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

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

#181

Post by ZephyrBlu »

chubot wrote: post #42
brmgb wrote: post #34

While I somewhat admire the author feelings, as a direct answer to the chosen title, I have to say I don't share them at all. I view programming with a mix of indifference and boredom and the sad few years I had to do it as a job are easily the less fulfilling of my life. If I had to sum up my feelings regarding programming, I would say it is: - a lot of uninteresting busy work; - intellectually mostly unchallenging.…

I felt that way after a few years of programming. I was bad at debugging and several other things that would have made my life a lot easier. After a decade of programming, I got better at it, and started to like it more (even doing it in my spare time) People like things they are good at. To be provocative: if you only did it for a few years, you probably weren't that good at it. The same can be said for math, playin…

I agree that people like things they're good at, but a few years is far longer than you need to get good at something.

You can easily get to at least the top 10-20th percentile in a single year if you dedicate yourself to something.

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

#182

Post by jholman »

fastball wrote: post #152
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a total failure to follow any sort of standard. A 504 is a gateway timeout due to the server failing to complete the action, hell, a 400-level for "you fucked up" would be preferable.

4xx would be what you want anyway, no?

What you described:

  let x = 2 // runs
  x = 3;    // runs
  x = 3;    // runtime error, you made a mistake
No, I'd want a balance update to succeed. Even if it's to the same value that it already had.

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

#183

Post by Aqueous »

wffurr wrote: post #174
arjun-menon wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Retiring sounds good right about now. My personal plan, instead of retiring, is to work on inventing solutions to the issues plaguing large and complex software projects. One of my primary sub-goals under this mission, is to create a new programming language that'll handle complexity excellently, while also making it hard for a programmer to write bugs in it (strong static type system, deep static analysis, thoroug…

>> create a new programming language The problems with software engineering aren't technical. They are organizational, political, and cultural.

with respect i think it's a combination. business demands value delivery and features on a constant basis, and programmers are constantly layering crap over crap in order to deliver. nobody stops and says "hey, wait a second - let's pause, and figure out how we're going to invest now to make the changes you're asking for easier in the future." programmers need to learn to identify when this is happening (a technical skill) and demand change, and product needs to learn to listen and understand the consequences of not heeding this advice. because after 5 - 10 years of 100 different people working on a given system, the complexity becomes unmanageable, and the business grinds to a halt. and then heads start to roll. and yet the people demanding the new features now are never going to have suffer the consequences, because they'll be off to another venture in 5 - 10 years.

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

#184

Post by dragonwriter »

o_m wrote: post #175

I used to love programming, but after doing it for some years professionally I feel like a lot of people (clients, managers, co-workers) look down on it. Like its just a neccessary evil they wish they didn't have to deal with. I feel like it is the lowest status profession you can have in the tech world.

> I feel like it is the lowest status profession you can have in the tech world.

QA, Ops, Support, and (in a reversal from a few decades ago) Analysis would like to have words with you.

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

#185

Post by ywei3410 »

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…

Oh man, we had a connection with an API recently where if you sent it some incorrect data it would just hang. No errors, no closing of the connection. Just hang. And ofc they don't offer a heartbeat over that channel.

That would still be fine... if the data was static. But it's not - and changes are communicated; but not to the relevant tech teams.

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

#186

Post by amenod »

RickS wrote: post #98
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The longer I am in this profession (and it's been over 20 years) the less I see my peers as "dicks and idiots" but more as victims of the same broken game. I work with very smart people, to be honest. It's the technology and the employers and the culture of development that's the problem. Retiring sounds good right about now.

> victims of the same broken game. I work with very smart people, to be honest. Couldn't agree more. I'm an SDE1.5 at best, working with a guy that's probably a 3.5. Writes code that's way over my head sometimes, and always well-tested and elegant. Lately I've been helping him by debugging issues in eg tsconfig and various JS build fuckery, and it's been both a relief and a surprise that even really brilliant people…

Of course they are. They are written by people and often become standard because of good marketing instead of merit.

However, I still find satisfaction in learning new things, trying to be better each day, overcoming new and more challenging problems and solving riddles in a nicer and more elegant way. I fail in all these things, too, of course - but it does give me a sense of purpose. And I don't appreciate any tool that comes my way, I'm picky that way. I love Python for its stdlib, React for its declarative nature, C for its simplicity... and avoid dealing with the JS build system of the month as much as I can. Enough to understand, but I try not to lose too much time and mental energy on them.

That said, if I didn't enjoy programming, I would be happy to move to management or even leave the industry to become a carpenter. I think that as long as you do something meaningful and also help other people (so that you can live off it), it doesn't matter much what that thing is.

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

#187

Post by t8e56vd4ih »

shagie wrote: post #168
dmingod666 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

I also try to look at software development as some sort of brain jogging or solving puzzles because I actually tend to neither care about the actual product nor do I care for hyped up new technology.

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

#188

Post by trhway »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #27
rufus_foreman wrote: post #4

"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not." I guess I wish I felt like that about progra…

The longer I am in this profession (and it's been over 20 years) the less I see my peers as "dicks and idiots" but more as victims of the same broken game. I work with very smart people, to be honest. It's the technology and the employers and the culture of development that's the problem. Retiring sounds good right about now.

>It's the technology and the employers and the culture of development that's the problem.

Classic "it is the other people" cope out. We all are willing participants in building that mountain of mostly garbage, and there is still huge civilization progress enabled by it.

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

#189

Post by pmarreck »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #4

"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not." I guess I wish I felt like that about progra…

Even the smartest programmer will eventually fail to understand every detail and implication of a system due to cognitive load limits, and thus bugs.

Which is why languages that feature less cognitive load to understand (such as functional immutable languages) are a better direction for tomorrow’s code.

If a function called from your known scope cannot modify anything you pass to it, that’s an entire class of bugs made impossible to create.

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

#190

Post by wffurr »

Aqueous wrote: post #183
wffurr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> create a new programming language The problems with software engineering aren't technical. They are organizational, political, and cultural.

with respect i think it's a combination. business demands value delivery and features on a constant basis, and programmers are constantly layering crap over crap in order to deliver. nobody stops and says "hey, wait a second - let's pause, and figure out how we're going to invest now to make the changes you're asking for easier in the future." programmers need to learn to identify when this is happening (a technical…

That's exactly right in some cases.

You are describing one set of organizational and cultural problems with software engineering that can only be solved through a cultural and political approach

Other organizations and cultures have different sets of problems.

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