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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

#81

Post by dukeyukey »

oersted wrote: post #17
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #2

> when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes Feels like a very outsized reaction to have to something well-intentioned, useful, and not-ridiculous.

I agree, "T-shirt sizes" sounds absurd and provocative, but XS, S, M, L, XL... is a very sane and simple scale for rough estimates of anything.

Yeah I'm happy doing that. Trying to estimate a new epic in story points when I only just got told about it is ridiculous, but I can usually give a rough S-M-L guess.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#82

Post by wccrawford »

holbrad wrote: post #49
kristiandupont wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN loves to make this claim but it just doesn't match my experience, from several teams. Estimates are not precise, obviously, but that doesn't mean that they are impossible to make or that they add no value.

I mean I've routeninly seen estimates be 3-5x longer that projected. It's up to you if you thing that's an accurate enough estimate or not.

I have personally produced estimates of 2 weeks that took 2 months, and estimates of 2 months that took 2 weeks. For years, I told my boss that implementing a certain feature would be "very hard" and basically wasn't worth it. When we actually pulled the trigger on it, it was done and deployed in a week.

I'm sure some people are significantly better than me at estimates, but I haven't met them. Estimating the unknown without serious research that borders on just doing the job is nigh impossible. And we're just an in-house dev team, so we never, ever do the same thing twice.

Estimating how long to put up another wordpress site is a lot easier than estimating a new project with new requirements and new tools. I typically find that people who think estimating is easy are just doing the same things over and over for new clients, rather than doing new things all the time for the same client/employer.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#83

Post by jstanley »

anonzzzies wrote: post #18
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #8

> software dev as we know it is about to disappear soon Pushing back on this a bit. We see promises and people working on this. But I haven’t seen anything definitive yet, and LLMs have their own existential threats around amount and quality of data. Recent article involving trying to get LLMs to reason about law required very fine task decomposition to get move forward. What we don’t know is whether doing this and t…

Hobbies outside work can still be coding. Code is not the same as it was with LLMs but it’s more effective for work and outside work. The LLMs just help but for me they don’t make coding less enjoyable outside modern web crap that is.

Why do LLMs make working on modern web crap less enjoyable?

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#84

Post by sanitycheck »

withinboredom wrote: post #63
sanitycheck wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

My point is that you can't estimate time with any accuracy. At the end of the day, even this fix and shenanigans was still "easy" once we knew what was going on. The effort never changed and we would have been dead on. The issue is when trying to say, "It will take me two weeks to do this," and it actually takes two weeks -- there are simply too many unknowns for ANY task in our industry for us to actually be confide…

Not to the day, but you can estimate a range based on experience. After that deployment issue you may add "release could be delayed by up to a week" to future estimates until you're sure it's fixed.

I've written TV apps and in that world I've often given estimates that are 5 days of actual work but, because Samsung's QA process can take 6 weeks and spurious rejections are common, "deployment" will often take literally months.

Time to release and time for development can be totally different things and it's arguable whether "waiting" time should be included in any individual estimate at all. (You're adding 4 separate features and doing 2 bugfixes in one release, which one gets +2 months? In reality "submit/release" becomes a different ticket/task.)

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#85

Post by RaoulP »

helpfulContrib wrote: post #31

I've recently started gardening as an alternative to the near-daily exhaustion I feel as a result of hacking just too hard on things. Let me tell you, there is nothing more joyous than going outside 3 days after planting new seed varieties in a recovered-soil hügel-bed, and seeing brand new leafy life reaching for the stars. I get the same sort of buzz out of watching seedlings push dirt out of the way, as I used to…

Vouched for this comment. I’m not sure why it was dead.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#86

Post by uxp100 »

mhaberl wrote: post #68

> Even my last team leader sent me a message out of the blue saying “I think I’ll run a bar. I want to be a bartender and listen to other people’s stories, not figure out why protobuf doesn’t deserialize data that worked JUST FINE for the past three years”. I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to th…

Yeah, I know a few white collar workers bartending or in a kitchen, one weekday night or so, but they had a lot of experience with the service industry before they got a white collar job, and worked in lower paying business side and non tech engineering jobs where the extra money was a little more appreciated, if not their main reason for being there. (The bartender wanted “forced” socialization and the cook was a food enthusiast who wanted to keep his skills sharp). I’m not saying a “techie” wouldn’t or couldn’t do it, but if they’ve never done it before they don’t know if they’re the type of person who would be burnt out by it or rejuvenated.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#88

Post by Difwif »

demondemidi wrote: post #78
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 worked for big companies, startups, and freelance. If you don’t take control of your career you will be unfulfilled. Software has the pick of the litter. The winning combination is a big company and a role you chose. Security, compensation, and creativity all in one. Startups are 90% likely to fail, contracting will set you back late in life if you don’t hustle all the time. YMMV but nothing beats a blue chip.

One man's garden of eden is another's hell on earth. I've gone back and forth between big and small. I'm genuinely happy at small companies with tight knit teams (getting abused by csuite for shit pay ofc). At big companies I get extremely depressed in a corporate hell scape mostly surrounded by people that have maintained sanity by dissociating from the job and collecting a paycheck.

I'm trying to start my own business now without going down the consulting route. At the very least I tell myself that the spoils of the hustle go to me. Let's see how this phase goes.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#89

Post by pawjast »

I like coding and don't feel like burn out yet.

But it's great to have other passions outside of it. To get away from your main occupation. To reset and to get a perspective.

And woodworks seems like a good choice. You're still making things, physical ones and you can hone your skill.

I've made a handful of things in my life (e.g. two simple custom beds for my home) without any prior knowledge of wood working at all. They weren't great, but good enough. And I couldn't have been prouder.

So thanks for sharing your story. I might get back to tinkering in my garage more often!

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#90

Post by anonzzzies »

jstanley wrote: post #83
anonzzzies wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hobbies outside work can still be coding. Code is not the same as it was with LLMs but it’s more effective for work and outside work. The LLMs just help but for me they don’t make coding less enjoyable outside modern web crap that is.

Why do LLMs make working on modern web crap less enjoyable?

Too many hallucinations because changes in fast changing libraries. It makes up functions that were removed and libraries that have been deprecated. With robust stuff that doesn’t happen. It is frustrating. Even copilot regularly includes some react lib that doesn’t work anymore for the past 3 years because it depended on old stuff that is full of security issues, bugs or doesn’t work on a new node etc etc. So then I spend more time on finding what is the newest (greatest … cough) thing to replace it than I would have done just searching google.
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