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

-Companies that don't know how to recognize valuable work, so they only track output.

-Cult of the hero.

-Places where learning is not part of the job, both in terms of technologies and in terms of business (as it turns out, people still learn, the bad way).

-Focus on individual performance but demands of teamwork.

-And of course, all the kinds of abusive relationship, work edition.

Never even comes up. Like I said, I've been doing this for a loooooong time. I have a massive open-source portfolio[0]. Much of it is days (or minutes) old. I've been surfing the leading edge for my whole career.

No one ever even looks at it. I've learned that if they give me a binary tree test, I might as well just end the process. They want kids straight out of college.

In one case, I was approached for an ObjC job. I sent them links to several repos (shipping apps that they could build, run, and test) that used ObjC.

They completely ignored it, and gave me a 50-line binary tree test in Swift. They also dinged me for using quality coding/documentation techniques.

I did OK, but not great. I generally do mediocre at leetcode. I spend exactly 0.0 hours, practicing it.

It really isn't my imagination. It's real. I have a Facebook "friend," that is a young man. Nice guy. We get along great. We don't mix, too often, as we travel in different circles, but neither of us has any problems with the other.

His profile background is a desert scene with "SHUT THE FUCK UP, BOOMER" over it, in big text.

If it was "SHUT THE FUCK UP B***H" or "SHUT THE FUCK UP N*****R", he would be [rightly] excoriated and shunned by his appalled friends.

But as long as it's oldies, he's actually cheered on.

This is the current environment that those of us "of a certain age" have to deal with.

Kicking back at older folks has been something that has been going on for thousands of years.

The difference, in my opinion, is that companies are now often run by twenty-something CEOs. In the "old days," the companies were run by older folks, and there was always a cultural structure in place, that ensured that youthful exuberance and rebellion would be tempered by experience, age, and meticulousness. It was enforced by fiat; sometimes, to a fault. I think that we need to have a hybrid; not one over the other. Most of the teams I worked on, had a great mix.

Nowadays, no one wants "Grandpa" saying annoying things like "I have found that I can't rely on system garbage collection, because of the memory and performance hit; especially in threaded applications."

So, the solution is simple. Don't hire oldies. You'll be selling the company before the system goes pear-shaped, anyway, so...win/win.

In my case, I like to design and implement software architectures that are supposed to last for many years, and have significant effects on the lives of vulnerable people, so I don't do a slapdash job. That's basically heresy, in today's world. Some time ago, I read a comment that basically went "If you do not get physically sick, looking at the code in your MVP, you are spending too much time, worried about code quality." That's kind of a "zeitgeist," right there. The very fact that I could pick up a project that I wrote on a lark, two years ago, blow the dust off, give it a couple of tweaks (actually, it was a refactoring that took a couple of weeks. Bit more than "tweaks," but I was adding additional functionality; not fixing deficits), and use it as the backend for a fairly advanced app, shows that the way I do things has merit.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

> If you like math then there is a ton of stuff in programming that's mathematical, but you can't get a job in those areas until you've mastered the basics.

I don't think you understand my point.

While I don't think I am exceptionally good, I am not a twenty two years old junior. I have a MSc in Computer Science from a (very) good university and an actual engineering degree. I can debug. I was developing real time simulators of complex networked equipments in a safety critical environment. I (thankfully) wasn't doing CRUD business software.

Let me illustrate my point with a story. I once spent three days trying to understand what wasn't working in some random network code in Ada using gdb and tcpdump because I wasn't allowed to install wireshark on these machines. In the end I realized there was a massive bug the version of the GNAT standard library we were using. Sockets were always bound to all addresses rather than the specified ip. I then had to write a work around because we absolutely couldn't update. And you know how I felt after that? Not clever. I felt sad, bored and like if I had forever lost a week of my life (which I had actually). Thankfully the project became bigger not long after and from then on I was able to spend more time managing the team and the project and didn't have to code much anymore. Gosh I hate coding.

My points regarding maths is not that you can't do mathematically oriented programing. It is that there is far more interesting problem in pure maths that have nothing to do with computers.

Nowadays, I work in management consulting on problems I actually find interesting and which thankfully involve more people than machines.

I was just sharing to give some perspective to the article. Some people actually deeply dislike programming.

A shitty environment can't foster good work relations.