331–340 of 438 posts
Oh, wow! This is the creator of Glypha ( https://boredzo.org/glypha/ ). I spent countless hours playing that game in the mid-ish 90's. Like so many games back then, you could tweak things with ResEdit. Nobody would believe my high score because they knew i could modify it.
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I think I might have hit a nerve. Not my intention, sorry.
Let me be crystal clear: most people fucking hate working. Bosses are the worst, the money is the sole reason to do it, and we’d all be happier working way less. The idea people are “addicted” to working under a capitalist society is absurd; we are forced like prisoners, not free to make the choice ourselves. Or maybe you consider being unhoused and underfed “freedom”. The “nerve” you’ve hit is that I hate people exc…
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…
My personal opinion: After looking at my current manager and previous managers in my previous jobs I decided to never become a manager. Being a manager means that I'll have to fill my day with nothing but meetings I cannot skip, keep talking on and on and on, deal with delivery headaches, respond to requests even while on PTO, do a lot of context switching between Slack, email, calendar, documentation, and other thin…
I wish I had not. it relegated my time to many tasks other than tech implementation.
FN having to train CFOs on financially managing cloud environs, managing people, pestering people for status reports, c-level presentations on this that and the other thing, etc...
My biggest mistake in my career was thinking I was "climbing the ladder" when accepting a position as a manager, director etc...
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Saying “no” is the correct answer. It’s the same as not solving chat request bypassing prioritization. The company is full of incentives to ask that guy for guidance/things, if he doesn’t say no most or all of the time, he simply won’t have time for his IC role, and would remain a lead just not in name. It’s hard that it comes to that extreme measure, but if his requests aren’t being heard, it’s either that or leavin…
Another simple trick if you don't like saying "no": become a freelancer. It will never ever occur to anybody in the company that a freelance software dev could possibly be put into a management role, so they won't ask. As opposed to an employed software dev. Bonus if you're in the EU/UK: in most countries in the EU this will even lead to tax breaks and higher before-tax hourly rates. To the point that you'll make (wa…
Having been a contractor in the UK for 5 years, I don't think this is true. Between VAT, Company and Dividend tax, the taxman (HMRC) always gets his share.
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Middle managers are a dime a dozen. However a good technical lead - who can contribute to the engineering team's discussions _and_ lead the team are very very hard to find.
Really? IMO there's an awful lot, they just ask for mid 200,000s.
It's a hard job to do well; it requires you care about technical details but also deal almost exclusively with people. It's a rare person who naturally fits into the "extrovert engineer" role and corporations are shitty about training those who don't fit yet to practice the right behaviors.
Plus, if engineering is "design with constraints" then you are given the extra restraint of headcount and finances.
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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…
It also depends on your philosophy. I want to master my machine not be its servant.
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> 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…
Also, "acceptable"? By whom? Why should I care what they think? I want to be engineering software. If they don't like that, they can either deal with it or let me go. Good thing there's plenty of developer jobs as well as corporate bozos to take the coveted management positions.
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Let me be crystal clear: most people fucking hate working. Bosses are the worst, the money is the sole reason to do it, and we’d all be happier working way less. The idea people are “addicted” to working under a capitalist society is absurd; we are forced like prisoners, not free to make the choice ourselves. Or maybe you consider being unhoused and underfed “freedom”. The “nerve” you’ve hit is that I hate people exc…
Most people work way more than they need. No one needs a six figures salary for 30 years straight. People just get addicted to the nice, non-necessary things, they can get on such income though. This, and their taste for anything other than working slightly withers away (as it's not practiced, due to lack of time).
This place is a fucking ivory tower huh? You guys are clueless
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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…
Hmm, interesting. I'm 39 and used to have amazing flow sessions in late 20s and early 30s but not seeing them much anymore. I can't tell if it's because of stresses of life or simply because I don't have enough time (with 3 young kids) to allow myself to fall into a state of flow. I really hope it's not stresses or my brain changing because I really valued those periods of focus.
I recently tried playing some video games adjacent to ones I've loved before, and I found it really hard to get into them. The games are Red Dead Redemption and SimCity 4, so the graphics and gameplay mechanics are ok. It's just been hard to really get into them.
That's not it for me. For me is I can create things. I always wanted to create machines, but even simple machines required enormous amounts of time in a machine shop, and once I left college I no longer had any machine tools available.
But with programming, I could create all kinds of machines, limited only by my imagination, at no cost.