41–50 of 68 posts
When I was a developer I thought “without me all the people in the building have nothing to sell and they can all just go home”. Then I spent a few years in sales (long story) and flipped 180 degrees. Without salespeople (and the customers they bring in) there would be nobody paying our salaries and we all could just go home.
Tired of these absolutes. Software should be about the code, but not for every person on every project for all parts of that project. It's great to "wake up" and realize that code doesn't have the intrinsic value you might have assumed, but you can also take that knowledge and go right back to writing beautiful code where it best serves the bigger mission.
Now, that is a letter to new developer that I wish I had read when I was a new developer:
Dear new developer,
Be careful when reading blogs. A lot of stuff you'll read online is insightful, informative, innovative, or inspiring. By all means, enrich your life with what you read, but be sure to also re-read "Wind in the Willows" from time to time and reflect on the character of Mr. Toad.
Regards,
Someone Who Made The Mistake of Putting Certain Bloggers on a Pedestal
It's about whether your code earns someone money.
"Software [ought to be] about people, not code" Related but not quite the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
“Software is about people” argues:
> I used to think software was fundamentally about code. Experience taught me that I was mistaken. Software is fundamentally an artifact made by people, for people’s purposes, and its success depends on them.
“Software ought to be about people” says:
> Software isn’t necessarily about people, but I believe it should be.
You may argue the latter, but I think the OP believes software is already shaped by humans .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> software jobs still hire based on how good your coding is primarily ehhh. In my experience, being able to code is a necessary but not sufficient skill for a software developer. The only exceptions I've seen is having some extremely deep expertise in a niche technical field (and even then I wouldn't call that being able to code well, so much as technical domain knowledge). When I was hiring at AWS the view for my te…
Okay sure but would you say software is not about code? Yes of course people skills matter I get it but the baseline is still code, no? Isn't it then weird to say software is not about it but rather people?
For most problems solvable in code, there are literally infinite valid code representations of possible solutions (at least in higher-abstraction languages, the space is much more bounded at the assembly level). If you consider the subset of those representations that result in sufficiently performant execution, does it really matter which one is running? This is where most programmers will start mentioning clean abstractions and readability and maintainability, but those are concerns of making the code understandable for people reading and modifying that code. The people are still the driving force.
I'm not arguing for slop here - I definitely care about code quality - but it's important to stay grounded in the reason that it matters: people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should have stopped at 90 degrees ;) Without salespeople you can't sell software. Without developers, you can't make software. Since we all have to pay bills, selling software is of crucial importance, but that doesn't make the developers less important. It just means that the society we live in makes those who sell as important as those who make. Just like we strive to evolve software development, we should also…
Sales is part of the capitalism layer that sits atop the actual work. Same as CEOs and finance. None of them do useful work, only decide what useful work gets done. In communism you couldn't sell software without a Party representative - that doesn't mean he's useful.
Software can be modeled as a social relation. Unless you're manufacturing your own chips from scratch, that is. Charging people for software never sat right with me.
Tired of these absolutes. Software should be about the code, but not for every person on every project for all parts of that project. It's great to "wake up" and realize that code doesn't have the intrinsic value you might have assumed, but you can also take that knowledge and go right back to writing beautiful code where it best serves the bigger mission.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> software jobs still hire based on how good your coding is primarily ehhh. In my experience, being able to code is a necessary but not sufficient skill for a software developer. The only exceptions I've seen is having some extremely deep expertise in a niche technical field (and even then I wouldn't call that being able to code well, so much as technical domain knowledge). When I was hiring at AWS the view for my te…
Okay sure but would you say software is not about code? Yes of course people skills matter I get it but the baseline is still code, no? Isn't it then weird to say software is not about it but rather people?