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A love letter to my future employer (2020)

catzkorn.dev

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Re: A love letter to my future employer (2020)

#11

Post by chownie »

jama211 wrote: post #4
zwnow wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing it professionally destroyed all the magic for me. Everything is slop, customer appointments are exhausting af, nobody is able to precisely communicate their needs and im supposed to be the people pleaser saying "sure can do" to every lunatic idea some person with enough money has. If you want to take responsibility and actually build a valuable product your only option is open source software as companies, no m…

I sense just a touch of catastrophising going on here…

If anything, we're not responding to this enough.

If we were civil engineers it would be shocking for the public to learn that we are sometimes ordered build the bridges terribly on purpose, for something like the purpose that it influences people toward using toll roads -- when in the world of software engineering not only has this kind of anti-user (anti-human) behaviour become commonplace but actually it's increasingly the only novel work we do between gluing other people's code together.

Re: A love letter to my future employer (2020)

#12

Post by bcrl »

zwnow wrote: post #3
globular-toast wrote: post #2

Sad that the blog posts stopped after getting employed. I was hoping for some interesting insights after five years of doing it professionally.

Doing it professionally destroyed all the magic for me. Everything is slop, customer appointments are exhausting af, nobody is able to precisely communicate their needs and im supposed to be the people pleaser saying "sure can do" to every lunatic idea some person with enough money has. If you want to take responsibility and actually build a valuable product your only option is open source software as companies, no m…

It really depends on the culture of the organization, personal and team goals. Very few places have everything in place to support engineers by making work low friction, productive and with the right support from the rest of the team combined with interesting tasks and goals. Once in a while a job like that comes along, but usually it ends up changing over time as priorities for the organization and individuals shift.

But yeah, I'm pretty down on tech these days (and even telecom). Bullshit happens everywhere and drains virtually all the fun out of everything. There are loads of incumbents, pole owners and municipalities that don't even do the bare minimum required by responding to permits in a timely manner. It's depressing that it is refreshing to me when people do the bare minimum -- replying to emails on the next business day (making it possible to get to the real work of installing cables for a customer). Most days for me now are hounding people to do what they should have done weeks / months / years ago, or writing legal documents to try to address harm they're causing.

Re: A love letter to my future employer (2020)

#13

Post by hampelm »

zwnow wrote: post #8
jama211 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense just a touch of catastrophising going on here…

Not really. No matter what enterprise dev I talked to their product is completely unsaveable. Too big for a rewrite and basically a Frankenstein monolith/microservice done wrong architecture. It's really painful to see how bad some stuff is millions of people depend on. If builders built houses like devs built software, we would have no houses.

Check out the homebuilding subreddit. The amount of "bad" stuff that ends up under the surface of nice drywal is, in fact, _just fine_, is quite high! Here's a recent example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebuilding/comments/1mjxqin/is_th...

Re: A love letter to my future employer (2020)

#15

Post by zwnow »

hampelm wrote: post #13
zwnow wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. No matter what enterprise dev I talked to their product is completely unsaveable. Too big for a rewrite and basically a Frankenstein monolith/microservice done wrong architecture. It's really painful to see how bad some stuff is millions of people depend on. If builders built houses like devs built software, we would have no houses.

Check out the homebuilding subreddit. The amount of "bad" stuff that ends up under the surface of nice drywal is, in fact, _just fine_, is quite high! Here's a recent example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebuilding/comments/1mjxqin/is_th...

Building with drywall is a concept ill never understand. Houses are made of brick walls where im from.

Re: A love letter to my future employer (2020)

#16

Post by globular-toast »

catzkorn wrote: post #7
globular-toast wrote: post #2

Sad that the blog posts stopped after getting employed. I was hoping for some interesting insights after five years of doing it professionally.

Hi! I've been trying to write 'the next post' for the last 5 years - it's often something I think about that I've just left these posts in the ether with no conclusion. It wasn't a conscious decision not to continue, but I started interviewing then got hired at an early stage start up (Tailscale), and everything turned into a blur. When I went back to the draft I had going, it felt overwhelming to try condense the pa…

Looking forward to it!

Re: A love letter to my future employer (2020)

#17

Post by gottorf »

zwnow wrote: post #15
hampelm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the homebuilding subreddit. The amount of "bad" stuff that ends up under the surface of nice drywal is, in fact, _just fine_, is quite high! Here's a recent example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebuilding/comments/1mjxqin/is_th...

Building with drywall is a concept ill never understand. Houses are made of brick walls where im from.

I'm sure you know, but to clarify, drywall is not structural. Load is borne by lumber in most cases, though some homes in America are built with structural masonry; South Florida builds a lot of homes with concrete masonry units, for example. The drywall is just there as a pleasant skin to hide the structural underpinnings. There's nothing stopping someone from using drywall in the interior even in structural masonry buildings, and this happens pretty often, in fact.

There's nothing wrong with wooden houses! They're a cost-effective method of building, and with proper care, such houses will last over a hundred years. Masonry buildings, of course, also need care to avoid falling apart, though probably less so than wooden buildings.

I don't know where it is that you're from, but I'd wager that large parts of the US sees harsher climate conditions. Between hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and wildfires, American houses have to deal with a lot. Properly-constructed wooden houses handle what they need to.

Sure, you could say that all else equal, a masonry structure is more durable than a wooden one. But as they say, anyone can build a bridge that stands, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands. Cost is always an object in the real world.

Re: A love letter to my future employer (2020)

#18

Post by globular-toast »

chownie wrote: post #11
jama211 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense just a touch of catastrophising going on here…

If anything, we're not responding to this enough . If we were civil engineers it would be shocking for the public to learn that we are sometimes ordered build the bridges terribly on purpose, for something like the purpose that it influences people toward using toll roads -- when in the world of software engineering not only has this kind of anti-user (anti- human ) behaviour become commonplace but actually it's incr…

Agreed. You don't even need to just include engineers. Even professionals like electricians or nurses etc stand to be struck off or even sent to prison for incompetence like mislabelling a fusebox or something. Meanwhile software engineers are being told to just fucking put a bolt in the fusebox, we haven't got time to do it properly.

Re: A love letter to my future employer (2020)

#19

Post by jama211 »

chownie wrote: post #11
jama211 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense just a touch of catastrophising going on here…

If anything, we're not responding to this enough . If we were civil engineers it would be shocking for the public to learn that we are sometimes ordered build the bridges terribly on purpose, for something like the purpose that it influences people toward using toll roads -- when in the world of software engineering not only has this kind of anti-user (anti- human ) behaviour become commonplace but actually it's incr…

We’re not building bridges though are we. I’m more aware than anyone that the software is terrible about the place. I’ve also seen that fail to matter that much 99% of the time.

Re: A love letter to my future employer (2020)

#20

Post by jama211 »

globular-toast wrote: post #18
chownie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, we're not responding to this enough . If we were civil engineers it would be shocking for the public to learn that we are sometimes ordered build the bridges terribly on purpose, for something like the purpose that it influences people toward using toll roads -- when in the world of software engineering not only has this kind of anti-user (anti- human ) behaviour become commonplace but actually it's incr…

Agreed. You don't even need to just include engineers. Even professionals like electricians or nurses etc stand to be struck off or even sent to prison for incompetence like mislabelling a fusebox or something. Meanwhile software engineers are being told to just fucking put a bolt in the fusebox, we haven't got time to do it properly.

Because people’s lives aren’t typically at stake because a website is janky.
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