Quite a bit of romanticizing goes on with this fantasy, but I think it does illuminate why software jobs tend to pay so well. It’s usually not very fun, hard to learn, hard to keep up with, and if it weren’t for the pay many people would not bother with it.
Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
131–140 of 545 posts
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a level or two down from the abstraction of company size, crafting hobbies are also a reprieve from the tyranny of linters. So many programmers today believe that code is always better when it all looks identical. Consistency is a good thing, but not when it's expected to be absolute. Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but impor…
If there's a small team, individual freedom can be perfectly fine, as everybody knows everyone and it's easy to talk with each other in case there are discrepancies. For larger projects however, not having tooling set up that enforces certain consistency is an absolute showstopper for me. I'll either introduce it or I'll quit; I simply do not want to waste my time with developers squabbling over arbitrary formatting-…
I hear you. But I’ve been programming for 30 years and I have some strong intuitions around where my code needs an empty line to space things out. Stuff like that. The day I first tried gofmt and it removed some of my carefully considered whitespace, I turned around, put blood on my hands in the old way and made a promise to the night that my soul belongs to me and gofmt will never sully my code with its corporate BS aesthetic.
Some consistency in a codebase is good. Naming consistency. Indentation. But people go too way far with it. Who cares if your JavaScript makes consistent use of semicolons? It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it’s soul destroying knowing your talents are wasted for 40+ hours a week
It’s only soul destroying if you let it be. As someone who grew up in poverty and spent most of my 20s working at a call center and pawn shop, I feel like the luckiest person in my family with my soul destroying corporate job. It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind. You don’t have to wait for something in the future to be happy now.
The illusion paradigm
By saying you want to be happy, you’re already telling yourself there’s a gap between your state currently and that you wish to accomplish
“I’ll be truly happy WHEN”
When comes and goes, rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy. All done”
Fully agree, it’s a state of mind.
I’d also add most people who say they want to be happy don’t seem to be looking for happiness but rather contentness, but I digress
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there's a small team, individual freedom can be perfectly fine, as everybody knows everyone and it's easy to talk with each other in case there are discrepancies. For larger projects however, not having tooling set up that enforces certain consistency is an absolute showstopper for me. I'll either introduce it or I'll quit; I simply do not want to waste my time with developers squabbling over arbitrary formatting-…
I hear you. But I’ve been programming for 30 years and I have some strong intuitions around where my code needs an empty line to space things out. Stuff like that. The day I first tried gofmt and it removed some of my carefully considered whitespace, I turned around, put blood on my hands in the old way and made a promise to the night that my soul belongs to me and gofmt will never sully my code with its corporate BS…
This is why linters are configurable; if your team doesn't care about consistent use of semicolons, ignore that linter.
Right?
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consistency is critical for reducing mental load when working as a team. Format your personal projects however you want, but when collaborating your editor should apply the standard format every time you save.
Maybe I'm not articulating my point very well. I absolutely agree that consistency, in principle, is usually a very good thing. My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing, which it's not. Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time and unnecessarily tyrannical. In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between…
> In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between 100% consistency and say 95%.
I think you are contradicting yourself a bit with
> Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code.
The point being that something small might have significance to one person but not the other.
And that consistency is probably important, but there is a difference between consistency of your stuff and consistency between your stuff and stuff of others.
So I think what it boils down to is that crafting hobbies are often more fulfilling not (only) because they have tangible outcomes, but because you can do them on your own and on your terms.
If you were to do woodworking where you craft one piece of a bigger thing (say a part of some larger furniture), you would also have to produce very homogenic and precise output. And it probably would not be very fun and fulfilling.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#136> Even my last team leader sent me a message out of the blue saying “I think I’ll run a bar. I want to be a bartender and listen to other people’s stories, not figure out why protobuf doesn’t deserialize data that worked JUST FINE for the past three years”. I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to th…
> I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories you can hear. I'm assuming that by this you mean that most stories you hear around the bar are just the same stories with different characters and protagonists?
"The faces change but the characters remain the same" was some oddly insightful advice I received at my first "real job".
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#137>I went through those stages too: when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes Oh, boy, I can relate. Every three months, I think our program increment planning meetings can't get more ridiculous and, yet, they do. Most recently, we were told that we should just treat story points as days of effort.
I don't think t-shirt sizes is absurd. It's one of the few good ways that really conveys "we have only a very vague idea how long this will take".
Story points are dumb because they always are just a bad proxy for time.
Really though, the right solution is time plus confidence. Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.
Unfortunately a large number of people simply can't comprehend this, and also no tools support it, so I've never seen it actually done. I imagine management wouldn't like it either because then they can't pretend they have a perfect plan with no uncertainty.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#138Interestingly, Glenn Reid also escaped from making software (Touchtype.app, PasteUp.app, wrote "The Green Book", _PostScript Language Program Design_) to making dovetail joined furniture by hand.
That said, I've always described the "Maker" movement as "Geeks who missed shop class", and have argued that the world would be a better place if the Sloyd system of woodworking as a basic constituent of education was prevalent:
https://rainfordrestorations.com/tag/sloyd/
>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#139>I went through those stages too: when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes Oh, boy, I can relate. Every three months, I think our program increment planning meetings can't get more ridiculous and, yet, they do. Most recently, we were told that we should just treat story points as days of effort.
At least there is some honesty there. Everywhere that does estimates, even if they make the devs think its complexity or some other nonsense, is translating that to days somewhere down the line.
I spit my coffee all over the table when they ask for days. And they look at me like I'm crazy.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#140> Even my last team leader sent me a message out of the blue saying “I think I’ll run a bar. I want to be a bartender and listen to other people’s stories, not figure out why protobuf doesn’t deserialize data that worked JUST FINE for the past three years”. I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to th…
Anything gets old. I feel like a lot of the problems my friends and I have with software work comes down to having to wrangle the same sort of nonsense week in, week out.
Alienation of the workers and all that. Profitable but psychologically damaging. We thrive when we get to be whole persons.