101–110 of 207 posts
Been programming over 30 years, since I was 8 years old and my dad’s coworker gave me his old BASIC programming books and I was hooked. I have always found programming easy, and still do. It is just fun, and I still love learning new languages and tools and paradigms. It is still my favorite hobby. However, WORK is hard. Dealing with office politics and changing priorities and bad leadership and meetings and TPS repo…
Did I write this? Are you me???
Speaking as someone with 10+ years experience with C# and TypeScript, coding is in general pretty easy. What’s hard is managing complexity and dealing other people on large projects. This really isn’t surprising when you think about it by comparing writing of code to writing of spoken languages. Just because you’re excellent at grammar and spelling, allowing you to write great emails and possibly even essays, does no…
Been programming over 30 years, since I was 8 years old and my dad’s coworker gave me his old BASIC programming books and I was hooked. I have always found programming easy, and still do. It is just fun, and I still love learning new languages and tools and paradigms. It is still my favorite hobby. However, WORK is hard. Dealing with office politics and changing priorities and bad leadership and meetings and TPS repo…
Most of those processes, tps reports, jira and other annoyances is because in a programming environment you literally have too many cooks in the kitchen. Every programmer can create the system from scratch, so to prevent them from doing so, we have to make it super annoying. Basically it's a people problem. The most incredible work happens in the first 3 months by a lone developer green-fielding with no boundaries. T…
Every programmer believes he can create the system from scratch
FTFY
I'm one of the "every", too. If I knew how hard writing a C++ compiler from scratch would be, I'd have never tried it.
Disagree. Programming now for 30 years and it's a breeze to pick up new frameworks and ideas. I do see a lot of struggling developers who are only in it for the paycheck, who learnt their Java only skills 20 years ago who wonder why it doesn't get any easier...
Been programming over 30 years, since I was 8 years old and my dad’s coworker gave me his old BASIC programming books and I was hooked. I have always found programming easy, and still do. It is just fun, and I still love learning new languages and tools and paradigms. It is still my favorite hobby. However, WORK is hard. Dealing with office politics and changing priorities and bad leadership and meetings and TPS repo…
Ya, programming/maintnence/testing are the easy parts of our job. Especially work politics, but keeping up with paper work (OKRs, perf reviews, status reports, design documents that might not ever be read by anyone else...) is the hard part, and I guess why we get paid so much?
I'm a pretty decent developer with a good memory for project history and context, and I also have a pretty high tolerance for dealing with paperwork BS (I've been in this industry for 20 years). This doesn't seem like that tough of a skillset to replicate, but yet they still want to pay me what seems like ridiculous amounts of money to do work that really isn't that difficult. But it's annoying, and most people won't do it.
I was recently asked by a family member "Why would you want to work in an industry like that? Doesn't all the paperwork and restrictions make it an unsatisfying place to work?" My answer is basically: if you want to make a difference in healthcare, you have to play by the rules of the game.
Been programming over 30 years, since I was 8 years old and my dad’s coworker gave me his old BASIC programming books and I was hooked. I have always found programming easy, and still do. It is just fun, and I still love learning new languages and tools and paradigms. It is still my favorite hobby. However, WORK is hard. Dealing with office politics and changing priorities and bad leadership and meetings and TPS repo…
Ya, programming/maintnence/testing are the easy parts of our job. Especially work politics, but keeping up with paper work (OKRs, perf reviews, status reports, design documents that might not ever be read by anyone else...) is the hard part, and I guess why we get paid so much?
I.e The companies customers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I've said forever that I spend one month a year coding, and 11 months debugging, testing, documenting, negotiating, packaging, releasing, supporting.
There's been academic studies on this. The average hourly productivity as measured in lines of code for professional developers is very low. Along to order of 1 to 2 lines of code per hour. This is because of all the other communication and synchronization that you mentioned that needs to happen.
> What is good code?
Missed one that really needs to be articulated: Correctness.
Poor correctness is one of the most harmful and widespread problems in software today.
Even one of the most wealthy and best-paying companies cannot manage to deliver an acceptable level of correctness for some of the most widely-deployed Internet-facing software: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=chrome
And that company is arguably better at software engineering than the majority of companies.
The takehome isn't "even Google makes software littered with critical defects, so I guess that excuses everyone else, lol". But rather, that most of our engineering field hasn't been held responsible for correctness, and now we routinely knowingly deliver engineering work that we assume has critical defects. And we show no remorse: even when some software is routinely shipping multiple security vulnerability patches per week, we keep doing the same shoddy engineering, sustaining the gushing pipeline of vulnerabilities needing patching.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I don't worry too much about AI. It can write the code better and faster than I do? Wow, you just freed up 5% of my day.
Can't we send the AI to meetings instead?