181–190 of 296 posts
> Sometimes I also think if it would be different if I was born several decades earlier Or you'd be complaining about writing yet another missile ballistics program, or converting another basic mathematical or statistical algorithm into MUMPS.
Programming is one of the only engineering fields that has a quick feedback loop between Hypothesis -> Results. And I love that! Also the open ended difficulty bar inspires constant accomplishment. I love it by every character typed! I have to stop myself cause I have some coding to do ;^p
I've felt this way before. Dejected that the my new job wasn't an exciting candy land of save-the-day hacks and movie montage of elegant code spanning the screen. My expectations were too high. I thought we would always do the right thing to kick out software all grown up ready to take on the world. When the realization set in I got angry. First at the job then at myself. I held it tight knowing someone was to blame.…
It's not just a job for you; you never wanted it to be just a job.
It looks like you have found the cathedral in your job.
One of the author's frustrations, seeing months of work abandoned - is the byproduct of training programmers as scientists and engineers rather than designers...or rather it is the byproduct of a pedagogy which attempts to extend mathematical logic and proofs to messy social problems. Landing pages and NoSQL backends are not deductively better or worse: at best they are statistically or inductively so. Typically, how…
I don't think that's necessarily a bad situation - hell, the bulk of my work is prototyping, and I throw away probably 90% of it. I just don't think this is unique to design, and I think that software engineering differs in that you usually need to proceed farther to see the flaws in your design. Science is a more apt metaphor - the scientists I know easily throw away 99% of their lifetime output, because the point of science is to prove yourself wrong as quickly as possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
protip: every job is like this. I went into journalism because i LOVED reading and writing. Making it a career sapped the fun out of it. Now i'm coding professionally. It's much more fun than the pressures of journalism, but I do find myself sometimes thinking "this was more fun when I did it just for the heck of it"
protip: Be a very picky freelancer and only work on projects that interest you.
Solving problems is interesting. Repetition is terrible. As programmers many of the things we build are to automate processing that other people would find repetitive and make errors doing. As a result, our work becomes repetitive and we make errors doing it. As some level we've succeeded – we've added a layer of abstraction and made a lot of people's lives easier – but we've also moved our expectations ahead of us a…
"Solving problems is interesting. Repetition is terrible." Most "programming" is just "digital plumbing". No matter how flashy or utilitarian the taps or basin are, underneath the job is pretty much always the same - you hook up hot water to one tap, cold water to the other, and the sink drain to the drainpipe. You can do a great job or a shoddy job - so long as nothing leaks _too_ much, it doesn't make any differenc…
How? Mostly (not entirely) by working for a defense contractor. Everyone seems to knock corporate jobs, but I swear to you I've done so much cool stuff because it is only companies that size that can bid on and win this interesting work. Plus, I went to university (another false meme around here - college is just a piece of paper), where I learned the chemistry, physics, electrical engineering, and math to do all this stuff.
There is plenty of pain in big government type projects, but there is pain in every thing important. Do you want to wrestle with undocumented CSS behavior, or wrestle with how to program this robot, or how to reduce defect rates in your machine in the factory, or how to make this plane fly. Sentence structure doesn't make it clear, but I consider only the first boring, and the rest extremely interesting.
There are a lot of those kinds of jobs. You may not live in SF anymore, and end up at an airbase in Iowa, or in Albuquerque, or Huntsville. OTOH, your pay will be absolutely amazing compared to local property prices, and you can raise a family, go on great vacations, and not worry about living in the crazy bubble we are in right now.
I know it won't appeal to everyone, but I swear to you there are tons of extremely interesting, challenging jobs out there that aren't start ups, and aren't corporate internal reporting apps (TPS reports). You will need to be far more than a Ruby on Rails developer, CSS+HTML5 jockey, or what have you.
edit: all of the above is written by a US citizen. I don't know what opportunities are like in other countries, and don't mean to imply that any of the above applies to anyone but a US citizen. I don't know.
There are an incredible amount of hard problems and interesting challenges in frontend web dev. The field is changing at a fantastic pace, and there are all sorts of exciting projects to get involved with. Its wide open. If you think its all just JS hacks you're doing it wrong.
> There are an incredible amount of hard problems and interesting challenges in frontend web dev. Name three that your boss will allow you to work on. > there are all sorts of exciting projects to get involved with Name three that your boss will allow you to work on. > If you think its all just JS hacks you're doing it wrong. Or maybe that's his boss doing it wrong: like, "This form is ugly on our HR people's compute…
Of course, this assumes that it actually is your boss who's wrong, and you're not just ignorant of the market realities that your business operates in. If you want to avoid that JS hack and drop support for IE6, you better have numbers that show that it's a negligible part of your revenues. And if you do have those numbers, it will be much easier to convince your boss.
(True story: I was working on Google's visual redesign of 2010. As a team, we all estimated that supporting IE6 would double the development cost and add a minimum of 3 months to the schedule. We took this info - along with numbers for IE6 market share - to our managers, who took this to their managers, until it reached the executive level. The verdict: we didn't have to support IE6. This was the first version of Google Search that dropped support for it - Docs had dropped support a couple months earlier - and started the tidal wave of sites not supporting IE6.)
Complicating this plan, though, is the fact that I put more emphasis on family than on work satisfaction. If I have to put up with a boring job but get to live in a nice house in a nice community and spend time with family, that might be worth it. I'm just not totally satisfied that it is yet. But I can't go risk everything in a San Fransisco start-up attempt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. I think about quitting every single day, but this fear lets me grind through the day. Being unemployed is just no option if you're not alone/have family.
Look at it this way, if programming were fun, people would do it for free (and many people do) but if you want to make money at it, you are going to not enjoy everything. That's the trade you make, they give you money to do something which you might not enjoy.
It's not that I do a job in a field that I hate. I have a crappy job in a field that I love. I'm convinced I could resign much more easily if it were the former case..