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Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

taylor.town

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Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#301

Post by sneak »

junon wrote: post #86
sneak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a comfortable, stable job for many years sounds like the worst version of hell one could possibly invent for people who live like I do. There are better things to aspire to than predictability whilst making someone else rich.

Only if you don't have other aspirations in life. My day job is solely to fund my personal projects that I actually enjoy. Not everyone is out to be insanely rich.

If you fairly profit from your direct efforts in a lifelong career as a productive programmer, you will merely become rich, not insanely so. You appear to have constructed a strawman.

Making someone else rich is the objection.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#302

Post by OoooooooO »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #271
bflesch wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having kids is such a traumatic, life-changing event. I mean this in the most positive way. I can see why so many people see this as the before/after watershed moment of their lives and ambitions. However, it's understandable that not everyone needs to have kids to come to this realization.

It also makes it feel all the more exploitative that young developers are encouraged to work long hours and put their everything into their job. And that women are de-incentivized to have children by the market, if not capitalist society at large - don't do it, it'll cost you your career! We only give you two weeks of leave after you gave birth. You can't afford child care, or all your wages would be spent on it! etc…

That's a US only problem though.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#303

Post by Mashimo »

taude wrote: post #164
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #139

There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small. Anyone pegging their self-worth on that goal is setting themselves up for a lot of mental health struggles. My levels of ambition and relentlessness absolutely shifted after having kids, I used to be absolutely furious about being the best. Now I am very much "fuck you pay me" and my prior…

Agree with you. I don't understand the point of this article other than some sort of tongue and cheek snobbery. Hope it maybe made the OP feel better about themselves.

I think it was just a joke :)

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#304

Post by agentultra »

Man spends entire career convincing himself the reason he keeps job hopping is because everyone else is writing crappy code.

Karl Hackerman shows up to each meeting complaining. He seems sour that he hasn’t been given the go ahead to rewrite the system in Rust. He knows a lot about bleeding edge frameworks and best practices and always seems annoyed that he can’t use them at work. He thinks it’s because everyone else has settled in to becoming wage slaves instead of striving to be the best programmers they can be. Everyone puts up with him because they know he’ll quit in six months anyway.

Karl is 47 now. Hasn’t held a job for more than a couple of years. Has mostly been freelancing lately and trying to sell books on tech and frameworks nobody cares about anymore.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#305

Post by recursive »

seanthemon wrote: post #181
armitron wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you left a job that paid 2x and exposed you to hard problems that require reliable solutions for a job inside the horror clusterfuck that's the modern web where nothing really "works" and there's no real engineering to speak of besides monkeys throwing crap in a shared pile and shovelling it out the door ASAP. Good for you I guess?

Tell me you know nothing about web dev without telling me you know nothing about web dev

I've been doing web dev for 20+ years. Which part is wrong?

It's not hard to find feature support or implementation differences between browsers. But these days, that's not really the problem. I can go read the ES language specification, and generally find user agents/node/deno/bun have compliant implementations.

The problem is brittle "ecosystem" stuff. How are the create-react-apps going? How is module bundling going amidst the UMD/CJS/ESM war?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#306

Post by smackeyacky »

boringg wrote: post #289
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently put a little modal on my phone that just says "Compete against yourself" every 30 minutes, and I'm finding it remarkably helpful at focusing my efforts back to what I want to see in the world. I like the mindset of trying to be just a little better than you were, every day. It feels... correctly scaled, somehow.

Great for the upside of growth - how do you change it for when you start to age and skills erode a little bit. That would be deeply frustrating. Need to change the model at that point! What to though?

Your skills don't age like your physical body does.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#307

Post by HenryBemis »

sramsay wrote: post #263
surprisetalk wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here! For context, I recently wrote a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to coast in large companies. [0] https://taylor.town/corporate-camouflage That got me thinking about what happens when people, especially engineers, coast too much, or fail to plan out their careers. I know plenty of smart people that are enchanted by comfort, then chain themselves to companies that take advantage of them. If you've developed t…

Honestly, I just thought it was hilarious -- a sort of parodic counterpoint to the Story of Mel.

I thought I was reading at The Onion!!

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#308

Post by nazgulsenpai »

surprisetalk wrote: post #240
taude wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with you. I don't understand the point of this article other than some sort of tongue and cheek snobbery. Hope it maybe made the OP feel better about themselves.

Author here! For context, I recently wrote a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to coast in large companies. [0] https://taylor.town/corporate-camouflage That got me thinking about what happens when people, especially engineers, coast too much, or fail to plan out their careers. I know plenty of smart people that are enchanted by comfort, then chain themselves to companies that take advantage of them. If you've developed t…

You say tongue-in-cheek while, almost verbatim, summarizing my day-to-day strategy at $megacorp! Seriously great stuff.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#309

Post by Mashimo »

OoooooooO wrote: post #302
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also makes it feel all the more exploitative that young developers are encouraged to work long hours and put their everything into their job. And that women are de-incentivized to have children by the market, if not capitalist society at large - don't do it, it'll cost you your career! We only give you two weeks of leave after you gave birth. You can't afford child care, or all your wages would be spent on it! etc…

That's a US only problem though.

You don't think it's an issue in Japan or south-east Asia?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#310

Post by duxup »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #139

There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small. Anyone pegging their self-worth on that goal is setting themselves up for a lot of mental health struggles. My levels of ambition and relentlessness absolutely shifted after having kids, I used to be absolutely furious about being the best. Now I am very much "fuck you pay me" and my prior…

Maintenance doesn't get enough respect / glory too. "Arthur" should be highly thought of.

Folks writing new code in the wonderfully free world without a ton of odd dependencies and corner cases ... IMO often aren't doing as much "work".

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