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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?

#441

Post by the-printer »

massinstall wrote: post #58
kraig911 wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

There has to be some sort of “Streisand Effect” phenomenon that can be applied to interpersonal communications, where by mentioning a thing in conversation that you hope not to entertain, it gets entertained as a consequence of it being mentioned.

> It would be curious to examine in a psychological study if this reinforced behavior has developed more due to a subtle social reward system for the “labelers”, or due to a punishment system for the “non-labelers”.

This is intriguing by the way.

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

#442

Post by fijiaarone »

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…

The Agile Manifesto starts with “We have found…”

So that’s the why. You can ask for elaboration, or disagree with the results, but the opinion of the signers of the Agile Manifesto, based on their experience, is that to prefer the former over the latter, while acknowledging that the latter principles have value, they tend to succeed (and enjoy their work more) when deciding between the two (there are always trade offs) to give greater weight to the more lightweight, practical, and less rigid values — hence the use of the word “agile”.

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

#444

Post by ccday »

kovac wrote: post #426

Not 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 engineerin…

Binary palindromes are real engineering, Google Search is not? Pretension indeed.

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

#446

Post by ShroudedNight »

015a wrote: post #366
tsunamifury wrote: post #321

Every 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…

And every time these posts come around, someone immediately jumps in and plays a character in Office Space, saying "oh the engineers don't like talking to people, that's why I'm valuable". Look at all the recent layoffs; get the data and ask around "how many Engineers with 1+ years of seniority were impacted by the layoffs". The number is dwarfed by literally every other business function. Dwarfed. Your probability o…

As an engineer, I've had both a fantastic people manager, and a fantastic project manager. They were godsends. They were also abnormally engaged and empathetic. They both sweated the technical details of the project we were working on and used that understanding to operate as very effective negotiators and shit umbrellas. As a result we were clear to move forward very quickly on multiple fronts and ended up having the capacity to pick up a whole bunch of slack from peer teams that had marooned themselves.

Good ones have tremendous amounts of value to contribute. Bad ones are the productivity equivalent of a ball-and-chain. Unfortunately, the cross-over point into net positive seems to be located noticeably higher than mean competence.

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

#447

Post by fijiaarone »

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.

Except socialism demands rigid control.

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

#448

Post by torben-friis »

randomdata wrote: post #398
torben-friis wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a reason waterfall was abandoned. Waterfall vs agile is not really about how much effort you put into design, it’s about how long the plan-code-reassess cycle is. You should not plan a whole year ahead and then act, it’s better to plan the next couple of weeks. But you still need to define how the work for those weeks fits in the system, the load it’s expected to take, the metrics that tell you it’s working, h…

> Waterfall vs agile is not really about how much effort you put into design, it’s about how long the plan-code-reassess cycle is. Read the Manifesto again. You will notice that is actually about the considerations you should take into account if you want to run a software team without managers. Each point is there to ensure that the necessary functions a manager would traditionally take care of still get done. Water…

> Read the Manifesto again.

I did, and here's the direct quotes:

> Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

As I said, the cycle length is shortened, yet...

> Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

...design is not removed from the process, but kept as a cornerstone.

> Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

This one might be a bit more of a stretch, but I see here the benefit of designing a simple, elegant solution rather than doing work straight ahead.

In any case, I don't fully agree with the agile manifesto, even when correctly implemented. Particularly this quote is the bane of my existence:

> The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Which you can identify as the very opposite of the ever popular 'this meeting could have been an email'.

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

#449

Post by fijiaarone »

wpietri wrote: post #381
ianmcgowan wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that this generation's revolutionaries are always the next generation's reactionaries..

In this case, not so much. Most of the early Agile people I've had the chance to talk with are a bit horrified by what it's become.

Isn’t that the definition of reactionary?

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

#450

Post by speed_spread »

The truth is that "programming & solving problems" is only ever a fraction of a programmer's job even at the coolest company. You'll always end up having to first figure out other people's code and data, coordinate teamwork, support production environments, refine expectations (a.k.a. finding out what "the real problem" is), document critical procedures, improve tooling, and so much other _stuff_. And it's totally ok, because these things can be fun too! And because when you finally get to write code, if you're just a bit smart, you'll consider these other aspects and give them appropriate care in the way you code, so that maybe things are easier for everyone in the long run.

What steals the fun out of the profession is the process, whether it's agile or lean or whatever. Having someone breathing down your neck for every bit of work you do, trying to categorize and measure every activity into a rigid grid to try and demonstrate a form of control over a process that we all know is essentially organic, if not chaotic. Smaller workplaces generally have much less decorum but given enough time all will grow their own process.

At some point you figure out that the ultimate "problem" is always of human nature. The code you are paid to write and the problems you are paid to solve are _not_ yours. And that's precisely why you're getting paid.

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