Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
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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
#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.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#3Supporting software is the hardest job, IMHO. People ask some really dumb stuff -- not out of stupidity, but of ignorance; they just don't know what they are asking. To them, the "why is this broken" is "100% your fault and 100% fixable but you are too lazy to fix it."
It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing with if you can help it.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#4> 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.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#5> 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.
Any recommended readings on the "unable to estimate" claim?
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#6> 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've always felt this is because estimation never gets treated as an exercise which might involve actual software engineering. You get handed a task you've never seen before, for a system you've never seen before, and asked "how long would implementing this take?"
You never get handed a task which is "write as much of a prototype of a system which would do this, so we can estimate how much more work we think is involved".
And then when you do have enough knowledge to reasonably estimate, people just declare with no evidence that it should be quicker anyway and then are surprised when it is not.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Any recommended readings on the "unable to estimate" claim?
I read Steve McConnell's Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art and I can recommend it without hesitation. It is quite old by now so there might be something newer and better out there as well.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#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 then handing it to an LLM is as beneficial to humans in speed/quality/feedback as simply doing it yourself. Have already seen people saying that copilot’s interaction loop short circuits actually thinking about the problem.
Regardless, hobbies outside of work are absolutely essential in this absurd time. The author made some beautiful things.
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#9> 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.
> software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.
Sure we can, it's always one of:
- A couple of minutes
- Today
- A week or two
- Probably around a month
- I have no idea, could be any of the above or more
Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
#10I am working on coding stuff I like as escape for the absurdity of modern software. I make little games, stuff for 8 bit systems etc. Stuff that is as far away from anything modern , especially the hell of node, next, devops and ‘web frameworks’ as I possibly can. It works. It’s very relaxing, like a bonsai tree.