outsourcing panic of the late 90's and early 00's was pretty great at weeding out those who didn't care one bit about code.
Anecdotally, but a new grad was telling me a number of his peers in college had the explicit goal of not coding two years out of a CS degree. Most of them were eying PM positions or "Tech Evangelist" roles.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#217The strangest thing is that I love refactoring, and I sort of assume that it's another one of those things that programmers love to do, but managers keep pushing us to limit our time and move on to things that are visible to customers. But now I'm wondering if that's not the case. Or maybe it's just the sort of programmer who loves abstractions and is cast as a "perfectionist". I'm currently getting my footing now as…
This is totally me. I love refactoring, simplifying and adjusting code to be easier to modify. I almost always refactor before adding features, since I can adjust the code to make my modifications easier to do.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#218The strangest thing is that I love refactoring, and I sort of assume that it's another one of those things that programmers love to do, but managers keep pushing us to limit our time and move on to things that are visible to customers. But now I'm wondering if that's not the case. Or maybe it's just the sort of programmer who loves abstractions and is cast as a "perfectionist". I'm currently getting my footing now as…
The guy who will clean up your code base isn't a viable role because then the team that works on the code day to day will have to re-learn where everything is. It can work when a company is acquiring new code to refactor during integration, since the refactor catches bugs and makes engineers become familiar with it, but that would be done by people staying with the code base as well. Probably the closest things to th…
Yeah I don't think being on a team of people doing regular cleanups would really work well. I'm thinking more like "Oh, yeah we've had that code hanging around for a while. We don't really want to touch it because it's kind of a mess and we forgot how it works, but we have to make changes now and again. If someone could clean it up we'd be a lot more efficient".
This would likely not even be a software company as such.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#219Things 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…
I read this all the time and see that software engineers don't even read the agile manifesto:
,,Individuals and interactions over processes and tools''
What you are describing is the opposite of agile
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#220I 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…
Hmm, I often feel lots of important details or edge cases are only discovered when you start programming. It's a reason waterfall was abandoned. Planning, prototyping and then making a more informed decision is my goto approach, instead of planning forever. Actually, I often feel the architects that think they've "fully solved the problem" are full of themselves, and just not smart enough to realize all the things th…
I'd agree that an awful lot of the problems I run into are dumb trivial shit, once the "real work" starts.
This Android component doesn't allow styling without modifying the library object itself, for no good reason aside from whichever intern wrote it was lazy and nobody at Google cares about anything, so it made it through.
Ulimit exists, guess I should go fuck myself.
AWS says it supports this language for lambdas but it kinda doesn't if you look at the bug tracker for the tools.
This fancy new build tool someone else chose breaks this third party package in a way that goes away immediately if I just swap it for the old, uncool build tool.
That kind of crap. And it's the worst part of programming. There are also "real" problems, but they're the minority.