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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?

#331

Post by ranting-moth »

I dislike now that everything seems to be hacking around frameworks and dependencies, people don't want to (or can't) write code anymore. This is of course a rant, but you get the point. The following in a contrived example, just mentally replace it with whatever horror you've seen.

There's an awful lot of very nice good quality libraries, frameworks and 3rd party code that I'm very grateful for. But there's also a lot of hacky stuff around that people blindly import as dependencies. Then it becomes someones else headache (mine!) to deal with it.

I get a task to add a feature which isn't supported by the library that the new dev imported into the system. Turns out this library was someone's introduction to the C language and they decided to publish it.

It pipes unhygienic user input straight to system calls and has boundary issues. It's mostly one function with a lot of conditional checks on arguments. There are three copies of the source file, one for each supported platform.

I'm left with a insane task, PTSD and a deadline on Friday.

Do I just pretend I didn't see that and hack in another feature? No.

Do I tell the boss the problem? Yes. Will it delay the release? No, there's a demo on Monday and we have to release on Friday. Why Friday, we shouldn't release on Fridays!

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

#332

Post by hn_user2 »

jxramos wrote: post #322
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 forget what job it was I was interviewing for but I remember being stunned at the open lack of process they had in place for trying to bother unifying all these teams to be on the same platform framework etc and instead deliberately let sub teams work with tooling that worked for them and didn't create a lot of overhead trying to coordinate and sync and share a common codebase. Every place prior to that day I had o…

I have seen two extremes of this. The one side is forced conformity, and the other side was complete chaos. To the point where each project was written in its own language. Imagine changing teams to help on a project and step 1 is to learn a new language and deploy methods.

I feel like there is a golden middle where the team has decided on maybe 3 languages, one typed, one scripted, one cutting edge. And a few different deploy scenarios, and you can pick amongst them.

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

#334

Post by baby »

syntaxing wrote: post #81

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.

“Discipline” is the word I was looking for. I think that’s the best word to describe the kind of engineering that splits for fun engineering with serious/for prod engineering

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

#335

Post by adra »

pdntspa wrote: post #55

I 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…

There are plenty of non-technical people who have made my life happier. The more effective managers and business consultants/owners find a way of making my life easier by avoiding road blocks and taking on work that I didn't want to do anyways. The more frustrating ones would find arbitrary limits to my ability to produce or micro-manage.

This isn't an everyone problem, this is an acute number of people who made production harder. By its nature, truly incompetent employees are eventually weeded out (assuming you're not in a dinosaur bureaucracy). If you're constantly finding that you're unable to work with the nontechnical side of your companies, you should start to question if you're part of this problem.

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

#336

Post by Existenceblinks »

pdntspa wrote: post #55

I 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…

I could imagine this could get worse. Incompetent CTO who likes a broken language and buy all the hype shit. This is how our job market is rotten.

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

#337

Post by operatingthetan »

bennysonething wrote: post #318
feoren wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clearly passionate about something here, but it's not totally clear what it is or why. It might be interesting to read what you have to say, but you need to chill, organize your thoughts, and stop calling other posters idiots for disagreeing with you. Right now it feels like we're catching half of an angry shower argument against someone who's not here. I can tell, because I've made posts like this before, and…

What? I found their post informative and yours extremely patronising. They're not defensive about Aristotle, they are pointing that the quote seems to be misinterpreted because it's about relationships between men and woman.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34373176

edit: welp it's flagged now but they straight up called another poster "stupid."

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

#338

Post by jacobr1 »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #310
LAC-Tech wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read the original manifesto and principles, and quite frankly I'm not that impressed with them either. Some of the principles are actively harmful, like welcoming changing requirements late in the process.

Yep. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" OK, not terrible, but why not "interactions and tools over individuals and processes"? De-emphasize individual's egos and ritualized processes, focus on the things that get work done and communication between entities. "Working software over comprehensive documentation" Tends to make very frustrating-to-use software, because it's never fully working and has…

> "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation"

The distinction is more about how granular you need things. Do you need to negotiate every piece of business-logic and get signoffs on mockups up-front, and in the case of paying customer, rather than internal stakeholder potentially including placing them into a legal SOW? Or can you just agree to a bullet-list of high level functionality, and then establish a working arrangement to receive feedback and refinement. Build and MVP and get some use, then make it better. Likely the initial understanding of the requirements was flawed anyway, so being reactive to the change, with buy-in from the customer will be a better plan for success. But yeah, this might not work with physical products.

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

#339

Post by throwanem »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #201
slt2021 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pls name a company, I want a job at that company

Seriously, if I could do all of my work without people trying to talk my ear off all day and let me keep my work life and social life truly separate, that sounds ideal to me. "Oh the tech was textbook perfect but I didn't like that nobody wanted to stand around and bullshit all day" Like bruh.

I dunno. Sounds to me like the kind of culture where the first way you hear about poorly communicated expectations is when you're asked to sign a PIP.
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