221–230 of 373 posts
My observation is the ones who do it for money get burnt out and want to get out, the other kind never stop wanting to learn and just keep having fun.
"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.
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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…
That link deserves a top-level post.
As an aside, it is interesting looking at the history of other submissions from the same author - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=uni.edu
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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.
How so? The job situation for good developers has never been better. We can make salaries that would have seemed unthinkable two decades ago while working from home and doing something we enjoy.
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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…
> And that's not to say "good" is a fixed target... The interesting thing is that once you get to a certain point, you can see the infinite world that you haven't explored yet. > 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…
I would still claim that just like guitar, it may get more fun with practice, and that practice may take years. Even if you're working on some old legacy system, being the person who can make it sing is pretty fun IMO. Actually I find the legacy stuff to be more interesting because it actually runs and does things in the world.
BTW I also found that those kind of debugging sessions went down drastically in frequency in a ~14 year career of programming. (We had multi-week, multi-engineer bugs at my first job in games.) The industry changed its practices significantly, and I also changed my personal practices. It only takes a few experiences like that to reflect on what could have gone differently. Sometimes they are out of your control, but often not.
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edit: If this helps make the point more succinctly, I will also say I was mathematically oriented, and had a masters and BS in engineering from a good university. And I worked on a small team shipping major console games ... and despite that, I got drastically better at debugging and testing in the next 10+ years. (Debugging being the most literally scientific part of programming; I was better at math than science.)
Actually the experience of working with game programmers taught me how bad I was at debugging. There's also a lot to learn about software architecture for reducing bugs. If you get infuriated frequently by debugging, then there are things you can do to change that. Of course you may not want to if you've found other things you like.
I've found being too attached to code is a recipe for frustration in the workplace. You code something elegant, simple, dare I say beautiful and inevitably it will be butchered by new product requirements, business needs, that quick hack to satisfy a client or more generally uncaring colleagues who are looking to get their job done as quickly as possible. Perhaps romantic aspects could only be achieved when there are…
> It's hard to be romantic in corporate environments. I agree it's hard, but it's not impossible. One thing that heightens the experience for me is to: Listen to movie scores while you program. I first started this to help drown out other noises so I could concentrate. But, I soon realized that there's a lot of drama in the sound: there are highs and lows, chaos and order, fumbles and precision, brief pauses, slow ti…
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Yes, the construction of a ballpoint pen could be made romantic. But I mean...it's pretty incredible how many humans collaborate to produce the ballpoint pen, millions of individuals cooperating in countless ways, producing an essential implement which is greater than the sum of its parts. No one involved could tell you exactly how the pen is made, and yet it's sold at a price so low we never think about it. There is…
Sometimes it makes me dizzy - you pick up some ordinary thing, and suddenly marvel at all the people, all the work and effort, that goes into making the most mundane things. Odes to Common Things is a reminder of how amazing the universe is - the natural and the things we create. “A book, a book full of human touches, of shirts, a book without loneliness, with men and tools, a book is victory.” ― Pablo Neruda, Odes t…