How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#161

Post by dmingod666 » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 10:16 PM UTC

dmingod666 wrote: post #150

frereubu wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Every friend I talk to, from central bankers to dramaturgs, has regrets about the career they chose. It generally breaks down into where they are on the spectrum from (a) they wish their job was more creative to (b) they wish they had more money to live comfortably. I know almost no-one who is content that they've found a happy medium, and the few that do have done so through blind luck.

An alternate perspective to this is. The great line of thought, that you are meant to 'follow your passion' and discover your true calling. There is a job mean for you and you just need to find it. I disagree with this and feel this thinking makes peoples lives miserable thinking they're somehow wasting their lives and makes people take plunges in life that they later regret. I feel there is space for an attitude tha…

These ideas are from the book "be so good they can't ignore you" cal newport

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#162

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

rektide wrote: post #67

picks_at_nits wrote: post #33

I am deeply, deeply romantic about programming. I consider it an act of self-actualization. But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry, and that's a good thing. It's easy to feel romantic about your vocation when you have a number of reasonable options for achieving modest financial security, and you thus had the privilege of choosing the one that most closely matched yo…

> But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry, I am deeply /deeply/ romantic about programming, but industry is dreck. Unimaginative, low potential, sapping, low-ambition, filled with endless middle- & low-roads & compromises. Countless stakeholders, endless non-technical-personals to "reason" with. Plans & designs & endless corporate aligning & planning. All for middling…

[deleted]

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#163

Post by mgkimsal » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

rufus_foreman wrote: post #18

superbcarrot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots Out of all the problems with programming as a job, this is around the bottom of my list.

I'm working on an app that calls other internal services inside our company, one of them is a call to update an account balance. We were running into this issue where we were getting a 504 Gateway Timeout on the update balance call so I eventually found the Slack room for that team and asked about it. They ignored me for a couple weeks, but I kept asking and eventually someone answered and said yeah you'll get the 50…

Similarly a colleague just told me yesterday about a data vendor who is sending data over on a almost nightly basis. They changed the process/format - without notifying anyone - and things broke.

End users of my colleague's application were now saying they were seeing inactive client data coming up in their app, and it was causing confusion.

During the time trying to figure out the new behavior, the main client finally got something in writing about "here's how it works" from the data vendor...

* Rule 1...

* Rule 2...

* Rule 3: If a client record has not had any data updated, we will only send over the client name and header info, but no additional data records will be sent over.

* Rule 4....

* Rule 5: If a client record is no longer active in the system (for example, has been deleted), we will only send over the client name and header info, but no additional data records will be sent over.

Questioning back to the original data provider - if we get a client name and header info, but no additional data records - what does that mean? Does it mean the client is inactive/deleted, or simply that they've had no data change since yesterday?

Absolutely no coherent response, and I doubt there will be one. The defense of "no no, we have to keep stupid behaviour around because people rely on it!" doesn't even stand - this change came about in the last couple weeks, after having worked this way for more than a year.

It's both maddening and frightening how fragile so much daily data exchange is.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#164

Post by forgotmypw17 » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

This is basically why I quit doing it for money. It felt like taking this amazing, yes, romantic, thing, and perverting it until it is barely recognizable. Writing code that I knew from the onset would never last more than a year or two, would not see the light of day beyond inside its small nook. And in the end, we accomplished little more than moving money around and persuading other humans into doing things which were bad for them.

It took me several years to get over the numbness I developed after years of that crap, but now I'm in love again.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#165

Post by scsilver » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

psyc wrote: post #155

DC1350 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't understand this. You make it sound as if other trades and professions are about getting invited to parties.

Other professions arent as technical, and focus more on creating human connections rather than abstract connections.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#166

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

syndacks wrote: post #145

WalterBright wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Retiring sounds good right about now. I tried that. After 6 weeks of watching TV I restarted my business and went back to work. Retirement is a living death.

Hey, thanks for sharing this. Mind expanding? I'm curious to hear what you had planned going into retirement and what you seek going back to work. Are you right back to the same as you were right before "retiring"? Knowing how your first round of retirement went, what would you have done differently in the years/decades leading up to it?

What I discovered is that a life without purpose is not a life. The fun is in having worthwhile goals and striving to reach them.

Being passively entertained, bleh. It's also why I have a very limited appetite for "see the world" traveling. I can only look for so long, then I need to be doing something with a purpose.

I've seen what happens when people retire. They suddenly get old and lose their vitality. They become boring people.

My plan is to work until they carry me out in a box.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#167

Post by Osiris » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

cjsawyer wrote: post #128

vlunkr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's the biggest cliche in the world, but the grass isn't always greener on the other side. Lots of musicians wish they had a skill that let them sit at a desk all day and get a stable paycheck. Not saying you have to keep working in tech forever, but I don't think it's objectively stopped being fun and interesting.

I think the “trick” is to find a fulfilling non computer based hobby

I agree. I don't do side projects, I do BJJ and ride motorcycles. Those things keep me from getting burned out on coding.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#168

Post by shagie » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

dmingod666 wrote: post #150

frereubu wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Every friend I talk to, from central bankers to dramaturgs, has regrets about the career they chose. It generally breaks down into where they are on the spectrum from (a) they wish their job was more creative to (b) they wish they had more money to live comfortably. I know almost no-one who is content that they've found a happy medium, and the few that do have done so through blind luck.

An alternate perspective to this is. The great line of thought, that you are meant to 'follow your passion' and discover your true calling. There is a job mean for you and you just need to find it. I disagree with this and feel this thinking makes peoples lives miserable thinking they're somehow wasting their lives and makes people take plunges in life that they later regret. I feel there is space for an attitude tha…

There's a blog post from a CS Professor that I stumbled across a bit ago - Find The Hard Work You're Willing To Do - http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018...

Its short, only a few short paragraphs - but it has one key piece that I've found myself oft quoting to people:

> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.

> I realize that "Find your passion" makes for a more compelling motivational poster than "What hard problems do you enjoy working on?" (and even that's a lot better than "What kind of pain are you willing to endure?"), but it might give some people a more realistic way to approach finding their life's work.

--

I enjoy software development - and I do so because I enjoy solving those problems. To me, software development is like being paid to solve sudoku puzzles all day long (and yes, I watch cracking the cryptic from time to time)... well, at least when I'm not in meetings.

One of the important skills that I now realize that the dreaded math classes that I disliked (integrations and eigenvectors - ugh) was about the skill of continuing to solve the problem rather than giving up (and searching for the answer). Yes, there's a place for people who go to the back of the book or Stack Overflow for the solution - but many haven't learned the hard skill of continuing to solve the problem when its not easy.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#169

Post by stavros » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

farias0 wrote: post #148

WalterBright wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Retiring sounds good right about now. I tried that. After 6 weeks of watching TV I restarted my business and went back to work. Retirement is a living death.

Maybe the problem is that you spent it watching TV?

Seriously, I was between jobs for a while and it was the best time I've had in ages. I could (and would) do random projects that struck my fancy all the time, go out, see friends, write, design things... It was much more productive than a job, and I was constantly doing things with the parts of technology that don't suck.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#170

Post by mgkimsal » Sat, Feb 20, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

philosopher1234 wrote: post #112

reaperducer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't have the will/independence ("budget") to implement that change So, dicks and idiot middle managers. I think you made his point.

No. This is such a small issue who honestly cares if it gets fixed? I guarantee you this is not the most important thing anyone involved could be working on. Too many perfectionists on this website.

"We were running into this issue where we were getting a 504 Gateway Timeout on the update balance call so I eventually found the Slack room for that team and asked about it. They ignored me for a couple weeks,...."

Someone could have documented this and/or simply answered a damn question instead of wasting weeks of opportunity cost. Too many dicks and idiots on that website, it seems.

"who honestly cares if it gets fixed" - everyone that comes after this and has to deal with it and waste weeks of their life trying to pry some required nugget of info from a passive aggressive group of maintainers of stuff which actively ignores industry standards?