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Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

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Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#41

Post by Scarblac »

UK-AL wrote: post #37
Scarblac wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That book says the opposite though, we can definitely make good estimates. It's just that estimating well needs people with training on how to do that, and then it takes substantial time to make good estimates. And there will still be significant error bars (if the estimate isn't a range , it doesn't count as an estimate). But it's certainly doable.

People who ask for estimates, don't consider estimates with huge error bars good. Literally anyone can make estimate with a decent amount of error. To narrow down the estimate to what they want would take just as long as just doing the work.

I know, but those people need the training.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#42

Post by whiplash451 »

withinboredom wrote: post #4
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #2

> when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes Feels like a very outsized reaction to have to something well-intentioned, useful, and not-ridiculous.

It's quite ridiculous for a number of reasons, well documented by research and experience: software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.

Sizing is useful for one thing: making sure that two people are talking about the same thing.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#43

Post by t43562 »

lucianbr wrote: post #39
sukruh wrote: post #35

Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up e…

Aren't you afraid that the "fast-growing" small company will soon become a large company, with all the problems you mentioned you want to avoid?

It happens but then it's time to find the next one.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#44

Post by xenocratus »

lucianbr wrote: post #39
sukruh wrote: post #35

Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up e…

Aren't you afraid that the "fast-growing" small company will soon become a large company, with all the problems you mentioned you want to avoid?

Isn't it possible to just go looking for another fast-growing small company when your current employer reaches that stage?

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#45

Post by withinboredom »

sanitycheck wrote: post #34
withinboredom wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you're agreeing with me and using disagreeing words, or you didn't read what I wrote... Software engineers can't estimate how long things will take: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02637... They're wrong, 60% of the time by overestimation and when underestimated, so vastly wrong it's terrifying. I remember this one time I merely had to update a component in prod. Everything went fi…

I think you've linked to a study of "expert project managers", and we might see similar results in a study of whether "expert project managers" can succeed in tying their own shoelaces. If you're working with a system where your staging environment is not sufficiently close to your prod environment to be entirely predictive of behaviour, that's a "known unknown" and should be in the estimate.

The reason it failed in prod was entirely unrelated to it being prod. The same could have happened in staging. IIRC, the error was entirely due to a RST packet from some external system during the upgrade. It was a bug in the upgrading system that should have been accounted for, had anyone known it existed. Identifying the root cause of the failure, was what took the most time. Had deployments been idempotent it also probably could have been resolved in moments as well ... but here we are, 15 years later with lots of lessons learned.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#46

Post by lucianbr »

xenocratus wrote: post #44
lucianbr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you afraid that the "fast-growing" small company will soon become a large company, with all the problems you mentioned you want to avoid?

Isn't it possible to just go looking for another fast-growing small company when your current employer reaches that stage?

I just think that they wrote "fast-growing" as a positive attribute, when the logic of the comment would make it a negative attribute.

Of course you can go looking again. But why not look for a slow-growing or not-growing small company, so you don't need to go looking so often?

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#47

Post by anonzzzies »

fredley wrote: post #36
anonzzzies wrote: post #10

I am working on coding stuff I like as escape for the absurdity of modern software. I make little games, stuff for 8 bit systems etc. Stuff that is as far away from anything modern , especially the hell of node, next, devops and ‘web frameworks’ as I possibly can. It works. It’s very relaxing, like a bonsai tree.

I do this too. Making games for the Playdate has been the most enjoyable programming I've done in years.

Yeah, programming used to be excellent and that’s not nostalgia as I still write MSX, Amiga and Delphi (win/lin) software. Now, with modern stacks, I just hate all of it really. I do it fulltime for work with nextjs (and all the du jour stuff that literally changes every few months and makes life easier: secret it doesn’t at all) but we are transitioning everything to my Common Lisp dsl; in one year even my work software will be a pleasure again. Stuff I should’ve done 20 years ago but I drank this modern tooling koolaid; it’s more akin to the layers of hell.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#48

Post by t43562 »

I have to laugh because I find almost all programmers are like this. They are almost always people who like making things. A lot of them are musicians too.

I find DIY to be similar - you get a physical result, you use your hands to make something, the satisfaction is almost always about pleasing your own sense of what you want. Ok there's the wife too but ....

I also like feeling that I can cope with certain jobs even if not well. Also you do get better. Baking and cooking can be like this too. When you learn the "tricks" that make your bread turn out better or your skirting boards line up properly or whatever then it's a super feeling. :-)

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#49

Post by holbrad »

kristiandupont wrote: post #40
withinboredom wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite ridiculous for a number of reasons, well documented by research and experience: software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.

HN loves to make this claim but it just doesn't match my experience, from several teams. Estimates are not precise, obviously, but that doesn't mean that they are impossible to make or that they add no value.

I mean I've routeninly seen estimates be 3-5x longer that projected. It's up to you if you thing that's an accurate enough estimate or not.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#50

Post by devwastaken »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #8

> software dev as we know it is about to disappear soon Pushing back on this a bit. We see promises and people working on this. But I haven’t seen anything definitive yet, and LLMs have their own existential threats around amount and quality of data. Recent article involving trying to get LLMs to reason about law required very fine task decomposition to get move forward. What we don’t know is whether doing this and t…

It doesn't matter, it was never about LLM's, it's that tech holds special political powers across nations. Big tech can break laws and destroy people's lives and nobody is ever punished or regulated.

Software is in a race to the bottom because users have little market choice. LLM's are just the excuse, but in reality late stage capitalist economics demands that this happen somehow. Wether it be in the form of cheap labor or automated labor. You need to have political and physical leverage over the corps to force them into being sustainable.

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