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Be nice to programmers

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Re: Be nice to programmers

#151

Post by Sakes »

wam wrote: post #130
Sakes wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have really made me think with this comment. I will have to come back later to address it properly.

For the record, it's clear to me that you're speaking from a sincere desire to share what's worked for you (including a bunch of sound strategies for addressing problems as they arise) with other people. That's super cool. I just want to defend the idea that there's more to breaking the bigger cycle of drain/burnout described here than choosing to think positively.

I'd like to start off by saying thanks for for holding my feet to the fire on this one. It has forced me to rethink what I have written which is almost always a good thing, and in this case I believe it to be good.

What you have made clear to me is that I made a mistake in my interpretation of the OPs post. I had incorrectly assumed that he believed that to become a good programmer that you had to be pessimistic.

What he actually said was (not quoted) in order to be a good programmer he needed to adopt a certain mindset, which was to focus on the negatives. He believes this mindset is slowly making him unhappy because it is constantly reminding him of all the mistakes he made throughout the day, every work day, of every year.

I did overgeneralize his problem, and that was my mistake. I still contend that his problem is temporary and that he should not worry about it as it is a natural part of growing as a developer.

After reading his post a second time I realized something. He doesn't just think of tracking down bugs as focusing on the negatives, but he considers the bugs to be an actual list of his failures. Any bug to him is a failure at any point in development. No wonder he is upset. What is a bug to you? To me a bug in the wild is a huge, huge embarrassment. I feel just awful when one sneaks by. But a bug caught in development is nothing more than a logical typo. If you are a writer and you publish an article incorrectly switching you're with your, or their with there, you would feel dumb. But if it happened while you are burning through your first draft? Is this a failure? No just a minor mistake that you can resolve relatively quickly.

The solution to feeling bad about bugs is not to think positively about bugs, but simply not to worry about them. They will happen, you will catch them, and you will get better. I'd like to elaborate more on how doing nothing will fix the problem. I will probably do so tomorrow even though these comments will probably be dead. Thanks for going back and forth with me, it was fun.

Re: Be nice to programmers

#152

Post by joshlegs »

majormajor wrote: post #108

Among all the non-programmers I've talked to about work, I've never found one who doesn't have to deal with some sort of constant, repetitive negative feedback. Teachers have to deal with some kids that simply won't stop acting out, and who continually perform poorly on assignments (not to mention parents happy to tell them everything that the teacher is doing wrong). The salespeople have countless deals they fail to…

I have to agree with you. In so many careers your performance is subjective. The cool thing about programming, to me, is that when there's something wrong, it's objectively wrong, meaning it can be fixed. Sure you might be able to 'fix' things more quickly or less quickly than someone else, or implement a solution better or worse. But the product you create pretty much either works or doesn't work.

Re: Be nice to programmers

#153

Post by cpeterso »

On tough days at work, I am often reminded of Vladimir Vukićević's blog post about the "best visual representation that I’ve seen of what a programmer’s job is often like":

http://blog.vlad1.com/2008/07/21/other-peoples-thoughts-on-p...

[links to a humorous video with NSFW audio commentary]

Re: Be nice to programmers

#154

Post by goblin89 »

Same a doctor could say, I guess—they look for problems in order to help. Too bad they don't have unit tests.

Finding a bug is good, the worse the better, not finding one means software has bugs you don't know about. Distance yourself. You shouldn't allow one project's problems influence your state of mind, since it can hurt other ‘patients’.

For me, most of the frustration comes not from working as ‘just a’ developer, but from leading projects and interacting with customer. It's exciting to solve higher-level problems, but communication is easy as the ocean.

Re: Be nice to programmers

#155

Post by lmfao »

dsr_ wrote: post #111
jerf wrote: post #33

The punches are pulled in this piece. Not only is the compiler continuously complaining, once you ship code, your customers call in to complain about every conceivable bug and a great deal that weren't conceivable. You can have thousands of happy customers, but you as the developer will hear from the three guys with obscure configurations and bizarre setups encountering bugs. Shipping software is ten seconds of "Hoor…

Ha. I'm a sysadmin. Do you know when your sysadmins are doing the job right? When you don't notice. The only possible way for a sysadmin to get noticed is to screw up.

Thats kinda true actually :-) I am actually a coder by heart and moved now into a sys admin job. I kinda like it because once everything is nicely automated I did my work :-)

Re: Be nice to programmers

#156

Post by lmfao »

peeters wrote: post #30

There is nothing intrinsically negative about anything said here, just neutral things viewed in an extremely negative lens. Here's the exact same set of steps making up the "normal workflow", but framed as a positive feedback loop: 1. write some code 2. run the code 3. get further than you did before (perhaps with a new error message) 4. decide what's next and go back to step 1 I don't think negativity is intrinsic t…

Yeah, and nothing is better than the feeling of fixing a bug after 2 days of research/hacking/stackoverflowing :-) Motivates you like crazy to go on.

Re: Be nice to programmers

#157

Post by subsystem »

jgh wrote: post #146
majormajor wrote: post #108

Among all the non-programmers I've talked to about work, I've never found one who doesn't have to deal with some sort of constant, repetitive negative feedback. Teachers have to deal with some kids that simply won't stop acting out, and who continually perform poorly on assignments (not to mention parents happy to tell them everything that the teacher is doing wrong). The salespeople have countless deals they fail to…

I agree with you. I feel like this article is pretty melodramatic. I've been a (professional) programmer for the better part of 10 years and I've had my share of ups and downs, but this job is definitely a very, very good one. The sheer amount of freedom we get from a) the good pay and b) the fact that programmers are so in-demand right now that companies bend over backward for us really can't be matched in many othe…

I think these are two different things. It can still be a nice job to have, even if the process is broken. Writing reliable code is hard, probably harder than it should be. Just look at the amount of software with security holes[0] and/or performance issues.

[0] http://www.exploit-db.com/

Re: Be nice to programmers

#158

Post by D3 »

This has precisely nothing to do with programming. It is merely the realization that life is sisyphean in it's nature. The realization will occur whether one is a programmer or a street sweeper. It will not occur in the sufficiently ignorant. And the enlightened will learn to come to terms with it and even derive great pleasure from it.

Re: Be nice to programmers

#159

Post by hrktb »

majormajor wrote: post #108

Among all the non-programmers I've talked to about work, I've never found one who doesn't have to deal with some sort of constant, repetitive negative feedback. Teachers have to deal with some kids that simply won't stop acting out, and who continually perform poorly on assignments (not to mention parents happy to tell them everything that the teacher is doing wrong). The salespeople have countless deals they fail to…

Perhaps it's a matter of expectations. No one expects a salesman/woman to close 100% deals or even 50%,a manager's job is pretty well known, and the stress associated with it is taken care of from the start. Lawyers get paid whether they get justice or not most of the time, data-entry clerks have jobs that end at the end of the day, and they won't be thinking about a product they coded that might have some critical flow and come back to bite them months after the release.

If I remember well teachers and medical staff have depression and other work related mental issues rates on par with programmers, so you would be right about the negativity they also face everyday.

Of course it's not the end of the world, it's just something that is not brought on the table so often I think.

Re: Be nice to programmers

#160

Post by tallanvor »

jerf wrote: post #33

The punches are pulled in this piece. Not only is the compiler continuously complaining, once you ship code, your customers call in to complain about every conceivable bug and a great deal that weren't conceivable. You can have thousands of happy customers, but you as the developer will hear from the three guys with obscure configurations and bizarre setups encountering bugs. Shipping software is ten seconds of "Hoor…

Try working in support for a while. Customers only call when something isn't working the way they expect, and since documentation is usually and afterthought among development teams, figuring out what is really possible with the software is often difficult. When you do identify bugs, you often have to go back to the customer to tell them it's not going to be fixed - and take the abuse that comes with those messages. Let's not even talk about non-technical salespeople who may not really know what the product is capable of and either tell customers wrong things or outright lie about what the product can do to make a sale. At which point, once again, the problems end up in the laps of support engineers.
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