Life's too short to write shitty software
team.adzerk.com
Life's too short to write shitty software
1–10 of 107 posts
Re: Life's too short to write shitty software
#2Truth.
Re: Life's too short to write shitty software
#3At the end of the day, you should be having fun. I lost sight of that for a long time and wrote a lot of software that I thought would make money (it didn't), but I hated working on. This led to me falling out of love with software for a long while.
It's only in the past few months that I've really come to love it again. Between my day job at Mozilla, working on ridiculously fun optimizations, and a startup that went from no code to a damn near fully functional product in a week and a half (including the time it took to build the framework that the product itself is built on!), I've been having a blast. I forgot how fun it can be to just dive in and make shit work, and do it in the way I think will work best. I spent years over-thinking my development, with nothing to show for it; a couple months of coding with reckless abandon and I'm happier and more productive than I've been in damn near a decade.
Stop hating life, go have fun.
Re: Life's too short to write shitty software
#4I subscribed to the StartupDigest newsletter to keep track of local happenings. Content aside, every week their email begins with the same line, which becomes the snippet that GMail shows in the preview.
"Life is too short to work at a boring company".
Quite a reassuring reminder.
Re: Life's too short to write shitty software
#5Im sitting my in my cubical hating my job right this moment. I applied to ycombinator and I will escape cubical hell. If you've never held a corporate job, you are lucky. It sucks your soul and crushes your dream. The anti-ambition of people around me is discouraging and depressing. I work on software that is meaningless, and that just kills you inside. Its the feeling that you are spending days/months/years of your life not adding value to society but simply writing software that doesn't matter because odds are it will be shelved for another project when an upper manager decides that it was the improper path for the business to go down. I wake up every morning excited for my lunch break because I will get to escape into a book on some assorted topic in order to gain the knowledge to escape this hell hole. Yet, the fire inside me won't be quashed and I will escape it. I refuse to feel like this my entire life. I will get out and I will change the world with my talents. That feeling, that fire, keeps it bearable.
Re: Life's too short to write shitty software
#6The basic idea of this article is awesome - right now is certainly the right time to get a non-shitty job.
However, I disagree strongly with the idea that startups are some sort of panacea for bad jobs. There are plenty of bad startup jobs, and they're generally easier to get than a corporate job. It's easy to talk yourself out of the bad corporate job somewhere in the 5 levels of HR review and background check. It's harder to argue with "free beer, flexible hours, $90k, and you start Monday" - even if none of the above end up being true.
Re: Life's too short to write shitty software
#7I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
- Steve Jobs
A couple of years out of college I started living by this quote and it has worked out great for me.
Re: Life's too short to write shitty software
#8While I sympathize, my wife and kids need to eat now, not in 2 years when I pull equity out of an IPO.
If you can avoid the TPS-report-factory-factory (wink), by all means do so. But don't look down on those who are doing what they have to.
There's something to be said for knocking off after 8 hours, and going home to one's family as well. What I do is technically boring, but necessary, and doesn't consume my personal life. I don't have to spend 2 hours each way going to work through bay area traffic, either.
Yeah, I'd love to be building something super cool from scratch, but that lifestyle has a cost, as well.
Re: Life's too short to write shitty software
#9I joined my first startup in 1988. My previous company was acquired by Xerox, and I met "lifers", (in their 60s, worked there since graduation, looking forward to pension). I didn't want to be a lifer.
My parents thought I was nuts for not going to IBM. My wife was working at Digital, and hating it. She encouraged me to go to the startup. Which I did, and I'm still doing startups 25 years later. (I predicted that my startup would be in business when Digital no longer existed, and for a short time, that was true.)
At that first startup, I formulated a very simple test for deciding where to work and what to work on. I ask myself: Am I having fun? Am I creating something new and valuable? Am I being rewarded adequately? (i.e., financially).
This has worked out really well. I've worked on and shipped really interesting software, I am constantly learning new stuff, and it has paid off nicely.
Re: Life's too short to write shitty software
#10The basic idea of this article is awesome - right now is certainly the right time to get a non-shitty job. However, I disagree strongly with the idea that startups are some sort of panacea for bad jobs. There are plenty of bad startup jobs, and they're generally easier to get than a corporate job. It's easy to talk yourself out of the bad corporate job somewhere in the 5 levels of HR review and background check. It's…
Some corporate jobs are better than others. There are cheap-skates, and those that will reward talent. But if paperwork kills you, it won't work, no.