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Programming is Not Terrible

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Re: Programming is Not Terrible

#31

Post by antocv »

Programming is programming.

It depends on what you are programming that makes it terrible or a joy.

Im right know payed to do another CRM in PHP and Id rather gauge my eyes out at the end of the day than continue with it. Im not solving any problems at all. Its just business/stakeholders/managers/whomever that decided a few months ago that their CRM needed a "facelift" and here we are. We use some new frameworks (slim), TDD, bootstrap/jquery, talk about agile/lean but in the end the problem we are solving is just some stupid shit like making a document or presentation better than what it was before. And the users are joyful. They got to look at something new while at work. They compete with each other with who will be picked to be among the pilot group, the new the cool. Like kids. A day looks like, fix some "bug" in on the server in an older application among arcane spaghetti-code, or some client-side jquery platitude (oh its you ie8 again?), write some new "functionality" which is fetch this data put it in there display it like this, take this data validate, serialize and send it over there. This is not even programming, it is bullshitting.

Then I go home and relax and read, after a while Im ready to play with python and C, solving minor and sometimes bigger problems. Trying out some machine learning at the moment. Ah the joy of hacking. It fills me up for next day.

Re: Programming is Not Terrible

#32

Post by jasonlotito »

debacle wrote: post #22
sequence7 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. I have a theory about people who talk with patronising disdain about how programming is easy and you can do everything with open source already. Work is work, if it was all fun you wouldn't get paid for it. If most programmers want a challenge in their day job they could try learning how to communicate or how not to assume that everyone else is an idiot or even try and improve the processes their team use…

I guess you're assuming that I'm one of those semi-autistic types who isn't happy unless he's slugging down coffee while trying to hack the Gibson or whatever. I'm not - the social aspect of problem solving, and especially the social aspects of requirement gathering, is the best part of my job.

> one of those semi-autistic types

This is vile. You aren't semi-autistic. You are or you aren't. And what qualities are you referring to when talking about semi-autistic? Are you referring lack of communication? Stimming?

How the fuck does stimming have anything to do with slogging down coffee while programming?

Seriously, "semi-autistic"? People like you are vile.

Re: Programming is Not Terrible

#33

Post by martijn_himself »

antocv wrote: post #31

Programming is programming. It depends on what you are programming that makes it terrible or a joy. Im right know payed to do another CRM in PHP and Id rather gauge my eyes out at the end of the day than continue with it. Im not solving any problems at all. Its just business/stakeholders/managers/whomever that decided a few months ago that their CRM needed a "facelift" and here we are. We use some new frameworks (sli…

I am in a very similar situation. Except I do not have the energy to sit down at home and do more programming, I am happy to get away from it until the next day.

Re: Programming is Not Terrible

#34

Post by NathanKP »

UK-AL wrote: post #28
NathanKP wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The jobs that have problems that are novel or interesting, are damn hard to get. I disagree. The monthly Who's Hiring thread here on HN is full of great jobs solving interesting problems. If you find those jobs "damn hard" to get maybe you need to learn some of the in demand skills or build a better portfolio of projects that you've worked on. A github full of open source activity can get you an interesting job quite…

some of the in demand skills? Such as? Mobile Development Skills? I know that. The majority apps are boring though, interfacing with a web service, saving and displaying data etc. Web Devs Skills? I know Django the best, but again 99% of people using web frameworks are just doing the normal inputting and outputting data out of a database routine. ML? I know that, but most companies only hire serious academic research…

It sounds like you have enough skills. Maybe the only skill you need to develop is how to sell yourself to the type of companies you want to work for.

If you don't mind some completely unsolicited advice:

I just checked out your HN profile and found a link to your blog. I checked the blog and it is fairly empty with only two posts, and I see no Github link. That's the first thing a good startup company is going to look at if they think you might be a candidate for a position: your blog and your github.

I managed to track you down on Github via a Google Search and while two repos seemed empty for some reason, Harlan looks pretty cool and non trivial, showing a good level of technical skill.

The primary things I'd do if I were you is simplify and expand the message on your blog to explain who you are and what skills you have and link to Github prominently. Maybe on Github put up some more projects from a variety of different domains, and write a few more blog posts about those projects.

Additionally blog theme says a lot about you. Right now the ideal blog design if you want to come across as a "startup engineer" is something that looks like Medium or Svtble. Your blog theme looks like a Tumblr.

(No offense intended but another slight thing to adjust might be the photo on your blog. Obviously appearance isn't everything but in that photo it looks to me like you have a smirk instead of a smile for some reason. If you choose to include a photo it has to be one that makes you look like someone goodnatured and a great employee, because people hiring in behalf of a company are going to get one of their first impressions of you based on the photo, before they even look at the Github.)

Anyway, once again I hope you aren't offended by my well intentioned by completely unsolicited advice. For what it is worth I'm sure that you can get an interesting coding job at an interesting company.

Re: Programming is Not Terrible

#35

Post by willurd »

debacle wrote: post #4

I have a hypothesis. Is it possible that the people who talk with wide-eyed wonder about programming after doing it for ten years and the passion that they have for writing software haven't come to appreciate the banality of almost every problem that they're going to be asked to solve in the software space? If you find putting together CRUD apps and laying out contact forms challenging and engaging after ten years, y…

I don't agree with you. Therefore you lack the mental wherewithal to understand my point of view. I mean just look at all these connections I make between unrelated things. I also have all these cool statistics I made up to prove (not really) my point, so obviously you're wrong.

In all seriousness, though, maybe the programming you've done has been a slog. I'm sure I speak for quite a few programmers here on HN in kindly asking you to not call us all stupid for liking something you don't.

Re: Programming is Not Terrible

#36

Post by UK-AL »

NathanKP wrote: post #34
UK-AL wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some of the in demand skills? Such as? Mobile Development Skills? I know that. The majority apps are boring though, interfacing with a web service, saving and displaying data etc. Web Devs Skills? I know Django the best, but again 99% of people using web frameworks are just doing the normal inputting and outputting data out of a database routine. ML? I know that, but most companies only hire serious academic research…

It sounds like you have enough skills. Maybe the only skill you need to develop is how to sell yourself to the type of companies you want to work for. If you don't mind some completely unsolicited advice: I just checked out your HN profile and found a link to your blog. I checked the blog and it is fairly empty with only two posts, and I see no Github link. That's the first thing a good startup company is going to lo…

ok, what interesting problems are you working on? And I'll tell you if they're interesting or not?

Because 95% of startups I've come across are solving trivial problems.

Re: Programming is Not Terrible

#37

Post by greyfade »

NathanKP wrote: post #14
debacle wrote: post #4

I have a hypothesis. Is it possible that the people who talk with wide-eyed wonder about programming after doing it for ten years and the passion that they have for writing software haven't come to appreciate the banality of almost every problem that they're going to be asked to solve in the software space? If you find putting together CRUD apps and laying out contact forms challenging and engaging after ten years, y…

putting together CRUD apps and laying out contact forms That's the problem. If that's all you are doing 90% of the time after ten years it's time to move on to a different company. Once a company gets large and has numerous engineers it tends to settle down into a environment where people have set roles as engineers where they work on simple boring projects. But when you are building something from scratch in a small…

> That's the problem. If that's all you are doing 90% of the time after ten years it's time to move on to a different company.

Trouble is, 90% of the time, it's very difficult to find an opening at a company that does more interesting things. :(

Re: Programming is Not Terrible

#38

Post by NathanKP »

UK-AL wrote: post #36
NathanKP wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you have enough skills. Maybe the only skill you need to develop is how to sell yourself to the type of companies you want to work for. If you don't mind some completely unsolicited advice: I just checked out your HN profile and found a link to your blog. I checked the blog and it is fairly empty with only two posts, and I see no Github link. That's the first thing a good startup company is going to lo…

ok, what interesting problems are you working on? And I'll tell you if they're interesting or not? Because 95% of startups I've come across are solving trivial problems.

These are the things I've been able to do in the past year or so that I thought were pretty interesting and enjoyable:

* Code to render PDF's into images using asynchronous streams to make it extremely fast.

* The same thing for videos, to recompress them for delivery to iPads.

* Code to use AWS to create a service that can be fairly easily scaled up and down dynamically in response to demand.

* Creating a highly tuned Node.js server capable of serving thousands of requests per second. Even basic CRUD operations can be pretty interesting to code when you are fine tuning server system level settings, optimizing database queries, using caching, etc to make sure that response times are all around 10-15ms even at hundreds to thousands of requests per second.

Re: Programming is Not Terrible

#39

Post by capisce »

sequence7 wrote: post #19
debacle wrote: post #4

I have a hypothesis. Is it possible that the people who talk with wide-eyed wonder about programming after doing it for ten years and the passion that they have for writing software haven't come to appreciate the banality of almost every problem that they're going to be asked to solve in the software space? If you find putting together CRUD apps and laying out contact forms challenging and engaging after ten years, y…

Oh please. I have a theory about people who talk with patronising disdain about how programming is easy and you can do everything with open source already. Work is work, if it was all fun you wouldn't get paid for it. If most programmers want a challenge in their day job they could try learning how to communicate or how not to assume that everyone else is an idiot or even try and improve the processes their team use…

A job being boring is just one of the reasons you might get paid to do it. Another reason could be that it's hard and that you are one of the few available for hire with the necessary skills. Then it can still be all fun (for you). I think the problem and negative spiral occurs when people have to take boring work just to pay the bills. Boring work leaves you mentally drained at the end of the day which keeps you from learning more or working on spare time projects in order to get more interesting work.

The challenge is getting into a positive spiral instead.

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