Side topic, corporate vs. non-profit sector:
Downside:
75% lower rate than standard industry rate (5% lower rate of pay than "80%-Compa").
Upside: 38-hr work-week instead of the corporate-standard 50-hr week - effective hourly rate is 5% higher.
Plus: Set my own pace, nobody's getting rich at someone else's expense. Rarely, if ever, are there mass layoffs.
I love programming but I hate the programming industry
111–120 of 209 posts
Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry
#112The thing that's killed it for me is scrum, even though I'm also a 'scrum master'. Or maybe because of that.
Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, most of the corporate world seems to care more about their aesthetic notions of the Platonic ideal of what code should look like than whether or not it works or whether or not it is efficient. Certainly that's my experience from interviews. Maybe the people who care about business value should be the engineering managers not the people who equate their personal aesthetic preferences with the only ri…
Because code is read more often than written? And clean code is easier to read?
> clean code is easier to read
What's "clean code"?
Capital-C Clean Code? Hell no. This is code that looks clean only on the surface, but in practice it only works on toy projects. Anything big enough is impenetrable for debugging and a performance catastrophe.
Lowercase "clean code" from people who heard the above but never even read the book? What's that anyway? Nine out of ten times, this is just developers putting aesthetic preferences in front of correctness, simplicity and performance.
Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry
#114Programming, even when in service of my corporate overlords, is invigorating. Coaxing the machines do my bidding never gets old. I could do it all day and not get tired. During those rare times where much programming is needed, I often lose track of time only to realize I've been at it for 15 hours straight. Its been this way for the nearly 20 years I've been doing it.
Sadly, programming is only a minor part of the job. The further I get, the more that is true. I might only actually program an hour or two a week. The rest is spent in ridiculous meetings, hand holding people who fail to read, trying to coax others to coax the machines to do what is needed, "planning", and similar noise. The only rewarding part is mentoring younger programmers.
I continue to do it because its a safe path to retirement and I am nearly there. My plans for retirement: program stuff I want to program for the pure joy of it.
Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: The MVP is usually what ends up in production. If your code is a heap of garbage but chocolate-coated on the outside, you're gonna impress management and they'll want to push it live asap. Then the issues start exploding.
yes, a shitty foundation leads to shitty feature implementation. I've seen this everywhere from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Nobody cares about code quality, except maybe the one self-annointed gatekeeper who thinks he's making a difference and shitting on everyone's PRs delaying features. Get rid of that guy he serves no purpose
That guy keeps everything from collapsing.
Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> first try to make it work to spec In my professional experience, the only spec you get is a wishlist, never quantified, always vague. Half the work is figuring out what the customer wants. The only metric that anyone cares about is speed. You need to go fast, but to where? There is no consensus.
If quick and dirty gets you 10 shots, while slow and beautiful gets you 1, I’d choose quick & dirty any day.
An order of magnitude is a bit much. I'd say quick and dirty gets you 3 shots, while slow and beautiful gets you 1. And if you succeed, it means the result is dirty/ugly code that must be maintained forever.
Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hope it's okay to self-plug here (seems highly relevant): what you say is a big reason why I organize the Handmade conferences for a living and why they're free of sponsors [0]. An implicit goal is to grow popular enough to the point that enough programmers collectively agree they should have a say in the "corporate world," such as demanding that we slow down "pumping out" new features and make greater investments in…
This looks interesting, but why is 75% of your landing page your bios? When clicking the link, I definitely didn't have in mind "I wonder who founded this and what their background is". I now know a lot about who organizes this and what their reasons are, but I don't know anything about what it is .
To be fair, that's the about page, not the landing page. And their goals and reasons for organizing it are commendable.
Abner, I'd be interested to hear more about what it was like working with Jonathan Blow. (Maybe your project's about page isn't the place to go into it, but possibly here, your personal blog, or private email.)
I'd love to see his reaction to watching the Game Helpin' Squad's tutorial, "Time Travel Understander"!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI
I pointed Will Wright at their SimCity parody tutorial on "Pretend Gas Station", and he loved it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPMeWas4kXM
My favorite, which you have to pause to read all the hilarious popup text and chat that goes by quickly, is the Game Helpin' Squad's "World Quester 2" tutorial:
Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
This looks interesting, but why is 75% of your landing page your bios? When clicking the link, I definitely didn't have in mind "I wonder who founded this and what their background is". I now know a lot about who organizes this and what their reasons are, but I don't know anything about what it is .
That's the about page. The landing page has more info: > We are the largest indie conferences for low-level programmers. This is your portal to meet with folks into graphics, game engines, kernels, compilers, and more!
Ah, derp, I didn't look at the link, thank you.
Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry
#119It’s not the “programming industry” that OP hates, it’s the “corporate world”. I’ve worked with (and have been) developers who have mismatched expectations on what “the real world” wants out of them. The corporate world doesn’t give a shit about finesse, abstractions, witty or beautiful code. They care about finding developers who will pump out features to the business requirements. Some human beings in that cog (man…
I was coming to say something very similar. The hard truth is that the society-changing projects this person wants to work on are exceptionally rare, and most work boils down to selling products to consumers. Not that I'm saying this is ideal, but if it were easy to create deep and inspiring work that paid well, everyone would be doing it.
Re: I love programming but I hate the programming industry
#120Huh, I guess this is just totally misaligned with my lived experiences working for startups. It's the only environment I've ever worked in where engineers are allowed to do engineering. I don't just write code, I get to be the architect of a broader system. If you don't want to work for a company that makes meaningless bullshit, then... don't. There are plenty of companies making things that are actually useful to so…
Sounds like you might be better suited for working at a company that doesn’t do products but rather projects for others. Plenty of architecting to go around. Any if you get to work on enough new projects, you actually get the chance to make projects succeed faster by iterating on initial architecture and project setup. It’s still all meaningless bullshit of course, but it’s others’ bullshit.
I've found much the opposite. I love working for product companies, because the vision is clear. There's an actual goal in mind, not just "keep the customer satisfied."
I helped my last company build the world's first fully wireless neonatal ICU. I help my current company keep people in austere environments connected with each other. If that isn't meaningful stuff, I don't know what is.
Is this a geography problem? I feel like I hear complaints about meaninglessness of work from my peers on the west coast far more often than I hear them from my neck of the woods.