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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

#431

Post by ornornor »

knighthack wrote: post #335

As a lawyer, I find the law (which is supposedly 'logical' and 'rational') to be highly absurd at times. It's unavoidable, given that the law heavily involves humans. I am in part drawn to software development and programming, because it's logical and comparatively rigid (at least programming itself is, if you take away the environment/ecosystem/cults that develop around the idiosyncracies of different languages). I…

I guess programming itself isn’t absurd in the same sense that law isn’t absurd if you look at it through the lens of logic.

But that’s only a very tiny part of the art… what breaks the camel’s back for many of us is all the BS around it coming from management, investors, clueless middle managers, political business people, overcommitted salespeople, and the constantly changing tooling so that something you wrote 6–12 months ago won’t run today anymore without a variable amount of change and effort. Not to mention the layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction that make the whole thing inscrutable.

I think that’s what a lot of us are fed up with and mean with “programming has become absurd”

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#432

Post by martindbp »

usrnm wrote: post #56
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…

What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be the best way to do it to me

8 hours is a long time to be bored every day.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#433

Post by jononor »

sebastianz wrote: post #411
jononor wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 in 100k is a stretch. But 1 in 10 maybe? Physically we need water, food, shelter and medical care. Around 10% of US workforce is in agriculture, but a decent chunk of that is probably for providing non-essentials foodstuffs. So maybe only 10% work on actually providing all the essentials for human life.

Last time I was at the doctor's for a bone fracture I have been treated by people with tens of years of experience and education, in a gigantic building, and my bones were scanned by tools that cost millions and were science fiction 2 generations ago. Water food and shelter are not all there is to a comfortable life.

Agreed. That I why I had "and medical care" in the post :)

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#434

Post by ornornor »

arcbyte wrote: post #162
allen_berg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything gets old. I feel like a lot of the problems my friends and I have with software work comes down to having to wrangle the same sort of nonsense week in, week out. Alienation of the workers and all that. Profitable but psychologically damaging. We thrive when we get to be whole persons.

It's not profitable and we should stop saying that. The issue is that there's just not enough quality out there so companies accept less quality and have to start managing for it. If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.

> If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.

I don’t know this is true. My personal experience across a dozen jobs is that the only metric that really matters is “how low can you go?” Cost is the thing to minimize and quality is the absolute first thing to be considered optional and to be cut to fulfill the cost objective. Closely followed by “how fast can you go?” Not a pleasant way to work.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#435

Post by rightbyte »

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…

> Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better.

Less is more? Oh you are painting such a rosy picture of enterprise IT.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#436

Post by joquarky »

sebastianz wrote: post #411
jononor wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 in 100k is a stretch. But 1 in 10 maybe? Physically we need water, food, shelter and medical care. Around 10% of US workforce is in agriculture, but a decent chunk of that is probably for providing non-essentials foodstuffs. So maybe only 10% work on actually providing all the essentials for human life.

Last time I was at the doctor's for a bone fracture I have been treated by people with tens of years of experience and education, in a gigantic building, and my bones were scanned by tools that cost millions and were science fiction 2 generations ago. Water food and shelter are not all there is to a comfortable life.

"Comfortable" is a relative value.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#437

Post by randomdata »

htrp wrote: post #412
irrational wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the big companies because I can be paid a hefty six figure salary while working 4 hour days and spending the rest of the hours doing woodworking, gardening, home remodeling, baking, exercising, reading, etc.

Do you count the meetings as work?

Surely. It'd be hard to get to 4 hours otherwise.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#438

Post by jhjhjhjhjj »

The problem isn't whether or not you're a software engineer. The problem is finding balance. I started out as a mechanical engineer and eventually found my way to a software job that pays triple what I made as a ME and rarely requires me to work more than 35hrs/wk. That gives me plenty of money and time to build robots and make furniture as hobbies. Every once in a while I daydream that I'd rather be a chef, my other major hobby, but then I talk to chefs and they tell me either 1) fuck off with that shit 2) I will definitely be happier remaining in software. We as an industry are still insanely pampered and spoiled, even if our jobs are slightly less cushy than they were in 2021.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#439

Post by Aurornis »

irrational wrote: post #327
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…

I like the big companies because I can be paid a hefty six figure salary while working 4 hour days and spending the rest of the hours doing woodworking, gardening, home remodeling, baking, exercising, reading, etc.

I wish I could be so lucky. In recent years, every job I've worked for has reached a point where I had to endure 4 hours of meetings per day before we could even begin to get work done (if we were lucky)

The departments where people were casually putting in 4 hours per day mostly got axed during COVID and again during the 2024 recessions. There was a period of time where a lot of teams accumulated a lot of people so they could spread the work thin. Eventually management started catching on and put an end to that.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#440

Post by [deleted] »

digging wrote: post #244
ravenstine wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is fundamentally where I disagree with the person you're responding to and what seems like most programmers (or perhaps mostly web developers). If code is just instructions, it would look barely comprehensible to [most] programmers. Again, maybe I came off as more extreme than I actually am, because I think that consistent formatting is a very good thing most of the time, but that last 5-10% that programmer…

> What's also funny is that I've never worked anywhere that didn't have `eslint-disable` sprinkled everywhere. In many cases, these rules should be warning instead of errors, but because programmers love errors for some reason, virtually every rule violation needs to be an error. Well I'm quite proud of having owned a certain repo at work which takes exactly this approach. If I have to disable a rule more than once,…

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