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Coding is boring, unless

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Re: Coding is boring, unless

#51

Post by lordnacho »

ggambetta wrote: post #2

> Because 50% of my code (hyperbole intended!) was a direct copy/paste of Stack Overflow. And another 40% was a copy/paste from other scripts. Either my colleagues’ scripts or my own. It became repetitive. And there was little creativity or learning involved. How is this even possible? I've never had a job where copying and pasting code would have helped. It blows my mind every time I read this kind of claim, to the…

If what you're building is pretty standard, it might work, especially if there's no performance element. Web type stuff can often be "take this widget and glue it to this page" in which case it's almost directly from SO.

Pretty much everything I do requires parts that came from SO, but it's more like I get a bunch of puzzle pieces and then think about a smart way to assemble the big picture.

Then there's the profiling and arrangement that only makes sense on my particular codebase. No way to SO that.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#52

Post by lordnacho »

How does salary come into this? You'd think people would be able to stand the boredom a bit better if they got paid more.

For instance, I know people in banking who are getting 1200GBP a day doing nothing special in some Java CRUD. But it's not that easy to find something interesting like what you read about in startup land that pays nearly as much.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#53

Post by ryandrake »

gotchange wrote: post #6
ggambetta wrote: post #2

> Because 50% of my code (hyperbole intended!) was a direct copy/paste of Stack Overflow. And another 40% was a copy/paste from other scripts. Either my colleagues’ scripts or my own. It became repetitive. And there was little creativity or learning involved. How is this even possible? I've never had a job where copying and pasting code would have helped. It blows my mind every time I read this kind of claim, to the…

It always amazes me that there are people out there willing to hire and pay full these type of workers who scour SO for answers without working hard on the problem and expanding their knowledge and expertise in the process. No wonder that our field and profession is suffering from bad image and quality problem when so-called pros copy and paste all the time on the job.

Why? Do you get more sales or market share if your engineers are sitting there working hard on inventing wheels that are one Google search away?

You're the manager. The engineers on your team have 20 or so tasks to do, rote, boring stuff, such as "serialize object X to JSON" and "send serialized stream to server Y". Would you rather your team 1. take a day or so to "work real hard" re-implementing JSON serialization, or 2. just copy/paste something already working, spend an hour or so adapting it to the project, then move on to the next task?

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#54

Post by walshemj »

gotchange wrote: post #26
sohcahtoa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two ways to view what the job most programmers do is. IMO it isn't to write code, it's to solve business problems. Code just happens to be the tool that you use to do that, most of the time. Anyone who tries to solve a problem by staring hard at a blank piece of paper instead of just googling the answer is not making effective use of their time.

Technical workers solve technical problems not business problems. Upper management folks instead solve business problems. Our job as techies is to model/define the business problem in technical terms and then work on it. That's why they pay us and if some are not competent or proficient enough with their tech tools, that will reflect poorly on the quality of their finished product and copying and pasting won't always…

Sorry you are totally wrong here

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#55

Post by mbrock »

walshemj wrote: post #49
TeMPOraL wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been to the offices that look like that - I always assumed it's a typical startup setup. Frankly, I probably wouldn't last more than a week in such conditions - I don't respond well to sharing personal space with other people for prolonged periods of time.

And doing serious development on lap tops realy! you need some decent 2 or 3 monitor set ups with a nice i7 workstations with some nicer mechanical keyboards and mice. Yes I know you can get docks etc for laptops but its far more expensive for the same performance.

Need? Depends. I don't. I'm happy with a laptop and a bit of privacy. Different strokes.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#56

Post by gotchange »

DennisP wrote: post #46
binwiederhier wrote: post #37

> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process. In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. Th…

The business perspective shouldn't overlook the direct and indirect costs of engineer turnover.

Aren't these vagabond workers destined to leave anyway?

They seem to me that they have this wanderlust to switch jobs and try something new every couple year and get a kick out of it. I don't think that there's much to do to retain them and make them feel excited all the time.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#57

Post by jschwartzi »

asveikau wrote: post #47

Reads like a whiner to me. Gets bored and switches jobs every two years? Doesn't want to maintain anything not written by him when he can rewrite it? These are immature attitudes. I bet his rewrites introduce a ton of new bugs because he hasn't taken the time to understand what the old thing did.

Why? I'm bored with my job. What is missed is that you get bored with a company because they're treating you like a fixed resource. You get assigned tasks in your area of usefulness, which everybody takes for granted because that's all they've ever seen you do.

You ask for time to do useful things like work on the build system or refactor some stuff to use a new language feature, but because your boss is uncomfortable letting you branch out, they ignore you. You might get assigned some busywork documentation while all the real decisions are made after hours and with no input.

Essentially, you get bored with a job for the same reasons you get bored with an SO. They slip into a state of taking you for granted.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#58

Post by edw519 »

OP claims:

  Too Long; Didn’t Learn
  Maintaining legacy code is boring.
  Copy/pasting is boring.
  Internal tools are usually boring.
  Being a code-monkey is boring.
  The day-to-day always gets boring.
These things are usually true when you're not building something cool and meaningful.

These things are rarely true when you ARE building something cool and meaningful.

So...

Coding is boring, unless…

You're building something cool and meaningful.

That's pretty much been the way I've always seen it. Take OP's 6 headlines and add all the other stuff like:

  workspace
  equipment
  boss
  commute
  money
and I still believe that if you're building something cool and meaningful, you put up with everything else and if you're not, you'll find a million things you don't like.

What you build is the issue. Everything else rest are details.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#59

Post by digi_owl »

binwiederhier wrote: post #37

> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process. In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. Th…

quite. It seems to be the curse of the era that the techies are constantly chasing the "shiny". It seems that the web, through the likes of PHP and JS, has turned "programming" into a form of self expression. That the language used etc is supposed to say something about the programmer as a person.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#60

Post by campers »

gotchange wrote: post #56
DennisP wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business perspective shouldn't overlook the direct and indirect costs of engineer turnover.

Aren't these vagabond workers destined to leave anyway? They seem to me that they have this wanderlust to switch jobs and try something new every couple year and get a kick out of it. I don't think that there's much to do to retain them and make them feel excited all the time.

They can often be the ones who love their craft, enjoying evaluating new approaches, spend their own time coding and learning the latest frameworks, and can be the best coders on the team, able to tackle the more difficult problems with the best solutions.
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