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Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

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Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#311

Post by MoreQARespect »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #301
haspok wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will never ever occur to anybody in the company that a freelance software dev could possibly be put into a management role... If by "freelancer" you mean "contractor", then this statement is false. I had worked at multiple places in the UK where this happened, I suppose mostly because paying these people a salary would have required an disproportionate amount of money (as opposed to a standard daily rate) - UK t…

>TDD being a typical example Shots fired! I love tests, but I mostly agree with you. The whole idea of 'write your tests first' is great if everything is precisely defined. I find it odd I haven't seen more pragmatism around unit testing in the blogosphere. It's TDD or death out there.

Where not everything is precisely defined but "you know the right outcome when you see it" is where I think snapshot test driven development really shines:

https://hitchdev.com/hitchstory/approach/snapshot-test-drive...

E.g. "define API call -> don't define API response -> write the code that spits out the correct response -> auto-rewrite the test according to the response and commit".

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#312

Post by aeturnum »

awongh wrote: post #155
aeturnum wrote: post #25

For me, at least, programming is simply the most profitable articulation of an underlying personality trait that involves productivity, play, mischief, sardonicism and critique all together. This is what people mean when they point out that "hacking" isn't about software. The tantalizing just-out-of-reach articulation of a compelling concept. Satiating.

How is sardonicism involved in programming? It is a trait many in tech have, I'm not sure if you're saying that it's positively involved in doing programming....

I think there are lots of opportunities to be sardonic in programs! Either literally in comments or figuratively in programmatic structures you use, or at a higher level of project design. Any time the system is in a bad state, appearing like it's heading towards a crash, but you've prepared a clause to catch and diffuse the situation it feels a little sardonic to me.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#313

Post by KerrAvon »

jebarker wrote: post #281
lastangryman wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the practice of very subtly persuading employees to seek employment elsewhere when their "growth" has stagnated. https://www.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6cf-11e6-967b-c88452263... You will see it mentioned in context of poorly performing staff, but it can also be used when you have someone who is perfectly capable at their role but has no desire to climb the ladder. In many corporate environments that is viewed ve…

Thanks for explaining. That's awful. I wonder how common this is in tech companies where IC is a valid career path and terminal levels exist?

It is alive and well at FAANG.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#314

Post by aeturnum »

badpun wrote: post #176
aeturnum wrote: post #25

For me, at least, programming is simply the most profitable articulation of an underlying personality trait that involves productivity, play, mischief, sardonicism and critique all together. This is what people mean when they point out that "hacking" isn't about software. The tantalizing just-out-of-reach articulation of a compelling concept. Satiating.

>The tantalizing just-out-of-reach articulation of a compelling concept. What out of reach concepts do you have? I've found that, with time, I could code almost anything (barring ultraspecialized programs like FEA analysis etc.). The only thing between me and the finished program is hundreds or thousands of hours of work. I don't see magic in that.

Oh - I was trying to gesture at that feeling you get right before you start implementing a solution. The one where you think you see it perfectly and all you need to do is write it down and it will work. It's the feeling you get right before you accidentally stay up until 2am.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#315

Post by jksmith »

onion2k wrote: post #183
marktolson wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same path, but for the last 10 years i've been a CTO. Right now i'd kill for fewer meetings and more focus time. Starting to take its toll.

Hire an engineering manager and delegate.

Suggest wrong direction. Make teams more autonomous and develop the art of the backlog. Too much management is what's wrong with organizations these days.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#316

Post by digging »

tombert wrote: post #190
potatoboiler wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a current undergraduate, programming for fun is ubiquitous in my peers. Surprises me also that the author has to ask.

In a bit of fairness, I know a lot of very competent engineers who do not code for fun at all. Programming is purely a job for them, and then they go home and hack on nothing. There's honestly nothing wrong with that. It's perfectly valid to do something purely for the pay (so long as what you're doing is ethical, obviously). I suspect there are plenty of young people who see the bloated salaries that software engine…

I struggle a lot with my hobbies because I do almost no coding or learning about code in my free time, at least not directly. I think I could be a great(ish) programmer if I did programming as a hobby, but there's just so many other interesting and worthwhile things to do. I get a lot of FOMO from people who code as a hobby, and I think it doesn't help that they don't seem to get FOMO about my hobbies. But I know I will always feel something is missing if I don't spend time marveling at the natural world and creating art, so I guess I'm stuck.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#317

Post by theshrike79 »

zachturn wrote: post #238
theshrike79 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my exact feeling :D I love coding and problem solving, but during my career I noticed that I'm _really_ good at getting technical people to communicate with each other and integrating their work. I try to do both, but I still don't know which I like more. I tried the full manager / chart drawing architect -route and I hated it. Just coding was a bit boring too in the long run, because I want to make an impact…

> I'm incapable of shutting up if I see any inefficiencies that could be improved by communication This is one of my biggest struggles. I see so much flawed work and I can't help but voice my opinion, but I can't possibly dedicate time to try to fix it all, so I'm often afraid of just coming across as a complainer.

My "problem" is that if/when I open my mouth, people give me more responsibilities.

"Don't like how it's done? Now you're responsible for it." Granted I usually got a raise to go with it, but it was just admin work and not-coding - which I didn't like.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#318

Post by digging »

visarga wrote: post #195
ryandrake wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It saddens me to say but if I were starting over today I might not enter the field professionally. Most modern development is gluing components together and wrangling packages. It's so far removed from the machine and the distance is only growing. I don't know what's sadder: That this kind of programming is becoming a lost art, or that nobody seems to care. I got my first job out of college partially because in the…

I have known programmers who don't know how a float is represented in memory. I just can't comprehend how they can gloss over basics like that.

Guilty. I'm pretty good at my job, but I never learned CS fundamentals and don't work in a context where this matters (I currently work in front-end JS/TS).

I don't think it's worthless knowledge to me, but I think you're a bit blinded by your own context. I have seen many comments on HN bemoaning "Developers who don't even know X", and X is always something different.

I don't think there's a smoking gun for bad developers and it's weird to me when programmers think there is one, tbh. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge, and with something so arcane as programming, it's very easy to have no idea that you're missing some important or "fundamental" piece of knowledge

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#319

Post by stavros »

godshatter wrote: post #308
stavros wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My fun is building real-life usable software and seeing people getting value out of them, so I guess YMMV. I'm very lucky that I really like doing this, as it makes work as fun as my hobby, and my personal portfolio has a bunch of finished (if generally small) products in it.

I enjoy this too, but predicting who is going to like what exactly is still a mystery to me. Programs I built that I think are the most beautiful and useful thing around get ignored or just tolerated and some silly bash script or Word macro I wrote in five minutes as a one-off for someone has been passed around multiple times and is still in use 20 years later. Where I get my fun is that I live to increase my underst…

Yeah, I definitely get that a lot, I build things I think are amazing, and then nobody uses them ever. Oh well.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#320

Post by digging »

dfox wrote: post #280
hugatest wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why is that necessary knowledge? Don't get me wrong, once you go down to embedded you sometimes do need to know and sometimes it just improves your understanding (and it's kinda cool anyway), but if you do high-level work, perhaps web work, all you need to know is the abstract interface of floats as a data type. What operations you can do, what is guaranteed about the result of those operations (loss of precision…

Because not caring how FP values are stored and what the implications are (or even not realising that you favorite programming language uses FP by default) is a particularly fast way to become the "minus 10 times programmer". Storing monetary values as FP is one thing, but I've seen phone numbers and other numeric identifiers (long time ago before PCI-DSS even credit card numbers) stored as FP values, with predictabl…

> Because not caring how FP values are stored and what the implications are (or even not realising that you favorite programming language uses FP by default) is a particularly fast way to become the "minus 10 times programmer".

I don't think that's true at all. You're merely looking at a symptom of someone who is intrinsically a negative performer. But that's rather like assuming that someone with a cough has tuberculosis.

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