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“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

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Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#511

Post by qurren »

apothegm wrote: post #481
qurren wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm already unfazed at that part and don't care. What devastated me this week is that I was slogging so hard for the past several months trying to deliver on what I was asked to deliver on, only took 1 week of PTO out of the 4 weeks I have saved up, spent nights and weekends trying to honestly solve multiple high priority yet HARD problems that 500 other engineers in the company couldn't solve, I'm making good progre…

I hope you’re already looking for a different job. Because it’s never worthwhile in the long run to sacrifice your own mental or physical health for someone else’s career prospects or profit.

Yeah, I am casually looking.

This job is already way better than my previous job at Amazon, where people were more actively sabotaging each other. At my current company there is actual teamwork, at least :/ and my entire set of peers all gave me hugely positive reviews, just not my manager, who is going by some written "bar".

I honestly can't seem to find any company that has sane health standards and work-life balance anymore.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#512

Post by twister2920 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #483
pnt12 wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not have the customer talk to an llm and iterate on the plan? Many customers will appreciate the 30m back and forth replacing the multiple hour meetings. People are subtracting a lot of hard parts from their thinking, and think it's simpler than it is. What happens when the test suite isn't testing the real thing? The ci/cd doesn't even start? There is a bug requiring a hot fix ASAP? The code is growing into a na…

> Why not have the customer talk to an llm and iterate on the plan? They already do that, hence the SaaSpocalypse. The hope for these AI companies is that the models get better than engineers such that the answer to all your questions is that the AI will handle it.

> They already do that, hence the SaaSpocalypse

The market believes they will do that, hence the SaaSpocalypse. very important difference

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#513

Post by dofm »

necovek wrote: post #502
dofm wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I said it was showing my age, this is because I went to uni nearly 35 years ago. Back then, well pre-web, at a university that turned out chartered engineers who were on many of the same modules as we were, there was a consensus building that some areas of technology would be regulated to require chartered engineers. I was on an accredited degree course from the professional body who seemed sure, any time now, t…

I got you, but I believe a lot of the ground rules that would be in effect would make sense: a good SDLC — one that I was part of since ~20 years ago — with automated CI/CD, IaaC, reviews, constrained change requests, architectural processes, but all along very agile and able to ship quality changes in ~1-2h, was always necessary to ship good software. Building Cybersecurity and Data Privacy in from the start is the…

> I got you, but I believe a lot of the ground rules that would be in effect would make sense

Yeah — perhaps unsurprisingly an industry struggling to cope with absurd complexity and change has invented and in some cases reinvented a lot of the kind of tooling and process that engineers were talking about in the 90s.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#514

Post by tremon »

kcexn wrote: post #465
pjmlp wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the countries where Engineering is a professional title and not something people decide to call themselves, we still know the difference.

In which countries are Software Engineers not allowed to call themselves engineers unless they are professionally qualified engineers?

The English term "software engineer" is not a protected title anywhere, FAFAIK. However, the local language equivalent of "engineer" is protected pretty much everywhere in Europe because it was awarded solely at technical colleges and universities. The title is (mostly) equivalent to a Master of Science degree, except that technical colleges could also award it (the English equivalent being Master without field designation).

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#515

Post by apothegm »

qurren wrote: post #511
apothegm wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you’re already looking for a different job. Because it’s never worthwhile in the long run to sacrifice your own mental or physical health for someone else’s career prospects or profit.

Yeah, I am casually looking. This job is already way better than my previous job at Amazon, where people were more actively sabotaging each other. At my current company there is actual teamwork, at least :/ and my entire set of peers all gave me hugely positive reviews, just not my manager, who is going by some written "bar". I honestly can't seem to find any company that has sane health standards and work-life balan…

Yikes! I wish you luck. I promise better workplaces do exist.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#516

Post by floweronthehill »

necovek wrote: post #182
bdangubic wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“understanding requirements” is as much “wearing other hats” as having hands is “wearing other hats” for a carpenter. coding is always the hard part, always. whenever I was on any project and we had more work than resource we never hired “people to wear other hats” - we hired people to write code, that’s it. thats the fucking job. you ever see a leet-code-for-understanding-requirements? yea, me either…

You actually do. All of those puzzle-style questions of the sort of "how many liters of water in Mediterranean" ask you to develop a solution with a vague requirement by leveraging what you know roughly to demonstrate you can specify requirements yourself (oh, Mediterranean is roughly 5000sqkm [-> I need surface area], on average 50m deep [-> I need average depth], this gives me A x B liters total) — I'd call these t…

These are called Fermi problems.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#517

Post by stefan_iarca »

agentultra wrote: post #336
ip26 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s getting everyone to understand the problems, working together (etc)… There are manuals for this too, and interestingly enough this has been studied since the Romans at least! Is it then really the hard part?

Apparently it is. Modern companies seem to prefer dysfunction over anything else. I have been trying to understand why for my whole career.

[flagged]

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#518

Post by erelong »

it's kind of like people talking about what makes a business successful: the idea or putting it in to practice

some say ideas a "a dime a dozen"; the prevailing message that "code was never the hard part" is kind of the reverse of this

In truth the top comment reports correctly that it probably varies from person to person; obviously for people working on intricate algorithms to solve cutting-edge problems, "code is the hard part"; for those who simply make use of existing algorithms like that but to maybe solve an existing problem for themselves or others, it's more about knowing that algorithm exists and making use of it and "code isn't the hard part" (for them)

hence you can probably identify where code is and isn't the hard part with different pursuits

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#519

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

thangalin wrote: post #442
ethin wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouchy. That isn't as bad as the slop I've seen: one example I saw a few weeks ago from vibe-coded software had this absolutely mind-blowing bit of Rust code: pub(crate) fn zeroed_safe () -> T { unsafe { std::mem::zeroed() } } pub(crate) fn read_unaligned_safe (src: const T) -> T { unsafe { std::ptr::read_unaligned(src) } } pub(crate) fn box_from_raw_safe (ptr: mut T) -> Box { unsafe { Box::from_raw(ptr) } } pub(crate…

JsonReader. CsvReader. JSON and CSV data fixtures. "Write tests," I said. "Use JSON fixtures, like the other tests," I directed. So it did: { "document": { "ElementA": "/home/username/project/valid-01.csv", "ElementB": "/home/username/project/valid-02.csv" } } Then Opus had the audacity to couple the JsonReader to the CsvReader so that it could parse the CSV file contents during JSON parsing ... introducing at least…

Yeah, that's what I mean by "they're much better at reviewing and debugging than writing code". When you ask opus to review for clarity, cleanliness, and minimalism using a clean context, what does it say about that? does it fix its own idiocy?

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#520

Post by tombert »

IshKebab wrote: post #263
tombert wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the massive shitshow of Windows 11 and all of its failings is a result of large quantities of vibe code being merged into the OS. People are noticing.

Windows 11 was released before vibe coding was viable. And the shit show seems to be that they push ads and bloatware on people, not that it doesn't work reliably. Windows 11 IoT LTSC has been absolutely rock solid for me on both machines I have it on. Waaay more stable and reliable than Linux, and even a bit better than Mac (which is also way better than Linux). If they are vibe coding anything, it hasn't had any ba…

It's not just "ads" and "bloatware". Recent updates have broken notepad and calculator.
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