Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 733 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#641

Post by t43562 »

lelanthran wrote: post #504
mindcrime wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't upvote this enough times. Time and time again you see this: people say "I hate agile because of X, Y and Z" where X, Y, and Z - at best - are orthogonal to the idea of Agile, and at worst (and perhaps even "ordinarily") are complete anathema to the spirit of Agile. Sorry, but anybody who thinks Agile is about velocity, story points, planning poker, standups, retrospectives, backlog grooming, etc. has been sold…

> Sorry, but anybody who thinks Agile is about velocity, story points, planning poker, standups, retrospectives, backlog grooming, etc. has been sold a bill of goods. Now that's not to say that those things don't have (some) value. Spot on. You and parent have hit the two points that matter: 1. Agile is about removing impediments to productivity 2. velocity, story points, planning poker, standups, retrospectives, bac…

Yes, the business leadership almost always put an impossible waterfall approach ontop - they don't adapt to change at all well and are not really leading.

For me the value in Agile is what we end up NOT doing - we never get to that shit because in the end it's not that important. So we never waste time doing it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#642

Post by t43562 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #382
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" OK, not terrible, but why not "interactions and tools over individuals and processes"? De-emphasize individual's egos and ritualized processes, focus on the things that get work done and communication between entities. "Working software over comprehensive documentation" Tends to make very frustrating-to-use software, because it's never fully working and has…

> "Working software over comprehensive documentation" > Tends to make very frustrating-to-use software, because it's never fully working and has minimal documentation. Another problem: It makes onboarding new engineers difficult. Without any documentation on what each API endpoint does, or the purpose of every repo, getting an understanding of how the system works ends up requiring scanning through code manually or t…

Rather have a big document for a program that doesn't work?

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#643

Post by shahidkarimi »

13 years ago I was so passionate about programing and software engineering. I used to stay in front of screen consucutively for 48 hours. But, now I realize that it was not for me. I tried to commit sucide three times. I was not good at soft skills. Though I solved many complex technical problems at work but did not excel in career. Its been 4 months I am jobless and I dont want to code again. I think software engineering and coding is the most painful job on the earth. I prefer death over doing it again. On the other hand I am running out of cash, I have two kids not sure what will happen in next 3 months.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#644

Post by t43562 »

barrenko wrote: post #170
mpweiher wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> agile has killed the happiness...meetings...rituals...meta-work...not actual productivity. All of that isn't actual agile. It's Fauxgile and has nothing to do with what agile is about, which is about removing impediments to productivity, removing meetings (why were there standups? Because they shouldn't exist in the first place, and if you absolutely positively can't avoid them then at least make them as short as p…

Agile is like socialism at times.

Well, you probably like paid time off (as American companies like to call it) and that's a socialist thing. Potentially you might enjoy free healthcare if you could get it - at least you get free policing and defense.

Which country implements pure capitalism? What would that even look like? 0 tax? having to pay private police companies? ....

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#645

Post by t43562 »

misja111 wrote: post #272
kraig911 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000x times this. It's a weird thing our profession. There's a horrible but apt (misogynistic even) saying. Happily married men are happy husbands - Unhappily married men are great philosophers. I really feel agile has killed the happiness of our industry because it's met with a lot of back and forth, meetings, rituals, and meta-work and not actual productivity (If agile is done well though it can be amazing but that…

> I really feel agile has killed the happiness of our industry because it's met with a lot of back and forth, meetings, rituals, and meta-work and not actual productivity Agile was created to beat exactly those things that you are mentioning. Then Agile became big, enterprise became aware of it and smothered it with their rituals, processes and bureaucracy. And now we're back where we started again.

At higher management levels people are trying to "achieve" some goals and of course "agile" means that you are constantly evaluating what to achieve and discarding some of it while perhaps adding new things. There's less agility higher up because I think it takes too long for any of those goals to be proven stupid (or proven smart) so it's waterfall ontop and agile underneath and that's obviously a clash.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#646

Post by TranquilMarmot »

mulmen wrote: post #363
davidw wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real "unicorns" are * Small/medium size companies where you recognize most everyone even if you don't work with them. There are enough people so you don't have to do things you're not qualified for like in the very early days of a startup. * Steady growth, but not crazy, venture fueled moonshots. * Selling something that earns enough money to grow the business in a fairly organic way. I worked in a place…

I worked in a place like that and it was awesome. Unfortunately we were so good at what we did across the board that we got bought by another company to integrate into their larger offering. It made a lot of sense from a business perspective but the tech team in our office was made redundant and so my time there came to an end. I think this is the inevitable conclusion to good, small companies. Since it actually work…

I was going to say the same thing. Worked at a mid-sized startup, great culture, amazing coworkers that I'm still friends with today. We did great work and got bought out by a large company who had promised not to mess with our culture too much. That didn't last very long haha

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#647

Post by t43562 »

jacobr1 wrote: post #316
kraig911 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000x times this. It's a weird thing our profession. There's a horrible but apt (misogynistic even) saying. Happily married men are happy husbands - Unhappily married men are great philosophers. I really feel agile has killed the happiness of our industry because it's met with a lot of back and forth, meetings, rituals, and meta-work and not actual productivity (If agile is done well though it can be amazing but that…

> I really feel agile has killed the happiness of our industry Waterfall had its own endless set of meetings and downsides. I'm not sure agile changed that at all in the large, regardless of how "well" agile was implemented. Some teams did have project management that "shielded" teams, but that can happen under agile too, depending upon how it is structured.

I've enjoyed it working well. It was much better than being project managed. A great deal of the time it let us toss out stupid requirements - they just sat at the bottom of the infinite backlog because they weren't needed yet.

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#648

Post by wpietri »

nullsense wrote: post #575
wpietri wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the older I get, the more I'm able to see how companies could be so much better, so much more effective. But that's not something executives really want most of the time. So I think what will eventually drive me to retire is not getting tired of making things, but an inability to put up with the gap between what's possible and what's actually going on.

This. The most succinct way I've ever heard it formulated is the quote "not everyone, in the final analysis, actually wants their problem solved"

Yeah, that's been a hard lesson for me to learn. When the nominal purpose differs greatly from the POSIWID purpose, I find it very frustrating. Very human, of course, and if that were all it was I could work with it. But at least in American business culture we musn't talk about POSIWID purposes. It'd be so much easier for me if we could just say, "Ok, grandboss, we recognize the most important thing for you here is you looking amazing to your boss so you can climb the ladder. But we'd all like to also get some work done for our users, so how can we make everybody happy?"

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#649

Post by wpietri »

59nadir wrote: post #534
wpietri wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, not so much. Most of the early Agile people I've had the chance to talk with are a bit horrified by what it's become.

Indeed. Most of the commentary I've seen from people who were around is that scrum isn't agile but just an impotent compromise made by people who thought business could never actually handle an actually agile (as in flexible) work methodology. I think they're mostly right; Scrum really isn't very flexible. On top of that, like most popular languages and technologies it isn't really good enough for people who care, bu…

Totally agreed! And "good enough for people who don't [care]" is exactly it. Mainstream adopters for anything don't want big improvements if they have to change: https://williampietri.com/writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-a...

Re: Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

#650

Post by wojciii »

jokab wrote: post #549
wojciii wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 20+ years of experience in different companies (software and just using software);and I never ever heard of this behaviour. I never changed job (Unusually work 2-4 years at one company) where I didn't have everything ready on my first day.

IBM and Accenture in the Philippines.

Ah. I live in the EU where they a person is quite expensive to onboard and it makes no sense to hire people to be idle.
Post reply on HN