> As a developer, I never managed to stick to the same job for more than two years. Ditto here.
Yeah same here. It might be better to design your business assuming you won't keep an individual more than a couple of years.
Coding is boring, unless
91–100 of 158 posts
Re: Coding is boring, unless
#92I don't understand how good programmers can have boring work.
Any work you have that's not interesting is work that should have be done by a computer for you. If your computer can't trivially obtain and solve the work, the interesting work clearly isn't done.
Just using tools or applying well-known solutions to known problems is boring, sure. But that's operational work. I believe our job is to eliminate operational work by building better (at the omega point, fully automated) tools.
Re: Coding is boring, unless
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen these types of projects where a few developers just went overboard with all the new frameworks and languages. Two years or so later most of them have moved on and other devs are stuck with technologies that are now considered outdated. Especially in the JS world, that's a real scenario. I am all for keeping your engineers happy. Heck I am one of them. "Exciting" can mean "better architecture" or "extensible…
> other devs are stuck with technologies that are now considered outdated Isn't that a case of not letting developers rewrite anything? How did it got so outdated? Anyway, the Javascript world sucks. Frameworks shouldn't get outdated in just a few years, and any tech where they do is doing something very wrong.
> Isn't that a case of not letting developers rewrite anything? How did it got so outdated?
If you're writing (or rewriting) using whatever's hip/new there's a good chance it will be "outdated" within a few years. New languages and frameworks come out all the time and nobody is able to determine with certainty which have real staying power - but something that has been in [wide] use for 10+ years is much more likely to still be widely used ten years from now than something that just came out last year.
Think of it like music, people have been listening to Mozart for centuries - it's highly likely a hundred years from now people will still enjoy his music. It's a lot less likely they'll be listening to Taylor Swift (nothing against her / her music - just using her as an example of someone who's very popular right now).
Re: Coding is boring, unless
#94This is missing my biggest trick: one of my biggest ways of fighting boredom with code is focusing on meaning. E.g., if I'm building a system to serve particular people, I meet them, I visit their offices, I watch them work. I also like watching user tests and taking support calls. Even when some particular block of code isn't technically fancy, I'm not bored by it as long as it's of use to people.
Of course, once you start doing this, you're not really a "coder" any more, you're somebody who uses code to solve problems for people. This doesn't fit neatly into some managers' pigeonholes, but I think it results in much better products, so I'm ok with that.
Re: Coding is boring, unless
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I rarely visited SO for answers and I went through the novice phase like everyone else but I didn't pick the path of least resistance every time I'm faced with a technical problem, because I have a held belief that you can't accumulate knowledge and expertise if you don't polish your debugging/troubleshooting skills and make yourself go through the painful process of solving technical problems on your own without the…
If you write a paper you also first cite what is state of the art. Before you go into details what Innovation you came up with. So researching SO first, before reinventing the Wheel. Resembles more the scientific way of problem solving. You can also learn a lot by reading and understanding all the different solutions that are often given to a Problem. Your time is better used if you solve new problems or find a bette…
It's hard to argue much about this because nobody so far said what kind of problem we're trying to solve.
But I feel the first step should be going to the documentation of whatever language or library you're using, rather than Stack Overflow. SO will tell you the answer to a single question, the docs usually give some more information (you don't get "use this option", but "here are the options and this is what they do") so the chance is higher that next time, you'll just know the answer.
Of course when inexplicable things happen or when docs are bad, SO can be pure gold.
Re: Coding is boring, unless
#96> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process. In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. Th…
It's a wise decision if you care about engineers being engaged and liking their job.
I've personally seen this cost a company millions of dollars and years without a next product.
Re: Coding is boring, unless
#97> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process. In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. Th…
The business perspective shouldn't overlook the direct and indirect costs of engineer turnover.
Let them leave. They'll leave anyway.
Re: Coding is boring, unless
#98> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process. In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. Th…
The author assumes that you'll lose engineers in about 2 years if you don't keep coding fun and he assumes that trying new things when coding is fun. If you agree with those two assumptions, then the guess it is a good value proposition he proposes.
Even if you accept that, the cure may be worse than the disease. You'll lose programmers in under 2 years if they have to maintain a mishmash of learn-as-you-go style code with multiple quirky build and deploy systems, which seems to be a common result of the "write it in a new language" attitude.
When you're learning a new language you usually end up with unidiomatic code, and can't use the language tools effectively yet. The most "exciting" languages may not even have a stable tool set.
Re: Coding is boring, unless
#99> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process. In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. Th…
It's a wise decision if you care about engineers being engaged and liking their job.
If an engineer gets bored and leaves because they wanted to rewrite your codebase and you said no, that's probably not an engineer you wanted to retain anyway.
Even if you said yes, you're only kicking the problem down the field a bit, because six months later they'll get just get bored of the new stuff they've rewritten and will want to move on to rewriting something else. Ad infinitum.
I consider these people the "90% engineers", meaning they like to take a project from 0% to 90% complete, but then once the going gets tough, and they're no longer writing new code but trying to track down the bugs in their existing code, they decide it's no longer fun and need to move on to something else.
These people usually fail to realize the implicit risks associated with throwing away an existing codebase and starting over from scratch. All that time spent ensuring the business logic is correct and tracking down obscure bugs will need to be repeated in their new rewrite. (Spolsky elaborates: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html)
These people are essentially spinning their (or rather, their company's) wheels by creating more work for themselves, without actually getting anything done.
Re: Coding is boring, unless
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't these vagabond workers destined to leave anyway? They seem to me that they have this wanderlust to switch jobs and try something new every couple year and get a kick out of it. I don't think that there's much to do to retain them and make them feel excited all the time.
They can often be the ones who love their craft, enjoying evaluating new approaches, spend their own time coding and learning the latest frameworks, and can be the best coders on the team, able to tackle the more difficult problems with the best solutions.
But also refuse to maintain either the software they wrote or the older version that is still bringing in money while the new version is being written.
Chuck 'em. Nobody needs that type of developer.