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Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
421–430 of 733 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read something about how a lot of 'super group' bands kind of don't do anything truly great because of this type of dynamic. They all know they're good, they know the others are good, and they all have a bit of an ego and don't want to stomp on the others, so they all tend to "go along with it" without getting too pushy. That leads to good, but not great music.
Definitely. Though there are exceptions. Led Zeppelin comes to mind first.
I think part of the idea was that in an actual band that has been a band for a while, they usually find a way of working together that includes "difficult conversations" and saying no, and sometimes listening to one person's vision rather than tiptoeing around egos.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#423Every few months or so we get these really circle jerky posts by engineers who believe the world of business is them just pumping out code and somehow getting paid. 1) that’s the difference between a job and a hobby. You do the hard parts you’re paid to do sometimes. 2) decisions you don’t like by stakeholders you don’t like aren’t always wrong just because you see some way to “code it”. A product is not just its cod…
Thank you for commenting this. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading some of the other comments on this post, e.g. "I think we need to get nontechnical people OUT of our process" There are so many engineers out there that are basically coddled children who get paid handsomely to sit in a chair and write code, and have no concept of where their handsome pay comes from. Thankfully, this era is coming to an end and…
You're perpetuating this assumption that engineers are incapable of providing business value without all these nontechnicals that I am complaining about.
When I started my career I was working directly with stakeholders and building them exactly what they wanted. I did design, I wrote the code, I handled the infra, I triaged the issues. I was happy, my stakeholders were happy, and my process was not all that different than what LEAN prescribes.
Amazingly, we didn't practice scrum or agile or any of that crap. I'd have a meeting with stakeholders at the beginning of the project, then I'd go to work on it, and they would keep in touch. If there were major issues, another meeting. But that was it. My manager would check in periodically for more detailed status updates, or to weigh in on technical decisions, and provide additional feedback from stakeholders and VIPs. But that was it, we all owned our given areas.
Next company, same thing. Outgoing CTO drops literally the entire codebase in my lap and my boss says, pretty much, "it's your baby now". I clean it up, refactoring and rearchitecting as needed, and now, something like 8 years later, it's still running. In fact, that company got bought by another company in Europe, they've fired all of their staff, and yet somehow my infra still runs and drives business value. (Granted, I am a little nervous that they don't seem to have anyone supervising it, but I quit them years ago and only know this because they are asking me to rewrite the documentation that they lost after I left.) Last I checked annual revenues were around $20mil, and I know this because my code is the scorekeeper.
None of this could have happened if I was on a team with code school alum and a product manager and a scrum manager and all that bullshit. Whatever we would have made would have likely been leaky and broken and required the ongoing commitment of an entire team of people to run what should be an afterthought for one SWE.
A competent, talented programmer with deep knowledge of the machine can be a force to be reckoned with. But the business cabal cripples us, just as they like to blow out the kneecaps of anything that threatens their jaundiced power base. There are numerous successful projects out there that nontechnicals view as run by anarchy, yet, these things live on. The Pirate Bay is my favorite example, but you could say the same for a lot of open-source that is both important and lacking in a foundation or supervisory organization.
Nobody can truly "own" the product any more, and all of software suffers. I think that it is vitally important that every project be understandable and implementable by one person, because when you throw a team of technical halfwits at it important details get forgotten. And the machinery that has been built to cover for this: endless ticket threads, neverending meetings, the Office Space-esque interactions between a manager and their reports... all of this just goes away when you replace it with a handful of smart, motivated, talented folks that can operate independently.
As much as the business world hates them, there are a variety of one-man shops out there driving real business value and making real products, but my bet is they aren't making much use of all the bullshit "modern" tech (serverless, a bajillion AWS services, etc) because of the very real cost of needing massive teams of people just to keep these clockwork code contraptions running.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#424Earlier 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…
What is actually Agile then, and how does one actually practice it?
Agile is to Lenin as Agile processes are to Stalin.
Read the Agile Manifesto. That’s what Agile is. All else is either: - (good) trying to implement the Agile Manifesto, or - (bad) trying to make current process appear like Agile.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read something about how a lot of 'super group' bands kind of don't do anything truly great because of this type of dynamic. They all know they're good, they know the others are good, and they all have a bit of an ego and don't want to stomp on the others, so they all tend to "go along with it" without getting too pushy. That leads to good, but not great music.
Definitely. Though there are exceptions. Led Zeppelin comes to mind first.
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#426Not just you. Software development, especially web, is a very pretentious industry. I believe that itll be one of the first programming jobs that'll fall to AI if it happens someday (no, systen architecture is not some special, difficult skill only some of us can have as they'd have you believe). Embedded, OS, scientific programming, they do real work there.
Take a magazine like POC||GTFO and see what real engineering looks like. Recently I came across a nice challenge there to write a program for which the compiled binary must be a palindrome. Good stuff. If you can afford, switch to something like embedded development. You'll probably make less in the short term but you'll get to keep your soul.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
1000x times this. It's a weird thing our profession. There's a horrible but apt (misogynistic even) saying. Happily married men are happy husbands - Unhappily married men are great philosophers. I really feel agile has killed the happiness of our industry because it's met with a lot of back and forth, meetings, rituals, and meta-work and not actual productivity (If agile is done well though it can be amazing but that…
Why is this saying misogynistic? Because it’s a statement about men or because of the implied possibility they could be unhappy in their marriage? Also, why is it horrible? It appears this world has become manically trigger-happy to label something as -ist or -istic, when it contains even only a hint of something someone could possibly understand the wrong way. It would be curious to examine in a psychological study…
> It appears this world has become manically trigger-happy to label something as -ist or -istic
Also to label something as maniacal, perhaps.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so I hung out in the lobby for several hours waiting for anyone brave enough to get me to the badge people Did you consider asking someone going in or out to help you get a badge or to put you into contact with the right person? Sounds like you passively waited for someone to come and help you, which might be fine for a short while, but eventually it's better to take action. I've never heard of a "professional benc…
>> I've never heard of a "professional bench warmer" in software development. I think this is real. My friend who is serial Project Manager (he works for big corps here in Poland and changes job almost every year for last 15 years) actually uses the term "on bench" for programers that do not have projects assigned to them and he claims that he quite often hires people before project is confirmed, so from time to time…
I can confirm that - "on bench" was a real term used in a software house I worked for in Poland. I think it becomes a necessity when your company doesn't have a product on its own but delivers projects for other companies. Depending on the needs of your clients, the projects may be short 3 months stints or longer years long cooperations. In an environment like that firstly you want to be able to start working as soon as the contract is signed, so you must have some staff available all the time, and secondly you don't want to wreck the morale by letting your staffing level fluctuate with the workload. Hence some people are "on bench", waiting for a project to come, doing internal work or upskilling. This company was the best one from the ones I worked for in my career BTW
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s bland, safe, and lifeless. The statement has no bite. The original statement will be read by men and some men will connect to it right away, because rather than envision some abstract person, they are made to immediately picture a man, and in that image they may recognize themselves, like looking at a mirror.
> The original statement will be read by men and some men will connect to it right away, because rather than envision some abstract person, they are made to immediately picture a man, and in that image they may recognize themselves, like looking at a mirror. Sorry, are you saying that the audience of the statement is on purpose only men? If so, how could you possibly support any claim that it's not misogynistic?
Most people here are men. The content will reflect that. Get over it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
1000x times this. It's a weird thing our profession. There's a horrible but apt (misogynistic even) saying. Happily married men are happy husbands - Unhappily married men are great philosophers. I really feel agile has killed the happiness of our industry because it's met with a lot of back and forth, meetings, rituals, and meta-work and not actual productivity (If agile is done well though it can be amazing but that…
I’m with you right up to “if agile is done well”. It’s just a buzzword for practices that people would be doing better otherwise without all the bureaucracy. Pretty sure one of the original authors of the manifesto declared it dead too, but I’m not going to google it because honestly the agile manifesto is not a religious text to me and I think the whole industry grew out of a single fairly common sense idea that got…
It's a fair point. The whole DevOps thing is so ludicrous. I've seen companies that don't just have a "DevOps team" (which is absurd in and of itself) but multiple DevOps Teams, and I'm pretty sure there are some DevOps Teams that have embedded DevOps Teams that in turn have more embedded DevOps Teams.
And all of these people are completely gated off from interacting with the people actually building applications by a byzantine process involving ServiceNow tickets, MS Teams messages, eldritch incantations to Elder gods, ritual sacrifices, and the phrase "The goat doesn't need to be very big, but it does need to be alive."