Software Engineers also hate sensationlist headlines/titles.
I think Hacker News shows that they love them.
Software engineers hate code
111–120 of 235 posts
Re: Software engineers hate code
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But for the other 85+% of people in the profession its basically a game of AdLibs This is so true. I work at a fairly small organization (~35 devs). Large enough to see roles form but small enough that I can tangibly see everyone's contributions. I work SRE, so I see lots of code from all the teams and ultimately talk to almost all the devs. In our impressive enterprise-level codebase (our SaaS product has average…
Sounds like SRE has afforded you a unique "who's writing what code small-org-wide" semi-impartial perspective. Thanks for sharing! I'm curious if the ~three devs that "wrote 80% of the codebase" mutually recognize one another? i.e. do you think they think of themselves as in a "writes a lot of code" category along with the other ~two devs? Do they think of themselves as "writes a lot of code"? Does management recogni…
When I was a developer I hated it. I was almost always the #1 in LOC, Jira Tickets, Scrum Points, you name it. I was naturally good at it, but the environment was always very competitive and the other top performers would brush it off as just me being lucky with "LOC Heavy" tasks. And it would piss me off that I would get paid the same as a guy who wrote 200 LOC a month and wasn't doing much more than those lines.
Being a manager/lead developer today, I enjoy the people doing small work. I just let them pick tasks as they wish, and it takes longer, but they eventually pull through.
The problem is just that they're a bit unpredictable, so if something has a tight deadline, we gotta assign to someone else.
Re: Software engineers hate code
#113Literally my primary motivation to be productive at work is maxing the ratio of my code to other people's code that I have to deal with
Re: Software engineers hate code
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when the predictions say, that, forseeably, the company will lose money down the line because we waited to long for a rebuild, it may be time to pitch that to whoever allocates resources. Only developers who love greenfield or need a new framework on the CV would suggest a company could lose money by not rebuilding. If the developers are not competent enough to write maintainable code or maintain existing code, the…
> If the developers are not competent enough to write maintainable code or maintain existing code Or if the old system simply doesn't work with modern environments. Or if it depends on long abandoned frameworks. Or if the business grows but the old implementation scales badly or not at all. Or if it depends on components that incur licensing fees that become prohibitively expensive when it's scaled up. Or if there ar…
The key is identifying which parts of the code needs to be adapted or replaced and which do not. If the code is well designed with separation of concerns, replacing a framework or library or external dependency should not require all the code to be scrapped, just the layers directly interacting with replaced part.
Some trivial applications are basically just glue between frameworks, but most non-trivial application of value will have lots of code which is not tied to any particular framework, and often this is the most valuable part of the application.
Scalability is improved by identifying the bottlenecks and improve the design at those core points - not by rewriting everything from scratch.
I guess moving to a different programming language is a case where you literately have to touch all the code, but even then code can often be ported semi-mechanically instead of starting from scratch.
Re: Software engineers hate code
#115[dead]
Re: Software engineers hate code
#116Literally my primary motivation to be productive at work is maxing the ratio of my code to other people's code that I have to deal with
Literally my primary motivation to not be productive at work is people maxing the ratio of their code to my code. They do all the work and management is still fine with paying me more because of seniority. I think this is a fair trade as all freedom comes with responsibility -- I used to be the same way earlier in my career.
Re: Software engineers hate code
#117Using a house analogy, I don't hate other people's houses. I hate it when other people blow a hole in the side of my house to put in a new window. They blasted a hole through two walls because it was the quickest way. Then just taped some plastic over the second hole. The project manager said it's still summer and we don't really need that wall at the moment. I know who will have to fix the wall when the winter comes…
A follow up analogy is more typical in my experience. The foreman says that we should reinforce the walls. The PMP certified 6 sigma ninja Project Manager insists that the reinforced walls aren't necessary because no one is going to put anything on the wall. We will revisit the wall later when we the city tells us to enforce new wall codes. No more than 6 months later a contractor tried to add a shelf to the unenforc…
“All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again” - Six, BSG.
Re: Software engineers hate code
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. Of course there are actually software developers out there in the world that read and write code. After all, that's where all this software in the world actually comes from. But for the other 85+% of people in the profession its basically a game of AdLibs. Fill in the blank. That's why there is such heavy reliance on things like frameworks, dependencies, and Invented Here Syndrome (people who don't trust their…
> But for the other 85+% of people in the profession its basically a game of AdLibs This is so true. I work at a fairly small organization (~35 devs). Large enough to see roles form but small enough that I can tangibly see everyone's contributions. I work SRE, so I see lots of code from all the teams and ultimately talk to almost all the devs. In our impressive enterprise-level codebase (our SaaS product has average…
This is why the tech interview is still an unsolved problem (for non-tech ppl).
How does a non-tech role sift through the 32 devs who did 10YOE flipping bools vs. the 3 that built the entire system? They'd look similar on paper and in superficial conversation.
Re: Software engineers hate code
#119> This is the best-kept secret of the software engineering profession: engineers hate code. Especially code written by other people. It's why they love working on greenfield projects so much. No code, no maintenance, no headaches! Except that I've met lots of engineers who were the opposite. They hate greenfield projects and prefer maintaining existing code. I noticed this broad division of personality early in my ca…
I am one of those who prefer working on existing code. I like making things better, understanding how a code works is thrill, adding new features on existing premises. I am also an amateur fiction writer, and I notice the same thing in it. I like planning, but the first draft writing is a chore to me. An effort to vomit all my ideas as words. Then, I love rewriting. Revisiting what I wrote and improving it, fixing it…
I think the reason to like working on existing code is that infra is usually very complex nowdays, and for greenfield project you need to do lots of boring tasks to bootstrap it, and for existing code it is already bootstrapped by someone.
Re: Software engineers hate code
#120All code is not created equal. In a project there is normally some divide between shared code and service specific code. This divide can be as simple as a base class and its children or a library and the microservices that use it. I declare that shared code is sacred and should only be touched for a good reason. (Note: sacred does not imply good)
So when reviewing my carelevel is highly dependent on if shared code is touched. If the commit only contains changes in the leafs eg subclass / single microservice my gut instinct is to trust the code and go into LGTM mode (if it goes wrong it's at least localized). But if shared code is touched I don't trust it, I deep dive and complain about everything I can think of.