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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?

#611

Post by Murfalo »

emadabdulrahim wrote: post #439
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is currently culturally fashionable to construe things in this manner, so unsurprising. It is humorless and lacks common sense. Reasonably intelligent people understand context. They do not flatten all of reality and reduce everything to their favorite pet paradigm, projecting uncharitably all sorts of weird baggage onto the most innocuous of statements. So now you can't make a quip about wives unless you also mak…

Common sense is dead. Certain groups of people lack self and/or social awareness to notice that they've replaced religion with ideology. For example, we criticize religion for shaming many parts of our sexuality "Welcome to church, you're a sexual being and you should be ashamed". Now that's been replaced with "You're a man, you should feel guilty because you're from the oppressor group." etc. Welcome to Western soci…

OK I do think there is an issue with wokeness in society. But, I also think there is a problem with anti-wokeness that can be seen here with people chomping at the bit at the first (poorly attributed) use of "misogyny". Women aren't even mentioned, and the only way I see them/misogyny even entering the equation is if you make the rather odd pair of assumptions that an unhappily married man must: 1) be married to a woman, and 2) be unhappy exclusively as a result of his wife. You could attribute it to the result of the woke hivemind's effects, but you could also very much not! It's effectively an unintentional strawman...

I think there is probably a happy medium of wokeness that can be reached via measured discussion between respectful adults. I think in real life (at least in my experience) people are willing to have those discussions, and are much less polarized and divisive than the internet/cancel culture might have you believe.

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

#613

Post by Evfank »

_z048 wrote: post #612

Come join us at Upmortem. We're working on an AI slack bot. We cut all the nonsense out. No stand-ups. No people on call. Just pure development. Email me at [redacted]

I googled Upmortem and the first result is for "upmortem.com - Blameless Post Mortems: Upmortem" but page doesn't load due to missing DNS entries.

Don't know if this is your company, but it rhymed well with what you wrote here (no people on call) which I found a bit funny.

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

#614

Post by gardenhedge »

mpweiher wrote: post #150
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…

> 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…

How do you pronounce Fauxgile? I've heard of "Fragile" before.

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

#615

Post by garethrowlands »

lelanthran wrote: post #504
mindcrime wrote: post #168

Earlier 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…

> Sorry, but anybody who thinks Agile is about velocity, story points, planning poker, standups, retrospectives, backlog grooming, etc. has been sold a bill of goods. Now that's not to say that those things don't have (some) value. Spot on. You and parent have hit the two points that matter: 1. Agile is about removing impediments to productivity 2. velocity, story points, planning poker, standups, retrospectives, bac…

Strong agree.

Except it's not even really about productivity, it's about outcomes. The productivity is only important insofar as it achieves the outcomes. The ideal agile process would have the team on the golf course or in the spa but still changing the world (any suggestions on achieving this, gratefully accepted, as always).

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

#616

Post by alexvoda »

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 see there are many people commenting on the ethical value of that saying.

To understand it better it is worth noting that it is a bastardization of this misquote commonly attributed to Socrates: “By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”

As detailed in this ( https://qr.ae/pvP31C ) answer on Quora, Socrates never said (or was never recorded to say it, he didn't write down his philosophy) this exact thing. But there is a recorded dialogue that is plausible as the source of the simplified quote.

While less clear from what kraig911 said or from the original dialogue, the commonly spread (meme) version of the quote, which I pasted above, makes the misogynism clear. I hope further explaining that is not necessary.

It is important to note that Ancient Grece was very gender unequal, so a misogynistic quote in that social context is not something surprising, even for one of the brightest minds. That is just how society was in those times, and those philosophers did not get the benefit of hindsight we have today.

Besides, as stated above, Socrates didn't actually say that misquote. He was commenting about the challenges of his relationship with his wife. From that dialogue, it is even implied it was a conscious decision he made.

The misquote is especially dreadful because it is a generalization over the entire feminine gender. I am now quite curious when exactly in history did the misquote take its commonly known form.

I am quite surprised that of all the people commenting, no one attempted to go to the source of that meme. Instead, everyone just espoused their viewpoint. I wish HN to be a place of knowledge seeking, not a place of culture war.

Edit: looking into this a little deeper, Spencer McDaniel, the one who wrote the Quora answer linked above, has an entire blog about ancient times and expands on the issue of misquotes: http://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/07/16/fake-and-misattr...

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

#617

Post by garethrowlands »

mindcrime wrote: post #430
highwaylights wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

DevOps merges Dev and Ops. It is not an extra team.

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

#618

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dzikimarian wrote: post #583
Aeolun wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try reversing this argument and talk about employee resisting much better offer, to remain loyal and you'll get eaten alive by commenters :-)

The two aren't unrelated. In the distant past companies had professional and personal development programs. Some even had a commitment to try to avoid layoffs.

When MBA culture took over in the 80s it became normal for companies to act like extraction machines. Employee loyalty crashed, with a corresponding increase in churn.

Taking investment money makes it hard to create a humane culture. But smaller private companies do at least have the option to consider it.

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

#619

Post by philosopher1234 »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #299
schrodinger wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, it really isn't a big deal and I don't think anyone would be triggered or offended by the quote! And of course historical context matters. The poster was just proffering a friendly reminder that to push society forward it's helpful to consider these things. It's just like changing our default branches from master to main, honestly probably not a huge deal to any rationale person, but the cost is negligible…

> he poster was just proffering a friendly reminder that to push society forward it's helpful to consider these things It is totally not. As Ricky Gervais put it beautifully, like it or not, if you categorize the people of the past with the standards of today, you are preparing the people of the (near) future to categorize you about what you say today. Now imagine that people think of Aristotle as a misogynist, like…

He was a misogynist. That’s a fact. Yes, the standards have changed. It doesn’t mean we need to throw out everything he said, but sticking your head in the sand and ignoring a basic quality of his thought because… I’d not know why honestly? It’s threatening? thats not the way forward.

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

#620

Post by randomdata »

TheRealSteve wrote: post #507
randomdata wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now read it again as the entire document that it is. While I can see where you are coming from, your theme doesn't carry into the points you conveniently left out. Once you put it together, you'll realize that the message is: 1. Deliver software. You won't have a manager hounding you to do so. 2. Do good work. You won't have a manager questioning what you've done. 3. Don't spend more time programming than you need to…

Being a developer without a good Engineering Manager is a futile exercise in my experience. Software developers deliver quality work and solve problems efficiently as a matter course. If not, they should be let go to work someplace else, potentially outside the software trade. Saying those skills are exclusive to followers of the agile manifesto is silly. Find a good manager that brings you opportunities and respects…

> Saying those skills are exclusive to followers of the agile manifesto is silly.

What says that? The Manifesto is there to help guide you if your group chooses to forego managers, but it doesn't suggest not having managers is the right tool for the job. An engineer more than anyone should understand the concept of tradeoffs.

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