91–100 of 545 posts
"When you’ve been conditioned to believe rightly or wrongly that your value as a human being is derived from the economic value you provide to those around you and all barriers to producing work have been removed by an unprecedented upheaval to social norms, it felt like there was only one path forward and that was working as hard as possible every day."
>I went through those stages too: 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 Oh, boy, I can relate. Every three months, I think our program increment planning meetings can't get more ridiculous and, yet, they do. Most recently, we were told that we should just treat story points as days of effort.
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…
At a level or two down from the abstraction of company size, crafting hobbies are also a reprieve from the tyranny of linters. So many programmers today believe that code is always better when it all looks identical. Consistency is a good thing, but not when it's expected to be absolute. Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but impor…
Shouldn't all the lines of code uploaded in a pull request be automatically formatted into the coding style preferred by the reviewer anyway? It should be like an automatic translation done by some bot or something.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder whether we’ll see the same parallel as with cars: those with tech and those without - old-timers. I only code as a hobby anymore. Burnout destroyed my career and now I design PCBs and write embedded software without LLMs.
+1 for embedded software. I work for an IoT company and the web and app devs think LLMs are the saving grace of the universe. The firmware team just keeps chugging along, ignoring the noise, debugging hard problems, and writing unsexy low level code.
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…
Cheers! Nonsense is tiring, nonsense breeds detachment, and I daresay most humans will detach from sources of constant nonsense. (As well as from economies of constant nonsense. See: advertising, social media)
> endless PowerPoints
We can agree that PowerPoint is a lossy encoder for instances of Conway's Law.
But to your point about Small versus Large entities...
> ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.
There are many well-travelled roads to Unfulfillment in the software business. Both Small and Large entities have the problem known as people.
Although it's true that corporations tend towards uncalled functions and structured madness, small shops can amplify the oddities, mistakes, and loyalty-antipatterns of principal's exclusive control. And people at a small shop will often work longer hours just to sort these problems.
> people [...] who pursue creative/crafting hobbies
These people are lucky and are doing what is healthy. They are the tool-maker sort of person and are fortunate to have the time to extend their skills and knowledge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be the best way to do it to me
Doing the boring job at all is a waste of 50+% of your waking hours? By all means, do it if it makes the remaining 50% more enjoyable, but I think it’s possible to have both. I want to have my cake and eat it too.
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…
At a level or two down from the abstraction of company size, crafting hobbies are also a reprieve from the tyranny of linters. So many programmers today believe that code is always better when it all looks identical. Consistency is a good thing, but not when it's expected to be absolute. Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but impor…
If you use a programming language that affords some guarantees like Haskell or even just C#, people seem to be less interested in linters.
> 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.
It's quite ridiculous for a number of reasons, well documented by research and experience: software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.
I think it's working for a huge corporation vs a tiny one.
If you feel drained by all the bullshit of your current development job, I'm guessing you work for a huge company. Start work at a <10 employee company, and see if you can find more job satisfaction there.