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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

#181

Post by from-nibly »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #2

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 (man…

Id argue that there is art in figuring out how to continuously churn out features. Its really hard to write your code in such a way it can handle being jerked around, all while not wasting time on what might happen.

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#182

Post by graemep »

chii wrote: post #20
graemep wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability. I would add, moving the needle in the short term. A business taking a long term view would care more about quality (reliability, security maintainability).

Ostensibly that's true, but in the long term we're all dead anyway. So the company's shareholders might only want the term to be just long enough to cash out.

Most of us will be dead in decades.

What I mean by long term here is more than two or three years.

> So the company's shareholders might only want the term to be just long enough to cash out.

Which means they need to sell to people who think the business has enough of a future for them to cash out. That stretches the terms a bit, but not long enough from the point of view of employees, customers, or what is good of the economy as a while.

Depends on the composition of shareholders too. One thing I recall from my time in investment management was the problem of clients who were reluctant to sell because it would create a capital gains tax liability. At the other extreme are fund managers whose most pressing concern is where they will appear in this year's performance league tables.

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#183

Post by doomslice »

jampekka wrote: post #172
doomslice wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know that the big expensive thing is what your customers actually need? Do you actually know what your customers need? That’s basically the only important context. If you can’t deliver that, it doesn’t matter how well thought through, extensible, or scalable it is.

Do the customers know what they actually need?

Well if you don’t have a pretty good idea of the problem you’re solving for the customer, you’re much better off trying as many things as you can, quickly and cheaply, to figure out.

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#184

Post by andrewflnr »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #69
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> first try to make it work to spec In my professional experience, the only spec you get is a wishlist, never quantified, always vague. Half the work is figuring out what the customer wants. The only metric that anyone cares about is speed. You need to go fast, but to where? There is no consensus.

If quick and dirty gets you 10 shots, while slow and beautiful gets you 1, I’d choose quick & dirty any day.

10 shots facing the wrong direction still gives 10 guaranteed misses. At least make sure which cardinal direction the target is in.

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#187

Post by abnercoimbre »

DonHopkins wrote: post #117
stavros wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks interesting, but why is 75% of your landing page your bios? When clicking the link, I definitely didn't have in mind "I wonder who founded this and what their background is". I now know a lot about who organizes this and what their reasons are, but I don't know anything about what it is .

To be fair, that's the about page, not the landing page. And their goals and reasons for organizing it are commendable. Abner, I'd be interested to hear more about what it was like working with Jonathan Blow. (Maybe your project's about page isn't the place to go into it, but possibly here, your personal blog, or private email.) I'd love to see his reaction to watching the Game Helpin' Squad's tutorial, "Time Travel…

Shoot me a message (should be in my HN bio)

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#188

Post by jackcviers3 »

pyrale wrote: post #95
sokoloff wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that at least allows the consumer to decide the tradeoff. If this Electron app or container costs me more than it’s worth to me, I don’t run it.

> But that at least allows the consumer to decide the tradeoff. ...If they connect the dots.

When consumer software still came on physical media, nearly everything advertised the amount of ram and minimum system and cpu requirements necessary to run the software.

That just isn't the case nowadays, so you don't know there will be trouble until it occurs at runtime.

I can limit the memory available to ALL the tools I use every day (I only do it for docker and jvm stuff), set priority levels, etc., but it feels very weird for a brand new laptop to hit swap after a few days of uptime.

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#189

Post by Jensson »

Dan42 wrote: post #116
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If quick and dirty gets you 10 shots, while slow and beautiful gets you 1, I’d choose quick & dirty any day.

An order of magnitude is a bit much. I'd say quick and dirty gets you 3 shots, while slow and beautiful gets you 1. And if you succeed, it means the result is dirty/ugly code that must be maintained forever.

Doing it many times tend to be much cleaner than trying to get it right the first time. So fast -> clean, slow -> ugly code, as long as you use the speed to redo and clean things up.

Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry

#190

Post by bdw5204 »

peddling-brink wrote: post #93
bdw5204 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, most of the corporate world seems to care more about their aesthetic notions of the Platonic ideal of what code should look like than whether or not it works or whether or not it is efficient. Certainly that's my experience from interviews. Maybe the people who care about business value should be the engineering managers not the people who equate their personal aesthetic preferences with the only ri…

Because code is read more often than written? And clean code is easier to read?

Code is run more than it is read especially if you count users. And so-called "clean" code is a performance disaster[0]. It's also, if that link is an accurate representation of what "clean" code is, a readability disaster. The more readable code, in my opinion anyway, is the version that is also an order of magnitude faster.

[0]: https://www.computerenhance.com/p/clean-code-horrible-perfor...

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