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Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

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Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#151

Post by throwaway31131 »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #138
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offence to everyone else in this thread but the holy grail is truly The Art Of Problem Solving textbooks + mathacademy [0]. [0] https://www.mathacademy.com/

Learning stuff that doesn’t help in work(calculus is not helpful for 99% of software engineering) is really hard if you don’t base it in reality I find. Maybe it’s just me but I would never read a text book for fun so suggesting learning by reading a text book seems crazy. Calculus can be fun and interesting but the teacher has to actively try to make it so. The learning will take longer but you’re more likely to see…

That’s interesting because I can’t imagine learning a subject without a textbook. I have a hard time believing another medium would have the depth and density to get all the points across. Although it does depend on the subject matter and one’s learning goals.

But I also do read textbooks for fun… Now that I have a few decades of experience in a lot of these subjects I get way more out of the books. And I can start to understand more of the meta information. Like, of all the things the author could’ve used as an example, why did they pick that. Also, it’s hugely interesting for me to look at the homework problems and theorize why this particular problem was picked. Especially fun for electrical engineering books. But ya, I’m weird like that.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#152

Post by another_twist »

sedatk wrote: post #118

I can relate about OP’s comment about OOP. On a similar note, I had written about re-discovering visitor pattern: https://ssg.dev/are-interfaces-code-smell-bd19abc266d3/

That blog post is a poor example. It replaced a simple straightforward if-else loop with a hard to understand abstraction spaghetti. A few unit tests and you'd be well on your way to shipping rather than messing around with beautiful patterns.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#153

Post by ryanjshaw »

threecheese wrote: post #102

What does it say about me, that I was SURE his article was going to be admitting out loud that we are engineering ourselves into obsolescence, a lot of us are really enjoying it, and nobody is seriously discussing how afraid we should be for our families and future. I’m afraid to mention it professionally, given we have a literal policy around “AI doomers” (not the exact term) that has the word “separation” in it. Wo…

We’ve got a few years left where we function as tech leads for an army of AI agents.

The inflection point will be when business hires an AI to fill a managerial role. AI will discriminate against hiring human developers.

Since you’re so familiar with the process, I suggest you start positioning yourself as an AI development efficiency management consultant or similar.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#154

Post by im3w1l »

sailfast wrote: post #146
lovich wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They, for every team I’ve ever managed, have an off company owned systems chat on shit like slack or discord where they are roasting the fuck out of you. I’ve managed to be invited or told of them after ingratiating myself to the teams, or more often, after quitting and getting invited as one of the “good ones” They all know that every word on company shit is being monitored

Sure, but this ends up poisoning any sort of culture and creating all sorts of in-group nonsense which is almost impossible to undo. It’d be like using Blind as your company chat - nobody goes on there to say how great their experience has been, and the tone infects everything else. But maybe I’m just not very fun at parties… This should be avoided at all costs by creating a culture that is receptive to people’s conc…

Maybe I'm a bit unfair to you but to me your comment basically reads as wishing employees would be good little cogs in your machinery rather than people. Like making friends is natural human behavior. Forming friend groups is natural human behavior. It's not nice to disrupt this except that of course everyone has to be able to work together when needed.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#155

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

Right, because there's nothing special about remote vs in-office. It's just communication and collaboration.

Living beings do it all kinda ways. Bees waggle their butts, crickets rub their legs, geese honk, snakes hiss, some fish detect electrical signals. And to collaborate, the bees' dance indicates a flight path, birds singing indicates interest in mating, the snake's hiss and the geese's honk tells you to watch out. You use the tools you have and develop collaboration with them. There's clearly no right way, there's just ways.

But tomorrow morning, would you wanna learn to honk at people, or rub your legs, or waggle your butt, to order a latte at Starbucks? It'd be awkward, weird, painful, and unnecessary. So if you were asked to, you'd probably not try very hard to adapt to it. And if everybody you knew were in the same boat, all being forced to change with no real guidance, kinda not trying that hard to make it work? It would suck for everybody.

People just don't like changing what they're used to. They probably don't even mean to fight it. But we do like culture we're already familiar with. Change is hard, not changing is easy. We like easy. So people who grew up with remote work (on IRC, mailing lists, etc) find it easy, even more productive. But a company that's thrown into it without a healthy established culture are going to be swimming upstream indefinitely.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#156

Post by QuercusMax »

noman-land wrote: post #127
_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. Part of growing up in chatrooms was an implicit bravery of saying something out loud in a room full of thousands of people. There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms. Chatrooms have evolved in a really interesting way. I think the first generat…

I got a minor reprimand in a performed review for having a slightly heated conversation in a public channel. In the past that company had been very open about communicating about negative stuff (our CEO emailed the entire company when he visited one of the hardware labs that was a mess), but the upper management started tamping down on anything negative, and one of the things that suffered was any sort of honest communication.

Kind of a ship of theseus situation culture wise - when the original leaders are all gone, did they pick good successors to fill their spots? Very often not.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#157

Post by redrove »

gedy wrote: post #121
_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

I think it's largely that as this became more of a business, the "yappers" who want to talk things out got more leverage as PMs, etc. It sounds like a caricature, but they honestly seem to get super antsy only typing and sitting in one spot.

I've never seen it put this way but I think you've hit the nail on the head.

Text requires correctness to some extent; bullshitters will just yap away for hours and nobody can point to one piece of text and say "Here, this is where you are objectively wrong, and/or misrepresenting things".

The unfortunate reality of remote work is there's a lot of zoom meetings where yappers in high places will BS away -- a lot more "important" zoom meetings than "important chats", especially in public.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#158

Post by MarcelOlsz »

card_zero wrote: post #125
satvikpendem wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds akin to like body doubling, a method used by those who have ADHD.

Is there also an opposite effect? I concentrate best in solitude, preferably somewhere like an abandoned lighthouse.

I'm still trying to replicate my favourite working condition: being on a laptop in the middle of a concert. Pure focus.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#159

Post by redrove »

devmor wrote: post #112
_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

One of the author’s primary reasonings for why remote work sucks is apparently that they find it difficult to treat other people like human beings without close proximity to them. That’s pretty weird and uncomfortable and I don’t know that I would want to work with someone like that in or out of office.

It's a big problem especially if you haven't met the people you're working with. It's easy so think one dimensionally about a person, I catch myself doing it all the time and I can't say I'm wise enough to always stop it dead in its tracks.

Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

#160

Post by redrove »

fHr wrote: post #67
_ea1k wrote: post #22

Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help. I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but…

now we do the work of 7 projects in half a team paid 50% less and can't get to help anyone as we all drown in 7 tickets we should do in parallel with agents writing docu on the side and assist and some of the easier code on the side because management drank the koolaid of going full into AI and "the Team now can do 300% more right". I miss the old times where making 100k and still could have few minutes to help each…

Everything is FAST now, I 'member 10-15 years ago if someone came to you for help you actually had the time to pull up a (possibly virtual) chair and spend 3h helping them. If you do that now you'll get canned in 4 months.

Obviously the help also came with you bonding and chit chatting about other stuff, I miss it.

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