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

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

#721

Post by TranquilMarmot »

cutemonster wrote: post #651
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> mess with our culture What did they change/do? If I may ask

It was a very slow creep of changes. For the first year, they really didn't change much (except gutted our health insurance plan and got rid of "unlimited" vacation).

Eventually, they tried to get us to integrate with more and more of their other products, which introduced a TON of extra "stakeholders" on every single project.

With every extra stakeholder they also had to introduce extra meetings and extra process until even making a small change felt like a massive chore. I went from merging dozens of changes a week to maybe one or two.

Felt pretty claustrophobic after a bit so I ended up leaving to go somewhere smaller.

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

#722

Post by Malky »

Sounds like you could enjoy being a security engineer and focus of identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities in sofware/systems. More problem solving, less engineering. Or maybe just go for a pet project with people you actually like, because the aversion to processes might just be a sign of bad management.

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

#723

Post by Falkon1313 »

torben-friis wrote: post #269
matsemann wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I often feel lots of important details or edge cases are only discovered when you start programming. It's a reason waterfall was abandoned. Planning, prototyping and then making a more informed decision is my goto approach, instead of planning forever. Actually, I often feel the architects that think they've "fully solved the problem" are full of themselves, and just not smart enough to realize all the things th…

> It's a reason waterfall was abandoned. Waterfall vs agile is not really about how much effort you put into design, it’s about how long the plan-code-reassess cycle is. You should not plan a whole year ahead and then act, it’s better to plan the next couple of weeks. But you still need to define how the work for those weeks fits in the system, the load it’s expected to take, the metrics that tell you it’s working, h…

Despite having somehow done this successfully for many years, I still find 2 weeks total for the entirety of requirements gathering, planning, designing, developing, reviewing, and testing (plus all the meetings and documentation and jira cards etc.) is kind of an incomprehensible timeline for anything but the most trivial fix.

We're building entire skyscrapers and cathedrals by gluing a few toothpicks together at a time. Because that's all there's time for in a sprint. It shows in the quality of modern software, and the never-ending updates necessary to keep them from collapsing.

Of course planning it all out years in advance and then executing blindly on those plans without ever correcting course wouldn't make sense either. But maybe a middle ground could be better than either extreme.

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

#724

Post by JohnBooty »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #701
JohnBooty wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was an interesting story to read. I would say it sounds more like "they didn't have the chops/experience to do it" and less like "they didn't want to do it?" In situations like that my instinct as a developer is to figure out the hard part first. Some sort of prototype to prove that hey, this design works and can serve X requests per second. In other words some basic prototyping and research... a "spike" in scru…

If they had tried and failed I would agree it wasn’t that they had the chops. They wouldn’t even try. That was avoiding doing hard things in my book. And honestly, I fully believe they could have done it. And really, it wasn‘t actually hard, it’s change a data structure and do some data mapping. Hence avoiding actual work.

Ah. It sucks that you had to deal with that.

Thanks for replying BTW!

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

#725

Post by tsunamifury »

015a wrote: post #366
tsunamifury wrote: post #321

Every few months or so we get these really circle jerky posts by engineers who believe the world of business is them just pumping out code and somehow getting paid. 1) that’s the difference between a job and a hobby. You do the hard parts you’re paid to do sometimes. 2) decisions you don’t like by stakeholders you don’t like aren’t always wrong just because you see some way to “code it”. A product is not just its cod…

And every time these posts come around, someone immediately jumps in and plays a character in Office Space, saying "oh the engineers don't like talking to people, that's why I'm valuable". Look at all the recent layoffs; get the data and ask around "how many Engineers with 1+ years of seniority were impacted by the layoffs". The number is dwarfed by literally every other business function. Dwarfed. Your probability o…

Sir, in complete humility, you need to take a deep breath and shed whatever bad junk is embedded deep inside you. Your response is both: not about what was said, and re-enforcing negative stereotypes people have about engineers being arrogant and naive.

I get you might be scared for some reason, or think you're the best most invaluable engineer in the world. But let me introduce you to a team of 1000 more engineers just like you that I've lead, fired, replaced, etc. Be humble, be realistic, know how you contribute and do it. Doing the hard work is a big part of the work, not just the whatever you want to do. Of course people value engineering, but they aren't the only thing that makes a product go.

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

#726

Post by nchohan »

Evfank wrote: post #613
_z048 wrote: post #612

Come join us at Upmortem. We're working on an AI slack bot. We cut all the nonsense out. No stand-ups. No people on call. Just pure development. Email me at [redacted]

I googled Upmortem and the first result is for "upmortem.com - Blameless Post Mortems: Upmortem" but page doesn't load due to missing DNS entries. Don't know if this is your company, but it rhymed well with what you wrote here (no people on call) which I found a bit funny.

I wouldn't lie to you!

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

#727

Post by HarrySto »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #571

Yes. Although I'd argue that refactoring and rewriting are part of the programming fun. "sprint", "agile", design docs, red tape, bureaucracy, policy, and meetings are the crappy part. I just want to write code. I will work on the most boring problems. I don't care. Hard or easy. Features, infra, whatever. Just let me write beautiful code.

it is worth writing not only beautiful code, but also unique. You can use the https://apprefactoring.com/ service

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

#728

Post by cutemonster »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #721
cutemonster wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mess with our culture What did they change/do? If I may ask

It was a very slow creep of changes. For the first year, they really didn't change much (except gutted our health insurance plan and got rid of "unlimited" vacation). Eventually, they tried to get us to integrate with more and more of their other products, which introduced a TON of extra "stakeholders" on every single project. With every extra stakeholder they also had to introduce extra meetings and extra process un…

How interesting! (And sad, I hope that / guess that the new place is/was better)

> integrate with more and more of their other products, which introduced a TON of extra "stakeholders"

That scenario I hadn't heard about before. Good to know about that way for things to fail, too.

If you haven't seen:

"Excess management is costing the U.S. $3T per year (2016)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34290539

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

#729

Post by cutemonster »

krageon wrote: post #709
cutemonster wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mess with our culture What did they change/do? If I may ask

At a guess, having seen this before: - Paperwork - Extra managers - Lots of "stakeholder management"

Seems that was a good guess, have a look at the sibling reply :-)
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