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How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

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Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#361

Post by polishdude20 »

Grustaf wrote: post #334
dwaltrip wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are talking about moderately intelligent people who will never contribute anything meaningful to humanity. I have to disagree here. The bulk of humanity consists of minor contributions made by people few will ever remember.

Yes and the bulk of humanity manage to both make this minute contribution, and have a family and some friends.

You can be a software developer and have a family and friends. You're acting like there is only one choice when you are passionate about software : hunker down and be lonely with your computer as your only company.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#362

Post by rufus_foreman »

infogulch wrote: post #44
rufus_foreman wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on an app that calls other internal services inside our company, one of them is a call to update an account balance. We were running into this issue where we were getting a 504 Gateway Timeout on the update balance call so I eventually found the Slack room for that team and asked about it. They ignored me for a couple weeks, but I kept asking and eventually someone answered and said yeah you'll get the 50…

I can guarantee you that 5 other teams rely on that specific behavior and don't have the will/independence ("budget") to implement that change if the api was fixed. Not only that, but if they did make that change, their manager would instantly have a handful of directors down their throat demanding an explanation why they just added work to their teams that are busy with Feature Work (TM).

Yeah, I'm sure there are valid reasons for why it behaves the way it does and there have been staff reductions in the last few months. The point is that it is pretty typical to spend huge amounts of time figuring out why things work they way they do, and it turns out to be some minor detail that isn't going to help you be a better programmer, it is just work that needs to be done to keep things from falling apart. It isn't very romantic.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#363

Post by ClumsyPilot »

WalterBright wrote: post #166
syndacks wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks for sharing this. Mind expanding? I'm curious to hear what you had planned going into retirement and what you seek going back to work. Are you right back to the same as you were right before "retiring"? Knowing how your first round of retirement went, what would you have done differently in the years/decades leading up to it?

What I discovered is that a life without purpose is not a life. The fun is in having worthwhile goals and striving to reach them. Being passively entertained, bleh. It's also why I have a very limited appetite for "see the world" traveling. I can only look for so long, then I need to be doing something with a purpose. I've seen what happens when people retire. They suddenly get old and lose their vitality. They becom…

This guy planted an entire forest by himself, probably did more for the world thank most of us ever will:

https://metro.co.uk/2018/08/08/man-turned-desert-forest-plan....

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#364

Post by jeffe »

Agentlien wrote: post #313
xmprt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the recent emergence of many quality games from china might start reversing that trend thouugh...

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#365

Post by Grustaf »

polishdude20 wrote: post #361
Grustaf wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and the bulk of humanity manage to both make this minute contribution, and have a family and some friends.

You can be a software developer and have a family and friends. You're acting like there is only one choice when you are passionate about software : hunker down and be lonely with your computer as your only company.

That is the point _I_ am making.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#366

Post by bonestamp2 »

Vhano wrote: post #337
bonestamp2 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I understand that. But it's interesting how this experience can be spiritual to some and others may be "purists" who find explicitly avoid extra toppings (listening to music during the task) just to be closer to the task (and thus intaking it in full, they could argue)

I guess it depends on what you consider pure. Without the music, I'm listening to kids (or coworkers) screaming or watching paw patrol in the background. Is that more pure than listening to a professionally arranged and conducted orchestra? Even with noise cancelling headphones, it's still not perfectly quiet, thus the movie score is a delightful way to drown out the additional background noise.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#367

Post by philosopher1234 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #353
philosopher1234 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put yourself in the shoes of the team who was asked to fix this. They probably have a dozen feature requests, two dozen support tickets, and now this guy wants this bug fixed because it does t follow a standard and he had a hard time understanding it. Yes, that is a real issue, and in the ideal world it would be fixed along with every other issue on the list, but in the real world it is unlikely to ever be important…

again, part of the problem was lack of communication and documentation. waiting 2 weeks to be told "fuck off" (in essence) is shitty all around.. it's not JUST that a (stupid) bug exists, it's how it was handled in this case, and, apparently, how they choose to handle it going forward, affecting who knows how many more people/teams in the next few years, and how many more weeks of wasted time. And if this team handle…

I agree that the devs were needlessly uncommunicative, but I disagree that the right decision is necessarily to fix the bug. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to leave the bug as it is, even if it miffs some devs on hacker news.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#368

Post by brmgb »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #330
brmgb wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Nowadays, I work in management consulting on problems I actually find interesting and which thankfully involve more people than machines. That goes both ways though doesn't it. I find dealing with people rather than machines the least interesting part of my work. I do it because it's necessary but I find it exhausting and try and minimise it. Horses for courses.

Most certainly, don't get me wrong. It is not a value judgement on my part. I don't think people who enjoy coding are wrong and I can conceptually see how it can be fascinating.

I just wanted to highlight that this is not some universal truth that the more you do it the more in awe you are at it. For some, the experience forever remains a dredge.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#369

Post by Person5478 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #126
3princip wrote: post #65

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…

If your code gets butchered it is not that great. That's something I am slowly learning, and by slowly I mean in the scale of decades. I've seen some of my old code I wrote in the workplace ten years ago, going through the hands of many developers of various skill levels and with different ideas, and then getting back to me. Needless to say, it is pretty ugly. Analyzing that, I found the real good parts mostly untouc…

I disagree with this emphatically.

Code is meant to change. It changes. That's really all there is to it.

It's like saying a tire was bad because it got changed at some point during the lifetime of the vehicle. It's just not close to related.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#370

Post by Person5478 »

titzer wrote: post #69

I've been programming since my early teens > 25 years ago. The article asks "How can you not be romantic about programming"? And I have to say, that after all these years, I am romantic about programming...only sometimes, now. For one, programming a lot made me very near-sighted, and my eyes are dry to the point that I can no longer wear contacts. (I had a bad episode and nearly went blind a couple years back.) That…

> I'm willing to pay 15% performance for this layer to just be forever ridden of this, but people treat me like an alien.

I'm not. In fact, what irritates me the most about computing nowadays is how much slower everything is now than it was 20 years ago.

And the work at these levels is what allows everyone else to be so cavalier about performance.

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