371–380 of 634 posts
The common message is you often have less influence if you don't go the management track.
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I'm in my late forties and have been a professional developer for 25+ years. I agree with what you said in your comment, but this stood out: "You might be dead tomorrow; you might as well enjoy today." This is not a bad way to live, but as I get older I am increasingly aware that there will be a day when I'm dead tomorrow. And for that reason I'm increasingly less interested in spending time in the state where "time…
I'm about the same age as you. The passage of time is shockingly fast unless I do things to slow it down. I remember moments from my college days that I can pinpoint to the year they happened. That thing that happened sophomore year? I know it happened sophomore year because I did it with my roommate at the time. But nowadays I'll watch a movie on Netflix thinking it came out just in the past year or two, only to dis…
Nope. Makes it go even faster, and you remember even less.
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I get the impression that it's always "easy" to move into management, so there's no need to rush into a management role. In contrast, I fear that once I try management, it will be hard to move back to being a developer. How easy / hard was it for you to return to being a developer?
I think it's a function of time and effort. Every day you're not in a dedicated developer role, you will lose a tiny bit of "free" updating about what developers do, use, love, hate, etc. You can offset this somewhat by your own efforts, but they will be limited because the process of working with other developers bringing something to production is its own thing, separate from just keeping tech skills sharp. I've al…
Today I am very much hands on and I make it known that writing code and designing is my passion.
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Unfortunately, it seems like he dropped the ball in some major ways. So Apple started to take off a few years after you left? Then taking your fucking amazing technical and leadership skills to Apple! The post-startup is blowing it in terms of product development and the competition is eating their lunch? Then join the fucking competition. Programmers/engineers can change some important things. For example, our emplo…
I agree changing employers is one thing to do. What do you do if you're not a strong engineer but in a shitty situation?
Obviously this is a very personal matter - i.e. if you don't enjoy managing people and prefer to tinker with, learn, and build things, pursuing a management career is the worst choice you can make from a happiness standpoint. It's also not generally true that managers (even those with fancy titles) are more financially successful than engineers. By definition, there are far fewer VP/Director level positions than ther…
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> No integers. Fair enough. > Assignment is declaration. Not exactly. You can declare variables separately, if you want. In fact, a "var x = 42" statement will actually be split into "var x;" at the top of the scope and "x = 42" wherever you actually wrote it by the interpreter. The specified behaviour is a little weird and non-obvious, but once you know it, you know it. > Prototypes. That's a matter of taste (plus t…
> You can declare variables separately, if you want. The issue is that 'fop = 1' is not an error (outside of strict mode), even when I mean 'foo = 1.' Automatically creating variables makes what could be compile-time errors run-time instead. > Besides which, you can basically use prototypes to do classes, if that's your bag, and of course we have class syntax now anyway. Which I also find to be a mistake. Generic fun…
Bizarrely, I misread it as an overcomplicated ASCII art divider. Looks like I've got a JS VM in my head...
The fop typo - while I acknowledge that there are plenty of gotchas of this kind in javascript, a gotcha that will be caught by strict mode barely even counts in the grand scheme of things. Strict mode then gives you slightly better protection than in many otherwise more robust languages (Python and Ruby, for example).
On the ASI side, I don't see how it can be 'incorrect' - it's a well specified behaviour obeyed consistently, so far as I can tell, across the vast bulk of implementations. It may be a bad design, but that's a different thing. Go's version is certainly easier to explain in a paragraph or less.
I'm assuming by generic functions you're talking about eg. Clojure protocols or Haskell typeclass functions or stuff like that, which I also prefer (I also like round parens). But at this point, you're just criticising JS for not being $LANGUAGE_I_LIKE, which it isn't, obviously, but does not count as a terrible sin in and of itself.
I return to my main point - no, JS is not a great piece of language design, but it's hardly 'nuke from orbit' bad. There are certainly things I'd rather be working with, but equally there are worse fates that we could have been stuck with after the browser wars. "Life — the way it really is — is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse".
I agree that programming is a dead end job. It's popular and relatively easy. It doesn't require any special skills. Anyone with an average IQ can learn it. There's low cost and barrier of entry to getting started. It's fun and addicting when you're a kid. Then you get trapped and it becomes monotonous. There's only so good you can get at programming. Beyond that, most of your time is spent on debugging trivial issue…
Programming is the ability to manipulate that information for a purpose. You can be a programmer and make money if you combine that ability with specialized domain knowledge.
But the ability to program alone makes you interchangeable in the business. Just look at the hundreds of gigantic (5000+ employees) consulting firms selling expertise. The only people who make big bucks are the ones with domain knowledge.
I do think that programmers are at the forefront of the future of employment. Every other sector is afraid of automation, concerned about their algorithmic skills and routine tasks being done by machine and uncertain about how they will fit in a future where their skills are useless.
Programmers feel like that every few years (or months if you're a JS programmer ;-)) or on every new major project in a different domain.
But we get distracted by the fact that we spend so much time keeping up with the new tech that we confuse it for valuable knowledge. The new framework/language/api/etc. is only a tool to extend our ability and without domain knowledge in a sector (finance, healthcare, retail etc.), we have as little value as a paralegal or a doctor who can diagnose and treat but cannot invent a cure.
Unlike any of those professions, they are not 100% digitized. Programmers are forced to accept the limits of their intelligence and their capacity to learn new domains very early on. Nothing is preventing you from writing something truly amazing on your computer.
This community often gets it twisted. Let's face it, if you could innovate instead of repackage, you wouldn't need marketing or sales to communicate the value of your work. However exponential improvements and radical innovation are difficult, everyone settles for incremental improvements and have to spend their time marketing to persuade people that their product is better. (most likely by only a small margin from the competition. a margin most people wouldn't give a fuck about if they really understood the product)
If you speak the language of revenue, you can rationalize almost anything that will grow it responsibly.
If the language of revenue and various delivery tactics still don't convince your management, then it's time to leave.
I too struggle with focusing on the negative sometimes, so I constantly encourage myself (and the author and others who are feeling similarly) to redouble efforts to optimistically communicate in the language of revenue.
He would have been unhappy with the other choice as well, because then it is the programming side he would be missing out on. I would advise everyone to read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536 You chose one option out of many, and the others may no longer be a possibility. However, the writer's unhappiness does not spawn from his inability to be successful at what he does,…