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The bottleneck was never the code
201–210 of 446 posts
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#202It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…
There's nothing hypocritical about preferring the part of the job that isn't the bottleneck and wishing one could spend more time on enjoyable things. Nor is code being called "inconsequential" simply because it can be done (more) easily.
We've had systems that induce boilerplate before, and we've had systems that try to cope with that boilerplate before.
Considering the process to be tedious is really not the same thing as being antisocial.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, they hire me for a reason, whatever that may be. I want to do a good job and carry out the task because I want to get hired again by them or whatever agency is pimping me out. I've seen a lot of shit and that's my value. Whether or not the team wants to help me succeed is their political thing. And that's not invisible to management either.
You're not looking at it very empathetically. You're disregarding the concerns I floated, you expect the team that feels underwater to now stop everything to reshuffle the work scheduling to fit in a wild card all while you're calling them bad and replaceable. I mean it really sounds like you're not on their side at all. It's their job to help you succeed, apparently. From what you've said already, you don't care abo…
That's not at all what I'm saying and I don't know where you're getting that from. I'm not trying to stop anyone. I'm trying to be an extra paddle. I'm happy to do nothing iff I try to help but get boxed out. I have no problem just riding in the boat and saying "hey, there's rocks up there" or "This seam looks leaky, maybe patch it". I'm not here to fight people or egos.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#204One of the bottlenecks has always been the code. That code has been stolen and is being laundered while companies rely on mediocre engineers who have never written anything of value to promote the burglary tools and call the process "writing software". It is the same as putting an Einstein paper on a photocopier and call the process "writing a paper". I agree with the point of the article though: code generation does…
Personal anecdote. When I started as a wide-eyed university co-op, I was surrounded by a team of aging mainframe developers who had been coding since the 1960s. Their backgrounds ranged from working their way up from the mailroom to astrophysics to masters degrees in computer science. What struck me was how the entire team treated coding as a form of art. Of course, it had to be functionally correct and maintainable, but you could glance at a snippet of hyper-efficient PL/1 and instantly tell that 'Larry' or 'Trudy' wrote that routine - each programmer had a unique style, along with just the right amount of comments to make you laugh and guide you through difficult bits.
Most of the team has since passed away, and their code has been long replaced by modern systems, but what stuck with me is that great code is a form of art - where your individual style, insights and personality can be reflected in code for the better. The systems were efficient, responsive, extensible, and a joy to work on, since the team took a great deal of pride in their work. It really is akin to being affected by a clever and insightful work of art. A decade later, and programming became something to "make money" at, which flooded the market with many people who never really had a deep love of programming, and I guess that's ok, but something has definitely been lost along the way.
To your point, it may not be such a bad thing if people started boycotting computer science and it again became more of a calling than purely an avenue to employment.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#205It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…
The people I know like this are people I consider to be "advanced juniors". They are held back by their inability to work with other parts of the business and understand customer needs. In order to be successful they need to be spoon fed requirements. What I've seen from the limited sample in my orbit is that they've actually doubled down on AI and are creating little private worlds of agents and further isolating th…
Are my standards too high to expect juniors to also be able to work with other parts of the business and ask for additional requirements if needed?
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s kind of just strawman with an origin story isn’t it?
No because the goomba is the average of two real opinions, and the strawman is a distortion/reduction of any opinion such that its easy to argue against.
Ah, ok, so two real opinions made into a distortion. Right, I see how very dissimilar to an origin story of a strawman that is…
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
For business, software applications are tools that facilitate "the thing" that generates money. (We in the software world think that _thing_ is software and software _features_, but outside that world, there's usually a different _thing_.) The bottleneck for making software applications better at being used by (non-software) businesses is making sure the software does all the software things that actually benefit the…
> But yes, the speed can really help. You can prototype and trial and improve the feedback loop. Based on what I’ve seen, prototyping has been always easy. You don’t even have to build software for the first iteration. For UI stuff you can use a wire-framing tool. What has happened is that we abandoned the faster iteration methods (design think tank, quick demo and UX research,…) and we have full in on building the f…
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Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#208Everything in life revolves around people, and even more so today
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a false dichotomy. Software development has always been about keeping people in agreement, from the customer to the coder, and all the people in between (the fewer the better). Meetings that increases sync between customer and coder are few and precious. In large organisations ceremonial meetings proliferate for the wrong reasons. People like to insert themselves in the process between customer and coder to a…
Not a false dichotomy. I agree with OP and I can say for certain that if you are one of the few developers that is "fond of meetings with customers" you are not the the type of person OP is talking about, and you are more rare than you think. I am a former Dev turned PO/PM and now CEO, I can tell you many a developers are not fond of those meetings you are fond of and people like myself don't insert our selves where…
100%, majority of the posts here are based in fantasy of how the world should work. They're also highlighting why most Devs cant deal with customers effectively. Customers aren't showing up with a clear spec and handing it off while middle managers butt in and ruin the whole thing.
Though I agree, most managers are BSing way too much, but the reality is that most Devs cannot navigate conversations like they think they can, and like you said, nor do they want to. And that is exactly what the managers do.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#210It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…
> I mean, they're not even wrong, but the nakedly hypocritical attitude of people who, until a year ago, were the most antisocial and least collaborative members of any team they were on is still extraordinary.
I don't think there is any hypocrisy. The error in the analysis is assuming both conflicting opinions are held by the same person. They aren't.