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I love programming but I hate the programming industry

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Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#2

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

It’s not the “programming industry” that OP hates, it’s the “corporate world”. I’ve worked with (and have been) developers who have mismatched expectations on what “the real world” wants out of them.

The corporate world doesn’t give a shit about finesse, abstractions, witty or beautiful code. They care about finding developers who will pump out features to the business requirements. Some human beings in that cog (managers, directors, peers, etc) may allude to enabling developers to actually practice the “art” of programming but the bottom line is if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability.

Find comfort in programming outside of the corporate world and practicing the art but don’t expect the “industry” gives a damn about the how or why of programming, mearly the characters we punch onto the screen into cash. Once you come to terms with this, life gets a lot easier, less frustrating and you can actually find fun in the work (albeit, not necessarily “art”).

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#3

Post by msephton »

Solution: go independent, work on your own ideas, and sell them to consumers. That might be your own start-up, but for me it was to become an indie game developer.

One of my games, YOYOZO, was featured in Ars Technica's "Best Video Games of 2023" so I feel my decision was the right one.

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#7

Post by coldcode »

I spent 40 years as a programmer, but I always looked for ways to use creativity and imagination and never be a rote coder. Despite having success in my last job leading a small team building a strategically important piece of code (if it didn't work all the time, there would be 100,000 angry people every day, not to mention a whole cast of angry executives), I finally got tired of working so hard and decided to retire. You must find a new way or place to be a programmer if your job is not motivating (like starting your own company or trying something new) or finding another line of work. Reinventing yourself isn't easy and is much harder today, but you can do it if you want it enough.

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#8

Post by turtleyacht »

Some consolation if it can be done:

Rewrite the flagship app from the ground-up in a new framework. It's a little easier if most functionality is behind APIs. The requirements are already concrete: make it look and function the same.

Express the common business flows with a novel algebra (types). Make logic errors be type errors [1].

These pull requests may never get merged; the feature branch may age for years; at least you gave it an honest go.

[1] When people say, "but most business logic bugs aren't type errors," I just want to show them how to make bugs into type errors. -- Matt Parson, from Thinking in Types (2018) by Sandy Maguire.

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#9

Post by jstanley »

This is part of the programming industry, but it's not the whole thing. I'm reminded of the story of a bunch of blind people all describing different parts of an elephant. You move your hand around a bit and it sort of all feels the same, but that doesn't mean you've touched the whole elephant! Elephants are big.

This part in particular stood out:

> thousands of lines of unmaintainable spaghetti code engineers were bullied into writing in weeks instead of months using arbitrary trendy technologies.

This is not my experience at all.

I have 2 part-time jobs writing Perl code, and at both of those jobs the people I encounter are thoughtful and intelligent and want to do a good job (including managers).

Nobody is bullied into anything. Nobody wants thousands of lines of new code. We have enough thousands of lines of old code that nobody understands :).

Your experience of the programming industry very much depends on what part of it you work in, and specifically who you work with. But I think if you want to "quit the rat race", Perl is a good choice, because everyone who wants to rush around chasing fashion trends left Perl behind a long time ago. Also, I'm told Perl developers are getting harder to find so salaries are going up.

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#10

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

Startup time! Has its own tradeoffs but you get to go compete with the system that is maddening. Imagine them trying to run a race against people who are actually trying? That's why startups are able to win against huge companies with seemingly unlimited resources. They use those resources to fight internally over who controls the resources.

Startups have their own perils of course. But you get to do work. Real actual work.

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