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How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

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Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#91

Post by NikolaeVarius »

elliottkember wrote: post #81
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #6

I dont really understand the point of this article. Literally any system can be made romantic for the sheer fact that everything has spent hundreds of man-hours building up to it. The cheapest possible ballpoint pen is made up of years of research into the plastics, the machinery required to create bearings with the tolerances necessary, the exact chemical makeup of the ink etc etc. It just seems to be a waste of bra…

> It just seems to be a waste of brain-space to bother with making everything romantic. Is dancing is a waste of energy?

For me, yes complete waste of time and energy

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#92

Post by reaperducer »

infogulch wrote: post #44
rufus_foreman wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on an app that calls other internal services inside our company, one of them is a call to update an account balance. We were running into this issue where we were getting a 504 Gateway Timeout on the update balance call so I eventually found the Slack room for that team and asked about it. They ignored me for a couple weeks, but I kept asking and eventually someone answered and said yeah you'll get the 50…

I can guarantee you that 5 other teams rely on that specific behavior and don't have the will/independence ("budget") to implement that change if the api was fixed. Not only that, but if they did make that change, their manager would instantly have a handful of directors down their throat demanding an explanation why they just added work to their teams that are busy with Feature Work (TM).

don't have the will/independence ("budget") to implement that change

So, dicks and idiot middle managers. I think you made his point.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#94

Post by xmprt »

sombremesa wrote: post #51
picks_at_nits wrote: post #33

I am deeply, deeply romantic about programming. I consider it an act of self-actualization. But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry, and that's a good thing. It's easy to feel romantic about your vocation when you have a number of reasonable options for achieving modest financial security, and you thus had the privilege of choosing the one that most closely matched yo…

> For many, programming is the lowest-risk way to put a roof over their head and feed their family. It seems that to some extent the romantics are actually indebted to this cohort for pushing forth the ideas of fair compensation and fighting for workers' rights, because people who are passionate about their work usually end up getting taken advantage of.

Game Development is an example of what can happen when there are too many people passionate about their work. I'm not saying that everyone in that industry is taken advantage of but it's a lot more than the broader tech industry even though there's a lot of overlap between skill sets.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#95

Post by ggm »

Code which matters is like mathematics. It can be reasoned about, has respect for formalisms, may be subject to proof or inductive reasoning. It heads to things like type checking. I've never written any code like this. I often doubt I can.

Everything else is either ephemeral, or scripting, or should only waiting to be subject to tests against formalisms. Lots of things are broken in code which should not be btw.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#96

Post by [deleted] »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #27
rufus_foreman wrote: post #4

"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not." I guess I wish I felt like that about progra…

The longer I am in this profession (and it's been over 20 years) the less I see my peers as "dicks and idiots" but more as victims of the same broken game. I work with very smart people, to be honest. It's the technology and the employers and the culture of development that's the problem. Retiring sounds good right about now.

[deleted]

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#97

Post by mb7733 »

olav wrote: post #19
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #6

I dont really understand the point of this article. Literally any system can be made romantic for the sheer fact that everything has spent hundreds of man-hours building up to it. The cheapest possible ballpoint pen is made up of years of research into the plastics, the machinery required to create bearings with the tolerances necessary, the exact chemical makeup of the ink etc etc. It just seems to be a waste of bra…

It becomes rather interesting in my mind the moment you think about when the thing no longer exists. We loose so many things all the time, the ability to make stuff, the ability to repair things, even the use of drills and hammers quickly fades away for the TikTok generation. I love the notion of the OP and applaud initiatives like the various Smalltalks or https://gpblocks.org/ that try to keep the awe in our craft…

You think that young people don't use hammers?

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#98

Post by RickS »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #27
rufus_foreman wrote: post #4

"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not." I guess I wish I felt like that about progra…

The longer I am in this profession (and it's been over 20 years) the less I see my peers as "dicks and idiots" but more as victims of the same broken game. I work with very smart people, to be honest. It's the technology and the employers and the culture of development that's the problem. Retiring sounds good right about now.

> victims of the same broken game. I work with very smart people, to be honest.

Couldn't agree more. I'm an SDE1.5 at best, working with a guy that's probably a 3.5. Writes code that's way over my head sometimes, and always well-tested and elegant.

Lately I've been helping him by debugging issues in eg tsconfig and various JS build fuckery, and it's been both a relief and a surprise that even really brilliant people struggle with a lot of the same stuff I do. It's not (just) that I'm stupid and unintuitive – the tools are too, even for experienced engineers.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#99

Post by beaconstudios »

carlmr wrote: post #85
beaconstudios wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depression is a bit more complex than that though. You can be emotionally neutral if you're just not strongly affected by what you're doing, it's probably the default state if you've done something for a while. I'm emotionally neutral when I brush my teeth.

True, let me rephrase what I meant then, if everything, day in, day out, feels emotionally neutral, that's very depressive sounding.

Yeah for sure. Anhedonia (no longer enjoying things you used to) is a strongly associated symptom. Of course it could just be a rut and you need to shake up your routine, introduce some variety, but that's matter of severity rather than category.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#100

Post by taf2 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #27
rufus_foreman wrote: post #4

"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not." I guess I wish I felt like that about progra…

The longer I am in this profession (and it's been over 20 years) the less I see my peers as "dicks and idiots" but more as victims of the same broken game. I work with very smart people, to be honest. It's the technology and the employers and the culture of development that's the problem. Retiring sounds good right about now.

I’m 20 years in as well... I think it’s still fun... it’s just a game of fixing things... the other game about how people interact is not as fun but still kinda interesting... game on old friend
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