Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 733 posts

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

#511

Post by perrygeo »

pdntspa wrote: post #423
riceman1864 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differen…

Ownership, decision making ability, technical design, KISS, deeply understanding the system, direct communication with stakeholders, and personal responsibility. Good list! These are the qualities that consistently produce top-notch software. When given the opportunity, this is what good SWEs do by instinct.

What's notable that in each case, the modern ticket-factory approach ("all that bullshit") is explicitly designed to eliminate or dampen these instincts. Diffusion of responsibility, top-down control, eliminating direct connections, everything is decided by committee, treating professionals like replaceable cogs, stay in your lane and do tickets.

It's not just that engineers are very capable of delivering direct business value. It's that many of the "non-technicals" are actively involved in sabotaging the efforts of engineers to do so.

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

#512

Post by ThinkBeat »

I come from an era when not liking your job was the way things were. You could enjoy the social camaraderie, lunch and your paycheck. The army did an excellent job of preparing me for that situation.

With all that said I do love programming the way it used to be. You could often be allowed to write something pretty. (From a pure code perspective)

At the uni. I had that freedom as well.

These days solutions usually surround using duct tape, plastic straws, and a half-broken welder to force various components and 3rd party APIs to work together, even though they are usually never designed to work in that way.

Then a vendor changes its API, we need to connect to yet another service, and some people who see resume padding as their biggest goal in life will manage to throw the latest hyped products / frameworks / tool into the mix.

It is a monumental task to write that code to be pretty.

A lot of software engineers care a lot more that we are using the latest hotness than they do about making it pretty.

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

#513

Post by JakeAl »

thwawawa1234 wrote: post #256
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 made up. The vast majority of places “do it wrong”. Coaches come in and make things even worse, with even less understanding. Saying “they are doing it wrong” and having nothing change isn’t doing anything, and it’s not really a great point. (Not specifically calling you out I just hear this all the time) “Fauxagile” *is* agile, because thats what the majority of places in reality do. “Agile” needs a complet…

Agile just means making it up as you go when you have people who don't have the knowledge or experience to define first exactly what is required. If more programmers became managers and could work with the stakeholders, most specifically the clients that are ultimately paying their salaries then there would be fewer problems with waterfall. My experience is that if programmers would read the design document written by people who are knowledgeable instead of wanting to build it on the fly there would be no need for agile (assuming experienced people are writing the design documents. After ~1998-2000 it seems like marketing and sales were the ones that ended up doing that despite having no education or experience in designing software interfaces let alone programming). But that's just my experience, and I learned early on the first thing you do is read the manual and if it doesn't answer all the questions then ask and re-write the manual yourself before doing any budgeting or coding. Instead we got agile, which turned into make it up as you go through constant sprints/iterations and meetings as you design and build it rather than on paper. As comic Dave Smith said, if you say it works on paper but doesn't in practice then it doesn't work on paper either.

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

#515

Post by LAC-Tech »

lelanthran wrote: post #506
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" TLDR: Businesses purchase development effort in terms of contracts, and the contract is almost always "You will deliver $X for $Y amount, in $Z months or less" . Agile is the opposite of that as far as business is concerned - "We will pay $A per hour until our money runs out or we are satisfied with what we get" . I've never understood this one, to be honest. Busin…

It's like you reached inside my head, pulled out my crudely formulated thoughts and feelings on why it struck me as ill-advised, and refined and explained everything perfectly.

Internal teams! My work these days is directly with people paying for the thing. That's why Agile gives me the shivers.

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

#516

Post by lazybreather »

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…

Code does not make money by itself. Business does. Code has to work for business. And if programmers can manage business, nothing like it. But someone has to. You can rarely have it both ways, code for fun and make money for the business too. And make no mistake, running a business is as difficult as building software if not more. If we assume that 'non-tech' people do not understand code, we can assume that 'tech' folks do not understand business too. Both of which are not true. Also, such a flaming rant on any other topic would be flagged out to oblivion. HN's predisposition with tech vs nontech is quite apparent.

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

#518

Post by Aeolun »

mulmen wrote: post #363
davidw wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I worked in a place like that and it was awesome. Unfortunately we were so good at what we did across the board that we got bought by another company to integrate into their larger offering. It made a lot of sense from a business perspective but the tech team in our office was made redundant and so my time there came to an end. I think this is the inevitable conclusion to good, small companies. Since it actually work…

Is it really that hard for owners to resist the alure of a buyout? I dunno, I always like to think that I’d continue doing the good thing that I’ve got going.

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

#519

Post by Aeolun »

davidw wrote: post #400
granshaw wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise software is not art and shouldn't be approached the same way. You want a roller-coaster-like experience, go join a startup

No one said 'roller coaster'. Part of quality software is saying 'no' to stuff, or having a coherent vision, not 'software by committee'.

Only if you have a quality engineer at the wheel though. Otherwise you just end up with horrible software.

I guess that’s why large enterprises hate it, since they’re all about reducing risk.

If they get middling software every time then that’s preferable to the two extremes.

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

#520

Post by Aeolun »

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…

I think there is a strong punishment system for the non-labelers. People that feel strongly about this stuff are really rabid, and seem to spend all their time calling people out on perceived slights.
Post reply on HN