Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because you are used as a tool for other people.
Is that any more dehumanizing than just working a job in general?
Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
311–320 of 372 posts
Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question is whether enough of the other people around you have the same characteristic you describe that it's reasonable to require it for everyone, including the ones that don't. For those of us who don't work better that way, being required to go into an office in person to provide ambience for our coworkers is extremely dehumanizing.
You've brought in "require" from nowhere. Neither the parent comment nor OP's article mentioned _requiring_ in-office attendance for everyone on earth. Many people make this leap, so I don't mean to single you out. I think this is one reason this topic is so touchy -- it's hard to even express an opinion without someone assuming you mean to impose that opinion on everyone else (e.g. mandatory RTO), and then taking of…
> Remote work eliminates a lot of problems with office work: commutes, inefficient use of real estate, and land value distortion. But software development is better when you breathe the same air as the folks you work with. Even with a camera-on policy, video calls are a low-bandwidth medium. You lose ambient awareness of coworkers’ problems, and asking for help is a bigger burden. Pair programming is less fruitful. Attempts to represent ideas spatially get mutilated by online whiteboard and sticky note software. Even conflict gets worse: it’s easy to form an enemy image of somebody at the end of video call, but difficult to keep that image when you share a room with them and sense their pain.
None of that is phrased as personal opinion or their own subjective experience. I don't think it's hard to express an experience about personal preference, but it's hard to express an opinion about how other people's experiences without them having something to say about it if they disagree.
Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
#313Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
#314I would say something like 95% of the code I have been paid to write as a software engineer has 0% test coverage. Like, literally, not a single test on the entire project. Across many different companies and several countries, frontend and backend. I wonder if I'm an anomaly, or if it's actually more common that one might assume?
Way more common. Tests are at best overrated. And doing them properly is big PITA. The first thing is that the person writing the tests and the person writing the code should be different. And our languages are not really suited for the requirements of testing. They can and do save your ass in certain situation, but the false security they provide is probably more dangerous.
Obviously pragmatism is always important and no advice applies to 100% of features/projects/people/companies. Sometimes the test is more trouble to write than it's worth and TDD never worked for me with the exception of specific types of work (good when writing parsers I find!).
Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't take issue with what you've said about remote work despite very much having the opposite opinion to you because you phrased it as your own personal opinion. This blog post does pretty much the opposite though; its analysis of remote work is pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth. It was an especially weird editorial choice to make use of th…
It feels like you're blaming the author for the lazy thinking of someone who might read his opinion and take it as objective fact. The 7 times 9 analogy doesn't track it all. 7x9 = 63 is an objective fact by definition . His thoughts on remote work are an opinion by definition . If other people decide that what he says is dogmatic, blame it on their own lack of critical thinking skills. The meta-point of the article…
> Remote work eliminates a lot of problems with office work: commutes, inefficient use of real estate, and land value distortion. But software development is better when you breathe the same air as the folks you work with. Even with a camera-on policy, video calls are a low-bandwidth medium. You lose ambient awareness of coworkers’ problems, and asking for help is a bigger burden. Pair programming is less fruitful. Attempts to represent ideas spatially get mutilated by online whiteboard and sticky note software. Even conflict gets worse: it’s easy to form an enemy image of somebody at the end of video call, but difficult to keep that image when you share a room with them and sense their pain.
It's hard for me to read that as anything other than literally describing to me what my the experience of working with me remotely is. OP has never worked with me as far as I'm aware, so they have no idea whether it's accurate or not. Charitably, they might not mean what they're saying literally, but I'm making the argument that for topics that are controversial because of how people have been burned by overly prescriptive policies in the past, the burden is on the speaker to avoid voicing opinions in a careless way that relies on the listener to glean that their intent isn't the same as what people have experienced in the past.
My meta-point is that while people are free to express their opinions without spending effort trying to make their intent understood, but by the same token, people are free to react to those opinions with the exact same level of effort spend trying to understand their intent. In my experience, there are a lot of people who complain that they're treated unfairly for expressing their opinions without realizing that what people are actually reacting to is how they express their opinions, not their opinions themselves. I've personally struggled quite a lot over the years in having trouble understanding how other people will interpret my communications, so I have a lot of sympathy for people who also struggle with this, but if someone doesn't seem to even accept the premise that part of the responsibility for being understood lies with the person in expressing their intent clearly, I lose patience quickly. This is especially true when the "opinions" are expressed in a medium where the person communicating has an unbounded amount of time to work on clarifying their intent before the message actually is received by someone else; I don't expect everyone to be able to perfectly articulate things in real-time when talking in person, but when the opinion is expressed via a blog post, they don't have the same constraints in working on how they convey what they're saying. The fact that the blog post seems to be overall taking the stance that it's better not to try to worry about how someone will interpret their intent makes it feel even more likely they might just not understand what people's actual issue with their communications have been in the past.
It genuinely seems like they might not have been able to distinguish between good-faith misunderstandings and bad-faith intentional misinterpretations of what they've said, and that's unfortunate if it's led them to the conclusion that they just don't need to care about what anyone thinks about their opinions rather than that they need to learn how to better communicate to those who are attempting to respond in good faith and ignore the ones who aren't. A lot of people understand that people can disagree with them in good faith in the abstract but fail to actually recognize when that's happening in the present, and quite a lot of what's expressed in this blog post resembles what I've seen from other people who struggle with that.
Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Technical” people are also people, and that doesn’t exclude them from communicating like reasonable adults. Blaming the rest of the world for an inability to communicate effectively is not orienting the blame correctly.
You're wrong (IMO) The onus should not be on the communicator to qualify every statement of opinion. This is tedious and unreasonable. Not prefacing what clearly is an opinion with "IMO" is not a jedi mind trick that makes others believe it as fact. You're also demonstrating some hypocrisy by presenting your own point of view in the same manner. No qualifiers. You're simply stating something as truth
I fundamentally disagree with this. In my experience, it's in pretty much in possible for people to perfectly understand intent without a certain amount of effort from both the communicator to express it clearly and the listener to understand it. In practice, I don't think there's a good chance of successful communication for any nuanced topic without good-faith effort from both sides, and I can't differentiate between the language the author used and what I'd expect to hear from someone who reflexively dismisses any disagreement as in bad faith.
Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not as subjective as it is more of a case by case decision. This example is quite misleading but polymorphic classes are sometimes useful when the domain grows, when you have have to update new behaviors all the time.. In that case then the switch becomes harder to maintain. Classes isolate behavior so new types don't modify existing code. I'd stick with switch statements in all the other cases. Sure, this could…
Yeah, the problem is when people create extra classes just to avoid the switch statement.
Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't take issue with what you've said about remote work despite very much having the opposite opinion to you because you phrased it as your own personal opinion. This blog post does pretty much the opposite though; its analysis of remote work is pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth. It was an especially weird editorial choice to make use of th…
> pretty much entirely just generalizations of their own experience, but phrased as if they're objective truth I mean you're describing 90% of blog and forum posts on the Internet here. This (IMO - so it's not ironic) is the biggest leap most people need to make to become more self-aware and to better parse the world around them: recognizing there is rarely an objective truth in most matters, and the idea that "my tr…
Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've brought in "require" from nowhere. Neither the parent comment nor OP's article mentioned _requiring_ in-office attendance for everyone on earth. Many people make this leap, so I don't mean to single you out. I think this is one reason this topic is so touchy -- it's hard to even express an opinion without someone assuming you mean to impose that opinion on everyone else (e.g. mandatory RTO), and then taking of…
OP's article didn't explicitly state requiring, but it did claim make the claim that I'm objectively worse at my job by working remotely than I am in person: > Remote work eliminates a lot of problems with office work: commutes, inefficient use of real estate, and land value distortion. But software development is better when you breathe the same air as the folks you work with. Even with a camera-on policy, video cal…
But I guess this is a good example of default assumptions. When I read a personal blog, unless I see words like "objectively", or see explicit arguments stating that others should/must do X, I by default read it as the author expressing their personal opinion on X.
But I can see it the other way too. I think it could be solved by the author using an "I" framing as they did in every other section.
Re: Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
#320I would say something like 95% of the code I have been paid to write as a software engineer has 0% test coverage. Like, literally, not a single test on the entire project. Across many different companies and several countries, frontend and backend. I wonder if I'm an anomaly, or if it's actually more common that one might assume?