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Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

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Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#161

Post by AdrianB1 »

My godfather turned to woodworking after commanding an AA missile regiment. He moved ~ 50 km (30 miles) from Alin and spent about 20 years sculpting in wood, he became quite good. I was a kid when he started, not paying attention to that, but when I was in my thirties I talked to him about it; he said it was relaxing and very enjoyable.

I grew up further North in a region where every house had some tools for working wood. It was natural, some people were really good at it, some mediocre, but using a manual wood planner or a wood chisel was almost routine for any man or kid. I am no longer living there and I am not working with wood, but I find it escaping to do some work in the garden, put some pipes for irrigation or fixing something on the vise. It is a different world than the craziness of the software industry, especially in the corporate world.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#162

Post by arcbyte »

allen_berg wrote: post #140
mhaberl wrote: post #68

> 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.

It's not profitable and we should stop saying that. The issue is that there's just not enough quality out there so companies accept less quality and have to start managing for it.

If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#163

Post by AdrianB1 »

usrnm wrote: post #56
sukruh wrote: post #35

Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up e…

What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be the best way to do it to me

In corporations is not a lot of money, almost never the market rates. In my big non-IT company I am paid at rates lower than any external company we contract for projects, even if their people are always lower qualified.

Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#164

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

allen_berg wrote: post #142
krisoft wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it. For some. I certainly started that way. But many of my friends at Uni started from a different point. I heard many describing how they choose computer engineering because it is perceived as a good career or because they heard it pays a lot. I'm not sure if those people have the same "Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it." to fall back to.

A lot, most of the people actually who got into software for the past decade or so seem to have been motivated by money. They'd just as easily became doctors or lawyers. And it shows, a lot of software now is just some grey corporate kafkaesque mess.

FWIW this happened during the dot com boom and a lot of them scurried off during the dot com bust. The amount of US salary one can pull with no formal education needed is the driver for this cycle.

My preference in hiring is people that are drawn to computing naturally, they will be there for the long haul.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#165

Post by thunky »

ravenstine wrote: post #62
Arainach wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

> My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing

If everyone doesn't follow the standards all the time then there are no standards.

Code is not art, it's instructions.

If you can't write instructions without adding your own avant garde whitespace brush strokes to it then yes coding for a professional company may not be your jam.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#166

Post by andoando »

ravenstine wrote: post #62
Arainach wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

I think I agree. I've some seen anal linting rules that straight up make you refactor your code to make it fit. That I can't stand

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#167

Post by AdrianB1 »

sukruh wrote: post #35

Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up e…

When you are young and especially when you don't have a family to support, you move to some place where you like to work. When you are older and opportunities are rare (and agism is huge in the industry), you just take what you can and escape any way you can, like video games or side passions of any sorts. I bought a motorcycle when I was over 30 years old for commuting (heavy traffic, the bike was saving hours), but after a few years I started to take motorcycle trips in the weekends and, once in a while, across Europe. But it can be anything that you find enjoyable, the point is that you have to try different things and see what you like, when I was 20-25 years old I had no desire to ever buy a motorcycle. Now, if it's a light rain, I am happy to take it for a ride.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#168

Post by jebarker »

cyberlurker wrote: post #104

Nothing wrong with finding a new hobby but this is a stereotype of tech workers. If it isn’t woodworking, it’s beekeeping or some other perfectly fine side quest. I have a small issue with the way the people who get into these hobbies are so bitter. Every job has stuff like this, we aren't special.

> Every job has stuff like this

And many jobs have much worse stuff like danger, filth, hard manual labor, no social standing etc

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#169

Post by vbezhenar »

tonetegeatinst wrote: post #95
lumb63 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for embedded software. I work for an IoT company and the web and app devs think LLMs are the saving grace of the universe. The firmware team just keeps chugging along, ignoring the noise, debugging hard problems, and writing unsexy low level code.

Security student here. Just wanted to say that while not everyone appreciates the firmware programming at such a low level....it is truly a dark art to me and I find it really interesting and always want to learn more.

Here my take. Not a pro, but still might find useful.

1. Learn basics of electricity, learn to use oscilloscope, logic analyzer. You don't necessary need to have knowledge to design complex PCBs (that's a separate skill and not easily attainable) but you need to be able to understand existing design on high-level and do some debugging. For example you wrote code which does some SPI to talk to some device but it does not work. You need to analyze electricity to understand what's going on in the wire.

2. Learn basics of assembly. You don't need to write your software in assembly, but you need to read it and write some little snippets if necessary.

3. Learn to read data sheets.

Modern MCUs and devices are really like libraries. You're using some interfaces, calling some functions and get some responses. Data sheets are library documentation.

4. Learn C, learn build tools (at least make), learn debugger (gdb), learn linker.

Then it's only matter of time and experience. Most vendors supply their terrible libraries that you're supposed to use. Most vendors support some bad IDEs that you're supposed to use. Often you're forced to use Windows because not everyone supports Linux or macOS. It's not fun part and sometimes you can avoid it, but sometimes you can't.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#170

Post by thfuran »

ravenstine wrote: post #62
Arainach wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

>Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time

How can it be a waste of time? The whole point is to avoid wasting time talking about formatting on PRs or seeing line noise on PRs because people have slightly different preferences or settings for code formatting.

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