Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

It's the main benefit of Rust ;)

(obviously it's not but it is super nice that main in Rust is just:)

    fn main() {
    
    }

What, `def main():`? Or do you mean the __name__ == "__main__" thing for distinguishing whether the code was imported?

Remote work is great (for the reasons you gave and more) and saying it "sucks" made me roll my eyes, and it's reductive in the same way as saying office work "sucks." I wouldn't have had a job if in-office was the only option. It certainly didn't suck for me.

Being bad at problem solving with people far away is just another problem you can solve with practice. Same as being bad at problem solving even when help is right next to you.

Or work with a random programmer at a random company for a bit. We had to do some audit/estimate for a company with huge tech issues (race conditions causing data corruption, huge slowdowns with just small usage spikes etc) costing them clients/money. The company runs around $50m/year or so selling software to enterprises. Anyway; software backend written with Java/Spring, deployed/updated on EC2 manually, no automated tests (zilch). Frontends with Vaadin. Almost no processes are used, just Jira + tasks and then 'start at the top every morning'. No one knows sql anymore (Hibernate), no one knows html/js (Vaadin) and, even though most people are senior and there since the beginning, no-one has done anything high level on the job in the past 20 years or so. They have just been inside this 'ecosystem' writing code and it works. Old Java with some modern updates just to satisfy the compiler/linter (but not fully understanding why that nonsense is needed). None of the core seniors I interviewed touches computers outside of work, they had 0 tech courses since working there etc. They are all 9-5 code producing robots. I want to bet they can mostly/all be replaced today by Claude Code, of which existence, of course, they are not aware (they did chatgpt but not Codex or Copilot). We have since found so many issues in the code. Yeah, I do feel very much uplifted about my own skills after encounters like this, and these are by no means rare, i would rather say; extremely common.

Unlike OP though, I cannot be as open about these companies as we would definitely not have any clients left after.

> made me roll my eyes, and it's reductive in the same way as saying office work "sucks."

Yes, "remote work sucks" is reductive, but I elaborated beyond the heading. Also, I wouldn't disagree with "office work sucks." Remote work simply has its warts, too.

> just another problem you can solve with practice

Perhaps, but practice alone clearly isn't enough. I've been working remotely since 2020 and it hasn't gotten more enjoyable. I would love to solve that problem, though. I read Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried in the past, but that was written a long time ago. I've added more recent works (Effective Remote Work by James Stanier and The Async-First Playbook by Sumeet Gayathri Moghe) to my reading list.