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Coding is boring, unless

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Re: Coding is boring, unless

#11

Post by purpled_haze »

jgh wrote: post #4
ggambetta wrote: post #2

> Because 50% of my code (hyperbole intended!) was a direct copy/paste of Stack Overflow. And another 40% was a copy/paste from other scripts. Either my colleagues’ scripts or my own. It became repetitive. And there was little creativity or learning involved. How is this even possible? I've never had a job where copying and pasting code would have helped. It blows my mind every time I read this kind of claim, to the…

He pointed out that it's a hyperbole.

It is and yet it's not.

If you think about it, most of the code we benefit from each day was written by someone else from the operating system, to the language compiler/interpreter, to the frameworks, libraries, etc.

Many developers get their queues about how to use a language, framework, library, or application because they learned how to use it on StackOverflow.

Do you really know how much code was written to get to the point where you are sitting there, using all of the benefits of past coding, much of it thrown away to make way for other code for better or worse? All of that code is likely far beyond 50% of what your company has written.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#12

Post by gotchange »

superplussed wrote: post #5
ggambetta wrote: post #2

> Because 50% of my code (hyperbole intended!) was a direct copy/paste of Stack Overflow. And another 40% was a copy/paste from other scripts. Either my colleagues’ scripts or my own. It became repetitive. And there was little creativity or learning involved. How is this even possible? I've never had a job where copying and pasting code would have helped. It blows my mind every time I read this kind of claim, to the…

For the first year or so of learning Ruby and Rails, I did end up copying and pasting alot from SO. In fact, I think I had a streak of visiting SO every day for at least a year, and that wasn't idle browsing, that was "Oh shit I'm stuck, better hit up SO". So now when I hear claims like this, I just assume it's coming from someone that is new enough to a specific technology that relying on SO is necessary for them.

I rarely visited SO for answers and I went through the novice phase like everyone else but I didn't pick the path of least resistance every time I'm faced with a technical problem, because I have a held belief that you can't accumulate knowledge and expertise if you don't polish your debugging/troubleshooting skills and make yourself go through the painful process of solving technical problems on your own without the help of someone else and I could say that help very much in honing my skills.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#13

Post by FLUX-YOU »

ggambetta wrote: post #2

> Because 50% of my code (hyperbole intended!) was a direct copy/paste of Stack Overflow. And another 40% was a copy/paste from other scripts. Either my colleagues’ scripts or my own. It became repetitive. And there was little creativity or learning involved. How is this even possible? I've never had a job where copying and pasting code would have helped. It blows my mind every time I read this kind of claim, to the…

>Are there people who get paid to do things that simple that they can be copied and pasted from Stack Overflow?

Yes, because the reality is that someone has to do it, and a half-assed effort from a developer browsing SO is still better than getting a random Joe off of the street for $10/hr to try it.

Not all companies have interesting problems to solve 100% of the time. It's not impossible that your company is trying to solve a problem that the majority of SO questions will answer, because your problem is just that boring.

If that blows your mind, you should know there are people that get paid well to do stuff that is a lot more simple than even cobbling scripts together from the internet.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#14

Post by sohcahtoa »

gotchange wrote: post #6
ggambetta wrote: post #2

> Because 50% of my code (hyperbole intended!) was a direct copy/paste of Stack Overflow. And another 40% was a copy/paste from other scripts. Either my colleagues’ scripts or my own. It became repetitive. And there was little creativity or learning involved. How is this even possible? I've never had a job where copying and pasting code would have helped. It blows my mind every time I read this kind of claim, to the…

It always amazes me that there are people out there willing to hire and pay full these type of workers who scour SO for answers without working hard on the problem and expanding their knowledge and expertise in the process. No wonder that our field and profession is suffering from bad image and quality problem when so-called pros copy and paste all the time on the job.

I think there are two ways to view what the job most programmers do is. IMO it isn't to write code, it's to solve business problems. Code just happens to be the tool that you use to do that, most of the time.

Anyone who tries to solve a problem by staring hard at a blank piece of paper instead of just googling the answer is not making effective use of their time.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#15

Post by nilliams »

S_A_P wrote: post #10

I don't know. I've been writing c# for years and I still go to SO for things. Sometimes it's even stuff I should know, like creating a text file. However I don't do some of these tasks often enough to remember by heart and it's not an exciting problem to figure out so I go for SO. I don't see a problem with that at all. I also don't get the sentiment that you're not a real coder if you use SO and copy paste code. I d…

Way I read it the overuse of SO (along with C&P programming) thing was just one example/potential symptom -- he wasn't making a broad generalisation that all SO usage is bad.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#16

Post by VLM »

I'd agree with most of the article except the "The day-to-day always gets boring" segment. If you don't like yourself, traveling merely results in not liking yourself somewhere else. If you are boring, going somewhere exciting merely results in an exciting place now including qty one boring person. If you don't like your job, being forced to participate in a hackathon will result in increasing the hatred of the job not loving it. The diversity part especially was racist, all brits are the same, all greeks are the same, there is more to diversity. Note how that section also neatly excludes all potential employees with social lives or family lives outside of coworkers due to the relatively intense level of required coworker socialization, yet categorized that very exclusion as diversity. This is especially striking on a holiday weekend, I had a lot of fun this weekend without a single coworker being involved, not even a phone call, so far anyway. It would suck from a stress standpoint never being able to get away from work, or having to give up holiday family time just to put food on the table.

An unmentioned advantage is there is some (ugh) synergy in the two separately described issues of elimination of giant monoliths and rotation of personnel. However, eliminating "can grok the entire system architecture" as a precondition of writing code doesn't mean nobody needs to grok the entire system architecture.

One way I've handled "Too Long; Didn’t Learn" professionally is to just fix stuff on a higher level. In the article there is an example of a boring inside tool acting as a "fake-Spark". Well why not just re-implement in Spark? The reason why not might tie into the other paragraph that paraphrases to "micromanagement is not fun", but just job hop until you find a professionally managed company then its all good.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#17

Post by TeMPOraL »

sohcahtoa wrote: post #14
gotchange wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always amazes me that there are people out there willing to hire and pay full these type of workers who scour SO for answers without working hard on the problem and expanding their knowledge and expertise in the process. No wonder that our field and profession is suffering from bad image and quality problem when so-called pros copy and paste all the time on the job.

I think there are two ways to view what the job most programmers do is. IMO it isn't to write code, it's to solve business problems. Code just happens to be the tool that you use to do that, most of the time. Anyone who tries to solve a problem by staring hard at a blank piece of paper instead of just googling the answer is not making effective use of their time.

Indeed. Some would call it lazy - I prefer "leveraging the combined knowledge and experience of all humanity".

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#18

Post by lubonay »

sohcahtoa wrote: post #14
gotchange wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always amazes me that there are people out there willing to hire and pay full these type of workers who scour SO for answers without working hard on the problem and expanding their knowledge and expertise in the process. No wonder that our field and profession is suffering from bad image and quality problem when so-called pros copy and paste all the time on the job.

I think there are two ways to view what the job most programmers do is. IMO it isn't to write code, it's to solve business problems. Code just happens to be the tool that you use to do that, most of the time. Anyone who tries to solve a problem by staring hard at a blank piece of paper instead of just googling the answer is not making effective use of their time.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Reaching for Google and SO as your first impulse when confronted with a problem will deteriorate your ability to find your own solutions in the long run. Use it or lose it, as they say. And besides, any non-trivial problem can't be solved by copying code from SO alone.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#19

Post by Bahamut »

sohcahtoa wrote: post #14
gotchange wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always amazes me that there are people out there willing to hire and pay full these type of workers who scour SO for answers without working hard on the problem and expanding their knowledge and expertise in the process. No wonder that our field and profession is suffering from bad image and quality problem when so-called pros copy and paste all the time on the job.

I think there are two ways to view what the job most programmers do is. IMO it isn't to write code, it's to solve business problems. Code just happens to be the tool that you use to do that, most of the time. Anyone who tries to solve a problem by staring hard at a blank piece of paper instead of just googling the answer is not making effective use of their time.

It depends on the problems you're solving - SO does not help with problems of architecture. For code structuring, staring hard at a sheet of paper or nothingness can absolutely be more effective.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#20

Post by anonyfox »

I switched jobs a year ago: from a low paid startup job to a company that does project-to-project grunt work for local banks.

I (@Hisako1337) learned a lot during the past years, absorbed the whole mindset of Lean Startup, Customer Development and truly agile software development. I taught myself the complete fullstack, from User interviews to SPA frontend dev with advanced SEO, backend development with imperative, OO and functional mindsets (Love Elixir currently!), using different communication protocols (have a degree in distributed systems), and optimize solutions by using appropriate database solutions, from relational to document stores to graph databases. I even learned how to build desktop apps with web tech before it was as cool as today and currently I absorb every piece of machine learning material I can find/buy. Every bit of learning happens in my spare time, because: ...

Now guess what I do for a living for my current "FinTech" employer? Bugfixing a decade-old Spaghetti-architecture CRUD PHP app, doing pretty useless projectwork for customers (middle bank management).

I'm not allowed to improve things, because stuff might break and of course there are zero tests written. Boredom? I hate every Single hour at work. Most colleauges behave like braindead zombies. But the salary is quite good and I can't move to better job locations.

Others here might not believe that situations like described in this articles occur- but really- things can be fairly worse. I'd love having problems that are worth a question at SO, not the trivial gruntwork I'm supposed to do all day, with zero impact for anyone for idiots that have no clue but enough money.

Sorry for the rant- this article triggered a wave of emotions...

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