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The dispassionate developer

blog.ploeh.dk

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Re: The dispassionate developer

#21

Post by rektide »

> For reasons that are complicated and that I don't fully understand, the software development community in the eighties and nineties developed a culture of anti-capitalism and liberal values that put technology on a pedestal for its own sake. Open source good; commercial software bad. Free software good; commercial software bad.

I think a lot of techies believe there is massive untapped potential in information technology, and to some degree that the commercialism occludes humanity from gaining a fair, reasonable, and developing perspective on how computation and communication happens in the modern world.

We see the world not as being well served by the software and services about, but as being made helpless, as suffering real pain, and never being given the chance to understand or grapple with issues we encounter. The current system is not a fair shake, and does not permit the formation of human will. Computing technology is too amazing, humans have too much awesome potential, to be bounded by such a finite fixed tragic end, as all this. It's long been time to stop playing with shadows on the wall, & embarking on a more honest means to make accessible the tiniest yet most amazing empowering bicycle-of-the-mind creation of our era is a journey we feel deeply moved to start upon.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#23

Post by kubanczyk »

alexashka wrote: post #6

It's interesting to read blogs, they almost universally make these leaps of faith that x implies y without noticing that they do it and spend the rest of the time operating on these faith-based assumptions. Let me give a couple of examples from this blog: Software devs had anti-capitalist values -> free software -> unintended consequences -> customer is the product Do you see where the leap of faith occurred? The las…

Not sure why you got the downvotes. The article in its entirety is a grand non sequitur. Observations. Rambling. "I don't know. Be dispassionate."

Re: The dispassionate developer

#24

Post by giantg2 »

aphextron wrote: post #15
giantg2 wrote: post #10

Working in the industry kills one's passion. It did for me.

Pretty much. At this point it's just a paycheck, and such an easy (large) one that I can't possibly justify bothering to find any other line of work. Even if doing something else would make me happier, ultimately work is just work and optimizing for the least effort/highest reward is really the only criteria for it IMO. It leaves more room to find your meaning and passion in life outside of what you have to do to pay…

Mine is frustrating and not a large paycheck at all. I was just browsing job posting this morning, but it's depressing. There's nothing interesting out there that pays more, and my skill set is not really in demand.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#25

Post by the_only_law »

giantg2 wrote: post #24
aphextron wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. At this point it's just a paycheck, and such an easy (large) one that I can't possibly justify bothering to find any other line of work. Even if doing something else would make me happier, ultimately work is just work and optimizing for the least effort/highest reward is really the only criteria for it IMO. It leaves more room to find your meaning and passion in life outside of what you have to do to pay…

Mine is frustrating and not a large paycheck at all. I was just browsing job posting this morning, but it's depressing. There's nothing interesting out there that pays more, and my skill set is not really in demand.

I can usually find interesting stuff, but nothing I’d ever be qualified for. Can’t speak to what most of it pays, but if I had to guess: more than I’m making now, less than I could be making theoretically.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#26

Post by mwcampbell »

This post makes some good points. But I think there's another extreme we need to be careful to avoid. In a world full of workers who are emotionally and morally disengaged, just doing what they're told for a paycheck, there's plenty of room for exploitation of a different kind.

Perhaps the best model for software development is a small company with a few cofounders who are passionate about what they're working on, who charge a fair price for their software, and who work smarter in every possible way (yes, including making full use of open source) to minimize the amount of hiring they have to do. When they do hire, they treat their employees fairly and don't expect too much of them.

But then when I'm presented with, say, a security questionnaire, I wonder if developing software that meets today's standards is inevitably the sole domain of big companies. (I suspect many other developers feel the same way about my own pet cause, accessibility.)

Re: The dispassionate developer

#27

Post by ARandomerDude »

giantg2 wrote: post #10

Working in the industry kills one's passion. It did for me.

This is true of most things, I've noticed.

My neighbor is an amazing carpenter. He makes beautiful furniture from exotic pieces of wood he's had for 10 years just waiting to be used on that perfect project. I told him he could make a fortune selling things like what he's got in his living room, but he just shrugged and said it would take away all the fun. He's right.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#28

Post by FpUser »

>"...Would you like a cool job in tech? Show me your open-source portfolio."

I do not know what constitutes "cool job" but I've been developing for longer than many lived and not once was I asked about my open source contributions. When I do work for clients it is nearly always to design and create a product. I have a "portfolio" of such products with appropriate references and this is what I show to clients and it seems to work very well.

Also working on product makes me interested way more in the design / inventive aspects. Programming itself is just a tool for me to express my ideas. This makes me a "dispassionate programmer". I can appreciate good tools / languages /tech / etc that make me complete the task easier but once more - they're just tools.

Last thing. I do not have any "open source" contributions. I am not proud of it but do not feel guilty either.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#29

Post by ofrzeta »

I was at one of the first "DevOps Days" conferences in Hamburg where we sat in a huge circle and everyone had to introduce themselves and say what they are "passionate" about. Although I am a little bit more interested in the craft than an average 9to5 programmer I couldn't bring myself to use that phrase and could only articulate what I am "interested in". I am not a native English speaker so maybe my feelings around the meaning of "passion" are distorted but I didn't get how you could be passionate about continuous integration.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#30

Post by lordnacho »

"As you start to ponder the implied ethos, the stranger it gets. Would you like engineers to be passionate as they design new bridges? Would you like a surgeon to be passionate as she operates on you? Would you like judges to be passionate as they pass sentence on your friend?"

I'm not sure what exactly he means by passionate, but I do know a surgeon who spends time reading and lecturing about the history of surgery. I'm sure there are judges who take pride in understanding more than just how to do their current jobs too. And for a fact you will run into engineers, both the traditional and software kinds, who care to get some context related to their professions. I also spent a fair bit of time when I got a trading job reading up on how the market had evolved. Does that qualify as passion?

Now, there's of course a difference between demonstrating that you care about the larger context of your work, and doing work for free. I think the only place where we associate passion with no money tends to be the arts, the common trope being that person who acts or paints but needs a job to pay the bills. Then clearly they aren't doing it for the money.

But of course you can do something for money while also caring deeply about it.

Overall he's right though, you should never let someone talk you into a position where you need to demonstrate that you want to work for free. If you are in the village play because you like it, and that play somehow ends up on Netflix and makes a gazillion dollars, you should get a sensible piece of it. Likewise if someone is proposing you help with some software that might end up being worth a lot, you should get a piece.

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