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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

#221

Post by hugatest »

potatoboiler wrote: post #179
mhh__ wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To even ask is ridiculous.

As a current undergraduate, programming for fun is ubiquitous in my peers. Surprises me also that the author has to ask.

At uni, different styles do cluster.

There are the circles in which the nerds cluster who are really in the tunnel about whatever subject it is, here it's programming or CS in general. They do it for fun, they come home and sit at the computer all evening and half the night. Occasionally they do the homework assignments, and if those are interesting, they nerd out about them endlessly. And they are really good at it. They don't really go to parties and are a tad (or a lot) anti-social. But they don't care. Typical minor subjects are math or physics. It's beautiful.

Then there are the circles of the in-it-for-the-moneys. They do homework assignments because they have to, they go to classes because they have to, they read business news, go to parties, feel important and have dollar signs in their eyes every time they think about graduating and finally making big bucks. If lucky then they get help by some of the nerds (see above). But they actually detest the nerds, just as the nerds detest them.

There are more circles and I don't want to deep-dive here, but I actually this also reflects at the workplace 10-20 years later. It's easy to see from which of those two groups the high-performing ICs (some of them a bit socially awkward) come, and from which their managers, and why there is tension between those.

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

#222

Post by pavlov »

tnova wrote: post #203
pavlov wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the same story was told 600 years ago in Spain: "My father, an Inquisitor himself, told me of the time when the Grand Inquisitor promoted him. Ordinary priests are a dime a dozen, the great man said, but it takes special skill to be an Inquisitor. And that's why you never let them go back to the pulpit when you do find a good one."

I’m not sure I follow the analogy here, are you implying technical leadership is committing heinous crimes against humanity?

It’s a joke on the original anecdote’s timeless formula of double-filtered appeal to patriarchal authority (the father relaying the wisdom of the boss to the son).

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

#223

Post by hugatest »

DanielHB wrote: post #185
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #171

I would recommend everyone who retires from programming to get into the maker world. 3D printed, embedded programming - it’s great fun and just feels different from the day to day programming grind.

don't do it as a profession, embedded programming grind is worse than conventional cloud/web programming grind

I do embedded and it's fantastic. I could never do the cloud/web grind.

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

#224

Post by vjk800 »

kstenerud wrote: post #142

In 2 days time I'll mark my 27th year as a professional programmer (and just over 40 years since I started programming). I've worked in small companies, big companies, and mega-corporations. I've been a programmer, manager, team lead and CTO. And in doing so I discovered that I don't like managing people, I don't like meetings, and I don't like paperwork. I like long periods of focus. So I'm a software dev/architect…

I used to love the long periods of focus in my 20s, but ever since more life started happening, I can't do those anymore. It turns out my stress tolerance is incredibly low and when the life outside my work is not completely in order (like it rarely is after the 20s), being able to get into the flow state gets very difficult.

I wish I was one of those people who could just forget the problems at home, etc. when they sit in front of the computer and start coding, but I can't, and as a result my ability to focused work has gone down a lot, and nowadays I do more "people work" simply because that's easier to do when my head is not in it 100%.

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

#225

Post by hugatest »

visarga wrote: post #195
ryandrake wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It saddens me to say but if I were starting over today I might not enter the field professionally. Most modern development is gluing components together and wrangling packages. It's so far removed from the machine and the distance is only growing. I don't know what's sadder: That this kind of programming is becoming a lost art, or that nobody seems to care. I got my first job out of college partially because in the…

I have known programmers who don't know how a float is represented in memory. I just can't comprehend how they can gloss over basics like that.

And why is that necessary knowledge?

Don't get me wrong, once you go down to embedded you sometimes do need to know and sometimes it just improves your understanding (and it's kinda cool anyway), but if you do high-level work, perhaps web work, all you need to know is the abstract interface of floats as a data type. What operations you can do, what is guaranteed about the result of those operations (loss of precision etc). In other words, why would a Haskell programmer need to know the IEEE FP standard?

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

#226

Post by imdsm »

asdfman123 wrote: post #210
totorovirus wrote: post #157

What I've seen in the past two years, a lot of people who have seemingly no fit to a life of a programmer have joined software industry. In my experience the best devs were the people who self-taught programming for pure joy of building a software, making a glimpse of imaging to something real through writing code. The others who were on this job because the compensation was hefty - they were likely to opt out to a m…

There is middle ground though. I love to code and am doing this job for that reason, but there’s a lot of other things I want to do while I’m alive, too. When I’m done coding all day I want to do other things like exercise, climb mountains, learn instruments, etc. My motivation to do other things isn’t due to a lack of curiosity, but curiosity channeled into other activities.

And that's understandable. What John was saying and many of us here echo is that, for us, we'd like to want do the other things, but programming (outside of the commercial grind) is sweeter than all those things. To be consumed by (personal) work, working late into the night only to wake up and continue, uninterrupted and enjoying the bliss of focus, well, it can't be beaten. There's nothing like it.

> Programming is beginning again to be to the exclusion of all else in my life. (The table saw sits slowly rusting. The bike hangs on the wall in the garage.)

This in particular hits home. Programming, to the exclusion of all else in life.

> What am I trying to say? I have a programming addiction? (Maybe.)

There are times that I feel pulled in every direction by life, family, work, being alive, and it keeps me from this software ambrosia, even though I know that spending my life in front of a CRT/LCD/TFT/whatever they are these days is in a way wasted. I've spent 23 years doing it and I'm 33 now, and it feels like life has flown by in the glow of a terminal prompt.

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

#227

Post by hugatest »

esafak wrote: post #88
raz32dust wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait what did Slack do?

Cause distraction.

In the olden days it was IRC. Already then it was about controlling yourself. Whether you would get distracted or not. If you want to get into the zone, it's up to you how to do that. If you have an IRC or Slack window on the side to let you get distracted is your call.

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

#228

Post by ZephyrBlu »

potatoboiler wrote: post #179
mhh__ wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To even ask is ridiculous.

As a current undergraduate, programming for fun is ubiquitous in my peers. Surprises me also that the author has to ask.

I'm honestly surprised. That was not my impression at university. Most people seemed to struggle with coding.

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

#229

Post by amelius »

doppel wrote: post #133
irrational wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technical leadership is very expensive to find though, and once you find one you don’t let them go back to the production line. I have a friend at our company who is a gifted programmer. He was moved into a management position. He discovered that he hated working in a leadership position. He tried to get them to move him back to an individual contributor position. They refused. He said, move me back or I quit. It t…

I feel it's completely acceptable to wish to stay in an IC position, but to refuse outright to give advise or share the experience (it's hard to tell from your short paragraph) seems... odd? It's acceptable to want to stay in a specific role, but I am not certain I feel it's acceptable to eschew an increasing responsibility or mentoring role as you gain experience. That way lies the "genius programmer that works alon…

It can be explained by social anxiety issues, as these people typically prefer to sit in a corner coding and be left alone. Probably a self-reinforcing condition that's difficult to get out of. Just one example I can think of.

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

#230

Post by badpun »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #141
pluijzer wrote: post #137

After many years I'm still pasionate about programming, still do it in my spare time and enjoy my work. But, it really does need to be in a language and platform I enjoy. I also notice that if you have a job with a more niche language all your collegues will be passionate about the work too. This is why I personally do not care much about language comparisons. It might be that the language of my choice is only margin…

Niche languages filter for nerds, and nerds are more fun to work with? (if you are good at what you do, else you will incur the nerds’ wrath).

I agree. Strongest and most passionate devs I've seen by far in my career so far were almost all Scala developers.
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