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Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

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Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#61

Post by kweingar »

rubicon33 wrote: post #52

> I am not sure though if this is still the case for software engineers. Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time? I think I met a few as I was winding down my career. I do feel though that back around 1988 or so when I started getting serious into programming that all fellow programmers I met were also doing it w…

I had this attitude in college. I wasn’t a CS major, but I really enjoyed programming. I was floored by how many CS majors seemed to not enjoy the discipline.

My interest in computers and programming hasn’t waned. But with every passing year, I have become more invested in my relationships, obligations, health, and other hobbies. So programming is a much smaller slice of the pie these days.

I still think of myself as an interested and enthusiastic programmer, but I will admit that my interest and enthusiasm pales in comparison to my hobbyist coworkers.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#62

Post by conductr »

rubicon33 wrote: post #52

> I am not sure though if this is still the case for software engineers. Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time? I think I met a few as I was winding down my career. I do feel though that back around 1988 or so when I started getting serious into programming that all fellow programmers I met were also doing it w…

It's been nearly a quarter century since I began university as a CS major. I had been hobby coding for a couple years and the courses were not interesting at all to me compared to actually building things. So, I decided to get a gig writing code. It was sort of a part-time job ahead of when people normally would get an internship (which back then anyway, was not common in first 1-2 years). This job was excruciating. I realized I had no interest in writing code for other people/companies/etc. but my hobby was really building things that I thought were interesting. Anyways, I switched majors and continue to code as a hobby/entrepreneur and have continued to enjoy it. I really don't think I'd like it as a hobby if I went into the profession.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#63

Post by scottLobster »

rubicon33 wrote: post #52

> I am not sure though if this is still the case for software engineers. Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time? I think I met a few as I was winding down my career. I do feel though that back around 1988 or so when I started getting serious into programming that all fellow programmers I met were also doing it w…

At least where I work, it's hard to have passion given the fundamental issues with the codebase that there's never any time or money to address. It's like being on a ship pockmarked with holes and water coming in, that by all rights should be sinking, but is kept going by the endless pockets of our customers paying us to man the various pumps and keep the engines from flooding. And of course throw on new features that create yet more holes that there's no time or money to fix. However there's never any money to patch said holes, despite the buckets that get dumped on manning the pumps on a daily basis. The ship does something important, so you can take some pride in fulfilling the mission in spite of circumstances, but that tiny sliver of satisfaction is all there is.

If you're passionate about the mission/coding you will just produce a lot of impotent anger, because there's no way an IC is going to restructure the program given the layers of bureaucracy in the way. Maybe if you went management and then spent a decade or two climbing the corporate ladder, and even then you'll run into brand new managerial constraints. So if you're going to stick around, you learn to detach. It's one of the many reasons I plan to have a new job by Christmas :)

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#64

Post by crossroadsguy »

rubicon33 wrote: post #52

> I am not sure though if this is still the case for software engineers. Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time? I think I met a few as I was winding down my career. I do feel though that back around 1988 or so when I started getting serious into programming that all fellow programmers I met were also doing it w…

> replaced by a clock-in and clock-out mentality

I started as a software engineer who was "passionate about software" and could see my life revolving around it. The change in my mindset towards this, that gradually happened few years ago, i.e. the "clock-in and clock-out mentality" is one of the best changes in my life!

It always shocks me to see such sentiments from people. I mean how difficult is it for people to comprehend that that are too many kinds of people out there and hence too many kinds of software engineers out there!

Clock-in, clock-out doesn't mean these software engineers don't like the work they do, or do not write software that is good, or that they do not take pride in, or they do not feel responsible for it. Anyway that doesn't mean every other free hour, or any free hour in their lives, away from that day job (which is software engineering) have to be about software or code, or hell even an hour have to be about software.

Your job, your profession doesn't have to be your passion! Not everybody needs to be an artist, or a software artist (if I can say so)! There is a work that needs to be done and there are people who can do this and they do this and it can be just that, nothing more.

Did you every think about yourself, how you got into software engineering? Did you really always want this trade - truly? Was this genetic in some way? Or some kind of divine intervention? I mean I know I am getting facetious here with this analogy but just look at it before pointing a finger to a whole new generation of people who are maybe just different.

I kinda disliked it, at the beginning of my career, when I saw my engineering peers moving into finance, MBAs and what not, but slowly I have started to appreciate it as I am getting this idea sunk into me deeper - work is work, nothing else. There is whole lot of rest of the life out there. Go where you want, how you want to, immerse yourself into something only as much you want, there doesn't have to be a scale of "passion" you have to conform to.

It is so tiring and frustrating to keep encountering this mindset so often. Luckily my generation is genuinely starting to stop giving a fuck about this and the newer generation is more vigorous in rejecting of "your work has to be your passion" regressive mindset.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#65

Post by worrycue »

hgs3 wrote: post #49

> But there is something becoming more familiar to me as I go back to the wild west of C programming (where very little happens behind the scenes I might point out - no garbage collection here!). I share this sentiment. I pursued computer science because of the romanticized notation of tracking every bit and byte and talking directly to the hardware. I know I'm not alone given the popularity of old-school fantasy con…

> I pursued computer science because of the romanticized notation of tracking every bit and byte and talking directly to the hardware.

Isn’t computer science mostly math? Figure people in computer science would be more at home with the abstract stuff like Haskell where you can’t even see the underlying hardware and your programs are expressed as a bunch of (declarative) functions where sequential execution of instructions is a very small part of your programs.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#66

Post by crossroadsguy »

shubhamjain wrote: post #10

> The respite from programming though lasted maybe about four months after retiring. I started a small project , in part to learn Python, in part to play with e-ink displays. I was back programming (back abusing git) but of course the pressure was off. It both was and wasn’t like the day job I had left behind. This is one reasons I got disillusioned with FIRE and the concept of early retirement. Programming was my fi…

> I got disillusioned with FIRE

Maybe the RE part, but definitely not the FI part. In fact if I achieve the FI part I may not even have to go through the RE part and I can keep working for as long as I want at my own pace, conditions, and comfort.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#67

Post by deepGem »

rubicon33 wrote: post #52

> I am not sure though if this is still the case for software engineers. Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time? I think I met a few as I was winding down my career. I do feel though that back around 1988 or so when I started getting serious into programming that all fellow programmers I met were also doing it w…

My younger self was loathe to programming. It was just a job for me, clock in clock out as you say. I was always in this zone of product managers and managers are superior as they were always in some meetings and it gave me the impression that important work gets done in meetings. I hated being a lowly engineer right from the start.

Only when I got into those meeting rooms, did I have a rude awakening. I realized the value of shipping software. I rolled up my sleeves and started getting back into building software, reluctantly initially but then I fell in love with the craft eventually.

Today if I find anyone who is getting disillusioned as I was, I try to educate them and help them find the joy in shipping software. Am not sure if it has really helped anyone, but I think it's the right thing to do.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#69

Post by vlovich123 »

hgs3 wrote: post #49

> But there is something becoming more familiar to me as I go back to the wild west of C programming (where very little happens behind the scenes I might point out - no garbage collection here!). I share this sentiment. I pursued computer science because of the romanticized notation of tracking every bit and byte and talking directly to the hardware. I know I'm not alone given the popularity of old-school fantasy con…

> Most modern development is gluing components together and wrangling packages. It's so far removed from the machine and the distance is only growing.

That’s actually what I love most about things today. Hard components I might want to use probably already have a ready to made library I can start with. Time from inception to prototype to production is so short that it really removes a lot of the tedium. I wish it could be even shorter but a lot of the time I’m writing code is because there isn’t something that meets my specific requirements. I wish AI could fill that gap but it feels like we’re an extremely long way away from that. In other words, the part I enjoy most is the high level problem solving or even coming up with what new requirements might be to solve a problem. The mechanical aspect of realizing the vision can be fun but it can also be quite frustrating / repetitively tedious.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#70

Post by strken »

rubicon33 wrote: post #52

> I am not sure though if this is still the case for software engineers. Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time? I think I met a few as I was winding down my career. I do feel though that back around 1988 or so when I started getting serious into programming that all fellow programmers I met were also doing it w…

I think there's a number of hours a week I want to spend writing code, but while it's more than 10 it's less than 40.

Above and beyond that, I love software, but I don't love Zoom calls, on-call shifts, unnecessarily annoying processes that I'm not allowed to automate, Slack messages, KPIs, objectives that combine vagueness about what we're doing with strict rules about what we're not allowed to touch, horrific dynamically typed JS code where half the arguments to a function are obscure mashed-together objects, over-specified tickets that leave no room for creativity, trying to jam my code into a service where it doesn't fit because leadership wants to encourage code reuse but doesn't understand DRY, or anything else that makes up the actual profession of software engineering.

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