341–350 of 373 posts
I am deeply, deeply romantic about programming. I consider it an act of self-actualization. But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry, and that's a good thing. It's easy to feel romantic about your vocation when you have a number of reasonable options for achieving modest financial security, and you thus had the privilege of choosing the one that most closely matched yo…
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…
This reminded me of something that happened last week. I had written some code I found absolutely beautiful, then had to delete an hour later since the customer's requirements had changed. Personally, I find these situations disheartening but it's never frustrated me.
Cash rules everything around me. After a few decades of relying on coding to feed my family, I miss the way it felt magical, writing in Basic on a ti 99/4a. I thought I was going to tell computers to do wonderous things. In reality most of us are telling them to serve ads or sell crap to people. Most of the rest of us are telling them to serve data to companies doing the above. It’s just business now, nothing more.
So what are you going to do about it?
It is part of the global human collaboration, where we're all gears and screws, but some of us are more geared toward screwing others.
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Game Development is an example of what can happen when there are too many people passionate about their work. I'm not saying that everyone in that industry is taken advantage of but it's a lot more than the broader tech industry even though there's a lot of overlap between skill sets.
I would like to say that while this is definitely still a thing it has gotten better in recent years. There has been a big push against crunch and there are more and more studios with a focus on work-life balance.
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This about sums it up for me as well. I feel so absurdly lucky that what I love to do also pays well. If programming paid like shit, I don't think I would be able to stop myself going down that road anyway, in the same way someone who loves painting can't help but paint.
This is a great place to be. Do you think one needs a certain level of mastery to come to that point though? When you are still struggling learning, the endless reading on topic X can be tiring and exhausting, especially in the context of deadlines.
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Or worse than table scraps: pieces of paper that may be worth something someday if you keep working hard enough.
The system and forces that make this table scrap arrangement possible are the same forces that generally drive the salaries and perks of tech workers much higher than the average for other professions. It's healthy to be cynical but it's also important to look at the overall balance of power of the social classes. The 9% versus 90% makes more sense than the 99%
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Or worse than table scraps: pieces of paper that may be worth something someday if you keep working hard enough.
I just treat startup equity as a lottery ticket: but, I find the work itself interesting and would be programming even if it wasn’t my career.
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This is a great place to be. Do you think one needs a certain level of mastery to come to that point though? When you are still struggling learning, the endless reading on topic X can be tiring and exhausting, especially in the context of deadlines.
As a self-taught programmer, I think the level of skill doesn't matter as such. I remember gobbling up a book I found on Unix commands when I was learning shell scripting eons ago. It was a rough start as the whole thing was totally new to me. I was mainly driven by being able to accomplish what I wanted using code (I am very lazy and hated the daily manual execution of the steps). Once I had a poorly setup script wo…
As soon as you get to the point where m is positive (you have learned enough to be able to make things a little better on your own, even if using google for parts), you’re off to the races. m dominates b in that equation as x (time) increases.