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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

#51

Post by MyFirstSass »

mavamaarten wrote: post #14
withinboredom wrote: post #3

Supporting software is the hardest job, IMHO. People ask some really dumb stuff -- not out of stupidity, but of ignorance; they just don't know what they are asking. To them, the "why is this broken" is "100% your fault and 100% fixable but you are too lazy to fix it." It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing with if you can help it.

Absolutely. People nag our customer service until they get redirected to us (software engineers). When you finally spend expensive time looking into their issue, finding the root cause on their end, take the time to explain it in detail, more often than not the answer is among the lines of "couldn't be bothered to read your response, it still doesn't work, fix it!". I love software development. I love building both s…

Same in many industries.

I have friends who are restaurateurs and people are often extremely ungrateful, demanding and straight up mean.

Most don't earn a lot, margins are slim and people are late, you have to perform 100% for each dish, then people don't show up, get mad when arriving late, want well done when they say rare, or think the chef can just magically change the recipes to accommodate bizarre allergies or lifestyle choices when juggling 20 dishes at a time with a kitchen that off course has been prepped to the max and a few dollars on the brink of bankruptcy.

Ie. people are just people. Better get used to it, same with employees.

I have so many insane stories about this personally.

I once made a PDF processing tool for a company that saved them a lot of time, was pretty expensive and worked brilliantly until it "definitely broke" and i used 1 stressful month back and fourth figuring out why until i saw it was an employe that always "personalised" the PDF's with cute emojis, saved it before sending it further up the chain actively corrupting it so TOC and links were destroyed because of an old version of Acrobat Reader - this was after i asked 10 times if anyone tampered with it in any way.

It's always some human process, organisation, idiosyncrasy or politics taking up 80% of the time while 20% is spent on the actual work.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#52

Post by ravenstine »

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…

At a level or two down from the abstraction of company size, crafting hobbies are also a reprieve from the tyranny of linters. So many programmers today believe that code is always better when it all looks identical. Consistency is a good thing, but not when it's expected to be absolute. Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code. Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to format your code in a way that violates the rules in some trivial way.

With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work. The tools they use are intended to help them accomplish something and aren't there to prevent you from doing anything.

It's possible to do personal software projects however one wants, but one will no doubt be faced with the modern compulsion to want to "do the right thing" and add a bunch of time wasting tooling. If you don't, and you share your code, inevitably someone is going to want to add a bunch of rules and bureaucracy to your software that was already working and free of serious problems in the first place.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#53

Post by sukruh »

lucianbr wrote: post #46
xenocratus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, fast-growing companies can grow out of my preference zone and as other commenters said, jumping ship when that happens may be the correct way to go.

There are other issues with slow-growing or not-growing companies. When the company is not growing, people are incentivized to take a zero-sum approach to their work relationships. If the pie is not growing, you need to guard your own slice and take from others. This creates a toxic environment. If the company is growing, then collaborating on growing the pie can become the shared attitude.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#54

Post by surfingdino »

withinboredom wrote: post #3

Supporting software is the hardest job, IMHO. People ask some really dumb stuff -- not out of stupidity, but of ignorance; they just don't know what they are asking. To them, the "why is this broken" is "100% your fault and 100% fixable but you are too lazy to fix it." It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing with if you can help it.

I stay away from "civilians", i.e. companies that do not already have an IT department tasked with software development. They do not know how software works and refuse to meet the most basic requirements for learning how to use software or for entering data.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#55

Post by Arainach »

ravenstine wrote: post #52
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…

At a level or two down from the abstraction of company size, crafting hobbies are also a reprieve from the tyranny of linters. So many programmers today believe that code is always better when it all looks identical. Consistency is a good thing, but not when it's expected to be absolute. Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but impor…

Consistency is critical for reducing mental load when working as a team. Format your personal projects however you want, but when collaborating your editor should apply the standard format every time you save.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#56

Post by usrnm »

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

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#57

Post by sanitycheck »

withinboredom wrote: post #45
sanitycheck wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds annoying, but seems like you found a bug in the upgrading system that could have struck anyone during any change?

The time/work to investigate and fix it probably wasn't considered (or shouldn't have been, at least) part of the work on the component you were changing - that was just delayed, same as it would be in scenarios like "Dave got hit by a bus and he's the only one with the prod password" and "Our CI service suddenly went out of business and we need to migrate everything".

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#58

Post by ravenstine »

withinboredom wrote: post #3

Supporting software is the hardest job, IMHO. People ask some really dumb stuff -- not out of stupidity, but of ignorance; they just don't know what they are asking. To them, the "why is this broken" is "100% your fault and 100% fixable but you are too lazy to fix it." It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing with if you can help it.

That and there's essentially no respect for the need to make existing software better. Product owners want feature upon feature and usually aren't interested in actual UX polish as long as the design looks pretty enough. Software engineers usually either don't have much power to push back against this or, if they do, they tend to be spineless.

By and large, we are not doing a good job, and we are not often allowed to actually do a good job. Modern software frustrates me to no end, and in the last few years I've been noticing more non-technical folks getting frustrated. Everyone expects apps and websites to randomly fail in stupid ways or do things in ways that are not intuitive. I barely want to tell anyone I'm a software engineer at this point because it's embarrassing.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#59

Post by lomase »

withinboredom wrote: post #21
zoul wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But sorting issues according to their rough size is precisely what makes at least basic sense. A scale of trivial (can make many of those in a day), simple (several of those a day), medium (roughly a day of work) or large (days) makes it possible to have at least basic conversation around work planning. I’m not extra sold about calling those by shirt sizes, but I’m sure we’re on the better end of the absurdity scale…

At that point, you are estimating EFFORT, not time. Software engineers are REALLY GOOD at estimating effort. The fact that they translate to time (simple == several days) is ephemeral.

I think that is how Agile is suposed to work. The programmer stimates how hard the task is relative to other task he has done.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#60

Post by surfingdino »

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 learned to play the game. I too really enjoy being able to talk directly to the client while building, but I also learned to play the game of cogs, where I am separated from the client by layers of increasingly clueless management. I balance the insanity with pursuing photography.
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