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 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.
That book says the opposite though, we can definitely make good estimates.
It's just that estimating well needs people with training on how to do that, and then it takes substantial time to make good estimates. And there will still be significant error bars (if the estimate isn't a range, it doesn't count as an estimate). But it's certainly doable.
There are no good recommendations because it’s wrong. GP has taken “software estimation is hard and very imprecise” and vastly misrepresented it to try to dunk on someone on the internet.
It’s this sort of disinformation that perpetuates the contingent of software developers that cry bloody murder whenever they’re asked to say if something will take a day or a year.
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.
It's not just that, but also we tend to estimate in the context of "if I were sitting at a computer working on just this problem, this is how long it would take." The reality is that there are meetings, high priority bugs for unrelated systems, interruptions from the business, coworkers and life, code reviews for other team members, rediscovering what you were doing before being interrupted, etc.
Using time tracking, I was able to discover I only spend 2-3 hours per workday actually programming, the rest was all interruptions and such. Thus I can estimate that one day really equals 3-4 workdays. Then my project manager throws in another 3-4x on top of that to deal with scope creep, rework, bug fixes, etc... and we're usually on-target ~50% of the time.
My friend's advisor in grad school (Physics, not CS) used to ask his students for various project estimates, and then he would double it and increase the units: 2 hours = 4 days; 1 day = 2 weeks; 2 weeks = 4 months; 2 to 3 months = 4 to 6 years = thesis project. My friend's estimated 3 month project turned into his 4 to 5 year thesis project. I mean, hey, it was experimental physics and his project ended up using a shipping container-sized faraday cage, scanning tunnelling microscopes, a clean room wearing a bunny suit, building stuff himself in the machine shop, writing software. All this for something that literally had not been done before and no one was sure it would work or what exactly would need to be done to get there (which starts to sound similar to some aspects of software projects). Plus the usual overhead like teaching ungrateful engineering undergrads (guilty!), hosting movie night at the lab and making liquid nitrogen ice cream, etc.
When I was at Amazon, I read the SDE guidelines from HR, where they describe their view of the role.
An SDE1 was expect to spend 4hr coding a day; an SDE3 about 2.5hr coding a day.
That’s normal for a job, eg, apartment maintenance (my college job) would have us actually wokring about 4 hours a day, between setup, cleanup, breaks, travel, miscellaneous tasks, etc.
Convincing other SDEs to assign points to stories based on that (4hrs of coding per point) was surprisingly hard.
> 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".
The non engineer types won't hand you that, but I've had some success with proposing that when there's a lot of uncertainty.
But sorting issues according to their rough size is precisely what makes at least basic sense. A scale of trivial (can make many of those in a day), simple (several of those a day), medium (roughly a day of work) or large (days) makes it possible to have at least basic conversation around work planning. I’m not extra sold about calling those by shirt sizes, but I’m sure we’re on the better end of the absurdity scale here :)
At that point, you are estimating EFFORT, not time. Software engineers are REALLY GOOD at estimating effort. The fact that they translate to time (simple == several days) is ephemeral.
Thanks, but this isn’t my first rodeo. In the future, please more carefully exercise more discretion when whipping out the snark.
> software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.
This is both irrelevant and wrong.
It’s irrelevant because t-shirt sizes, story points, and other abstract measures, are - intentionally - not measures of time. It’s a measure of effort, benchmarked against other units of work. Yes, this can, sometimes, give a vague indication of time. It’s also useful for other reasons, too, like weeding out whether or not everyone is on the same page with regard to what needs to be done in the first place. All of this is explained in literally any primer on the subject.
You’re wrong in saying that software engineers aren’t capable of estimating effort (or even time) with any degree of accuracy. They can. I can tell you that my Python hello world script will take less time and effort than rewriting the Linux kernel. None of the “research” and “experience” that you so confidently refer to says what you think it does. It says that there are big limitations to the degree to which timelines can be estimated. This is entirely true. But there’s nuance to it. You’re so desperate to find a shortcut to being smart on the internet that you’re spreading blatant disinformation in the process.
They're wrong, 60% of the time by overestimation and when underestimated, so vastly wrong it's terrifying. I remember this one time I merely had to update a component in prod. Everything went fine in staging, then when I pressed the "button" in prod ... all hell broke loose. We spent the next 4 days fixing it.
I never wrote that software engineers can't estimate effort, I said they can't estimate time, but you're accusing me of the former.
I think you've linked to a study of "expert project managers", and we might see similar results in a study of whether "expert project managers" can succeed in tying their own shoelaces.
If you're working with a system where your staging environment is not sufficiently close to your prod environment to be entirely predictive of behaviour, that's a "known unknown" and should be in the estimate.
The reason it failed in prod was entirely unrelated to it being prod. The same could have happened in staging. IIRC, the error was entirely due to a RST packet from some external system during the upgrade. It was a bug in the upgrading system that should have been accounted for, had anyone known it existed. Identifying the root cause of the failure, was what took the most time. Had deployments been idempotent it also probably could have been resolved in moments as well ... but here we are, 15 years later with lots of lessons learned.
Sounds annoying, but seems like you found a bug in the upgrading system that could have struck anyone during any change?
The time/work to investigate and fix it probably wasn't considered (or shouldn't have been, at least) part of the work on the component you were changing - that was just delayed, same as it would be in scenarios like "Dave got hit by a bus and he's the only one with the prod password" and "Our CI service suddenly went out of business and we need to migrate everything".
My point is that you can't estimate time with any accuracy. At the end of the day, even this fix and shenanigans was still "easy" once we knew what was going on. The effort never changed and we would have been dead on. The issue is when trying to say, "It will take me two weeks to do this," and it actually takes two weeks -- there are simply too many unknowns for ANY task in our industry for us to actually be confident in that assessment.
Not to the day, but you can estimate a range based on experience. After that deployment issue you may add "release could be delayed by up to a week" to future estimates until you're sure it's fixed.
I've written TV apps and in that world I've often given estimates that are 5 days of actual work but, because Samsung's QA process can take 6 weeks and spurious rejections are common, "deployment" will often take literally months.
Time to release and time for development can be totally different things and it's arguable whether "waiting" time should be included in any individual estimate at all. (You're adding 4 separate features and doing 2 bugfixes in one release, which one gets +2 months? In reality "submit/release" becomes a different ticket/task.)
But that's exactly why people start using things like t shirt sizes: to emphasise the point it's not a time estimate. It's a rough ordering of relative complexity of different tasks, which is something programmers can do.
Of course, the business still needs time estimates, so someone will somehow attempt to turn them into time estimates. But that can't be helped.
> It's a rough ordering of relative complexity of different tasks, which is something programmers can do.
Yeah, when put as an estimate of effort or complexity, we can be good at estimating that. But that isn't how it was put.
> so someone will somehow attempt to turn them into time estimates.
It works until it doesn't. I would estimate manually entering data as "pretty easy" but it won't be done in a day no matter how much you pay me. I can only type so fast. There are many tasks that are easy but take a really long time, and many complex tasks that take a very short amount of time.
Software engineers, when quoting for fixed priced jobs, learn quite quickly to estimate accurately.
Software engineers, when pressured by managers to provide low estimates and/or to provide estimates quickly, will estimate inaccurately. (It can also be deliberately high as well as low, based on previous experience of having their estimates chopped in half.)
Whether you use SP or T-shirt sizes or whatever, somebody is translating that into days because days (and thus dollars) are what matter to the business. If someone asks me for an estimate, I'll give them a range in days/weeks, and they can turn it into whatever nonsense unit they like.
HN loves to make this claim but it just doesn't match my experience, from several teams. Estimates are not precise, obviously, but that doesn't mean that they are impossible to make or that they add no value.
I have personally produced estimates of 2 weeks that took 2 months, and estimates of 2 months that took 2 weeks. For years, I told my boss that implementing a certain feature would be "very hard" and basically wasn't worth it. When we actually pulled the trigger on it, it was done and deployed in a week.
I'm sure some people are significantly better than me at estimates, but I haven't met them. Estimating the unknown without serious research that borders on just doing the job is nigh impossible. And we're just an in-house dev team, so we never, ever do the same thing twice.
Estimating how long to put up another wordpress site is a lot easier than estimating a new project with new requirements and new tools. I typically find that people who think estimating is easy are just doing the same things over and over for new clients, rather than doing new things all the time for the same client/employer.
Sure, so have I. I don't think estimates are good for determining a date for a contract or anything like that. I think they provide data about the tasks when prioritizing, which is valuable. Code coverage is also a really low quality indicator of test quality, but it is still useful.
That sounds a bit extreme? True, estimation is hard, but surely we can differentiate between 1-2 day work, 1-2 week work and a big scary project with a lot of risk. That's what T-shirt sizes are for.
And if a bug in a library stops you from completing your work so you have to develop a workaround, and adds several days to your “1-2 day task”? The estimate is wrong.
There are simply too many unknowns in other libraries and systems to be accurate.
Yeah I'm happy doing that. Trying to estimate a new epic in story points when I only just got told about it is ridiculous, but I can usually give a rough S-M-L guess.
Supporting 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.
Absolutely. People nag our customer service until they get redirected to us (software engineers). When you finally spend expensive time looking into their issue, finding the root cause on their end, take the time to explain it in detail, more often than not the answer is among the lines of "couldn't be bothered to read your response, it still doesn't work, fix it!".
I love software development. I love building both simple and complex systems. But users often suck, and honestly sometimes even the people you're making software for suck. I just want people to be grateful for what I'm doing and I honestly find that lacking a bit in our field.
It's the same with many things. Hotel users suck sometimes, restaurant users suck sometimes, even museum users suck sometimes. Some people are grateful, some people think you're the hostile one.
I have friends who are restaurateurs and people are often extremely ungrateful, demanding and straight up mean.
Most don't earn a lot, margins are slim and people are late, you have to perform 100% for each dish, then people don't show up, get mad when arriving late, want well done when they say rare, or think the chef can just magically change the recipes to accommodate bizarre allergies or lifestyle choices when juggling 20 dishes at a time with a kitchen that off course has been prepped to the max and a few dollars on the brink of bankruptcy.
Ie. people are just people. Better get used to it, same with employees.
I have so many insane stories about this personally.
I once made a PDF processing tool for a company that saved them a lot of time, was pretty expensive and worked brilliantly until it "definitely broke" and i used 1 stressful month back and fourth figuring out why until i saw it was an employe that always "personalised" the PDF's with cute emojis, saved it before sending it further up the chain actively corrupting it so TOC and links were destroyed because of an old version of Acrobat Reader - this was after i asked 10 times if anyone tampered with it in any way.
It's always some human process, organisation, idiosyncrasy or politics taking up 80% of the time while 20% is spent on the actual work.
Definitely a problem on my end sometimes, but usually i'll figure that out if i just grind hard enough, the crazy time sinks are almost always from miscommunication somewhere in some org.
Customer service for software should be high skilled and paid correspondingly. They should be able to take a customers project and reproduce the issue and likely answer the issue without involving software dev. I worked under a place that operated like this and thought that the issues we did see were legitimate and it fostered a desire to help the customer rather than resent them. Customer service was not easy there.
I stay away from "civilians", i.e. companies that do not already have an IT department tasked with software development. They do not know how software works and refuse to meet the most basic requirements for learning how to use software or for entering data.
That and there's essentially no respect for the need to make existing software better. Product owners want feature upon feature and usually aren't interested in actual UX polish as long as the design looks pretty enough. Software engineers usually either don't have much power to push back against this or, if they do, they tend to be spineless.
By and large, we are not doing a good job, and we are not often allowed to actually do a good job. Modern software frustrates me to no end, and in the last few years I've been noticing more non-technical folks getting frustrated. Everyone expects apps and websites to randomly fail in stupid ways or do things in ways that are not intuitive. I barely want to tell anyone I'm a software engineer at this point because it's embarrassing.
Agree, the thing I hate most is people saying that it's "not user friendly", not realizing that it might be a subjective thing, and it's a very generic way of putting it, and how hard it is to satisfy hundreds of idiotic conflicting requirements. And most of all that it's them not wanting to put any effort in learning a new tool and asking developers to smoothen every possible use case, which is impossible.
> 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.
Hobbies outside work can still be coding. Code is not the same as it was with LLMs but it’s more effective for work and outside work. The LLMs just help but for me they don’t make coding less enjoyable outside modern web crap that is.
Too many hallucinations because changes in fast changing libraries. It makes up functions that were removed and libraries that have been deprecated. With robust stuff that doesn’t happen. It is frustrating. Even copilot regularly includes some react lib that doesn’t work anymore for the past 3 years because it depended on old stuff that is full of security issues, bugs or doesn’t work on a new node etc etc. So then I spend more time on finding what is the newest (greatest … cough) thing to replace it than I would have done just searching google.
It’s funny because a big draw of React is the sizable user base and library count, but that ends up being a double edged sword when using LLMs for codegen.
Well, if they are not up to date I guess with the latest; it changes so fast and there are so many examples of all different flavours of how to do something... I guess they will find a mechanism which will make newer info more relevant and older info more forgotten in some cases and also a way to draw in the latest all the time. My problem is more the not built/designed etc here issue; when you have a react WidgetBlah library and someone else also wrote one, there are reasons you rolled your own (often also not but ok), but why didn’t you keep the api the same. People talk about features here as a reason for breakage but when I compare a breaking feature change (for instance, a react component sig changed from one version to another) then I hardly ever see a reason why that was not made backward compatible. I have complained about this in many GitHub issues and the answer is usually ‘this way is better, just refactor it: it’s easy’. Sure it’s easy but it’s work and this happens a little too often. Sometimes I would like Java standard bodies and voting about api changes and this is one of those.
RAG and large context sizes mitigate this well enough for me. Ingest the library's docs (and maybe a sizable chunk of your codebase) and use that to get better LLM output that isn't out of date or hallucinated.
It doesn't matter, it was never about LLM's, it's that tech holds special political powers across nations. Big tech can break laws and destroy people's lives and nobody is ever punished or regulated.
Software is in a race to the bottom because users have little market choice. LLM's are just the excuse, but in reality late stage capitalist economics demands that this happen somehow. Wether it be in the form of cheap labor or automated labor. You need to have political and physical leverage over the corps to force them into being sustainable.
I 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.
+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.
Security student here. Just wanted to say that while not everyone appreciates the firmware programming at such a low level....it is truly a dark art to me and I find it really interesting and always want to learn more.
Here my take. Not a pro, but still might find useful.
1. Learn basics of electricity, learn to use oscilloscope, logic analyzer. You don't necessary need to have knowledge to design complex PCBs (that's a separate skill and not easily attainable) but you need to be able to understand existing design on high-level and do some debugging. For example you wrote code which does some SPI to talk to some device but it does not work. You need to analyze electricity to understand what's going on in the wire.
2. Learn basics of assembly. You don't need to write your software in assembly, but you need to read it and write some little snippets if necessary.
3. Learn to read data sheets.
Modern MCUs and devices are really like libraries. You're using some interfaces, calling some functions and get some responses. Data sheets are library documentation.
Then it's only matter of time and experience. Most vendors supply their terrible libraries that you're supposed to use. Most vendors support some bad IDEs that you're supposed to use. Often you're forced to use Windows because not everyone supports Linux or macOS. It's not fun part and sometimes you can avoid it, but sometimes you can't.
Learn to read documentation in general. It's shocking how many people seem incapable of finding answers that are in official documentation but not on Stack Overflow.
The most humbling part is, there’s always another level down. I thought programming code for the Linux kernel was low-level, until I worked on a team where there was an entire separate MCU on the same package underneath the primary cores running Linux that booted and controlled the whole system. I thought that was low-level until I worked for a team building a similar chip and had to participate in the design and validation efforts for it. There is almost always a whole world beneath the level of abstraction any of us operate on. Beneath the software world are IP blocks, which are composed of digital logic circuits, which are composed of transistors, which are governed (if you get small enough) by quantum effects… reaching the bottom is nearly impossible; it’s very humbling.
This is especially true from a security standpoint. Many analysts are worried about XSS attacks and other such high-level techniques. C has an entire different class of vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows. And beneath that, there are countless vulnerabilities by exploiting properties of the physical hardware. Most industries choose to ignore these problems, because they’re very expensive to mitigate.
Yeah, programming used to be excellent and that’s not nostalgia as I still write MSX, Amiga and Delphi (win/lin) software. Now, with modern stacks, I just hate all of it really. I do it fulltime for work with nextjs (and all the du jour stuff that literally changes every few months and makes life easier: secret it doesn’t at all) but we are transitioning everything to my Common Lisp dsl; in one year even my work software will be a pleasure again. Stuff I should’ve done 20 years ago but I drank this modern tooling koolaid; it’s more akin to the layers of hell.
> when people started coming with so many unrealistic and absurd expectations and demands about what my furniture should do
There, fixed it for you.
People are the same just pay sucks way more.
I wholeheartedly endorse woodworking as a meditative hobby to forget about your day work but as a career path you are going to have some very rude discoveries.
Looking at their projects it's mostly basic carpentry level as well. Fine woodworking, the projects where you can charge five figures for a dining table (and you spend a few months making it full time), needs much more design vision and years of practice. Those 10k hours required to master a skill seem about right.
Been through a burnout 20 years ago, had to take a year off and then discovered that if you place correct boundaries and don't let people mess with you, our trade can be pretty enjoyable.
> projects where you can charge five figures for a dining table
The best way to avoid turning a meditative hobby into a job is to resist the urge to monetize it.
Your basic carpentry diss is unwarranted IMHO. I enjoyed reading about and seeing the projects produced with simple tools and some work. The author is clearly very creative and resourceful and I bet this inspires a few people look for a creative outlet of their own.
> The best way to avoid turning a meditative hobby into a job is to resist the urge to monetize it.
This is exactly what I meant. However OP started off talking about switching careers.
As a hobby they are doing great, producing stuff they need and having fun doing that. No-one can criticize this.
> Your basic carpentry diss is unwarranted IMHO.
If it's a hobby sure, absolutely. I think the stuff they are doing is fine.
But as a new career this is going to be very tough if they don't up their game into some direction that is either very efficient volume production or high quality design and craftsmanship. There are obviously also education and youtube paths but both have also tough requirements.
Even famous fine furniture makers are complaining that it is very tough to live off commissions.
Author here! Don't worry, I'm well aware that what I can create currently can't be sold :) what I can currently do is like an MVP in wood, I cut a lot of corners (literally) just to see the thing done, and live with the defects. A client would not live with the defects, they would want something perfect for their money.
I didn't really mean "switching careers" although I see how that can be read that way. I meant more like leaving the current app income stagnate until it goes down, and in that time I would eventually find a more physical job to support me. Not necessarily woodworking.
I watch youtubers that work their asses off to earn thousands of dollars on a piece they've worked months, and like I said there's no undo. A mistake can set you back a lot. I know we have it good in software.
I don't know if I'll ever have the skills to create wood things that I would be able to sell. I'm thinking maybe I could do that with Kavals, there's less expectation and competition there. But furniture.. I don't know, I will probably end up in the same state as with software.
You would basically never use an axe in woodworking. It's widely considered bad practice, produces unstable results, and there are better tools available
Well, I mean you could use an adze or a froe. Axes are really common in green woodworking (chair making) and they’re great for getting wood to split along the grain.
I second the green woodworking comment. An axe (and wedges) are a good way to hand-split logs into boards. And easier than doing it with a saw in some cases. Hand tool woodworking really makes you appreciate the multitude of weird old tools you find in antique stores and how clever people were when using human power before power tools.
I've recently started gardening as an alternative to the near-daily exhaustion I feel as a result of hacking just too hard on things.
Let me tell you, there is nothing more joyous than going outside 3 days after planting new seed varieties in a recovered-soil hügel-bed, and seeing brand new leafy life reaching for the stars. I get the same sort of buzz out of watching seedlings push dirt out of the way, as I used to get from checking for PR's on some of my repo's, lol ..
Its at the point now where I have to have a desktop garden, or else I just don't feel complete as a human being. Lucky, there are tons of things I can take from my new hügel-bed's to plant on the desk, herbs, spices, salads and things .. its just so rewarding.
So yeah, garden, programmers. Garden. Its so good for you. And you can get a buzz from the methods, just like you do with code, 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 eats a creative person's soul.
I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems and get paid the market rate for my skills. Not prepare endless PowerPoints for my skip-level, who has no ownership but has to act in their own best interests in a swamp of principal-agent problems.
This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?
Yes, fast-growing companies can grow out of my preference zone and as other commenters said, jumping ship when that happens may be the correct way to go.
There are other issues with slow-growing or not-growing companies. When the company is not growing, people are incentivized to take a zero-sum approach to their work relationships. If the pie is not growing, you need to guard your own slice and take from others. This creates a toxic environment. If the company is growing, then collaborating on growing the pie can become the shared attitude.
Slow growth and no growth companies tend to be under a lot of pressure for cost-optimization (which makes sense in a lot of ways, but is grueling to live through…)
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 important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code. Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to format your code in a way that violates the rules in some trivial way.
With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work. The tools they use are intended to help them accomplish something and aren't there to prevent you from doing anything.
It's possible to do personal software projects however one wants, but one will no doubt be faced with the modern compulsion to want to "do the right thing" and add a bunch of time wasting tooling. If you don't, and you share your code, inevitably someone is going to want to add a bunch of rules and bureaucracy to your software that was already working and free of serious problems in the first place.
Consistency is critical for reducing mental load when working as a team. Format your personal projects however you want, but when collaborating your editor should apply the standard format every time you save.
I absolutely agree that consistency, in principle, is usually a very good thing.
My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing, which it's not. Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time and unnecessarily tyrannical.
In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between 100% consistency and say 95%.
It's far more important that APIs and other conventions are consistent. When constructs in the code aren't consistent, it can be an absolute nightmare. When code isn't formatted well, it's usually just annoying and can be trivially fixed with automation.
What I love, is a code formatting check on the server side. Just check that the code is properly formatted using Biome or Prettier. Everyone can set it up in their editor, or run it manually however they want, and nobody ever has to think about it.
What I absolutely detest, is any kind of code formatting comment on a PR. If it cannot be enforced automatically, it’s not worth arguing about, and definitely not something to hold a PR up for.
> In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between 100% consistency and say 95%.
I think you are contradicting yourself a bit with
> Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code.
The point being that something small might have significance to one person but not the other.
And that consistency is probably important, but there is a difference between consistency of your stuff and consistency between your stuff and stuff of others.
So I think what it boils down to is that crafting hobbies are often more fulfilling not (only) because they have tangible outcomes, but because you can do them on your own and on your terms.
If you were to do woodworking where you craft one piece of a bigger thing (say a part of some larger furniture), you would also have to produce very homogenic and precise output. And it probably would not be very fun and fulfilling.
> The point being that something small might have significance to one person but not the other.
Yeah, that's totally fair. I think conversations can be had with such cases, and I think that trying to effectively eliminate the conversation is a bad thing, which relates closely to my overall objection. Ironically, it ends up in conversation anyway unless a developer is always a good little goober and never marches out of sync.
Maybe my mindset would be different if I saw great software around me, but I see mostly crappy and user-hostile software these days. I'm not sure whether strict formatting "standards" is of meaningful benefit for the users.
> If you were to do woodworking where you craft one piece of a bigger thing (say a part of some larger furniture), you would also have to produce very homogenic and precise output. And it probably would not be very fun and fulfilling.
Yeah, I guess you've identified where my thought in response to woodworking falls apart. haha If it were one's employment, it could indeed be as confining as being a programmer at BigCo.
Arguing about what 5% is appropriate is a significant distraction. I do not believe that any benefits from allowing these discrepancies are superior to the reduced mental load in authoring, reading, and reviewing code of "the linter is automatic and true". If a rule can be written into a linter, simply have it automatically formatted and never argue about it again. It eliminates entire classes of argument.
> Arguing about what 5% is appropriate is a significant distraction.
Yes.
> If a rule can be written into a linter, simply have it automatically formatted and never argue about it again.
That is unless one believes to have good reason to violate that rule, in which case suddenly time is being spent having practically the same conversation in this part of the thread that I started.
The point of automatic formatters is that they are universally enforced. There is no violation of the rule, even if you have a "good reason". If you have a pattern of good reasons, you can write to whoever controls your team's coding standards/linter rules and suggest a tweak, but you never have one-off violations, you just accept the automatic format.
> My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing
If everyone doesn't follow the standards all the time then there are no standards.
Code is not art, it's instructions.
If you can't write instructions without adding your own avant garde whitespace brush strokes to it then yes coding for a professional company may not be your jam.
I'll slightly disagree here because code needs to be read by a computer and by your human teammates.
There are times when I'm frustrated because prettier is making a necessary but unintuitive choice and causing my code to become harder to read. But those are rare, and I would never trade them for the guarantee of readable code the other >99% of the time.
Yes, this is fundamentally where I disagree with the person you're responding to and what seems like most programmers (or perhaps mostly web developers). If code is just instructions, it would look barely comprehensible to [most] programmers.
Again, maybe I came off as more extreme than I actually am, because I think that consistent formatting is a very good thing most of the time, but that last 5-10% that programmers in positions of power fetishize is where things can get frustrating and time can get wasted.
The worst is when linter rules are used for things that should be evaluated by a human being in code review. At a previous workplace, someone thought it was a marvelous idea to try and enforce things like functions having no more than 6 lines or some other poppycock. My current workplace is OK, but even then there are some stupid rules like not being allowed to assign `this` to a constant, even though the function in-scope is being re-bound by some stupid middleware making it impossible to use fat arrows or `.bind` (in JavaScript). Sorry, but I'll assign whatever the f*** I want to a constant that isn't escaping the current scope in any way. What's also funny is that I've never worked anywhere that didn't have `eslint-disable` sprinkled everywhere. In many cases, these rules should be warning instead of errors, but because programmers love errors for some reason, virtually every rule violation needs to be an error.
> What's also funny is that I've never worked anywhere that didn't have `eslint-disable` sprinkled everywhere. In many cases, these rules should be warning instead of errors, but because programmers love errors for some reason, virtually every rule violation needs to be an error.
Well I'm quite proud of having owned a certain repo at work which takes exactly this approach. If I have to disable a rule more than once, I take a good look at whether we need it at all, so we have extremely few `eslint-disable` comments in the entire codebase. It's one of the cleanest and most transparent codebases I've worked in -- but that's also an artifact of me spending long stretches working in it alone and having little oversight of how I spend my time. So there's a tradeoff :)
Programmers don't love errors. In fact, we see time and time again that even just seeing the word "error" causes programmers to forget how to program. It's their kryptonite.
But they don't see value in warnings. Either you have a problem that needs to be fixed or you don't.
My point was that removing code (not just reformatting it) without changing behavior is a gain, not a loss. Art is the opposite.
That tells me that the code itself is not important; the task/instructions the code performs is the important part. Therefore code is a utility, not an artform.
Yes I want written instructions to be understandable to humans, so my code conforms to tool-enforced formatting standards 100% of the time, not subject to artistic interpretation.
This is one of the major differences between hobby programming and work programming. When you're writing code as a hobby, it can be anything you want: code can be art, instructions, math, beauty, a means to an end, an experiment... At work, code must ultimately be a tool that creates profit. It has to be manageable, consistent, and boring.
It is a mistaken idea that work programming is or must be boring. I think you might mean "boring" as opposed to unnecessarily "creative" or complicated. But not all work code is boring, boiler-plate code.
I think of "boring" in this context the same way my dentist calls me a nice, boring patient. He means no surprises for either of us, nothing out of the ordinary, just a mouth in good shape with maybe a cavity or two.
That's how I like to see code. I don't want to struggle to figure out what you're trying to do. I want to be able to read your code and understand it easily and get on with what I need to do.
The opposite of this, keeping the medical context, would be the orthopedic surgeon who was so excited about how badly my then 25-year-old wife had smashed her wrist. "I never see this much joint damage in someone so young. It's incredible." Not words you want to hear from a doctor!
>Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time
How can it be a waste of time? The whole point is to avoid wasting time talking about formatting on PRs or seeing line noise on PRs because people have slightly different preferences or settings for code formatting.
Right, exactly. Code formatting should be fully automatic (format on save, verify on commit) so that no one has to waste any time thinking or arguing about it, ever.
Does your company not just use an automatic formatter? Set a prettier config, format the entire codebase and never have to deal with another formatting change in a PR ever again.
But my issue with formatting, while great most of the time, is that sometimes I want to violate it, and tooling around automatic formatting and format validation is usually installed with the intention that it is 100% correct all the time. Sorry, but as a senior programmer, sometimes it really should be up to me to decide whether code belongs on a single line, and I don't want to fight against automatic formatting or the CI pipeline throwing a hissy fit when I desire that discretion.
On the contrary, as a senior developer you should be able to look at and see the team-wide benefits of consistency. You don't have to handhold new junior devs to learn the style, you don't need to watch their PRs to see if they're being consistent, and you don't need to argue with other senior devs about whether something should be on a single line or not. You just let the automatic formatter do its thing.
Being a senior eng isn't about always knowing what's right, it's about knowing how to keep the team moving efficiently.
I think you’re selling you example short here. Linting and formatters should be about applying a minimal acceptable limit to code, not diluting everything to the same mediocrity. It’s been a long time since I ran into a formatter that I hate out of the box.
> Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to format your code in a way that violates the rules in some trivial way.
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.
That desire is in conflict with a desire for the reviewer to see only the changes and many of the diff tools don’t diff this reformatted code against that reformatted code but rather work on the pre-reformatted.
It could obviously be done, but involves a yak shave that isn’t clear that it brings enough value to be worthwhile.
It's not a bot but formatters like prettier for example make it very easy to set them up as git-hooks, where the formatter is applied on commit. Meaning, unless you specifically commit without hooks, all committed code should comply with the formatter.
For linting (e.g. eslint in the JS-space), this is also possible, however, most linting-processes tend to run just long enough to be annoying when run on every commit. In the monorepo I work on we created a command "prep-pr" which specifically addresses this issue - run it before creating a PR, and the CI-pipeline will mostly be green, at least in terms of linting/unit-testing.
My theory is that excessive linter rules might be a symptom of trying to compensate for the weaknesses of a programming language. I see it a lot in Python and JavaScript projects where the language gives very litte guarantees about anything.
If you use a programming language that affords some guarantees like Haskell or even just C#, people seem to be less interested in linters.
Linting reduces the expressiveness of a language so that a large team can have some consistency.
It’s not necessarily a weakness of the language.
Languages like Haskell, C#, and Java don’t have the same amount of expressiveness as js, python, or ruby, so they don’t benefit as much from a linter, though I know places that use one for C# to prevent usage of the ‘var’ keyword
If there's a small team, individual freedom can be perfectly fine, as everybody knows everyone and it's easy to talk with each other in case there are discrepancies.
For larger projects however, not having tooling set up that enforces certain consistency is an absolute showstopper for me. I'll either introduce it or I'll quit; I simply do not want to waste my time with developers squabbling over arbitrary formatting-choices or irrelevant coding-style-details that can easily be enforced by some tooling.
Of course, developer-experience is paramount. Meaning, the tooling must be easy-to-use and generally not stand in the way. Otherwise it can indeed create a lot of friction which will annoy everybody. But once this has been set up (properly!), it will make a lot of silly discussions and choices obsolete.
I hear you. But I’ve been programming for 30 years and I have some strong intuitions around where my code needs an empty line to space things out. Stuff like that. The day I first tried gofmt and it removed some of my carefully considered whitespace, I turned around, put blood on my hands in the old way and made a promise to the night that my soul belongs to me and gofmt will never sully my code with its corporate BS aesthetic.
Some consistency in a codebase is good. Naming consistency. Indentation. But people go too way far with it. Who cares if your JavaScript makes consistent use of semicolons? It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.
Sure; but when I join a team and they've already got a linter set up with stupid pedantic rules, they never seem to appreciate my complaints about it. "Oh god, can we not have that conversation again!". I understand. But nobody is happy.
Carpentry isn't my jam, but I've taken up piano. I love it.
I have similar feelings as GP about Black (probably the most popular python code formatter), which goes by the philosophy that linters should not be configurable because that just moves conversations about styles from the code to which rules to use.
Black also behaves decently wrt empty lines. It does have some opinions on that, like two lines between functions and in some other contexts, and at most one line elsewhere. But inside function bodies, it will collapse multiple consequent blank lines into a single one, but it will never remove them altogether, so it's still possible to use them to logically structure code.
I curse the inferior linter formatting and at the same time would not have it any other way because why? Some diva would come in and put up a MR reformatting half the code base to their preferred way, mixed in with the actual change they are making and I would have to hunt for the actual changes in the reformatting noise. And then we would spend half a day arguing about it like in the good old days. Fast forward six months and there would be 6 different code styles in the codebase and it would just be terrible.
Sorry. Guilty party here. I used to be that diva at times, but also came around to your point of view after being on the other side of that several times myself.
But I think the biggest thing as I move up and spend more time reviewing code than writing it...style preferences make it so much easier to review code. Linters have given back years of my life at this point!
Why not just set up a rule to auto-format the code before it is committed so that nobody wastes time discussing formatting trivialities and the repo stays consistent?
It would be fantastic if there was a good normal-form formatter I could use for local work, and let automation format the code back to lint style. Unfortunately with something like IntelliJ/Java the commit-time reformat is not reversible. Maybe google's Java formatter is, hmm.
In my experience, it is not the divas who are the problem, but inexperienced developers (especially ones from non-CS background) who have a weird/no sense of formatting. I have seen my share of strange, inconsistent formatting in code reviews with junior developers.
I've worked in a place where reviews were obsessed with coding style. No one noticed serious bugs, but forget a space in the right place and you'd be doomed. And yet people still managed to rewrite stuff to their preferred style while managing to not violate any rule. No prescription about function and variable names? they'd change every single one their way. No prescription about argument alignment, they'd change it. Everything not esplicitly forbidden was an outlet to express their creativity or maybe tame their frustration.
This has never been a problem for me. Coding guidelines, clang-format and precommit scripts can do this automatically. Also a senior should reject or revert the work of the diva. You shouldn't accept this at all.
> Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to format your code in a way that violates the rules in some trivial way.
Symptom of nothing better to do, I have found ;)
Hard to picture someone who values their time blocking PRs on tiny stylistic nits.
I think you’re romanticising woodworking a bit here. A large saw is specifically built to allow doing a single, precise cut, in exactly the same way, over and over again.
The tools are absolutely made to prevent you from messing up the various ways, it’s just that you don’t use the professionals tools at home.
And indeed that’s something I’d apply to software: both hobbyists and small companies are tempted to use professional tools (as in, intended for lots of engineers collaborating) for small projects or a low number of collaborators that don’t warrant such stringent rules.
> A large saw is specifically built to allow doing a single, precise cut, in exactly the same way, over and over again.
Ignoring hand tools, which give you precise, tactile control ... I'd still argue with this.
There are tools for specific things and they're meant to reduce error. But a router (woodworking) can be used to do half the stuff you want/need to do. A table saw can make straight cuts, rabbets, joinery.
The tools themselves (outside of specialty ones) are generally multi-purpose and allow for experimentation and creativity.
Programming tools are no different. All tools are like this.
OP's complaint is about syntactical differences and that's just because his team doesn't agree with him.
And tbh, to me, the fun creative part in programming lies in architecture, not how I space my code. With woodworking, the creative part is how I put it all together but not the actual cutting part.
Most of the stuff in the lee valley catalog is the same garbage you can get at rockler or any other tool outlet. The only thing possibly drool worthy are the Veritas tools. For the longest time I felt the same as you, I had assumed everything from LV was the same quality or at least close to the Veritas line. The truth is most of the LV stuff is garbage. On the other hand everything from Lie Nielsen is phenomenal, it's just not always in stock.
I spent a lot of time searching for and restoring old tools. I finally realized I was spending way more time on the tools than actually using them.
That’s not the arrangement of the words “Rockler” and “garbage” that will get you upvotes in r/woodworking.
If you had a Woodcraft in town you’d only go to Rockler for things you can’t find at Woodcraft. Which is largely cabinet-making and air handling equipment.
Lee valley and veritas are mostly making reproductions of golden age Stanley tools before the race to the bottom (what the kids call enshittification) started, with a few omissions or improvements. They aren’t garbage, they’re low volume. That makes them less appropriate for people being paid by the hour or piece.
I live equidistant, 15 minutes, from a Rockler and two Woodcrafts and I am not concerned about what would get upvotes in /r/woodworking.
I went to rockler this morning to get a reamer because the only reamers at Woodcraft are for pen making. With the exception of big brands like festool or powermatic most of the tools they sell at rockler are not great tools. This reamer is not great.
That’s kind of missing the point here (I actually do enjoy woodworking as a hobby! :)
OP complained about all the strict rules software engineers have to abide by, while woodworkers get to have all the fun with sharp tools, nobody telling them how to use them, and generally freedom at how they do stuff.
But that’s precisely the perspective of a highly compensated person doing manual labor for fun, not the one of a professional woodworker. It’s like someone cooking fancy once or twice per week saying chefs have such a great job because they get to dice the onion the way they like. Ask any professional chef how well that works.
Something you do as a hobby will always seem more fulfilling, because it’s a hobby. Anyone doing it professionally very likely also has strict rules to follow, you just don’t know about them - because you’re not a pro.
Note really. A table saw is incredibly versatile tool. Yes, it has a bog standard purpose of ripping stock to width, but there are scores of uses beyond that. E.g., removing the fence and freehanding a 20 foot piece of baseboard through it to cut a scribe. There are plenty of professionals who do that. Source: I used to be one.
> where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code.
Isn't this part of the problem? If the purpose of code is to be understandable, the important communications shouldn't also be subtle. Your intention that the extra empty line before a block of code signals "This is the important part" is likely to be entirely lost on a reader of the code (especially in a codebase where the formatting isn't consistent so those spare lines are littered everywhere). Much better to leave a comment saying "there's a subtle but important thing going on here".
> Much better to leave a comment saying "there's a subtle but important thing going on here".
Sure, but don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Well-meaning engineers frequently don't document their code at all. It's why I advocate programmers at least use descriptive variable names and function names; what I call "self-documenting code".
It still falls short of well-documented code but, as I say, gets you "good".
For sure, well-written code often doesn't need comments to explain itself; my point was that "there's an extra space here so you know this bit is important" is pretty much the opposite of that.
I do use whitespace (empty lines) to "group" parts of a function the way paragraphs group thoughts in prose. For a function it might be as simple as param-check, setup, loop, tear-down. But it makes it a little clearer that some lines of tightly-grouped code represent an "activity" (sub-activity?).
As an example, your own comment three above is split into three parts (quote and two sections of your own). Plus my comment here, split into two.
Code has its own flow and natural groupings just like human language, and adding spacing to match makes it easier to understand even though it is subtle.
Thank you for that: "linters" (but as a person's role, not as a tool).
Pretty sure that contributed to my early retirement from the industry. It didn't used to be that way — perhaps because there were fewer cooks; perhaps because of a more cavalier, cowboy-style approach to coding.
I definitely preferred the days of the open range....
How you choose to add whitespace to your code is not a meaningful outlet for creativity. Linters are a great tool for eliminating bike shedding.
I don't think wood working per se gives you more flexibility than building software. It's wood working as an individual, not part of a team, so you can make your own decisions and not answer to anyone. If you were a one man software consultant you would have the same amount of autonomy.
It’s devex. Not for you, but for the reader. It’s part of the craft. We can argue about whether craftsmanship is creative or skill, but at the end of the day it’s satisfaction that they are chasing. Satisfaction they are denied at work.
Not that they can’t find at work. It’s actively taken away from them.
As a one man software consultant, I just want to point out that you are working with clients, in their systems, on their problems. You provide advice, they make the decisions they deem best for their company.
You get to choose the problem spaces and teams, which is a degree of autonomy. But it is not quite so free as “making your own decisions and not answering to anybody.”
> How you choose to add whitespace to your code is not a meaningful outlet for creativity.
I'd like to mildly disagree. Using whitespace to group functionality together in "paragraphs" and aligning the horizontal indentation in the clearest possible way is not too far away from editing a short story to make it flow better.
Earlier today my linter rearranged multiple "key: value" one-liners into two-liners and the end result is both objectively and subjectively worse.
Yeah, it's proto-editing, but with such limited degrees of freedom in the activity your creative options are pretty limited and as time goes on and on the endeavor starts to look like this: https://xkcd.com/915/
Interesting, I can't tell if the comic is about "people will become obsess and develop taste in what they see every day", or "people will develop preferences to separate themselves into groups".
I normally just auto-apply `black` to my code, but occasionally I feel the need to have things arranged in a way that is easier to read -- e.g. a list of several dictionaries. In that case, I just put a comment telling it to stop reformatting at the start of the block, and another at the end.
This is why I like when formatters give you some wiggle room in how the rules are applied.
Like, in Prettier, adding a trailing comma to a short list of items will tell the formatter to put each item on it own line, while removing the trailing comma will keep each item in a single line (if the line length is not too long).
Yep. Imagine being a woodworker on a massive project like a large sailing vessel or Japanese castle. Suddenly coordination and collaboration requirements go right back up. Now you can't just wing your project. You've got to make sure the part your building matches the agreed upon spec and hope the teams you're "integrating" with have also followed the spec. When one of those teams gets "creative" suddenly things aren't fitting together and progress on the ship crawls to a halt.
When I think of going multiplayer with my hobby and doing something big, I'm not thinking about what you described - that's just walking into bullshit and letting everything interesting about your work be suffocated. No, I'm thinking Skunkworks, or Xerox PARC. I imagine others are too.
This happens literally every single day in residential construction. Aside from the building code, there isn't typically a "spec" for construction. The plan doesn't specify "this wall shall be plumb to within +/- 0.001 radians". Somehow, cabinets still get hung even though the framer framed a crooked wall on top of a crooked stem wall all because foundation guy was hungover that day.
That’s because average residential construction has some tolerance for error (and is therefore poor quality imo).
Sure - perhaps not plumb to within +/- 0.001 radians, but there’s still an expectation that the wall needs to be vertical within some error tolerance band (even if not specified). Error correction happens real-time - the cabinet guy compensates for the wall error, and so on.
That’s also why I find residential construction so shoddy (the US at least) - electrical junction boxes are always a little off-angle, cover plates aren’t flush, etc.
This is a take I don't think I've seen before. Is someone actually mad prettier is changing their single quotes to double quotes? Are they mad some line is breaking at some word?
Certainly I've never been. I use linters / formatters even when I'm working solo because the mere concept of having to think where to break lines is meaningless disruption from the actual goals I have.
If you _really_ want to break a line somewhere, just add a comment in between and your linter will comply.
> Is someone actually mad prettier is changing their single quotes to double quotes? Are they mad some line is breaking at some word?
Yes, both of these.
Obviously there are huge benefits to auto-formatting in large teams and popular open source projects, but some people also find benefit in having control of alignment, line breaks, indentation etc.
for some people talking about whether it's best to put a curly brace on its own line or on the same line as an if condition is like talking about which religion is the one true path to paradise...
Strict adherence to formatting rules can impair readability, yes.
Before back-tick strings in JS, it was useful to employ both single/double quotes for strings -- you'd use one most of the time, and then if you needed to embed a bunch of that quotation mark in a string literal, you'd switch to the other one.
'my string'
'my other string'
"insert values ('foo', 'bar', 'baaz')"
A formatter with naive "single quotes only" rule would obliterate the last one to:
'insert values (\'foo\', \'bar\', \'baz\')'
unless you remember, before you hit save, to add a directive like:
// linter pwease preserve my qwotes
I still use linters and formatters every day, and on balance I think they're good to have, but it's ridiculous to pretend they don't have downsides, or that there isn't room for the occasional dash of human intervention in the automation; hence, the linters which have // linter pwease directives.
The key point here is that the formatter has to be sufficiently advanced to know to do the right thing the vast majority of the time. Once it gets there, and once you've gotten used to the code it produces, it's better. Note that the "prettier" formatter will do the right thing in JS here, at least with the default config. It will even switch "\"string\"" to '"string"' for you.
Linting is a bit of a different beast, because linting includes changes to the code behavior itself, not just syntax. In JS there are so many footguns, that linting can often be pretty involved/strict. I think most of the people who don't like linting in JS either aren't aware of the footguns, or don't do very much code review and haven't worried themselves much with "what sort of bizare and unusual ways can this fail" sort of a thing.
Seriously. Python Black is a godsend. I don't have to waste brain cells on formatting minutiae, just right-click and go "format my code, please." It's consistent, it works, and IDGAF about the details.
The only formatting that drives me up the wall is people using K&R braces in C# or Java. It's not 1970 anymore, and we're not all typing on green-screen terminals. It's like people fetishizing vim or emacs over modern IDEs.
..huh? But either way, should you ever be annoyed by K&R again next time you work with C#, you can trivially change it by setting csharp_new_line_before_open_brace = none in .editorconfig and running dotnet-format tool against solution files.
K&R doesn't just mean the opening brace isn't on its own line, it also means single-line blocks have no braces at all. Always using braces but not putting the opening one on its own line is 1TBS (not the best name, but I don't know what else it's called).
You know what annoyed me as a C/C++ programmer? People using Microsoft style braces... But OK, if you are using Microsoft-Java, then Microsoft rules apply.
AFAIK there is no rule in K&R requiring no braces for single-line blocks. In that situation, braces are optional.
The K&R style was hugely influential on Java and many other languages, it has nothing to do with green-screen terminals (I used those, as well as white and amber), it is just a style. I also moved on from vi, and use IntelliJ and Sublime most of the time.
The only difference between K&R braces and Java braces is that they combine lines on if-else. The Java guys did it because it enabled them to fit more code on to overhead slides. Overhead slide projectors predate green-screen terminals BTW...
I'll take the tyranny of the linter tool over not having it at all (and I've had both). At least with my current project, it's single-handedly helped catch tricky React re-render bugs, because it warns me when I'm missing a dependency, or also warns me ahead of time if I'm likely to encounter a re-render every frame (and what's causing it), etc.
Also it's helped keep unused garbage out of the codebase also, which people tend to leave in there otherwise.
Also prettier has helped in me no longer reviewing MRs where every single line shows up in a file because their local machine has a different tab indent set or a different way to handle newlines (like with or without carriage returns, IIRC).
Sure it styles some things that aren't my preference, but I don't have to do it myself, it just automatically changes it all, so I can deal with it.
And if something is especially annoying or causes issues, I can usually get an exception added to the configuration, at least on my current team.
It seems like you're making a distinction between types of work.
For hobby or artisanal pursuits, homogeneity isn't the goal. Often the uniqueness is a feature. But for mass production or large coordinated efforts, uniqueness is a bug. You don't want your car to be manufactured by someone who just felt like a 3mm panel gap felt more right than the 4mm gap the specs called for. Standardization makes coordination easier and that's why some products are better when they are homogenous while others are better when they're allowed to be "creative."
>> With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work.
This is why woodworking is actually a poor analogy for software development. A better analogy is carpentry. And when it comes to carpentry, it is much more important to ensure whatever you're building is extensible or follow certain specs. The cabinets you make, for example, need to fit into a certain space under or over the counter, and need to be homogenous to a large extent.
Consistency is dramatically overrated. We all read through comment threads on HN where each is written in it's own style and nobody has a problem understanding it. I read through open source repos all the time, which all have their own styles and which are often not self-consistent; my comprehension is not impaired. I have worked with teams that enforce linting with a religious fervor and teams where anything goes. The anything goes team is probably more productive and with a comparable rate of bugs (but I don't have the metrics to prove it). Personally, I don't feel like my comprehension is better or worse in one setting or the other.
The difference I do notice is that when there are no linters, nobody wastes time trying to figure out how to work around it for a few lines. A great example is Eigen matrix initialization through the stream operator overload [1]. You really want to manually format that so each row is on it's own line. If you use clang-format in such code, it will be littered with
MatrixXf mat(2, 2);
// clang-format off
mat << 1, 2,
3, 4;
// clang-format on
which adds a ton of unnecessary noise which does impair reading.
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.
But you know, at the end there should be someone who is cleaning the toilets and taking out garbage. You eating the cake and having it is a bit selfish.
Me living in a 4 BR house with only our 4 family members instead of us taking in a stranger is also a bit selfish.
Everyone does some level of selfish things; trying to shape work so that you find it enjoyable (and therefore likely something that others would also find enjoyable) is an acceptable form of selfishness to most.
Just because someone's cleaning the toilet doesn't mean that everyone must struggle. Yes, life's not fair to everyone, some people starve right now, while other throw away kilograms of food. Some people clean toilets while other people were born with gold spoon in their mouth and will enjoy whatever they want for the rest of their lives.
Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender to the world fairness, I think.
>Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender
But there is something to be said that some people are born into situations that force them to adopt a very risk adverse posture. If you don’t have any safety net, “daring to work at a place that does not suck” takes on a different risk profile and doesn’t necessarily generalize well as a strategy.
Why can't we just automate the terrible jobs out of existence? There's no good reason why we can't have a machine that cleans the toilet or takes your trash out to the street. Plus a self-driving machine that picks up your trash.
I think it was Joel Spolsky, who said one of his responsibilities as CEO of a new startup was cleaning the toilets until they could afford to pay a janitor.
I thought it was a good reminder to have an attitude of just seeing what needs to be done and doing it.
Possible, but unlikely today. I think the advice being converged on is not to let the possibility of 100% enjoyment ruin one's actual, real-life situation. Attain it if you can, but don't spend your life rueing its absence.
It's more so true today than ever before, where there are more companies than ever willing to consider allowing software developers, and some other kinds of knowledge workers, to work any where in the world.
It gives you more opportunities to find that combination of work you find meaningful, coworkers you mesh with, flexibility, and decent compensation, than any other time in history I'm aware of.
It's still not easy. Just easier than in the past.
I completely agree. As you stay, it's still not easy, especially in the post-ZIRP economy. Do I deserve to work with a team of interesting people, on a product I can be proud of, on a team that gives me flexible work hours? I sure do. But finding it is a big challenge for me, so I'm still going to celebrate the freedoms my current job gives me until I can find the right one.
The non-boring companies I've worked for have had problems of wanting to work you at 150% of your schedule, quite often illegally. It is insanely rare that you'll get a job that keeps you busy (only) 8 hours a day constantly. Either the place is always on fire and has 12 hours of work a day, or you'll have it better managed and work will be bursty with the majority of the time under utilized. Spend that extra time being taught stuff on the company dime.
Sometimes jobs aren't just boring, but one is constantly stressed by absurd deadlines or communication efforts with bosses/customers whose expectations are both in line with business practices and out of reality. You surely get back home with a nice check, but no energy or will to spend it on anything fun. Being good at forgetting the workplace and associated problems when one walks out of there is an art not everyone can master, especially among those who actually love their jobs.
I have a hobby that involves metalworking and building and it was strongest and I was at my most hobby-productive during a time I worked for a soul-destroying FAANG full of unreasonable expectations, stress, awful management, and so on. I think for the sake of your mental health, you really need to get good at "forgetting the workplace" and switching to fun mode. It's a skill like anything that you can practice. I know people who can't separate, and they take their misery from work and spread it into their home life. It's awful, especially for their family.
I fully recognized that would be required when I was in that situation. The TV show Severance kept coming to mind. I think I only saw a couple of episodes and the basic premise of dividing your mind between work and home was too real and I had to stop.
Thankfully I had an alternative and went back to startups. I could absolutely never accept dividing my brain like that, steeping in cognitive dissonance and just letting myself rot inside. Once you’ve felt the good life - where work is play and learning happens all day long - there’s no amount of money that can be accepted to lose that.
At Google I started to forget if I could even build things anymore. Doubted I would be able to pick up the skill of solving problems again if I left the company. I had strange and hard to interpret nightmares after realizing the company’s PR department had sold me a lie. At this point they are a traditional company.
It’s only soul destroying if you let it be. As someone who grew up in poverty and spent most of my 20s working at a call center and pawn shop, I feel like the luckiest person in my family with my soul destroying corporate job.
It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind. You don’t have to wait for something in the future to be happy now.
> rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy
I've heard this, but only from people who had been in an very shitty situation and then got out. Happiness is a state of mind, but misery is a set of circumstances, and the latter precludes the former unfortunately.
These conversations where highly paid software people complain about insanely minor things (the code linter is the worst part of your job??) are actually kind of nice to read, in a funny way.
The privilege of having pixels be the most stressful part of your life... it's actually really nice to read that. Having perspective from hardship is good, and everyone will have at least some perspective at some point in their life when hardship is forced upon them. But hardship in and of itself isn't good. I'm happy it is being completely eradicated from life, at least for some of us.
Yea, that linter thread was wild! Sometimes I think we are totally pampered and out of touch!
I've cleaned McDonalds bathrooms, worked in a plastics factory where the chemical stench left my nose nonfunctional for weeks, hauled heavy sacks of shingles up onto a roof in 100+F degree summer temperatures.
I am utterly grateful and consider it a lucky privilege to now be typing into a computer in a climate controlled office, where my biggest stressor is a deadline.
I will say: I don't necessarily like to say "lucky," or even "privileged". Luck incites tricky emotion because there's an implication with luck that you didn't deserve it. A gambler who won at the slot machine should have lost his money -- luck carries that "should have" connotation with it. Likewise, privilege carries a zero-sum connotation, because we always mean someone is privileged in relation to another, which introduces almost an adversarial tone to it.
For me, a better term is fortunate. I am fortunate that I have a job in a nice office, solving interesting puzzles all day, getting paid (relatively) a lot of money doing it. Fortune has come upon me. I work hard, although not really harder than any other reasonable person. I was born in the right zip code, to the right family, had access to an amazing education, had the stability in my life to pursue it. Fortune.
I will never look down on anyone who is fortunate. I wish most people could have fortune in their lives. If the price we pay is a few complaints that the soda machine is down today, so be it!
I don't mean to pile on but i feel the same when software devs here talk about how becoming a farmer is their salvation from their workplace suffering. As a kid I remember watching my cousin lie on his back with a stick welder underneath a horse trailer in 105F Texas summer heat. No thanks, i'll stick with my coffee, desk, and computer.
edit: different strokes for different folks, i don't want to sound too presumptuous. For some people what i described is exactly what would bring them joy.
A lot of the folks working in these bigger tech companies didn't grow up this way. A lot of them grew up in wealthy families, lived in wealthy neighborhoods, were pushed into an elite tech career by their parents, went to elite pre-university schooling, elite universities, etc and have never had to feel monetary scarcity. Just look at HN comments and see how many 3rd generation programmers there are. As an adult with savings working at bigger tech companies and never having experienced hardship or poverty as a child, the prospect of following your dream feels alluring.
I grew up in poverty myself but my partner and many of my friends at bigger tech companies grew up the way I discussed earlier. Most of them were pushed through their parents' social circles into a tech career and never were wanting for money. They feel the grind inherent to being paid for your time as opposed to volunteering your time and think of it as an injustice. My partner and friends complain constantly about tech and their jobs but other than a handful who briefly worked service jobs in their teens, they have nothing to compare it to. I spent my summers as a teen moving heavy boxes/furniture, often in 100F+ hot weather, and being paid in cash (hoping to become a cabinetmaker!) barely making ends meet and I know what it's like to keep a job a job.
I left Big Tech (I had joined it as a startup and ended up staying much longer than I expected) so I understand the complaints about heavily bureaucratic jobs where most of your time is spent coordinating rather than building, and while I'm always unhappy at something or the other with my job, I know how good I have it. I do a job that I don't hate, working with generally smart people, alternating between a cushy office and my home where outside of my work I mostly just complain about minor office perks. It's fantastic.
As a counterpoint to that, I grew up in a blue-collar family under modest circumstances and I still feel like bigcorp software development is soul-crushing. Surely, you appreciate it for a while. But eventually the reality of it sets in, and can't ignore the BS anymore.
I know I'm luckier than most humans on Earth, but still hedonistic adaptation is a thing, even if you grew up in a poor family.
>For some people what i described is exactly what would bring them joy.
Backbreaking manual labor sucks. The heat. The cold. The shit. The frost. I'll format my fucking code any way you tell me to to avoid farm life. Like I give a shit. A week in and I won't even notice. Ah Christ, the smell of cow pus ...nyaagggggh.
As for woodworking: You will get cut, there is no hope of avoiding it, and no telling how bad it's going to be. The next day, we will see how serious your woodworking gig really is. You gotta be out there, bub. Get it stitched up and keep on cranking out the pieces.
Because it’s soul destroying knowing that to get medical insurance, it is directly tied to your employment. If not for that, people would gladly pursue their interests and passions without the fear of a bankrupting medical incident.
That's not "soul destroying", it's real life. The vast majority of people in this world have to do a job that they aren't in love with so that they can pay the bills. Anyone who is privileged enough to be in a highly paid tech job should be extremely thankful. Not only do we get paid well, we have to work 1/4 as hard as the people busting their asses for a living. We have a real sweetheart deal even if our jobs aren't always everything we would like.
There's something to be said for being able to look back and see a bridge or road or house of piece of furniture or an automobile you built, and see it's still being used and providing value to someone. Even if the monetary compensation was only mediocre.
It sounds like modern day slavery, or perhaps more precisely "corvee" labor. You have to toil away on your master's land before doing your own thing. I find it unbearable, but sadly much of the world has to deal with it.
And you are mocking his authentic feelings. Slaves are an abstract kind of human for him. Feelings are not comparable, right? Now this poor dude can't even vent a lil in an online forum?
To the OP: When it sucks a lot, try singing. It really, really helps. Throw your head back and let it out of you on the way home.
In corporations is not a lot of money, almost never the market rates. In my big non-IT company I am paid at rates lower than any external company we contract for projects, even if their people are always lower qualified.
Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.
If you were comparing what the other company was charging your company for their developers: Labor and software services have different markets. Because, among other things, tax/insurance regulations and the expectations of contract longevity are not the same. A software shop needs to charge 2-3x salaries to be profitable. I was referring to a theoretical free market for labor.
If you were comparing salaries, either your company was compensating you with extra prestige, job security, etc. or you were underpaid.
I am comparing manager/architect positions in Europe with long-term (5+ years) contractor positions in India. Yes, I know contracting is more expensive than employees, but not to this level. We use contractors because internal developers would be paid so bad, nobody would apply (and they don't).
I'd say they pay bad so they don't have to have the local employees that would be protected by strong local laws. Contracting is effectively cheaper, mostly because the company doesn't care about the health of the local company/economy.
I learned to play the game. I too really enjoy being able to talk directly to the client while building, but I also learned to play the game of cogs, where I am separated from the client by layers of increasingly clueless management. I balance the insanity with pursuing photography.
I work for a large company , and I love people I'm with and had some great challenges and accomplishments, but yeah... There's still a creative urge that's left not completely filled. So I ran a photography business for a decade!I loved interacting with happy and involved clients, and creating something that brings them immediate joy :). I don't have time anymore to do it professionally but I still do it for friends and family ( while I work with my therapist to survive my day job :)
I was in a fast-growing company (although adjacent to Tech), that grew "big" and went though tons of extra bureaucracy where you will spend months fighting for some stupid change that makes all the technical sense. Now the company is sinking, I hope I will be fired and with the severance package I can enjoy life for 6-8 months and then go find again a company where I can fix things and impact someone's life in a mostly positive way. Wish me luck.
I worked for big companies, startups, and freelance. If you don’t take control of your career you will be unfulfilled. Software has the pick of the litter. The winning combination is a big company and a role you chose. Security, compensation, and creativity all in one. Startups are 90% likely to fail, contracting will set you back late in life if you don’t hustle all the time. YMMV but nothing beats a blue chip.
One man's garden of eden is another's hell on earth. I've gone back and forth between big and small. I'm genuinely happy at small companies with tight knit teams (getting abused by csuite for shit pay ofc). At big companies I get extremely depressed in a corporate hell scape mostly surrounded by people that have maintained sanity by dissociating from the job and collecting a paycheck.
I'm trying to start my own business now without going down the consulting route. At the very least I tell myself that the spoils of the hustle go to me. Let's see how this phase goes.
Another idea: work for an IT services big company. Then you'll have a lot of change, will be much less of a cost center (only at times) and talk directly to the customer to solve their problems. Not the same as a startup of course, but at least on paper it looks like checking your points with slightly less stress or risk.
> This is why I am very happy [...] where one can have honest conversations
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.
>"This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?"
I am very good at designing and creating software products from scratch. Was doing it for few years a an employee of smallish company that served numerous clients. I then went on my own and kept doing the same. I have my own product that brings in some money. Also I design and develop software product to various clients. I've had ups and downs but in average am very happy, not overworked, have more than enough time for myself and like my job which is basically a hobby paid for by the clients. My client are usually small to medium size that are not really in software but for one or another reason software runs their business.
I run my own self-funded solo business. I talk to my customers and make a meaningful difference in their daily work. If I do my job right, they gladly pay me subscription money. I'm pretty happy with this, especially given that I choose my tools and technologies, and that my customers are smart engineers.
I think there is something special about physical creativity that scratches a certain part of your even if you have a very fulfilling day-job.
"Even" Chris Lattner (of LLVM and Swift fame) which I as an outsider at least would say have a fulfilling job dabbles in the occasional woodworking: https://nondot.org/sabre/Woodworking.html
I think those people also are more likely to have the work life balance to pursue hobbies where most people doing fast growing/early stage startups are off balance. I personally don’t care what I spend my time on at work, I’ve found even when I enjoy the work, it doesn’t increase my fulfillment in life over the long term. So I try to optimize the life part of the ratio as much as I can, at times at expense of the work side of the ratio.
When you are young and especially when you don't have a family to support, you move to some place where you like to work. When you are older and opportunities are rare (and agism is huge in the industry), you just take what you can and escape any way you can, like video games or side passions of any sorts. I bought a motorcycle when I was over 30 years old for commuting (heavy traffic, the bike was saving hours), but after a few years I started to take motorcycle trips in the weekends and, once in a while, across Europe. But it can be anything that you find enjoyable, the point is that you have to try different things and see what you like, when I was 20-25 years old I had no desire to ever buy a motorcycle. Now, if it's a light rain, I am happy to take it for a ride.
I get what you're saying, but for the author of the article it seems the opposite issue. He seems to (mostly) live from his own software products, and his two main points of stress are unreasonable customers & his own inability to let things go when fixing/working on stuff.
> 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.
Depends on the industry. I've been doing iOS for over a decade. You're right in that there are different dynamics with enterprise that can wear you down. I find that to be less so the case with jobs in the retail sector. Things are always fluid and changing there.
Still, this is a very subjective statement. As someone in my middle ages, I've come to appreciate and understand how views change over time. The 20-something me would have jumped over to new jobs every 2-3 years. The 40 something me recognizes value in work/life balance, stability, and a more defined and often opportunistic growth path in larger companies. And it's at this stage that while I may not fully comprehend the occasional stubbornness of 60-something devs, I can at least approach their way of thinking as not wrong. When you have a spouse, family, and mortgage to support, the potential upsides of a smaller, more nimble company just don't overcome the peace of mind of being in the corporate world.
I'm one of those creative types. I have woodworking shop, I'm a musician, my wife and I are part-time performing magicians.
I've only ever worked for small start-ups. Including my own which paid the bills for 15 years.
Working for start-ups does not solve the problem for me.
The problem for me is that I need to give a shit about WHAT I'm creating. And I find that after 25 years of working in the tech industry professionally, as an end user the older I get the less interest in modern technology I have.
It's hard for me to not see the negatives. I want a car that I can maintain myself and that does not talk to a network for critical functions. I want a fridge that just cools my food and doesn't come with an app or "smart" features. I have zero interest in AI. I love writing code, and I'm already over-burdened by poor code quality that I've inherited and that was written by inexperienced devs. I don't need AI generating code for me that I then need to review and refactor. It's faster and more fulfilling for me to write it myself. I never got on the smart phone bandwagon. Yes, I own one, but I often forget where I left it and when I find it the battery is usually dead because I haven't touched it in days. I don't want a "smart home." I'm not a gamer.
So in my off hours, I find that I spend my time doing things that don't touch modern tech at all.
So yeah, I find myself constantly planning my exit strategy from the industry. I enjoy coding, making things and solving problems but I don't enjoy modern technology the way that I used to. And making products that I wouldn't use myself is what I find soul crushing.
As an aside, high skill and low excitement is a great recipe for composure. It makes me think of a veteran I once knew. He once talked us out of a sticky situation because seeing his calm demeanor, the authority figures had no reason to suspect we were up to something.
Amen. On the same bandwidth here. No social media. I don’t read the news. We don’t have a TV. I yearn for old tech. New tech has no character or charm. AI is the worst thing to happen to the industry. Literally just makes our working conditions worse
There are plenty of big tech or big tech adjacent public traded company jobs paying far better that are still majority coding and with a lot less speed pressure than an early stage startup, among other things allowi Ng for an earlier retirement.
I work for a digital services consultancy handling large gov't contracts. It has all the problems of every large organization, public or private, but it's not overly demanding. The work is more challenging from a people perspective than a technical one.
But, as in my last big project, I'm building something well that makes a concrete difference in people's lives, internally and externally. In my previous project, the software we delivered saved hours a day for clerks who were typically very overworked, and we received grateful emails telling us that they'd been able to sit down for lunch for the first time in years. In the current project we're bringing GIS capabilities and full accessibility to a gov't online service--we have a mandate to ensure it works properly with screen readers, and we're actually doing new work on making map features accessible to the visually impaired.
So much of the motivation for geeks is technical satisfaction that we can miss many other forms of fulfillment in our technical jobs. Having worked on the web since the late 1900s, through multiple hype waves and "oh, we're doing this again" moments, I find the non-tech, more people-oriented rewards much more satisfying.
> 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
Guilty (although retired now). When I could apply creativity to my job, I did so, but I think I prefer to have had the outside-work activities to have been my creative outlets.
The application to express creativity in software is fairly narrow in comparison to other activities and, as was pointed out in this thread, physically creating with your hands (rather than virtual creating with your keyboard) is ... real.
>> The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul.
This really struck me because I'm realizing it is soul destroying but have gotten competent, and even good at it. I was involved in my family's small business and some of my own startup attempts and consulting, so I remember those feelings.
At small companies, across a long career, I’ve solved the same problems many times. But that’s not the part that stings the most.
What grinds my gears is failing to solve problems I’ve already solved. At some point you have to convince others that a plan is good. Your arguments might not work on a new team. You might not know what the secret sauce was that got you consensus last time. Or after years of getting your way you may forget some of the arguments for an idea.
Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight.
There’s a lot of vaguely intellectually lazy, cheap instead of frugal thinking, and ethically challenged people in or around our industry, and the collective weight of it causes pushback on progress.
> Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight.
That's where you write a blog post, a company note, or a book if you got the time. The best proof of mastery is teaching because that's when you got confronted to the problems from another perspective (the other may not learn it as well as you do). And you won't have to repeat yourself that much if your arguments and process are written somewhere.
Companies can be wildly different in how they operate, how decisions are made, and what trade offs they prefer, what culture they have.
Simply adoption something that worked in a previous place isn’t a way of usually making decisions, imagine a company with 100 engineers where they all came from different companies and have different ways they solved the cicd problem - how do you move forward from that ?
Decision making can be complex - can also be very simple, depending on the company ..
This comment hits the crux of what OP was really getting at. It's not that software itself is an inherently bad trade; it's what's been happening to it and why.
> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product
Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.
It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.
As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.
This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.
The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.
people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources
I’ve said this a million times on this forum.. the little trick whereby people who were once employees became merely _human resources_ has done more to damage work-life in this world than anything else I can think of.
Its natural to exploit resources to their fullest. Labeling humans as resources is inherently dehumanizing and desperately needs to end.
I've lost my cool one time when a very young "manager" asked: "Do we have a backend resource on this call?"
It really got my blood boiling and I've said something very similar to: "No we don't have a resource on the call, we have engineers, colleagues, employees, humans and friends on this call. Resources are air, water, memory, cpu and time, please don't call people like that". This followed by silence, and a lot of red faces.
Couple of weeks later, had a talk with my manager who is a true and true programmer I really respect. And then he says something with that "resource" referring to our team members...
I have experience across various industries, and many professions think very highly of themselves. But over here I have seen the working population be so easily manipulated, self-effacing, and self-abnegating. Most of the time bad managers just say "jump!" and engineers just ask "how high?".
I had the unfortunate privilege of meeting two of the first "techbros". They were marketers more than tech people, but they were tech-adjacent and that was enough to make them cutting edge.
The thing they kept saying was "We'll run it through the machine." Meaning "We'll hand that off to our software team and have them complete it." Of course today, the one who stayed in tech might be salivating about running software requirements through an actual machine to produce code.
But resources are what you are, hoss. Sounds like the youth of this manager got you messed up. Old head move is to pull him to the side, with the sotto voce, give him a chance to show you he is open to feedback. How can he change now without losing something? This is workplace 101 stuff.
Good attempt at tone policing, I'll grant you that.
You can keep calling yourself whatever you like, or more to say, swallow whatever little pride you still have. But I don't subscribe to that and I won't be called a tool/object/resource in my presence.
I like the big companies because I can be paid a hefty six figure salary while working 4 hour days and spending the rest of the hours doing woodworking, gardening, home remodeling, baking, exercising, reading, etc.
It's an odd thing - at all the big companies I've worked for, you can usually get all your work for the day done in 4 hours. Between meetings and status waste, that's all anybody expects from you.
What you personally do is only part of your job. Communicating with others is probably at least the other 50%. Even if your an individual consultant your clients will expect you to communicate with them.
I wish I could be so lucky. In recent years, every job I've worked for has reached a point where I had to endure 4 hours of meetings per day before we could even begin to get work done (if we were lucky)
The departments where people were casually putting in 4 hours per day mostly got axed during COVID and again during the 2024 recessions. There was a period of time where a lot of teams accumulated a lot of people so they could spread the work thin. Eventually management started catching on and put an end to that.
> I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems
I finally identified that at my last job, and have begun actively working to make that happen. For example, I transitioned internally to a "platform" team so that I know my customer—my fellow product developers at the company.
This has resulted in me being MUCH happier with my day-to-day work.
Same. The enterprise can be enjoyable from some aspects, but in the end the soul-suck isn't worth it to me. I think a great skunk works team with a big budget is probably the dream, but short of those rare and difficult-to-get opportunities, the startup/small-tech co is the place to go for people like us. Some are better than others at faciliting honesty, but it's far more common IME than big corp.
Not everybody is like that, even in software. I mean sure, creative aspect is very cool, but its fraction of any senior job, including most bigger startups from what I've heard. Even my current corporate job which started 12 years ago was pure dev in the beginning, now its maybe 20-30%. Responsibilities, personal growth, but also business grew in complexity and IT landscape and various regulations governing it exploded and keep exploding. I know stuff very few other do, so I get involved continuously into tons of efforts.
As they say, if you work manually hard work rest with mental challenges, and vice versa. Wood working must be cool since you create visible results with your hands and there is certainly some physical effort. I don't seek further creativity TBH, I look for extreme/adrenaline sports, be it climbing, ski alpinism, paragliding and few other similar (but also super chill diving to cover all elements and balance intensity). And ie in climbing, finding out how to climb some new route that is hard and scary for you is extremely rewarding, a literal creative ballet on vertical rock face.
Till kids came, this was making me properly happy and fulfilled to 120% since I was doing something every evening, every weekend, every vacation combined with 3rd world backpacking. Plus it made me super healthy and more focused on healthy eating too, became quite attractive to women since all this changes visuals but also confidence and overall persona for the better in aspects many women notice.
With small kids, and few non-horrible injuries I am now somewhere in the middle now, but kids are top priority, rest are not that important now (folks who keep going the same way/pace after having kid(s) I don't respect, it shows later on those kids in all kinds of bad ways). I know I have skillset to show them later some pretty awesome places and activities, but will let them go their own way. Just managing maximum possible off screen time since thats cancer for young soul and sugary stuff since thats cancer for body, now its easy and they follow our examples so they happily much some bio carrots and ignore cakes.
> Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff.
There are many levels to "build stuff", so it's important to introspect what kind is important to you.
I love to build quality code. Production code that is quite efficient, fast, secure and maintainable while being full-featured.
Having done five startups now, this is very difficult to do in startups.
(There was one startup where we had a great team of like-minded quality-driven people and it was awesome, but it was the exception.)
"Building stuff" in startups usually means throwing together a mess of half-baked code and holding it together with chewing gum and duct tape and immediately moving on to the next thing that sales promised a customer yesterday but hasn't been started. From a business perspective, that's not wrong. It's a startup, you need to grow fast and add features at lightning speed to capture some market. But if you crave to build quality, this isn't it.
It's only in larger companies with some stability and steady revenue that there is some possibility of finding the environment to build things I can be proud of. Of course, most large companies also just build junk. Finding a good one is hard, and is an exercise left to the reader.
> Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff
My experience is the opposite: you can usually chill at big companies, while startups need money fast and attracts the worst managers. I know it's not the same experience for everyone, but I'll never work for a startup ever again.
I’m very lucky. I work on a very small software team, with a very flat structure, where my boss, with a very high level of trust, tasked me with replacing several very old parts of the product stack using my best judgment and choice of languages/tools. He also appreciated that during the interview, I mentioned that my work must be oriented towards customer value; that is the ultimate goal of any of our work. I am often privy to client feedback. However, I am also protected by a hard communications firewall from direct contact with those customers, as well as the much larger field tech and sales side of the company. My job thoroughly satisfies my creative and technical needs, such that I do not pursue much programming or high-skill crafting outside of work.
Nobody believes me when I tell them this. Software is so thoroughly corrupted by the low-trust managerial paradigm, where massive hierarchies are built to justify high-paying managerial positions that end up reducing the efficiency and productivity of great programmers, that it’s simply taken for granted: We should never trust engineers to make independent decisions, to schedule their own pursuit of tasks, to pick the right tool for the job, to do this all with customer value in mind.
Who knows? Maybe I’m the exception and engineers don’t deserve to be trusted. In which case we have a very, very big societal problem. All I know is that our software team performs very esoteric group interviews, and our style seems very good at sniffing out pretenders and exploiters.
> However, I am also protected by a hard communications firewall from direct contact with those customers, as well as the much larger field tech and sales side of the company.
One of the worst faceplants I've seen in my current role was when my team was developing a solution to integrate some third-party data. Our PO reported to a Product Manager who was tapped as the "I talk to the end users" person and he completely fucked it up. The team was siloed off to do this for multiple quarters, and at the rollout we literally got laughed at and told "we can't use this." But God forbid my team actually, you know, TALK and DEMO to the end users once an iteration like you're supposed to in Scrum, as opposed to plugging in some drone from corporate who it turns out doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
We have a liaison in a similar manner, but she manages a Jira ticketing system by which we require our sales people and field techs to fully communicate issues and feature demands. The company used to give out programmer phone numbers and emails. Projects used to get completely side-tracked by programmers chasing trivial features or even entire alternative tools and getting sidetracked long-term from the primary projects. It cost the company their leadership position and a significant amount of programmer turnover. It's still an ongoing issue that our field techs and sales folks simply do not understand the field well enough to know what they're asking for.
The ticketing firewall has been a net boon and we've been able to overhaul a number of ailing backend systems, while adding features that were in demand for going on two decades. Turns out, most of the features being requested were easy to implement given the right choice of languages and architecture. We went from constant fires to downright quiet in our office. Most of the ongoing project work is aspirational and would vault us back to industry leadership, instead of the constant remedial work that was bogging us down.
> This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?
My experience is the opposite. Startups i've worked at were mostly 'boys clubs' where if you weren't part of a 'core group' then you were merely a mercenary. So you are in the same situation as in 'big tech' without the safety or prestige. You still have schmooze and 'manage up' to get into that core group of decision makers. Startups aren't immune from human nature.
startups as meritocratic wonderlands of creativity is not an idea based in reality.
What will you do if your company becomes “successful”: is either acquired by a “big company” or becomes a “big company”? Particularly if you play a significant role in your company’s success? Maybe get a head start and learn about wood.
I made my son a floor bed, it's really true that when you work with code all day having something tangible that you can touch helps.
It took twice as long as I thought. It cost double what it would have cost to buy one of Etsy but it's still one of my favourite things I've done in ages. My son still gets excited when he see's it sometimes
I have to laugh because I find almost all programmers are like this. They are almost always people who like making things. A lot of them are musicians too.
I find DIY to be similar - you get a physical result, you use your hands to make something, the satisfaction is almost always about pleasing your own sense of what you want. Ok there's the wife too but ....
I also like feeling that I can cope with certain jobs even if not well. Also you do get better. Baking and cooking can be like this too. When you learn the "tricks" that make your bread turn out better or your skirting boards line up properly or whatever then it's a super feeling. :-)
I also find cooking (not necessarily baking) to be quite similar to programming: you follow steps and if some bug happens in production (too salty, too thick, not flavourful enough) then you go in and try to debug it and fix it (I guess the simile breaks down here).
But if someone is good at breaking down IT tasks, I believe they will be able to prepare a large meal with multiple courses, as I find it requiring a similar mindset to releasing a feature.
I love baking! I purposefully don't try to optimize my recipes so that there's always a bit of art, magic, randomness, individual element to it. It's so much fun compared to corporate job!
Confirmation bias. I have seen multiple different programmers developers etc that such a generalization just puts a smile on my face. Age, family status, location, family influences probably have more to do with the selection of a hobby rather than the text modification job alone. The last decades rendered us more or less exceptional and people like to play with this satisfactory idea. But programmers are no different to electricians or plumbers or architectural technicians, etc.
> Even my last team leader sent me a message out of the blue saying “I think I’ll run a bar. I want to be a bartender and listen to other people’s stories, not figure out why protobuf doesn’t deserialize data that worked JUST FINE for the past three years”.
I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories you can hear.
This is just comparing apples to oranges. Woodworking or any other hobby that you enjoy will be more pleasing than any real job you will do. Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it. Working as software developer can be less so.
Yeah, I know a few white collar workers bartending or in a kitchen, one weekday night or so, but they had a lot of experience with the service industry before they got a white collar job, and worked in lower paying business side and non tech engineering jobs where the extra money was a little more appreciated, if not their main reason for being there. (The bartender wanted “forced” socialization and the cook was a food enthusiast who wanted to keep his skills sharp). I’m not saying a “techie” wouldn’t or couldn’t do it, but if they’ve never done it before they don’t know if they’re the type of person who would be burnt out by it or rejuvenated.
> Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it.
For some. I certainly started that way. But many of my friends at Uni started from a different point. I heard many describing how they choose computer engineering because it is perceived as a good career or because they heard it pays a lot. I'm not sure if those people have the same "Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it." to fall back to.
A lot, most of the people actually who got into software for the past decade or so seem to have been motivated by money. They'd just as easily became doctors or lawyers. And it shows, a lot of software now is just some grey corporate kafkaesque mess.
The people responsible for all the packages on npm, pip, cargo, Conan really really love writing lots of lines of code to solve every imaginable tiny problem. So they are out there.
FWIW this happened during the dot com boom and a lot of them scurried off during the dot com bust. The amount of US salary one can pull with no formal education needed is the driver for this cycle.
My preference in hiring is people that are drawn to computing naturally, they will be there for the long haul.
I'm not sure it's just the money. You can still do those other things and make good money.
I think a lot of people are drawn into the industry these days from various online communities because you can enforce your particular viewpoint of social order in a small niche and basically be mini-tyrants. This is very western-world specific, but looking at the "communities" around Ruby, Node, Rust, Nix, etc, it looks fairly clear.
I put communities in quotes because I'm referring to those communities within the community that tend to label themselves as the whole community, write petitions to remove undesirables, etc.
The ability to create a space entirely of likeminded individuals that purges undesirables is highly attractive to certain kinds of people. Saw this happening on forums and bbs first decades ago and now it's the governance body of everything.
It's happened in tabletop gaming too -- one local game group I was a part of got co-opted by a guy just through starting a discord and hosting events. Suddenly a very apolitical community started being dominated by tankie politics and banning of members for wrongthink. We were just trying to game with some minis up till then. I got fed up and quit once the guy running the discord started ranting about how everyone in America should be forcibly relocated to cities and reeducated in more progressive values. I'm just trying to point plastic lasers at people and roll dice, my guy.
I got into programming before the past decade and initially it was the lure of a good career i.e. money. But when attended my first class, I instantly knew that this was it. Sometimes the path isn't pretty but it can lead to beautiful places.
> I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories you can hear.
I'm assuming that by this you mean that most stories you hear around the bar are just the same stories with different characters and protagonists?
Anything gets old. I feel like a lot of the problems my friends and I have with software work comes down to having to wrangle the same sort of nonsense week in, week out.
Alienation of the workers and all that. Profitable but psychologically damaging. We thrive when we get to be whole persons.
It's not profitable and we should stop saying that. The issue is that there's just not enough quality out there so companies accept less quality and have to start managing for it.
If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.
> If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.
I don’t know this is true. My personal experience across a dozen jobs is that the only metric that really matters is “how low can you go?” Cost is the thing to minimize and quality is the absolute first thing to be considered optional and to be cut to fulfill the cost objective. Closely followed by “how fast can you go?” Not a pleasant way to work.
I am very much this way. Greenfield dev on a project that's interesting is very engaging. Munging through thousands of lines of code trying to find the conditional or field that isn't being set properly, or that is being incorrectly accessed is draining.
Or finding that `savePaypalTransactionToDatabase` doesn't return the row ID, but instead returns true/false to indicate success, and not being able to easily refactor it because god knows where that function is being used, and what sorts of knock-on effects it can have, even with a decent IDE, and deciding "fuck it, I'll just write a wrapper around it that then queries for the
You know what, nevermind, it's Saturday, why am I thinking about work.
I keep reflecting on this, it's always when you get negative mismatch. Being forced to work with the wrong people (too negative, too angry, not motivated) or not having time to work on a good idea or good solution.
When you don't have to suffer these, you can work long, cause it's basically a kind of self fulfilling game.
The key difference is that you are not working on the same side project doing the same thing for 40 hours a week for years. You probably change around you side project every few months and likely don't work on them full time.
> Woodworking or any other hobby that you enjoy will be more pleasing than any real job you will do.
I think that you mean that a hobby (that you can pick up and put down as you please) is always more enjoyable than a job (at which you must work, usually on someone else's schedule, to make money), but, just to be quite clear, there's no reason that woodworking can't be a real job.
Programing is fun but it lacks a tangible component, I started my studies as a CS major but after a spending an entire spring break writing and debugging(and basically only those things...eating and sleeping happened if I remembered to) were the second year project. I realized that I would end up working the same way, so I found a major that I can't take with me and isn't just contained in my head.
I worked in the robotics lab at my university for a few months. That was a really nice way of making software more tangible. Seeing things move through physical space made it more real.
I miss working in robotics, in part due to this. Also implenting a complex path algorithm is so much more rewarding than moving data around. The field testing trips were the cherry on top.
The nicest part of working at the bar is when you leave the bar you're done working. Also, you don't need to get your drink pouring approved by another bartender that nitpick small details of what you did to boost their own ego.
It's the timeless notion of "work". All the chaotic constraints thrown at one person: teammates, customers, tooling, psychology, politics.. they will turn anything into a slow boiling hell.
That said some domains are cleaner than others, just like small rivers have clearer water, I remember working in food stores or even mechanics and you don't get the same kind of fatigue as in software engineering. The stimulations are more diverse, a bit deeper (helps getting into flow in a way) and the culture helps (less discussion about shallow things like indentation). Fast food for instance, being a real-time thing requires tight planning and tight execution, no space for slack. It makes you sweat but you get seriously fast and good at your operations. Unlike coding where you can spin in circles for ages never get anywhere, and go home drained feeling useless.
I'll be 40 in a few months, so recently I've been a bit more pensive than usual, reflecting on where I'm at in my life. One of my biggest regrets so far is how much time I spent wishing I was somewhere other than where I was.
>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.
At least there is some honesty there. Everywhere that does estimates, even if they make the devs think its complexity or some other nonsense, is translating that to days somewhere down the line.
I don't think t-shirt sizes is absurd. It's one of the few good ways that really conveys "we have only a very vague idea how long this will take".
Story points are dumb because they always are just a bad proxy for time.
Really though, the right solution is time plus confidence. Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.
Unfortunately a large number of people simply can't comprehend this, and also no tools support it, so I've never seen it actually done. I imagine management wouldn't like it either because then they can't pretend they have a perfect plan with no uncertainty.
I never understood this sentiment. It seems to me that the communication is broken, when a developer has problems with delays. It’s not their decision, and it’s not their risk. If developers report uncertainties properly, even during development, when a previously unknown unknown appears, or a known unknown takes longer than it was estimated, it’s not their fault. If this doesn’t happen, it’s obviously difficult to explain. Otherwise, I never had problems with even delays 4x the original estimation, because every party knew even from the start, that we had no idea how the end result would look like.
The fact you even had to say that part points to the management problem at hand. Not only are you trying to keep idle time low, you're trying to estimate essentially unknown timelines, and you have to think about whether people are even telling the truth or padding hours where they feel they can.
I just think the range is too wide. Sure anything can be a 1 day task (potentially just an easy solution to add in, or some variables/settings to change, etc). And any 1 day task could be turned into an 8 day task (anything from refactoring unnecessarily, all the way to just walking the dog too frequently). I'm left wondering, how long should this task have taken?
> you're trying to estimate essentially unknown timeline
Yes. The exact amount of time the task will take is unknown. That doesn't mean I have no idea how long it will take. The point of the estimate is to tell other people my idea of how long it will take. Even if I only have a rough idea it is probably a better idea than a lot of people.
Incidentally I've found that a lot of people don't understand that, and I have a hack! If you find yourself in a situation where you're waiting for something... let's say roadworks, and you say "any idea how long it will take?" and they refuse to give an estimate, even though they clearly have a better idea than you... What you can do is suggest an outlandish number, and then they'll say "oh no no not that long. More like x".
> Really though, the right solution is time plus confidence. Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.
It's a half-assed reimplementation of PERT charts, which were invented in the 1950s and used successfully for many decades, until everyone decided that everything old is terrible.
Last year I abandoned my JavaScript career of 15 years. I made a promise to myself that I will NEVER go back for less than $500,000. Yes, the number is large enough to reach absurdity, but that’s the point.
I am currently happy at my current job that pays well enough writing proxies. The team and leadership are great with tremendous internal training. It just feels military, which is fitting since it’s at a military organization.
If this line of work doesn’t work I will still not go back to software. I would rather be unemployed and lose my house.
Like painting or architecture, woodworking have a finished state, after that, you just ship it and not worry about it again. whereas in software, everything is so malleable that a rewrite is often going to happen again and again.
But it's great to have other passions outside of it. To get away from your main occupation. To reset and to get a perspective.
And woodworks seems like a good choice. You're still making things, physical ones and you can hone your skill.
I've made a handful of things in my life (e.g. two simple custom beds for my home) without any prior knowledge of wood working at all. They weren't great, but good enough. And I couldn't have been prouder.
So thanks for sharing your story. I might get back to tinkering in my garage more often!
This line from the article may be one of the saddest descriptions of modern "success" I've ever read:
"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 don't think the difference is between software vs any other endeavor.
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.
There are tradeoffs too though...large corporations can offer large problems to solve too, even though they will often be behind a bunch of red tape. Some people are well equipped to deal with that. Some people are okay with encountering the red tape, and waiting the 3 months for it to resolve...in the meantime you focus on other things, still get paid, and then go home and focus on hobbies/family/whatever. For the people that want to "move fast and break things"...yeah don't join a fortune 100/500 company.
Nothing wrong with finding a new hobby but this is a stereotype of tech workers. If it isn’t woodworking, it’s beekeeping or some other perfectly fine side quest.
I have a small issue with the way the people who get into these hobbies are so bitter. Every job has stuff like this, we aren't special.
There is a talk 'Programming With Hand Tools' by Tim Ewald, where the author explains why he uses hand tools (as opposed to electric tools) in his woodworking hobby and how this might be reflected back to programming.
I haven’t seen the talk but I think about this comparison all the time. Knowing how to use hand tools makes you keenly aware of your material. I was recently surprised to learned exactly what “against the grain” meant while trying to plane hard maple. This awareness translates into a more nuanced understanding of power tools and has made me a much better power tool woodworker. Understanding programming tools all the way down to bare metal has the same effect. I teach a computer security course where we look at a number of classic control flow attacks (eg, stack smashing). Students are simply unable to explain the behavior I show them until they get all the way down to raw memory dumps of programs.
The only downside to seeing this connection is that you’re constantly tempted to use idioms from woodworking to explain programming problems, which just confuses most people.
Being involved with software professionally and woodworking as a hobby, I can recommend that talk. The parallels he draws are so good that I was almost angry with myself for not seeing them before watching that talk.
The absurdity I see most is based in culture. Technology development is awesome the business plans and machinations are the absurdities. Any job that does not have a manager with a business plan or an org chart is a breath of fresh air.
Replace woodworking with "any hobby you want to pursue".
I find that a lot of people go to work thinking they enjoy it, and wake up later and realize it is just "work". This leads them to go off and figure out what they really enjoy, and they start doing that (they call it a hobby). Some of them ruin their hobby, by turning it into a full time job, where once again, it just becomes "work".
I tried out hydroponics over the pandemic and it was fantastic! I stuck a pepper plant into a cup of water, made sure the nutrients were right, and watched that thing go off, I was an extremely proud plant dad.
It's just amazing that such a small seed contains all the necessary information an initial machinery to rebuild a complete plant that then builds more seeds.
It blows your mind, if you think about it for a moment.
Quite a bit of romanticizing goes on with this fantasy, but I think it does illuminate why software jobs tend to pay so well. It’s usually not very fun, hard to learn, hard to keep up with, and if it weren’t for the pay many people would not bother with it.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadFeels like a very outsized reaction to have to something well-intentioned, useful, and not-ridiculous.
It's just that estimating well needs people with training on how to do that, and then it takes substantial time to make good estimates. And there will still be significant error bars (if the estimate isn't a range, it doesn't count as an estimate). But it's certainly doable.
To narrow down the estimate to what they want would take just as long as just doing the work.
It’s this sort of disinformation that perpetuates the contingent of software developers that cry bloody murder whenever they’re asked to say if something will take a day or a year.
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.
Using time tracking, I was able to discover I only spend 2-3 hours per workday actually programming, the rest was all interruptions and such. Thus I can estimate that one day really equals 3-4 workdays. Then my project manager throws in another 3-4x on top of that to deal with scope creep, rework, bug fixes, etc... and we're usually on-target ~50% of the time.
An SDE1 was expect to spend 4hr coding a day; an SDE3 about 2.5hr coding a day.
That’s normal for a job, eg, apartment maintenance (my college job) would have us actually wokring about 4 hours a day, between setup, cleanup, breaks, travel, miscellaneous tasks, etc.
Convincing other SDEs to assign points to stories based on that (4hrs of coding per point) was surprisingly hard.
The non engineer types won't hand you that, but I've had some success with proposing that when there's a lot of uncertainty.
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
The most common problem with estimates is hidden or forgotten complexity, which makes both time and "effort", whatever that means, go up.
> software engineers can't estimate how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.
This is both irrelevant and wrong.
It’s irrelevant because t-shirt sizes, story points, and other abstract measures, are - intentionally - not measures of time. It’s a measure of effort, benchmarked against other units of work. Yes, this can, sometimes, give a vague indication of time. It’s also useful for other reasons, too, like weeding out whether or not everyone is on the same page with regard to what needs to be done in the first place. All of this is explained in literally any primer on the subject.
You’re wrong in saying that software engineers aren’t capable of estimating effort (or even time) with any degree of accuracy. They can. I can tell you that my Python hello world script will take less time and effort than rewriting the Linux kernel. None of the “research” and “experience” that you so confidently refer to says what you think it does. It says that there are big limitations to the degree to which timelines can be estimated. This is entirely true. But there’s nuance to it. You’re so desperate to find a shortcut to being smart on the internet that you’re spreading blatant disinformation in the process.
Software engineers can't estimate how long things will take: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02637...
They're wrong, 60% of the time by overestimation and when underestimated, so vastly wrong it's terrifying. I remember this one time I merely had to update a component in prod. Everything went fine in staging, then when I pressed the "button" in prod ... all hell broke loose. We spent the next 4 days fixing it.
I never wrote that software engineers can't estimate effort, I said they can't estimate time, but you're accusing me of the former.
If you're working with a system where your staging environment is not sufficiently close to your prod environment to be entirely predictive of behaviour, that's a "known unknown" and should be in the estimate.
The time/work to investigate and fix it probably wasn't considered (or shouldn't have been, at least) part of the work on the component you were changing - that was just delayed, same as it would be in scenarios like "Dave got hit by a bus and he's the only one with the prod password" and "Our CI service suddenly went out of business and we need to migrate everything".
I've written TV apps and in that world I've often given estimates that are 5 days of actual work but, because Samsung's QA process can take 6 weeks and spurious rejections are common, "deployment" will often take literally months.
Time to release and time for development can be totally different things and it's arguable whether "waiting" time should be included in any individual estimate at all. (You're adding 4 separate features and doing 2 bugfixes in one release, which one gets +2 months? In reality "submit/release" becomes a different ticket/task.)
How would we measure that?
Of course, the business still needs time estimates, so someone will somehow attempt to turn them into time estimates. But that can't be helped.
Yeah, when put as an estimate of effort or complexity, we can be good at estimating that. But that isn't how it was put.
> so someone will somehow attempt to turn them into time estimates.
It works until it doesn't. I would estimate manually entering data as "pretty easy" but it won't be done in a day no matter how much you pay me. I can only type so fast. There are many tasks that are easy but take a really long time, and many complex tasks that take a very short amount of time.
Software engineers, when pressured by managers to provide low estimates and/or to provide estimates quickly, will estimate inaccurately. (It can also be deliberately high as well as low, based on previous experience of having their estimates chopped in half.)
Whether you use SP or T-shirt sizes or whatever, somebody is translating that into days because days (and thus dollars) are what matter to the business. If someone asks me for an estimate, I'll give them a range in days/weeks, and they can turn it into whatever nonsense unit they like.
I'm sure some people are significantly better than me at estimates, but I haven't met them. Estimating the unknown without serious research that borders on just doing the job is nigh impossible. And we're just an in-house dev team, so we never, ever do the same thing twice.
Estimating how long to put up another wordpress site is a lot easier than estimating a new project with new requirements and new tools. I typically find that people who think estimating is easy are just doing the same things over and over for new clients, rather than doing new things all the time for the same client/employer.
There are simply too many unknowns in other libraries and systems to be accurate.
It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing with if you can help it.
I love software development. I love building both simple and complex systems. But users often suck, and honestly sometimes even the people you're making software for suck. I just want people to be grateful for what I'm doing and I honestly find that lacking a bit in our field.
I have friends who are restaurateurs and people are often extremely ungrateful, demanding and straight up mean.
Most don't earn a lot, margins are slim and people are late, you have to perform 100% for each dish, then people don't show up, get mad when arriving late, want well done when they say rare, or think the chef can just magically change the recipes to accommodate bizarre allergies or lifestyle choices when juggling 20 dishes at a time with a kitchen that off course has been prepped to the max and a few dollars on the brink of bankruptcy.
Ie. people are just people. Better get used to it, same with employees.
I have so many insane stories about this personally.
I once made a PDF processing tool for a company that saved them a lot of time, was pretty expensive and worked brilliantly until it "definitely broke" and i used 1 stressful month back and fourth figuring out why until i saw it was an employe that always "personalised" the PDF's with cute emojis, saved it before sending it further up the chain actively corrupting it so TOC and links were destroyed because of an old version of Acrobat Reader - this was after i asked 10 times if anyone tampered with it in any way.
It's always some human process, organisation, idiosyncrasy or politics taking up 80% of the time while 20% is spent on the actual work.
By and large, we are not doing a good job, and we are not often allowed to actually do a good job. Modern software frustrates me to no end, and in the last few years I've been noticing more non-technical folks getting frustrated. Everyone expects apps and websites to randomly fail in stupid ways or do things in ways that are not intuitive. I barely want to tell anyone I'm a software engineer at this point because it's embarrassing.
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.
Software is in a race to the bottom because users have little market choice. LLM's are just the excuse, but in reality late stage capitalist economics demands that this happen somehow. Wether it be in the form of cheap labor or automated labor. You need to have political and physical leverage over the corps to force them into being sustainable.
I only code as a hobby anymore. Burnout destroyed my career and now I design PCBs and write embedded software without LLMs.
1. Learn basics of electricity, learn to use oscilloscope, logic analyzer. You don't necessary need to have knowledge to design complex PCBs (that's a separate skill and not easily attainable) but you need to be able to understand existing design on high-level and do some debugging. For example you wrote code which does some SPI to talk to some device but it does not work. You need to analyze electricity to understand what's going on in the wire.
2. Learn basics of assembly. You don't need to write your software in assembly, but you need to read it and write some little snippets if necessary.
3. Learn to read data sheets.
Modern MCUs and devices are really like libraries. You're using some interfaces, calling some functions and get some responses. Data sheets are library documentation.
4. Learn C, learn build tools (at least make), learn debugger (gdb), learn linker.
Then it's only matter of time and experience. Most vendors supply their terrible libraries that you're supposed to use. Most vendors support some bad IDEs that you're supposed to use. Often you're forced to use Windows because not everyone supports Linux or macOS. It's not fun part and sometimes you can avoid it, but sometimes you can't.
Learn to read documentation in general. It's shocking how many people seem incapable of finding answers that are in official documentation but not on Stack Overflow.
This is especially true from a security standpoint. Many analysts are worried about XSS attacks and other such high-level techniques. C has an entire different class of vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows. And beneath that, there are countless vulnerabilities by exploiting properties of the physical hardware. Most industries choose to ignore these problems, because they’re very expensive to mitigate.
Regulation will force you to replace your car for EV and with more technologies for monitoring the driver and surroundings.
https://uzebox.org/
Cuzebox as the emulator:
https://github.com/Jubatian/cuzebox
Seconding this; I recently wrote a game for the GameBoy Color in C and it was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done with coding in a while.
There, fixed it for you.
People are the same just pay sucks way more.
I wholeheartedly endorse woodworking as a meditative hobby to forget about your day work but as a career path you are going to have some very rude discoveries.
Looking at their projects it's mostly basic carpentry level as well. Fine woodworking, the projects where you can charge five figures for a dining table (and you spend a few months making it full time), needs much more design vision and years of practice. Those 10k hours required to master a skill seem about right.
Been through a burnout 20 years ago, had to take a year off and then discovered that if you place correct boundaries and don't let people mess with you, our trade can be pretty enjoyable.
The best way to avoid turning a meditative hobby into a job is to resist the urge to monetize it.
Your basic carpentry diss is unwarranted IMHO. I enjoyed reading about and seeing the projects produced with simple tools and some work. The author is clearly very creative and resourceful and I bet this inspires a few people look for a creative outlet of their own.
This is exactly what I meant. However OP started off talking about switching careers.
As a hobby they are doing great, producing stuff they need and having fun doing that. No-one can criticize this.
> Your basic carpentry diss is unwarranted IMHO.
If it's a hobby sure, absolutely. I think the stuff they are doing is fine.
But as a new career this is going to be very tough if they don't up their game into some direction that is either very efficient volume production or high quality design and craftsmanship. There are obviously also education and youtube paths but both have also tough requirements.
Even famous fine furniture makers are complaining that it is very tough to live off commissions.
I didn't really mean "switching careers" although I see how that can be read that way. I meant more like leaving the current app income stagnate until it goes down, and in that time I would eventually find a more physical job to support me. Not necessarily woodworking.
I watch youtubers that work their asses off to earn thousands of dollars on a piece they've worked months, and like I said there's no undo. A mistake can set you back a lot. I know we have it good in software.
I don't know if I'll ever have the skills to create wood things that I would be able to sell. I'm thinking maybe I could do that with Kavals, there's less expectation and competition there. But furniture.. I don't know, I will probably end up in the same state as with software.
Including the questioning of the tools you use, and people telling you "you're doing it wrong".
Let me tell you, there is nothing more joyous than going outside 3 days after planting new seed varieties in a recovered-soil hügel-bed, and seeing brand new leafy life reaching for the stars. I get the same sort of buzz out of watching seedlings push dirt out of the way, as I used to get from checking for PR's on some of my repo's, lol ..
Its at the point now where I have to have a desktop garden, or else I just don't feel complete as a human being. Lucky, there are tons of things I can take from my new hügel-bed's to plant on the desk, herbs, spices, salads and things .. its just so rewarding.
So yeah, garden, programmers. Garden. Its so good for you. And you can get a buzz from the methods, just like you do with code, too ...
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 eats a creative person's soul.
I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems and get paid the market rate for my skills. Not prepare endless PowerPoints for my skip-level, who has no ownership but has to act in their own best interests in a swamp of principal-agent problems.
This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?
Of course you can go looking again. But why not look for a slow-growing or not-growing small company, so you don't need to go looking so often?
There are other issues with slow-growing or not-growing companies. When the company is not growing, people are incentivized to take a zero-sum approach to their work relationships. If the pie is not growing, you need to guard your own slice and take from others. This creates a toxic environment. If the company is growing, then collaborating on growing the pie can become the shared attitude.
https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted
With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work. The tools they use are intended to help them accomplish something and aren't there to prevent you from doing anything.
It's possible to do personal software projects however one wants, but one will no doubt be faced with the modern compulsion to want to "do the right thing" and add a bunch of time wasting tooling. If you don't, and you share your code, inevitably someone is going to want to add a bunch of rules and bureaucracy to your software that was already working and free of serious problems in the first place.
I absolutely agree that consistency, in principle, is usually a very good thing.
My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing, which it's not. Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time and unnecessarily tyrannical.
In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between 100% consistency and say 95%.
It's far more important that APIs and other conventions are consistent. When constructs in the code aren't consistent, it can be an absolute nightmare. When code isn't formatted well, it's usually just annoying and can be trivially fixed with automation.
What I absolutely detest, is any kind of code formatting comment on a PR. If it cannot be enforced automatically, it’s not worth arguing about, and definitely not something to hold a PR up for.
I think you are contradicting yourself a bit with
> Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code.
The point being that something small might have significance to one person but not the other.
And that consistency is probably important, but there is a difference between consistency of your stuff and consistency between your stuff and stuff of others.
So I think what it boils down to is that crafting hobbies are often more fulfilling not (only) because they have tangible outcomes, but because you can do them on your own and on your terms.
If you were to do woodworking where you craft one piece of a bigger thing (say a part of some larger furniture), you would also have to produce very homogenic and precise output. And it probably would not be very fun and fulfilling.
Yeah, that's totally fair. I think conversations can be had with such cases, and I think that trying to effectively eliminate the conversation is a bad thing, which relates closely to my overall objection. Ironically, it ends up in conversation anyway unless a developer is always a good little goober and never marches out of sync.
Maybe my mindset would be different if I saw great software around me, but I see mostly crappy and user-hostile software these days. I'm not sure whether strict formatting "standards" is of meaningful benefit for the users.
> If you were to do woodworking where you craft one piece of a bigger thing (say a part of some larger furniture), you would also have to produce very homogenic and precise output. And it probably would not be very fun and fulfilling.
Yeah, I guess you've identified where my thought in response to woodworking falls apart. haha If it were one's employment, it could indeed be as confining as being a programmer at BigCo.
Yes.
> If a rule can be written into a linter, simply have it automatically formatted and never argue about it again.
That is unless one believes to have good reason to violate that rule, in which case suddenly time is being spent having practically the same conversation in this part of the thread that I started.
If everyone doesn't follow the standards all the time then there are no standards.
Code is not art, it's instructions.
If you can't write instructions without adding your own avant garde whitespace brush strokes to it then yes coding for a professional company may not be your jam.
I'll slightly disagree here because code needs to be read by a computer and by your human teammates.
There are times when I'm frustrated because prettier is making a necessary but unintuitive choice and causing my code to become harder to read. But those are rare, and I would never trade them for the guarantee of readable code the other >99% of the time.
Again, maybe I came off as more extreme than I actually am, because I think that consistent formatting is a very good thing most of the time, but that last 5-10% that programmers in positions of power fetishize is where things can get frustrating and time can get wasted.
The worst is when linter rules are used for things that should be evaluated by a human being in code review. At a previous workplace, someone thought it was a marvelous idea to try and enforce things like functions having no more than 6 lines or some other poppycock. My current workplace is OK, but even then there are some stupid rules like not being allowed to assign `this` to a constant, even though the function in-scope is being re-bound by some stupid middleware making it impossible to use fat arrows or `.bind` (in JavaScript). Sorry, but I'll assign whatever the f*** I want to a constant that isn't escaping the current scope in any way. What's also funny is that I've never worked anywhere that didn't have `eslint-disable` sprinkled everywhere. In many cases, these rules should be warning instead of errors, but because programmers love errors for some reason, virtually every rule violation needs to be an error.
Well I'm quite proud of having owned a certain repo at work which takes exactly this approach. If I have to disable a rule more than once, I take a good look at whether we need it at all, so we have extremely few `eslint-disable` comments in the entire codebase. It's one of the cleanest and most transparent codebases I've worked in -- but that's also an artifact of me spending long stretches working in it alone and having little oversight of how I spend my time. So there's a tradeoff :)
But they don't see value in warnings. Either you have a problem that needs to be fixed or you don't.
I still don't think that makes it art and this is why: art can't be simplified. Code can.
Take that to it's extreme and you see that code can be simplified down to nothing without anything being destroyed. Art can't.
Maybe you could say that the act of programming (or simplifying) is an artform, but that's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about the product of that process, which is just instructions to accomplish a task.
I disagree. The thing being destroyed is readability and common understanding with your fellow programmers.
That tells me that the code itself is not important; the task/instructions the code performs is the important part. Therefore code is a utility, not an artform.
Yes I want written instructions to be understandable to humans, so my code conforms to tool-enforced formatting standards 100% of the time, not subject to artistic interpretation.
This is one of the major differences between hobby programming and work programming. When you're writing code as a hobby, it can be anything you want: code can be art, instructions, math, beauty, a means to an end, an experiment... At work, code must ultimately be a tool that creates profit. It has to be manageable, consistent, and boring.
That's how I like to see code. I don't want to struggle to figure out what you're trying to do. I want to be able to read your code and understand it easily and get on with what I need to do.
The opposite of this, keeping the medical context, would be the orthopedic surgeon who was so excited about how badly my then 25-year-old wife had smashed her wrist. "I never see this much joint damage in someone so young. It's incredible." Not words you want to hear from a doctor!
How can it be a waste of time? The whole point is to avoid wasting time talking about formatting on PRs or seeing line noise on PRs because people have slightly different preferences or settings for code formatting.
But my issue with formatting, while great most of the time, is that sometimes I want to violate it, and tooling around automatic formatting and format validation is usually installed with the intention that it is 100% correct all the time. Sorry, but as a senior programmer, sometimes it really should be up to me to decide whether code belongs on a single line, and I don't want to fight against automatic formatting or the CI pipeline throwing a hissy fit when I desire that discretion.
Being a senior eng isn't about always knowing what's right, it's about knowing how to keep the team moving efficiently.
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.
It could obviously be done, but involves a yak shave that isn’t clear that it brings enough value to be worthwhile.
If it is formatted to the formatting rules before every commit, how can there ever be formatting opinions?
What am I missing?
For linting (e.g. eslint in the JS-space), this is also possible, however, most linting-processes tend to run just long enough to be annoying when run on every commit. In the monorepo I work on we created a command "prep-pr" which specifically addresses this issue - run it before creating a PR, and the CI-pipeline will mostly be green, at least in terms of linting/unit-testing.
If you use a programming language that affords some guarantees like Haskell or even just C#, people seem to be less interested in linters.
It’s not necessarily a weakness of the language.
Languages like Haskell, C#, and Java don’t have the same amount of expressiveness as js, python, or ruby, so they don’t benefit as much from a linter, though I know places that use one for C# to prevent usage of the ‘var’ keyword
And enforcing new lines on else or catch after the brace, completely different to the language guides.
It looks a fucking mess.
For larger projects however, not having tooling set up that enforces certain consistency is an absolute showstopper for me. I'll either introduce it or I'll quit; I simply do not want to waste my time with developers squabbling over arbitrary formatting-choices or irrelevant coding-style-details that can easily be enforced by some tooling.
Of course, developer-experience is paramount. Meaning, the tooling must be easy-to-use and generally not stand in the way. Otherwise it can indeed create a lot of friction which will annoy everybody. But once this has been set up (properly!), it will make a lot of silly discussions and choices obsolete.
Some consistency in a codebase is good. Naming consistency. Indentation. But people go too way far with it. Who cares if your JavaScript makes consistent use of semicolons? It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.
Right?
Carpentry isn't my jam, but I've taken up piano. I love it.
:deep breaths:
But I think the biggest thing as I move up and spend more time reviewing code than writing it...style preferences make it so much easier to review code. Linters have given back years of my life at this point!
I would not be a fan of commit hook auto-formatting.
Nice. It adds a bit of spice to your git-bisect bug-hunting, to keep you on your toes.. Who doesn't like a good challenge?
Symptom of nothing better to do, I have found ;)
Hard to picture someone who values their time blocking PRs on tiny stylistic nits.
And indeed that’s something I’d apply to software: both hobbyists and small companies are tempted to use professional tools (as in, intended for lots of engineers collaborating) for small projects or a low number of collaborators that don’t warrant such stringent rules.
Ignoring hand tools, which give you precise, tactile control ... I'd still argue with this.
There are tools for specific things and they're meant to reduce error. But a router (woodworking) can be used to do half the stuff you want/need to do. A table saw can make straight cuts, rabbets, joinery.
The tools themselves (outside of specialty ones) are generally multi-purpose and allow for experimentation and creativity.
OP's complaint is about syntactical differences and that's just because his team doesn't agree with him.
And tbh, to me, the fun creative part in programming lies in architecture, not how I space my code. With woodworking, the creative part is how I put it all together but not the actual cutting part.
Trying to de-romanticize it means you have absolutely no idea what motivates most of us.
Signed, someone with restored antique Stanley wood planes, Japanese saws and who drools over Lee Valley product reviews.
I spent a lot of time searching for and restoring old tools. I finally realized I was spending way more time on the tools than actually using them.
If you had a Woodcraft in town you’d only go to Rockler for things you can’t find at Woodcraft. Which is largely cabinet-making and air handling equipment.
Lee valley and veritas are mostly making reproductions of golden age Stanley tools before the race to the bottom (what the kids call enshittification) started, with a few omissions or improvements. They aren’t garbage, they’re low volume. That makes them less appropriate for people being paid by the hour or piece.
I went to rockler this morning to get a reamer because the only reamers at Woodcraft are for pen making. With the exception of big brands like festool or powermatic most of the tools they sell at rockler are not great tools. This reamer is not great.
OP complained about all the strict rules software engineers have to abide by, while woodworkers get to have all the fun with sharp tools, nobody telling them how to use them, and generally freedom at how they do stuff. But that’s precisely the perspective of a highly compensated person doing manual labor for fun, not the one of a professional woodworker. It’s like someone cooking fancy once or twice per week saying chefs have such a great job because they get to dice the onion the way they like. Ask any professional chef how well that works.
Something you do as a hobby will always seem more fulfilling, because it’s a hobby. Anyone doing it professionally very likely also has strict rules to follow, you just don’t know about them - because you’re not a pro.
Isn't this part of the problem? If the purpose of code is to be understandable, the important communications shouldn't also be subtle. Your intention that the extra empty line before a block of code signals "This is the important part" is likely to be entirely lost on a reader of the code (especially in a codebase where the formatting isn't consistent so those spare lines are littered everywhere). Much better to leave a comment saying "there's a subtle but important thing going on here".
Sure, but don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Well-meaning engineers frequently don't document their code at all. It's why I advocate programmers at least use descriptive variable names and function names; what I call "self-documenting code".
It still falls short of well-documented code but, as I say, gets you "good".
Code has its own flow and natural groupings just like human language, and adding spacing to match makes it easier to understand even though it is subtle.
Thank you for that: "linters" (but as a person's role, not as a tool).
Pretty sure that contributed to my early retirement from the industry. It didn't used to be that way — perhaps because there were fewer cooks; perhaps because of a more cavalier, cowboy-style approach to coding.
I definitely preferred the days of the open range....
I don't think wood working per se gives you more flexibility than building software. It's wood working as an individual, not part of a team, so you can make your own decisions and not answer to anyone. If you were a one man software consultant you would have the same amount of autonomy.
Not that they can’t find at work. It’s actively taken away from them.
You get to choose the problem spaces and teams, which is a degree of autonomy. But it is not quite so free as “making your own decisions and not answering to anybody.”
I'd like to mildly disagree. Using whitespace to group functionality together in "paragraphs" and aligning the horizontal indentation in the clearest possible way is not too far away from editing a short story to make it flow better.
Earlier today my linter rearranged multiple "key: value" one-liners into two-liners and the end result is both objectively and subjectively worse.
Like, in Prettier, adding a trailing comma to a short list of items will tell the formatter to put each item on it own line, while removing the trailing comma will keep each item in a single line (if the line length is not too long).
I do not think that word means what you think it means
Sure - perhaps not plumb to within +/- 0.001 radians, but there’s still an expectation that the wall needs to be vertical within some error tolerance band (even if not specified). Error correction happens real-time - the cabinet guy compensates for the wall error, and so on.
That’s also why I find residential construction so shoddy (the US at least) - electrical junction boxes are always a little off-angle, cover plates aren’t flush, etc.
This is a take I don't think I've seen before. Is someone actually mad prettier is changing their single quotes to double quotes? Are they mad some line is breaking at some word?
Certainly I've never been. I use linters / formatters even when I'm working solo because the mere concept of having to think where to break lines is meaningless disruption from the actual goals I have.
If you _really_ want to break a line somewhere, just add a comment in between and your linter will comply.
Yes, both of these.
Obviously there are huge benefits to auto-formatting in large teams and popular open source projects, but some people also find benefit in having control of alignment, line breaks, indentation etc.
Before back-tick strings in JS, it was useful to employ both single/double quotes for strings -- you'd use one most of the time, and then if you needed to embed a bunch of that quotation mark in a string literal, you'd switch to the other one.
A formatter with naive "single quotes only" rule would obliterate the last one to: unless you remember, before you hit save, to add a directive like: I still use linters and formatters every day, and on balance I think they're good to have, but it's ridiculous to pretend they don't have downsides, or that there isn't room for the occasional dash of human intervention in the automation; hence, the linters which have // linter pwease directives.Linting is a bit of a different beast, because linting includes changes to the code behavior itself, not just syntax. In JS there are so many footguns, that linting can often be pretty involved/strict. I think most of the people who don't like linting in JS either aren't aware of the footguns, or don't do very much code review and haven't worried themselves much with "what sort of bizare and unusual ways can this fail" sort of a thing.
The only formatting that drives me up the wall is people using K&R braces in C# or Java. It's not 1970 anymore, and we're not all typing on green-screen terminals. It's like people fetishizing vim or emacs over modern IDEs.
All these are configurable (and not enforced by default but you can definitely do so with .editorconfig).
It is also fairly popular in C# to use expression-bodied members where they have just a single expression/statement e.g.
AFAIK there is no rule in K&R requiring no braces for single-line blocks. In that situation, braces are optional.
The K&R style was hugely influential on Java and many other languages, it has nothing to do with green-screen terminals (I used those, as well as white and amber), it is just a style. I also moved on from vi, and use IntelliJ and Sublime most of the time.
The only difference between K&R braces and Java braces is that they combine lines on if-else. The Java guys did it because it enabled them to fit more code on to overhead slides. Overhead slide projectors predate green-screen terminals BTW...
These days they are pretty good at preserving vertical separation if it already exists and adding it if it’s missing.
Also it's helped keep unused garbage out of the codebase also, which people tend to leave in there otherwise.
Also prettier has helped in me no longer reviewing MRs where every single line shows up in a file because their local machine has a different tab indent set or a different way to handle newlines (like with or without carriage returns, IIRC).
Sure it styles some things that aren't my preference, but I don't have to do it myself, it just automatically changes it all, so I can deal with it.
And if something is especially annoying or causes issues, I can usually get an exception added to the configuration, at least on my current team.
They would if their woodworking projects spanned decades and involved thousands of other woodworkers.
For hobby or artisanal pursuits, homogeneity isn't the goal. Often the uniqueness is a feature. But for mass production or large coordinated efforts, uniqueness is a bug. You don't want your car to be manufactured by someone who just felt like a 3mm panel gap felt more right than the 4mm gap the specs called for. Standardization makes coordination easier and that's why some products are better when they are homogenous while others are better when they're allowed to be "creative."
This is why woodworking is actually a poor analogy for software development. A better analogy is carpentry. And when it comes to carpentry, it is much more important to ensure whatever you're building is extensible or follow certain specs. The cabinets you make, for example, need to fit into a certain space under or over the counter, and need to be homogenous to a large extent.
Consistency is dramatically overrated. We all read through comment threads on HN where each is written in it's own style and nobody has a problem understanding it. I read through open source repos all the time, which all have their own styles and which are often not self-consistent; my comprehension is not impaired. I have worked with teams that enforce linting with a religious fervor and teams where anything goes. The anything goes team is probably more productive and with a comparable rate of bugs (but I don't have the metrics to prove it). Personally, I don't feel like my comprehension is better or worse in one setting or the other.
The difference I do notice is that when there are no linters, nobody wastes time trying to figure out how to work around it for a few lines. A great example is Eigen matrix initialization through the stream operator overload [1]. You really want to manually format that so each row is on it's own line. If you use clang-format in such code, it will be littered with
which adds a ton of unnecessary noise which does impair reading.[1] https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/dox/group__TutorialAdvancedIniti...
That's not true. Walls of texts get ignored or complained about. Grammar nazis show up if you use the wrong to/too.
If your typing on a phone autocomplete more or less enforces grammar and punctuation.
I want to have my cake and eat it too.
Everyone does some level of selfish things; trying to shape work so that you find it enjoyable (and therefore likely something that others would also find enjoyable) is an acceptable form of selfishness to most.
Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender to the world fairness, I think.
But there is something to be said that some people are born into situations that force them to adopt a very risk adverse posture. If you don’t have any safety net, “daring to work at a place that does not suck” takes on a different risk profile and doesn’t necessarily generalize well as a strategy.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
I thought it was a good reminder to have an attitude of just seeing what needs to be done and doing it.
It gives you more opportunities to find that combination of work you find meaningful, coworkers you mesh with, flexibility, and decent compensation, than any other time in history I'm aware of.
It's still not easy. Just easier than in the past.
The non-boring companies I've worked for have had problems of wanting to work you at 150% of your schedule, quite often illegally. It is insanely rare that you'll get a job that keeps you busy (only) 8 hours a day constantly. Either the place is always on fire and has 12 hours of work a day, or you'll have it better managed and work will be bursty with the majority of the time under utilized. Spend that extra time being taught stuff on the company dime.
Thankfully I had an alternative and went back to startups. I could absolutely never accept dividing my brain like that, steeping in cognitive dissonance and just letting myself rot inside. Once you’ve felt the good life - where work is play and learning happens all day long - there’s no amount of money that can be accepted to lose that.
Thankfully I quit and the new job has been great.
It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind. You don’t have to wait for something in the future to be happy now.
By saying you want to be happy, you’re already telling yourself there’s a gap between your state currently and that you wish to accomplish
“I’ll be truly happy WHEN”
When comes and goes, rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy. All done”
Fully agree, it’s a state of mind.
I’d also add most people who say they want to be happy don’t seem to be looking for happiness but rather contentness, but I digress
I've heard this, but only from people who had been in an very shitty situation and then got out. Happiness is a state of mind, but misery is a set of circumstances, and the latter precludes the former unfortunately.
The privilege of having pixels be the most stressful part of your life... it's actually really nice to read that. Having perspective from hardship is good, and everyone will have at least some perspective at some point in their life when hardship is forced upon them. But hardship in and of itself isn't good. I'm happy it is being completely eradicated from life, at least for some of us.
I've cleaned McDonalds bathrooms, worked in a plastics factory where the chemical stench left my nose nonfunctional for weeks, hauled heavy sacks of shingles up onto a roof in 100+F degree summer temperatures.
I am utterly grateful and consider it a lucky privilege to now be typing into a computer in a climate controlled office, where my biggest stressor is a deadline.
I will say: I don't necessarily like to say "lucky," or even "privileged". Luck incites tricky emotion because there's an implication with luck that you didn't deserve it. A gambler who won at the slot machine should have lost his money -- luck carries that "should have" connotation with it. Likewise, privilege carries a zero-sum connotation, because we always mean someone is privileged in relation to another, which introduces almost an adversarial tone to it.
For me, a better term is fortunate. I am fortunate that I have a job in a nice office, solving interesting puzzles all day, getting paid (relatively) a lot of money doing it. Fortune has come upon me. I work hard, although not really harder than any other reasonable person. I was born in the right zip code, to the right family, had access to an amazing education, had the stability in my life to pursue it. Fortune.
I will never look down on anyone who is fortunate. I wish most people could have fortune in their lives. If the price we pay is a few complaints that the soda machine is down today, so be it!
edit: different strokes for different folks, i don't want to sound too presumptuous. For some people what i described is exactly what would bring them joy.
I grew up in poverty myself but my partner and many of my friends at bigger tech companies grew up the way I discussed earlier. Most of them were pushed through their parents' social circles into a tech career and never were wanting for money. They feel the grind inherent to being paid for your time as opposed to volunteering your time and think of it as an injustice. My partner and friends complain constantly about tech and their jobs but other than a handful who briefly worked service jobs in their teens, they have nothing to compare it to. I spent my summers as a teen moving heavy boxes/furniture, often in 100F+ hot weather, and being paid in cash (hoping to become a cabinetmaker!) barely making ends meet and I know what it's like to keep a job a job.
I left Big Tech (I had joined it as a startup and ended up staying much longer than I expected) so I understand the complaints about heavily bureaucratic jobs where most of your time is spent coordinating rather than building, and while I'm always unhappy at something or the other with my job, I know how good I have it. I do a job that I don't hate, working with generally smart people, alternating between a cushy office and my home where outside of my work I mostly just complain about minor office perks. It's fantastic.
I know I'm luckier than most humans on Earth, but still hedonistic adaptation is a thing, even if you grew up in a poor family.
Backbreaking manual labor sucks. The heat. The cold. The shit. The frost. I'll format my fucking code any way you tell me to to avoid farm life. Like I give a shit. A week in and I won't even notice. Ah Christ, the smell of cow pus ...nyaagggggh.
As for woodworking: You will get cut, there is no hope of avoiding it, and no telling how bad it's going to be. The next day, we will see how serious your woodworking gig really is. You gotta be out there, bub. Get it stitched up and keep on cranking out the pieces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf3SGGAJWbA
To the OP: When it sucks a lot, try singing. It really, really helps. Throw your head back and let it out of you on the way home.
Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.
If you were comparing salaries, either your company was compensating you with extra prestige, job security, etc. or you were underpaid.
The former is tolerable for many, the latter usually isn’t for long
I work for a large company , and I love people I'm with and had some great challenges and accomplishments, but yeah... There's still a creative urge that's left not completely filled. So I ran a photography business for a decade!I loved interacting with happy and involved clients, and creating something that brings them immediate joy :). I don't have time anymore to do it professionally but I still do it for friends and family ( while I work with my therapist to survive my day job :)
I'm trying to start my own business now without going down the consulting route. At the very least I tell myself that the spoils of the hustle go to me. Let's see how this phase goes.
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.
I am very good at designing and creating software products from scratch. Was doing it for few years a an employee of smallish company that served numerous clients. I then went on my own and kept doing the same. I have my own product that brings in some money. Also I design and develop software product to various clients. I've had ups and downs but in average am very happy, not overworked, have more than enough time for myself and like my job which is basically a hobby paid for by the clients. My client are usually small to medium size that are not really in software but for one or another reason software runs their business.
"Even" Chris Lattner (of LLVM and Swift fame) which I as an outsider at least would say have a fulfilling job dabbles in the occasional woodworking: https://nondot.org/sabre/Woodworking.html
Depends on the industry. I've been doing iOS for over a decade. You're right in that there are different dynamics with enterprise that can wear you down. I find that to be less so the case with jobs in the retail sector. Things are always fluid and changing there.
Still, this is a very subjective statement. As someone in my middle ages, I've come to appreciate and understand how views change over time. The 20-something me would have jumped over to new jobs every 2-3 years. The 40 something me recognizes value in work/life balance, stability, and a more defined and often opportunistic growth path in larger companies. And it's at this stage that while I may not fully comprehend the occasional stubbornness of 60-something devs, I can at least approach their way of thinking as not wrong. When you have a spouse, family, and mortgage to support, the potential upsides of a smaller, more nimble company just don't overcome the peace of mind of being in the corporate world.
Side projects and meditation supplements.
Each year passes and O learn more about myself so hurray growth?
I've only ever worked for small start-ups. Including my own which paid the bills for 15 years.
Working for start-ups does not solve the problem for me.
The problem for me is that I need to give a shit about WHAT I'm creating. And I find that after 25 years of working in the tech industry professionally, as an end user the older I get the less interest in modern technology I have.
It's hard for me to not see the negatives. I want a car that I can maintain myself and that does not talk to a network for critical functions. I want a fridge that just cools my food and doesn't come with an app or "smart" features. I have zero interest in AI. I love writing code, and I'm already over-burdened by poor code quality that I've inherited and that was written by inexperienced devs. I don't need AI generating code for me that I then need to review and refactor. It's faster and more fulfilling for me to write it myself. I never got on the smart phone bandwagon. Yes, I own one, but I often forget where I left it and when I find it the battery is usually dead because I haven't touched it in days. I don't want a "smart home." I'm not a gamer.
So in my off hours, I find that I spend my time doing things that don't touch modern tech at all.
So yeah, I find myself constantly planning my exit strategy from the industry. I enjoy coding, making things and solving problems but I don't enjoy modern technology the way that I used to. And making products that I wouldn't use myself is what I find soul crushing.
Will take one of those instead, any day.
But, as in my last big project, I'm building something well that makes a concrete difference in people's lives, internally and externally. In my previous project, the software we delivered saved hours a day for clerks who were typically very overworked, and we received grateful emails telling us that they'd been able to sit down for lunch for the first time in years. In the current project we're bringing GIS capabilities and full accessibility to a gov't online service--we have a mandate to ensure it works properly with screen readers, and we're actually doing new work on making map features accessible to the visually impaired.
So much of the motivation for geeks is technical satisfaction that we can miss many other forms of fulfillment in our technical jobs. Having worked on the web since the late 1900s, through multiple hype waves and "oh, we're doing this again" moments, I find the non-tech, more people-oriented rewards much more satisfying.
Also, I'm building out the wood shop I want. :)
Guilty (although retired now). When I could apply creativity to my job, I did so, but I think I prefer to have had the outside-work activities to have been my creative outlets.
The application to express creativity in software is fairly narrow in comparison to other activities and, as was pointed out in this thread, physically creating with your hands (rather than virtual creating with your keyboard) is ... real.
This really struck me because I'm realizing it is soul destroying but have gotten competent, and even good at it. I was involved in my family's small business and some of my own startup attempts and consulting, so I remember those feelings.
What grinds my gears is failing to solve problems I’ve already solved. At some point you have to convince others that a plan is good. Your arguments might not work on a new team. You might not know what the secret sauce was that got you consensus last time. Or after years of getting your way you may forget some of the arguments for an idea.
Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight.
There’s a lot of vaguely intellectually lazy, cheap instead of frugal thinking, and ethically challenged people in or around our industry, and the collective weight of it causes pushback on progress.
That's where you write a blog post, a company note, or a book if you got the time. The best proof of mastery is teaching because that's when you got confronted to the problems from another perspective (the other may not learn it as well as you do). And you won't have to repeat yourself that much if your arguments and process are written somewhere.
Simply adoption something that worked in a previous place isn’t a way of usually making decisions, imagine a company with 100 engineers where they all came from different companies and have different ways they solved the cicd problem - how do you move forward from that ?
Decision making can be complex - can also be very simple, depending on the company ..
> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product
Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.
It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.
As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.
This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.
The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.
Its natural to exploit resources to their fullest. Labeling humans as resources is inherently dehumanizing and desperately needs to end.
It really got my blood boiling and I've said something very similar to: "No we don't have a resource on the call, we have engineers, colleagues, employees, humans and friends on this call. Resources are air, water, memory, cpu and time, please don't call people like that". This followed by silence, and a lot of red faces.
Couple of weeks later, had a talk with my manager who is a true and true programmer I really respect. And then he says something with that "resource" referring to our team members...
I have experience across various industries, and many professions think very highly of themselves. But over here I have seen the working population be so easily manipulated, self-effacing, and self-abnegating. Most of the time bad managers just say "jump!" and engineers just ask "how high?".
The thing they kept saying was "We'll run it through the machine." Meaning "We'll hand that off to our software team and have them complete it." Of course today, the one who stayed in tech might be salivating about running software requirements through an actual machine to produce code.
You can keep calling yourself whatever you like, or more to say, swallow whatever little pride you still have. But I don't subscribe to that and I won't be called a tool/object/resource in my presence.
Companies would rather overwork 1 person than pay 2 and have both slightly under utilized
The departments where people were casually putting in 4 hours per day mostly got axed during COVID and again during the 2024 recessions. There was a period of time where a lot of teams accumulated a lot of people so they could spread the work thin. Eventually management started catching on and put an end to that.
> I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems
I finally identified that at my last job, and have begun actively working to make that happen. For example, I transitioned internally to a "platform" team so that I know my customer—my fellow product developers at the company.
This has resulted in me being MUCH happier with my day-to-day work.
Not everybody is like that, even in software. I mean sure, creative aspect is very cool, but its fraction of any senior job, including most bigger startups from what I've heard. Even my current corporate job which started 12 years ago was pure dev in the beginning, now its maybe 20-30%. Responsibilities, personal growth, but also business grew in complexity and IT landscape and various regulations governing it exploded and keep exploding. I know stuff very few other do, so I get involved continuously into tons of efforts.
As they say, if you work manually hard work rest with mental challenges, and vice versa. Wood working must be cool since you create visible results with your hands and there is certainly some physical effort. I don't seek further creativity TBH, I look for extreme/adrenaline sports, be it climbing, ski alpinism, paragliding and few other similar (but also super chill diving to cover all elements and balance intensity). And ie in climbing, finding out how to climb some new route that is hard and scary for you is extremely rewarding, a literal creative ballet on vertical rock face.
Till kids came, this was making me properly happy and fulfilled to 120% since I was doing something every evening, every weekend, every vacation combined with 3rd world backpacking. Plus it made me super healthy and more focused on healthy eating too, became quite attractive to women since all this changes visuals but also confidence and overall persona for the better in aspects many women notice.
With small kids, and few non-horrible injuries I am now somewhere in the middle now, but kids are top priority, rest are not that important now (folks who keep going the same way/pace after having kid(s) I don't respect, it shows later on those kids in all kinds of bad ways). I know I have skillset to show them later some pretty awesome places and activities, but will let them go their own way. Just managing maximum possible off screen time since thats cancer for young soul and sugary stuff since thats cancer for body, now its easy and they follow our examples so they happily much some bio carrots and ignore cakes.
There are many levels to "build stuff", so it's important to introspect what kind is important to you.
I love to build quality code. Production code that is quite efficient, fast, secure and maintainable while being full-featured.
Having done five startups now, this is very difficult to do in startups.
(There was one startup where we had a great team of like-minded quality-driven people and it was awesome, but it was the exception.)
"Building stuff" in startups usually means throwing together a mess of half-baked code and holding it together with chewing gum and duct tape and immediately moving on to the next thing that sales promised a customer yesterday but hasn't been started. From a business perspective, that's not wrong. It's a startup, you need to grow fast and add features at lightning speed to capture some market. But if you crave to build quality, this isn't it.
It's only in larger companies with some stability and steady revenue that there is some possibility of finding the environment to build things I can be proud of. Of course, most large companies also just build junk. Finding a good one is hard, and is an exercise left to the reader.
(If you know any please share!)
Less is more? Oh you are painting such a rosy picture of enterprise IT.
My experience is the opposite: you can usually chill at big companies, while startups need money fast and attracts the worst managers. I know it's not the same experience for everyone, but I'll never work for a startup ever again.
Nobody believes me when I tell them this. Software is so thoroughly corrupted by the low-trust managerial paradigm, where massive hierarchies are built to justify high-paying managerial positions that end up reducing the efficiency and productivity of great programmers, that it’s simply taken for granted: We should never trust engineers to make independent decisions, to schedule their own pursuit of tasks, to pick the right tool for the job, to do this all with customer value in mind.
Who knows? Maybe I’m the exception and engineers don’t deserve to be trusted. In which case we have a very, very big societal problem. All I know is that our software team performs very esoteric group interviews, and our style seems very good at sniffing out pretenders and exploiters.
They were certainly very good at coopting the agile „movement“ in this manner.
One of the worst faceplants I've seen in my current role was when my team was developing a solution to integrate some third-party data. Our PO reported to a Product Manager who was tapped as the "I talk to the end users" person and he completely fucked it up. The team was siloed off to do this for multiple quarters, and at the rollout we literally got laughed at and told "we can't use this." But God forbid my team actually, you know, TALK and DEMO to the end users once an iteration like you're supposed to in Scrum, as opposed to plugging in some drone from corporate who it turns out doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
The ticketing firewall has been a net boon and we've been able to overhaul a number of ailing backend systems, while adding features that were in demand for going on two decades. Turns out, most of the features being requested were easy to implement given the right choice of languages and architecture. We went from constant fires to downright quiet in our office. Most of the ongoing project work is aspirational and would vault us back to industry leadership, instead of the constant remedial work that was bogging us down.
My experience is the opposite. Startups i've worked at were mostly 'boys clubs' where if you weren't part of a 'core group' then you were merely a mercenary. So you are in the same situation as in 'big tech' without the safety or prestige. You still have schmooze and 'manage up' to get into that core group of decision makers. Startups aren't immune from human nature.
startups as meritocratic wonderlands of creativity is not an idea based in reality.
It took twice as long as I thought. It cost double what it would have cost to buy one of Etsy but it's still one of my favourite things I've done in ages. My son still gets excited when he see's it sometimes
I find DIY to be similar - you get a physical result, you use your hands to make something, the satisfaction is almost always about pleasing your own sense of what you want. Ok there's the wife too but ....
I also like feeling that I can cope with certain jobs even if not well. Also you do get better. Baking and cooking can be like this too. When you learn the "tricks" that make your bread turn out better or your skirting boards line up properly or whatever then it's a super feeling. :-)
I also find cooking (not necessarily baking) to be quite similar to programming: you follow steps and if some bug happens in production (too salty, too thick, not flavourful enough) then you go in and try to debug it and fix it (I guess the simile breaks down here).
But if someone is good at breaking down IT tasks, I believe they will be able to prepare a large meal with multiple courses, as I find it requiring a similar mindset to releasing a feature.
I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories you can hear.
This is just comparing apples to oranges. Woodworking or any other hobby that you enjoy will be more pleasing than any real job you will do. Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it. Working as software developer can be less so.
For some. I certainly started that way. But many of my friends at Uni started from a different point. I heard many describing how they choose computer engineering because it is perceived as a good career or because they heard it pays a lot. I'm not sure if those people have the same "Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it." to fall back to.
My preference in hiring is people that are drawn to computing naturally, they will be there for the long haul.
I think a lot of people are drawn into the industry these days from various online communities because you can enforce your particular viewpoint of social order in a small niche and basically be mini-tyrants. This is very western-world specific, but looking at the "communities" around Ruby, Node, Rust, Nix, etc, it looks fairly clear.
I put communities in quotes because I'm referring to those communities within the community that tend to label themselves as the whole community, write petitions to remove undesirables, etc.
The ability to create a space entirely of likeminded individuals that purges undesirables is highly attractive to certain kinds of people. Saw this happening on forums and bbs first decades ago and now it's the governance body of everything.
It's happened in tabletop gaming too -- one local game group I was a part of got co-opted by a guy just through starting a discord and hosting events. Suddenly a very apolitical community started being dominated by tankie politics and banning of members for wrongthink. We were just trying to game with some minis up till then. I got fed up and quit once the guy running the discord started ranting about how everyone in America should be forcibly relocated to cities and reeducated in more progressive values. I'm just trying to point plastic lasers at people and roll dice, my guy.
I'm assuming that by this you mean that most stories you hear around the bar are just the same stories with different characters and protagonists?
Alienation of the workers and all that. Profitable but psychologically damaging. We thrive when we get to be whole persons.
If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.
I don’t know this is true. My personal experience across a dozen jobs is that the only metric that really matters is “how low can you go?” Cost is the thing to minimize and quality is the absolute first thing to be considered optional and to be cut to fulfill the cost objective. Closely followed by “how fast can you go?” Not a pleasant way to work.
I mean, yes - work isn't fun. But I have coding side projects I work on, and it is fun for me, still!
You know what, nevermind, it's Saturday, why am I thinking about work.
When you don't have to suffer these, you can work long, cause it's basically a kind of self fulfilling game.
I think that you mean that a hobby (that you can pick up and put down as you please) is always more enjoyable than a job (at which you must work, usually on someone else's schedule, to make money), but, just to be quite clear, there's no reason that woodworking can't be a real job.
That said some domains are cleaner than others, just like small rivers have clearer water, I remember working in food stores or even mechanics and you don't get the same kind of fatigue as in software engineering. The stimulations are more diverse, a bit deeper (helps getting into flow in a way) and the culture helps (less discussion about shallow things like indentation). Fast food for instance, being a real-time thing requires tight planning and tight execution, no space for slack. It makes you sweat but you get seriously fast and good at your operations. Unlike coding where you can spin in circles for ages never get anywhere, and go home drained feeling useless.
I'll be 40 in a few months, so recently I've been a bit more pensive than usual, reflecting on where I'm at in my life. One of my biggest regrets so far is how much time I spent wishing I was somewhere other than where I was.
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.
Story points are dumb because they always are just a bad proxy for time.
Really though, the right solution is time plus confidence. Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.
Unfortunately a large number of people simply can't comprehend this, and also no tools support it, so I've never seen it actually done. I imagine management wouldn't like it either because then they can't pretend they have a perfect plan with no uncertainty.
In any case, there should be absolutely no problem explaining why it took 8 days if it really did.
The fact you even had to say that part points to the management problem at hand. Not only are you trying to keep idle time low, you're trying to estimate essentially unknown timelines, and you have to think about whether people are even telling the truth or padding hours where they feel they can.
I just think the range is too wide. Sure anything can be a 1 day task (potentially just an easy solution to add in, or some variables/settings to change, etc). And any 1 day task could be turned into an 8 day task (anything from refactoring unnecessarily, all the way to just walking the dog too frequently). I'm left wondering, how long should this task have taken?
> Not only are you trying to keep idle time low
Yes... I'm paid to work.
> you're trying to estimate essentially unknown timeline
Yes. The exact amount of time the task will take is unknown. That doesn't mean I have no idea how long it will take. The point of the estimate is to tell other people my idea of how long it will take. Even if I only have a rough idea it is probably a better idea than a lot of people.
Incidentally I've found that a lot of people don't understand that, and I have a hack! If you find yourself in a situation where you're waiting for something... let's say roadworks, and you say "any idea how long it will take?" and they refuse to give an estimate, even though they clearly have a better idea than you... What you can do is suggest an outlandish number, and then they'll say "oh no no not that long. More like x".
Worked every time I've tried it.
I can't parse your second paragraph at all.
It's a half-assed reimplementation of PERT charts, which were invented in the 1950s and used successfully for many decades, until everyone decided that everything old is terrible.
I am currently happy at my current job that pays well enough writing proxies. The team and leadership are great with tremendous internal training. It just feels military, which is fitting since it’s at a military organization.
If this line of work doesn’t work I will still not go back to software. I would rather be unemployed and lose my house.
But it's great to have other passions outside of it. To get away from your main occupation. To reset and to get a perspective.
And woodworks seems like a good choice. You're still making things, physical ones and you can hone your skill.
I've made a handful of things in my life (e.g. two simple custom beds for my home) without any prior knowledge of wood working at all. They weren't great, but good enough. And I couldn't have been prouder.
So thanks for sharing your story. I might get back to tinkering in my garage more often!
"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 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.
I have a small issue with the way the people who get into these hobbies are so bitter. Every job has stuff like this, we aren't special.
And many jobs have much worse stuff like danger, filth, hard manual labor, no social standing etc
The only downside to seeing this connection is that you’re constantly tempted to use idioms from woodworking to explain programming problems, which just confuses most people.
I find that a lot of people go to work thinking they enjoy it, and wake up later and realize it is just "work". This leads them to go off and figure out what they really enjoy, and they start doing that (they call it a hobby). Some of them ruin their hobby, by turning it into a full time job, where once again, it just becomes "work".
It's really satisfying to see stuff grow, to learn how to tend to plants, how they compete and cooperate.
It helps me to preserve some sanity.
It blows your mind, if you think about it for a moment.