191–200 of 401 posts
Okay so "belt and suspenders" is an LLM-ism, it's not just me who recently learned that expression.
In the UK we call it 'Belt and Braces'
> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…
What if for a lot of software projects out there you don't need craftsmanship but you need something closer to real engineering: "This is what a sane PostgreSQL setup and transaction management for your app looks like, this is how you do validations and the ORM layer and logging and interaction with APIs and request queueing, this is how a good front-end page looks like, here's the off-the-shelf component library you use, here's how your process errors and show toast messages and handle redirects without messing around with browser history, here's all the accessibility and mean things you DON'T do (like hijacking scroll, not having contrast, having too many animations etc.)."
You don't have a rockstar building a bridge, nor do you usually have craftsmen taking risks on innovative materials and new approaches: most of the time, you just build the damn bridge in ways that have worked for decades and have been proven. Software industry doesn't seem to know what is proven or works, cause it's a moving target. Outside of maybe niches like writing code for airplanes, completely different standards there, not sure if most devs would personally want to work in those conditions, though.
Instead on one hand you have orgs and devs that are moving too fast and create a lot of churn without nailing down what works and doesn't, on the other hand you have a lot of people (myself included) that often have to push out slop because tech stacks are a mess and you still have deadlines which don't care about any of that, and largely the state of software development seems like a comparison between Windows 9X, the UI/UX of which was at least partially based on usability studies, and the modern version which... well, you can see for yourself.
> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…
Arguably they are even more willing to cut corners though. Nothing by IBM or SAP should be considered "crafted", yet those companies have a strong place in the world of business today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if it's a mandate top-down, you can: - show increase in errors and outages caused by this approach - integrate manager changes into your CI pipeline (coding / reviewing / testing / documentation) - discuss how your manager can do the changes they need to do without sidetracking all other work Make it indeed about the money: coding by PM + fixing what was coded + dealing with fallout is greater expense than codin…
I don't know why you assumed it was a PM thing, the mandate is for EMs to be more "hands-on". On your points: Manager changes are always going to go through the usual pipeline, we are 10k+ people so there's not even a way to go all gung-ho pushing stuff. They need to be reviewed, approved, etc. But we don't want our manager to code, nor does our manager, so we are just helping to cross the bare minimum expected from…
I've met a handful of people across my life that i'd call truly brilliant. Like, holy heck how in the world is this person this smart? Two things I've noted about really smart people are (usually mutually exclusively) 1) Sometimes they do not realize how smart they are, because it's simple to them, or because they know the subject they assume everyone else, say with a computer science degree, knows and recalls and un…
The first is that you aren't as smart as you think you are, because if you actually understood the people around you in any real way, you would instantly find them less frustrating. But instead you are using flawed heuristics, built out of your own insecurities, to interact with the world.
Possibility two is that you are smart, but you have developed a malformed coping mechanism whereby you take all your negative traits (social ineptness, anxiety, impatience) and treat them all as simple the nature outgrowth of your prodigious intelligence. This is a common coping mechanism, and the neat thing is, it has nothing to do with intelligence. You can be dumb as a brick and still feel like you're in a world of morons who are inferior to you.
In fact, I suspect these two explanations are one explanation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine walking through life and everything is clear, obvious, easy to process and having to watch humanity make stupid choices over and over and over again when the answers have been long known... I don’t claim to be book smart or have a high IQ or whatever but I feel this way about small things that I feel are common sense. It’s maddening to me to watch people fumble around. Or do X when obviously it will result…
One of the things I try to teach my kid is: You are going to have to deal with the fact that there are deeply stupid people all around you, without it affecting your mental health. Those stupid people might be in a position of power over you, they might be other kids in school (or coworkers, later), they might be the president of the country, they might be your neighbor, or they might just be obstacles on the road on…
You could optimize for different things. Code understandability by the team, speed, technical brilliance.
If you optimize for technical brilliance but nobody else on the team understands the code its still a failure.
Seen over engineered code
I kind of envy people who need to clean up after others. At least you're puzzling. My current job is genuinely just boring. It's tasks that are so simple, a junior could do it. But no, instead they needed a medior. I'm not saying I'm better than this, nor that no medior will pick it up. I just cannot push myself to care about the code this company makes. It's old, dusty and it serves no one of importance. These custo…
I am a bit curious here. Does that simply mean to should to extra hours and do bullshit duties or is there actually more coding work opportunities? Or do they expect that you should prove more valuable out of nowhere?
I don't want to downplay your experience. In the latter cases, I wonder if you can actually do something.
> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…
Sure, that cheap desk that arrived in a flat box and got assembled by me and a screwdriver was mass produced in a factory. But it's design had way more expert craftsmanship put into it than would ever be feasible for a bespoke product. High upfront design cost, then mass produced at a low marginal cost.
That had been the state of art for software from the beginning. When you download Firefox, there is no expert programmer carefully building you an artisinal web browser. There is a CDN server sitting in a data center somewhere copying bytes out of its cache for you.
One of the things AI us threatening to do is replace the CAPEX craftsmanship, which has not happened at scale in other industries.
What AI has had more success at it replacing low end "artisinal" software; which is a category that has thus far been so uneconomical is essentially doesn't exist.