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Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
171–180 of 545 posts
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#172> 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 you do 40 hours a week gets tiring eventually.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#173>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 to…
I feel like if that task took 8 days you’d end up having to explain everything that happened and why it couldn’t be done in 1.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#174Supporting software is the hardest job, IMHO. People ask some really dumb stuff -- not out of stupidity, but of ignorance; they just don't know what they are asking. To them, the "why is this broken" is "100% your fault and 100% fixable but you are too lazy to fix it." It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing with if you can help it.
Agree, the thing I hate most is people saying that it's "not user friendly", not realizing that it might be a subjective thing, and it's a very generic way of putting it, and how hard it is to satisfy hundreds of idiotic conflicting requirements. And most of all that it's them not wanting to put any effort in learning a new tool and asking developers to smoothen every possible use case, which is impossible.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#175Most 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…
I get what you're saying, but for the author of the article it seems the opposite issue. He seems to (mostly) live from his own software products, and his two main points of stress are unreasonable customers & his own inability to let things go when fixing/working on stuff.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#176Earlier 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…
Does your company not just use an automatic formatter? Set a prettier config, format the entire codebase and never have to deal with another formatting change in a PR ever again.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#177It s not software that s absurb, it s society at large that is. Starting with the insane pointless bureaucracy then trickling all the way down into every single aspect of our lives.
I love coding. And I love woodworking too: there are so many videos out there to help you get started. Learning to use dowels was quite the revelation for me.
Still very scared of the table saw (Don t have one yet).
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#178> when people started coming with so many unrealistic and absurd expectations and demands about what my furniture should do There, fixed it for you. People are the same just pay sucks way more. I wholeheartedly endorse woodworking as a meditative hobby to forget about your day work but as a career path you are going to have some very rude discoveries. Looking at their projects it's mostly basic carpentry level as wel…
> projects where you can charge five figures for a dining table
The best way to avoid turning a meditative hobby into a job is to resist the urge to monetize it.
Your basic carpentry diss is unwarranted IMHO. I enjoyed reading about and seeing the projects produced with simple tools and some work. The author is clearly very creative and resourceful and I bet this inspires a few people look for a creative outlet of their own.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#179Earlier 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.
I'm not sure it's just the money. You can still do those other things and make good money.
I think a lot of people are drawn into the industry these days from various online communities because you can enforce your particular viewpoint of social order in a small niche and basically be mini-tyrants. This is very western-world specific, but looking at the "communities" around Ruby, Node, Rust, Nix, etc, it looks fairly clear.
I put communities in quotes because I'm referring to those communities within the community that tend to label themselves as the whole community, write petitions to remove undesirables, etc.
The ability to create a space entirely of likeminded individuals that purges undesirables is highly attractive to certain kinds of people. Saw this happening on forums and bbs first decades ago and now it's the governance body of everything.
It's happened in tabletop gaming too -- one local game group I was a part of got co-opted by a guy just through starting a discord and hosting events. Suddenly a very apolitical community started being dominated by tankie politics and banning of members for wrongthink. We were just trying to game with some minis up till then. I got fed up and quit once the guy running the discord started ranting about how everyone in America should be forcibly relocated to cities and reeducated in more progressive values. I'm just trying to point plastic lasers at people and roll dice, my guy.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#180> 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…
> Woodworking or any other hobby that you enjoy will be more pleasing than any real job you will do.
I think that you mean that a hobby (that you can pick up and put down as you please) is always more enjoyable than a job (at which you must work, usually on someone else's schedule, to make money), but, just to be quite clear, there's no reason that woodworking can't be a real job.