I think both DHH and the poster do some projection because the message they both respond to is ambiguous.
DHH is completely correct that people who just wing it and then are proud of themselves are in fact ruining the profession for the rest of us who actually want to do good work. I've witnessed this, I've suffered from this, and sadly he's very right in what he says.
But the post author also hits right at the center of the issues in modern programming: that literally almost no skills are transferable and reusable. And I am not talking patterns or brain schemata here; they are of course very reusable and thank the gods that they are! I am saying that even working with the same language and framework, every next task in the project is ever-so-slightly and maddeningly different enough than all 10_000 before it so you can't really automate it and have to, yet again, do it by hand.
And even that's not the worse thing. As the article alludes to, you can have very hardcore and accomplished computer scientists and programmers who are forced to look stuff up because every single stack has its own weird list of quirks you have to adhere to if you want to get anything at all done. In that regard, most programmers are like your typical parents: no matter how misshapen or sick their baby is, they love it to tears and would do anything for it. And would attack anyone who seems to dislike it.
So yes, we absolutely should not normalize mediocrity but we also should not deny that our tech stacks are very often expressions of ego and personality and only very rarely are they actually an objectively technically optimal way of doing the thing they claim to do. And don't even get me started on good docs (or ergonomic "Getting started" pages, which are basically unicorns).
And I think that's what will drive me away from commercial programming one day. I am tired of fighting egos to get my work done. When I get to actually code I sometimes feel the urge to jump with joy. Yep, that's how bad it is on average out there, folks.
> the dog meme is a coping mechanism for professionals in dealing with a domain that will always throw problems at them that push them beyond their local knowledge
I think most memes are meant to express ephemeral events and feelings, not serious summaries of someone’s career or wishes.
It's depressing how fun and productive it can be to model a domain, but then attempting to deploy that in a production enterprise environment is dependency hell.
3 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 15.4 ms ] threadDHH is completely correct that people who just wing it and then are proud of themselves are in fact ruining the profession for the rest of us who actually want to do good work. I've witnessed this, I've suffered from this, and sadly he's very right in what he says.
But the post author also hits right at the center of the issues in modern programming: that literally almost no skills are transferable and reusable. And I am not talking patterns or brain schemata here; they are of course very reusable and thank the gods that they are! I am saying that even working with the same language and framework, every next task in the project is ever-so-slightly and maddeningly different enough than all 10_000 before it so you can't really automate it and have to, yet again, do it by hand.
And even that's not the worse thing. As the article alludes to, you can have very hardcore and accomplished computer scientists and programmers who are forced to look stuff up because every single stack has its own weird list of quirks you have to adhere to if you want to get anything at all done. In that regard, most programmers are like your typical parents: no matter how misshapen or sick their baby is, they love it to tears and would do anything for it. And would attack anyone who seems to dislike it.
So yes, we absolutely should not normalize mediocrity but we also should not deny that our tech stacks are very often expressions of ego and personality and only very rarely are they actually an objectively technically optimal way of doing the thing they claim to do. And don't even get me started on good docs (or ergonomic "Getting started" pages, which are basically unicorns).
And I think that's what will drive me away from commercial programming one day. I am tired of fighting egos to get my work done. When I get to actually code I sometimes feel the urge to jump with joy. Yep, that's how bad it is on average out there, folks.
I think most memes are meant to express ephemeral events and feelings, not serious summaries of someone’s career or wishes.