[HN Gopher] I no longer build software
___________________________________________________________________
I no longer build software
Author : tagawa
Score : 1102 points
Date : 2020-09-21 11:06 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| brentis wrote:
| To build on an idea is infinitly more complex. The supposed need
| for cloud architectures to save money is a fairy tale to drive
| the need for kubernetes/etc. They make sense for large scale
| deployments but for my 20k subscribers I long for a rack and a
| few servers vs. 20 instances and increasing monthly costs.
| [deleted]
| clvx wrote:
| I would like to see a tool to view the level of
| contributions(money, time, etc) to other projects (tech or not)of
| people requesting features to define a line of moral urgency.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Sounds like a humble brag to stroke his own ego. Wood working
| grunt work is virtually infinitely less intellectually
| stimulating than software grunt work. If he's working for himself
| now, good for him but the comment just comes off as superfluous
| and pretentious
| shultays wrote:
| This sounds like a humble brag to stroke your own ego
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| How so?
| simondelacourt wrote:
| As you've laid your judgement of your woodwork on all
| woodwork, and thus have concluded that all woodwork is less
| intelligible than all software building. I know this is an
| interpretation, and not verbatim. But it might be sensible
| to be a little bit less strongly opinionated on the levels
| of work being intelligible, as its just an opinion, and
| would not consider it a fact.
|
| The work I do on software I consider as relatively
| intelligible, but the woodwork I do, requires as much of my
| brain as the programming, just in a whole other area of my
| brain.
|
| Your harsh judgement on the matter is just rather
| irrelevant, it works for him, it tickles his brain, and was
| just an honest response on github, no need to get trolled
| here on HN.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| > thus have concluded that all woodwork is less
| intelligible than all software building
|
| If you read my initial comment carefully you'll see that
| I've made no such conclusion.
| newyorker2 wrote:
| I couldn't stimulate myself intellectually reading your comment
| :(
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Why not?
| suprfsat wrote:
| Probably wasn't stroking hard enough
| [deleted]
| colesantiago wrote:
| What?
| nix23 wrote:
| >virtually infinitely less intellectually stimulating than
| software grunt work.
|
| Really why do you know that? Sitting the whole day in front of
| a screen compared to create and finish (yeah that's a real
| thing in woodwork) a Project sound's much better (and like
| everything it has it's up and downsides)
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| I think you misinterpreted my comment. I do wood work and I
| create software. Wood working is intellectually stimulating,
| however, wood working grunt work is very much not so. I'm
| fairly certain that writing maintenance scripts or plumbing
| between old APIs is more interesting than running a bandsaw
| or a belt sander 10 or so times repetitively.
| nix23 wrote:
| >maintenance scripts or plumbing between old APIs
|
| A big No from me, looks like we just have different tastes.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Both are grunt work, the point is that manual labor grunt
| work is just as bad or worse. Do you do manual labor?
| SamBam wrote:
| You keep saying this like it's an objective fact. It's
| not.
|
| Running a bandsaw 20 times might sound to you like the
| epitome of boredom. To me, a (poor) woodworking
| perfectionist (i.e. I'm always trying to make my work
| furniture-grade, but usually failing) it's an exercise in
| constant concentration and error-correction. To a master,
| it can be the epitome of mindfulness.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| An activity being "mindful" is not the same as an
| activity being "intellectual stimulating." I do not
| consider software engineering mindful in any significant
| way but I do agree with you that repetitive manual labor
| is quite mindful.
| nix23 wrote:
| >Do you do manual labor
|
| Yes my apprenticeship was (4y) +3 years after that.
|
| Again different tastes.
| vncecartersknee wrote:
| I haven't even written a single line of 'code' at work in maybe
| six months now, everything is done in xml configuration files, a
| bit of sql here and there. Last job before this was more or less
| the same. Since I was a kid all I wanted to do was be a
| programmer, I don't really even feel like an engineer or a
| programmer anymore I just feel like I 'use' a computer all day
| it's weird. It's like a totally different part of the brain. I
| think I actually hate computers but I've no idea how to do
| anything else.
| hellofunk wrote:
| Amen. Modern software development is frankly kinda sucky. The old
| days pre-2000 were arguably a lot more enjoyable. Today it's just
| digital plumbing and dealing with all sorts of issues that are
| not creative. The sheer complexity is frankly absurd as well.
| I've thought about moving on from software many times, and I know
| many who have. Just because you _can_ do something doesn 't mean
| it's best way to spend your short life. Not to mention that
| sitting in front of a computer all day is not the best use of
| one's body.
| kemiller2002 wrote:
| I miss the old days from time to time. I will say though that
| everyone once in a while, you still get to do something
| "hardcore". It can still be fun, although it's not like it was.
| I do think we have as a field have done ourselves a
| disservices. Not to do the "back in my day," but I will say
| that with making many mundane tasks becoming easy, it's easy to
| slip into the mindset that there are no really complex things
| going on under the hood that sometimes you still need to
| tackle.
|
| A lot of people just starting out don't see this immediately
| and it is often too late in a project when it appears. This
| isn't their fault, and it's sad people outside of the field
| don't recognize this at all. I think it puts a lot of undo
| stress on new people when non-developers expect them to build
| things effortlessly and quickly all the time and when something
| doesn't work, the developers ultimately blame themselves,
| because they've been led to believe it was easy too.
| busterarm wrote:
| > The old days pre-2000 were arguably a lot more enjoyable.
|
| The existence of Dilbert says you're wrong.
| [deleted]
| kossTKR wrote:
| Okay so it seems most people here on HN hates their jobs?
| That's sad but i think its not unique.
|
| Web dev was especially insane during the IE era, more than
| today.
|
| Most people just hate their jobs, it's nothing unique to the
| tech sector and i would argue that tech is still a pretty
| comfortable niche to work in compared to most other fields.
|
| Doctors have extreme debt and work crazy hours, teachers get
| way too little, manual labor is very tough on the body,
| journalism is dead etc. - it seems to me that everyone i know
| just "has a hard time" because of information-overload, 24/7
| connection, lowered real wages etc. I.e systemic issues at the
| core.
|
| That said i also want to get more zen, cut back, transition to
| more resilience - but tech is not uniquely bad, and while i
| also have dreams about transitioning to more entrepreneurial
| roles or "moving into nature" - i still can enjoy "the chaos"
| of modern development / design - and this really is the key i
| think: to accept the mess, the imperfection, that no one knows
| what the hell they are doing in most sectors.
|
| Drop the fake self imposed yuppie consumer self policing and
| perfectionism mindset and just accept that we live in a crazy
| part of history where everything is obsolete after 5 minutes,
| so just do what you find acceptable, try to scrape some money
| together and remember to appreciate the fact that at least you
| are in a sector where it's pretty easy to be an entrepreneur if
| you want to - compared to a lot of other people who have no
| idea about how to get started or jump ship.
|
| Years ago if everything went awry i would stress out, be afraid
| of angry clients, be angry at myself - today i relax, i am
| interested and laugh at the complexity, and if someones angry i
| don't care, the world is crazy, we are monkeys living in a
| world not made for our biology, it's future tech
| dystopia/utopia right now, no one is able to piece something
| together that works for a long time anyway, it's mostly not my
| fault, but i still try to do my best. This mindset has helped
| more than a lot.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Okay so it seems most people here on HN hates their jobs?
| That's sad but i think its not unique.
|
| Internet comment sections have always biased toward people
| who hate their jobs, are unhappy with their lives, or are
| otherwise trying to escape into virtual distractions.
|
| Not everyone fits this description, of course, but the
| negative comments are over represented relative to what the
| general population thinks. Never interpret any internet
| comment section as representative of the norm.
|
| Growing up, my internet commenting activity was highest when
| I was least happy with my jobs. It was lowest or even non
| existent when I loved my job. (Currently I enjoy my job, but
| I have 10-20 minute periods of time to kill on my phone daily
| for other reasons now).
|
| Also, don't forget that HN comments are heavily biased toward
| cynical interpretations.
|
| > Drop the fake self imposed yuppie consumer self policing
| and perfectionism mindset and just accept that we live in a
| crazy part of history where everything is obsolete after 5
| minutes, so just do what you find acceptable, try to scrape
| some money together and remember to appreciate the fact that
| at least you are in a sector where it's pretty easy to be an
| entrepreneur if you want to
|
| If you hate work, becoming an entrepreneur is the last thing
| you want to do. Dealing with grumpy customers directly will
| only make things worse.
|
| The majority of people I meet in the real world have no
| problems separating their personal identity from their home
| life and well being. For some reasons developers are
| particularly bad at mixing their work and their personal
| identity while chasing perfectionism. I assume it's because
| we grew up in front of computers and many of us spend our
| leisure time on computers as well.
|
| Even the smallest bit of separation of work and personal life
| can fix this. In other words, learn how to disconnect from
| technology and do literally anything else for a few hours per
| week. We don't need to go all in on quitting the industry to
| get a break.
| kossTKR wrote:
| Important point. I do remember the general level of
| cynicism and depression being several magnitudes lower
| 10-15 years ago though - on early HN/Reddit for example -
| today it seems everyone hates everything and we are 1 year
| from collapse every year - and i don't personally disagree
| that we have more than enough important things to tackle,
| but the "i have given up"-tone has become widespread even
| in MS news that i don't check very often anymore.
|
| I miss excitement, enthusiasm and humor - and yeah the
| world may be plummeting into tech dystopia and climate
| collapse but throughout time aid workers, firefighters, war
| time doctors and myriads of other people have kept their
| humor, interest and skills despite chaos around them and so
| should i.
|
| About the entrepreneurship, yeah i agree but i still think
| "knowing how the internet works", how to make a website and
| how to learn by yourself is still a pretty good "extra
| skill" you get to have as a tech worker than can easily
| work as a stepping stone into new fields.
| [deleted]
| yoz-y wrote:
| I think I wrote this somewhere else too but in my opinion one
| of the issues is that software development is one of very few
| jobs that can "not suck". Many of us are pulled in for that
| promise and ultimately many will end up in plain boring jobs
| like everybody else.
| user5994461 wrote:
| Doctors have guaranteed work and income (the debt is only
| true in the US), they can walk into any hospital to get a job
| or open their own office, their status is protected and the
| job cannot be outsourced abroad. Have a look at what doctors
| make and what engineers make, the H1B salary data is a good
| sample, you will see that engineers are very pale in
| comparison.
|
| Teachers have guaranteed job, good income and many benefits.
| Salaries are usually set nationally not adjusted per
| location, it's not great to live in the most expensive tech
| hub but it's pretty good everywhere else in the country.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Yeah, this. As a doctor, the older you get, the more
| valuable you become(usually) while as a SW engineer the
| older you get ... well you know it already.
|
| You have no competition from abroad and no shortage for
| demand, like seriously, do you know any area that's lacking
| sick people?
|
| Not to mention status.
| aogaili wrote:
| Well, the grass doesn't seem to be much greener elsewhere,
| and it seems most of folks here are confusing hobbies
| (things you do at your own pace for fun) with work (things
| you've to do for others, at their own terms, for
| money/material stuff).
|
| If you google "being doctor sucks", you will find very
| similar complaints (see link below), and it seems some
| doctors were envious of nurses, but I didn't bother
| googling "being a nurse sucks" because I know what to
| expect.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=being+doctor+sucks&oq=being
| +...
|
| and here is another one about being carpenter sucks
| http://www.bbcboards.net/showthread.php?t=828471
|
| and this one is about how hard is it make money from
| woodworking https://thewoodwhisperer.com/articles/why-i-
| dont-offer-woodw...
|
| here is an interesting take away from that last thread:
|
| "I have built maybe 6 pieces I really liked in the past
| 10yrs. Thats someting you'll face in any craft business.
| Making crap you don't like."
|
| Well, welcome to modern capitalism, adulthood and work. The
| underlying assumption here is life supposed to be fun and
| easy, it is not, it has never been and perhaps it will
| never be.
| someguydave wrote:
| Yes both teachers and doctors in the US are protected from
| competing with immigrants through licensing schemes. They
| are also protected from competition due to the fact that
| they can be paid mostly from government accounts.
| bluebit wrote:
| Honest question, what is a great career pivot for someone
| that's been in development all their life? It seems that
| nothing pays as well as building software, unless you go into
| management which most developers would enjoy even less than
| digital plumbing.
| mcv wrote:
| Start your own company and build something you believe in.
| Few other professions are as well equipped to start their own
| business. Except for real plumbers, maybe.
| jnwatson wrote:
| I pivoted tomorrow sales engineering for 8 years, then a
| technical BD role, then back to SW engineering.
|
| You get to talk worth a bunch of people in sales and still
| exercise your problem solving skills.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Yikes. Apologize for the autocorrect.
| seattletech wrote:
| Sales engineering is a great place for being able to
| tinker, interact with a wide range of clients/prospects,
| and plus being a revenue center...
| EVdotIO wrote:
| How does one break into this? I've tried getting into the
| sales side of things, but it seems to elude me.
| kilbuz wrote:
| Perhaps something software-adjacent, such as a statistician.
| niemandhier wrote:
| Most programmers I met do not have the skills needed to be
| a statistician or a data scientist
| buddhiajuke wrote:
| Or dentist.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| As a statistician now working as a machine learning
| engineer, my response is "definitely not". It's all the
| frustrations of software development, but on top of that
| you are now frequently dealing with clients/colleagues
| whose requests are now not simply impractical, but usually
| defy the laws of mathematics and probability, and an ever
| present pressure to put out work that amounts to fraud.
| Analytics have a lot of value to provide many
| organizations, but it requires planning, foresight, and a
| willingness to sacrifice a little now for the sake of a
| payoff in insights later, which very few organizations
| have, in my experience. So it essentially becomes a
| buzzword and people throw worthless data at you to wave a
| magic wand over so you can tell them what they want to
| hear. Doing so would essentially require lying, so instead,
| we would perform the awful, worthless analysis, it usually
| didn't provide much insight, and we would include a litany
| of disclaimers about why the little insight it did provide
| wasn't al that trustworthy, which would just disappoint and
| infuriate the people we were working with. We would also
| provide detailed guidance on how to execute moving forward
| to make the process much more valuable the next time
| around, which without fail went in one ear and out the
| other.
|
| So essentially we became figureheads. Our work rarely was
| used in any significant way or provided much value, but we
| were kept around because the company wanted to be able to
| tout its "data driven" culture.
|
| It was so bad that at one company I worked for, they had
| the data science/analytics department start putting on a
| yearly intracompany conference on analytics that became a
| huge deal. One year they got Stephen Levy, the author of
| Freakonomics, to be the keynote speaker. At one point he
| shared a story about how he was consulting with a company
| on their marketing, and they found that they had
| accidentally not been running ads in a particular metro
| area, and were able to leverage this to act as a control to
| assess the materials effectiveness. But when asked to
| intentionally do something similar moving forward, the
| company balked. It was so close to home that my colleagues
| and I wondered if the head of our department had fed him
| the need to talk about it. And yet, not a single thing
| changed at the company during my time there.
|
| I currently work in a role much closer to software
| engineering, and I have all of the same problems described
| by the person in the original post and that many are
| describing here. But I consider it a strict upgrade over my
| time working as a statistician.
| kilbuz wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this, these are fair comments. My
| experience has been more positive, but I see the truth in
| many of your points. For what it's worth, I have always
| been involved in controlled experimentation, and never
| anything related to ML or modeling. Our biggest issue is
| usually ensuring we are getting accurate counts of
| events, and when I see all the challenges in that, I
| wonder how anything more advanced ever gets done.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I suppose, as with anything, your mileage may vary. And
| in this case, your mileage will depend largely on your
| organization. In my experience, most organizations are
| not equipped or prepared to do what is necessary to make
| most analytics efforts worthwhile. But in the instances
| where this is not true, working as a statistician is very
| rewarding. If you have had a more positive experience
| than I, more power to you, and kudos to you and the
| people you work with/for.
| xab31 wrote:
| Seconded. I work as a data analyst in medical research
| (bioinformatics postdoc). I am often introduced as a
| statistician, even though I'm not, because I can do a bit
| more than a t-test.
|
| The situation in research is exactly as you describe --
| we are figureheads who are put into place and highly
| pressured to confirm whatever hypothesis a PI wants for
| their latest grant or paper. They would never _ask_ us to
| commit fraud, only perhaps to "double check" an analysis
| 10 times until it shows what they want to see.
|
| If I were working for a company, this would at least be
| understandable, as companies don't even have a
| theoretical commitment to truth and scientific integrity,
| and there are no real consequences to a faulty analysis.
|
| But it is immensely galling to see in research. Here we
| are, paid by the public to supposedly pursue truth and
| improve human health, and instead the job is to
| constantly be finding ways to avoid fraud and fabrication
| without pissing off the collaborator. The result is, as
| you say, useless analyses if the analyst is honest, and
| fabrications if they are not.
|
| There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is one
| of the key reasons the ROI on science has declined
| drastically in the last few decades. It makes me laugh
| bitterly every time I see (increasingly frequently)
| political exhortations for plebeians to "trust the
| science".
| kls wrote:
| I have a cousin who is a travel welder, he is young and
| single. He is making over 100k but he has to relocate for
| work about every 6 months. It's a great gig for a young man,
| but ones lifestyle would have to fit how the work comes to
| them.
| Angostura wrote:
| The actual business analysis and requirements discovery?
|
| Meeting users, finding out about their problems and working
| out how software can solve them?
| jordache wrote:
| UX researcher? That doesn't pay as well
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Business/System analyst is a very different role than a
| UX researcher.
|
| In the agile world, the analysts were basically replaced
| by product owners, but I assume there are still places
| where they exist. I've done it for a while, it's quite
| cushy job if you're good at talking, writing, presenting
| (same as product owner but without the "ownership" part,
| so much less stress).
| vanviegen wrote:
| Does it need to pay as well?
| non-entity wrote:
| It seems like the only realsitc pivots are going to be
| adjacent business type positions, and even then there's a
| chance of a payout depending on company / position, etc. Like
| you said though I would hate these more than I do the
| software jobs.
| nicbou wrote:
| I run a website that helps people. I still deal with
| software, but on my own terms. If I put the same content on a
| cookie cutter WordPress site, no one would care. Now,
| programming feels a lot like woodworking: a deliberately
| inefficient way to do something, just because it's fun.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| > _Now, programming feels a lot like woodworking: a
| deliberately inefficient way to do something, just because
| it 's fun._
|
| Now that is a standout line right there. It perfectly
| describes some of my own personal projects. Sometimes--
| oftentimes--they go nowhere but I had fun.
|
| One such task was developing a secret Santa system in
| python with an auto mailer and "paper" backup while in
| Hawaii last year. It took me part of a morning during
| breakfast before we went out for the day. I refined it when
| we got home. There were others already out there and it did
| nothing more then putting names in a hat, but it was fun.
| And it's reusable. And it had the added benefit of needing
| no moderator--nobody in on the secret.
|
| The metaphor of a wood working project just seems to fit so
| well. Nice one.
| samatman wrote:
| It's a trap!
|
| Hate your job? Maybe it's the job, not the profession.
| Developers have an enviable amount of mobility; use it.
|
| Maybe you aren't taking care of yourself in some other way?
| Sleep, diet, exercise, possible clinical depression: these
| are all things to try.
|
| Perhaps you're burned out? It's 2020, that's a very real
| possibility. There's a whole literature on what to do about
| it, and "abandon your career" is dead last.
|
| Both of the preceding paragraphs have a "talk to your boss"
| component. Don't think that's a good idea? Great, you
| definitely have the wrong boss, GOTO LABEL "Hate your job?".
|
| Good reasons to stop developing software: a) there's
| something else you really want to do, and you have rational
| confidence you won't starve, and b) you're ready and able to
| retire.
|
| Bad reasons to stop developing software: literally anything
| else.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| My plan is to bank enough money from software jobs to be
| financially independent at a high standard of living (I'm
| well on my way to that). Then afterwards, just retire and do
| all sorts of hobbies without trying to make them into a
| career or earn career-equivalent amounts of money from them.
|
| If you're currently on that trajectory (i.e. you're able to
| save a large percentage of your income every year) then I'd
| recommend it. If not, then yeah, you might need a second
| career if you want to get out of development soon. My plan is
| not to need one.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| A very common pivot I've observed and am part of is to
| brewing craft beer (with the caveat that maybe that's a
| local/regional thing). It sure as hell doesn't pay as well as
| development, the hours are longer, but... you get to drink
| plenty of great beer! Something about brewing seems to draw
| the same sort of personality as development - there's a fair
| degree of technical knowledge and skill demanded, an
| attention to detail, and yet a creative aspect, too. Then,
| too reformed/recovering developers can always find a small
| refuge in automating some/some aspects of the brewing
| process.
|
| Oh, and it's _real_ plumbing...
| metafunctor wrote:
| Having been there per-2000, not really. It was not appreciably
| simpler, most of it was really plumbing (but maybe you were
| making up the pipes as you went along), and there were assholes
| abound.
| bigbizisverywyz wrote:
| I also feel that back then demand _massively_ outstripped
| supply which created its own kind of stress as I felt I was
| working a lot more with much less experienced devs who just
| got into it because it good paying work, but they didn 't
| really enjoy it.
|
| Nowadays there seems to be a lot more software engineering
| skill around generally, and a big yay! to github and Stack
| overflow, and the thousands of developers who freely provide
| code/frameworks and knowledge to give all developers a leg-
| up.
|
| It's good to no longer be in the thrall of the large software
| vendors (sun/apple/MS) to provide frameworks, tools &
| documentation.
| mouzogu wrote:
| This comment sums up exactly how I feel about my work and
| career at this point.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I don't recall it being any better pre-2000.
|
| Frankly the tools really sucked back then. Build systems and
| IDEs were awful. Just go play with an autotools-based C project
| sometime to remind/education yourself. Visual Studio 7,
| horrible. No mainstream refactoring IDEs to speak of. C++
| compilers across multiple platforms were horrible at standards
| compliance consistency, and you could barely get a working STL,
| practically everyone wrote their own string and containers
| classes. CORBA -- some nice ideas, bad in practice. Java was a
| dumpster fire of EJB/J2EE heavyweight, with slow an d expensive
| application servers. Expensive Oracle installs dominated the
| database world, with the rest shored up by MySQL installs that
| were only partially ACID. No CSS HTML, pre-HTML5 so a mess of
| nested tables to make things lay out properly. Most sites were
| a pile of spaghetti code "type 1" JSPs or ASPs or really bad
| PHP sites making database calls and queries right in the page
| source, horrible to maintain.
|
| Then the serving or hardware infrastructure, in the world of
| web stuff... forget about cloud or even reasonably priced
| hosting services. Most shops, even small ones, I worked at
| ended up having their own sysadmin team managing an owned or
| rented fleet of expensive Sun server hardware, etc. Closets
| full of hot and pricey hardware etc.
|
| And as for languages... I learned Python in 95 or 96, back when
| it was pretty new. But almost no shop would have considered
| hiring me to work in it. Erlang, Python, OCaml, various Lisps,
| Smalltalk, all that good stuff all _existed_ but pretty much
| nobody would ever consider letting you write production code in
| such "weird stuff" until Ruby kinda broke the barrier. Perl was
| everywhere, but "serious" shops started to push Java, but Java
| was frankly awful back then around 2000. As I allude to above
| C++ was painful to work in at the time. C# didn't really exist
| yet. Visual Basic was all over the place, but was frowned on
| for "serious" stuff.
|
| I think people forget how dominant and awful "enterprise"
| development is/was. It's still out there, but HN in general
| doesn't seem as exposed to it. Back in the late 90s, early
| 2000s, the accepted "enterprise" stack was the aspirational
| crap _so_ many shops adopted... it was for that time what
| "microservices" and "bigdata" other dogma are today. People
| didn't need it, but they thought they did.
|
| Frankly, everything took longer to get done. Simple things are
| quicker to get done now.
|
| Nah, it wasn't a particularly good time to be doing software
| dev.
|
| I guess if you were employed in the right place, and were
| lucky, you would at least get to work on pioneering work
| building the tools and infrastructure that we now take for
| granted and complain about. Being at a Google building Bigtable
| etc. or Sun Microsystems working on the innards of Java etc.
| back then would have been a dream job. But the vast majority of
| us never got that chance. We were plumbers, too, just with
| really crappy pipes.
| senko wrote:
| > Just go play with an autotools-based C project sometime to
| remind/education yourself.
|
| Funny you should mention autotools. It reminds me a lot of
| webpack, especially in the way nobody[0] really understands
| how it works, but you search around for examples and
| copy/paste what works for you.
|
| [0] a hyperbole; i'm sure someone does, just as I'm sure some
| people dreamt of M4 macros back in the day
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Oh it's so awful; but I recently was exposed to a project
| where some of the leads were trying to defend it as a
| reasonable tech choice. It really isn't. Not in this era.
| Most people never even used it correctly in the first
| place.
| anilakar wrote:
| > autotools-based C project
|
| It wasn't autotools per se that was horrible. It was the the
| fact that you had to pollute your system with random
| libraries, often no longer available from the operating
| system vendor repositories. Docker has been a lifesaver with
| these older projects.
| ditonal wrote:
| Totally agree, and let's also mention Stack Overflow and the
| plentiful learning resources on Youtube etc. In 2000, I was a
| teenager trying to learn C++ and the Win32 API, and when I
| got stuck I got really stuck. These days, the amount of
| resources to help you with a problem or learn a new
| technology are infinitely higher which removes one of the
| most frustrating aspect of software dev.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| In my experience gaming or playing with emerging tech is still
| fun--give it a shot!
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Not to mention that sitting in front of a computer all day
| is not the best use of one's body._
|
| You can say that about all desk jobs(even bus drivers) since
| they all sit on a chair the whole day but at least in some
| cases we get paid better and have more free time to take care
| of ourselves. And unlike the bus driver, I can leave work or
| take a coffee/toilet break whenever I want.
|
| And labor jobs that don't require sitting are usually even
| worse for your body long term(landscaping, plumbing, gardening)
| and sometimes pay worse as well. If I'm coding, I can
| constantly shift my body position if it gets uncomfortable
| while a plumber/gardner is just stuck in that straineous
| position until the job is done.
|
| Maybe athlete or personal fitness instructor is the only job I
| can think of where you earn money while staying in shape.
| bmj wrote:
| Any work is going to break down your body. It's the nature of
| the beast.
| hdjdbtbgwjsn wrote:
| Personal trainer is fairly bad for your body and wellbeing as
| well. Its basically split shifts since clients want training
| either before or after their work. So sleep is an issue.
|
| If work was easy then we wouldn't need to be paid for it.
| httpne wrote:
| >If work was easy then we wouldn't need to be paid for it.
|
| "work" in its natural sense is indistinguishable from play.
| Animals play as a way to practice "work". Lions etc play
| hunt. The problem is that "work" in modern times has little
| to do with what we are genetically-inclined to want to do.
| samatman wrote:
| Given certain passages early in Genesis, it's safe to
| conclude that work has been a pain in the back since, at
| least, the dawn of agriculture.
|
| Which, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, has made a lot of
| people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
| ativzzz wrote:
| We are genetically inclined to sleep, find food, and have
| sex. Work in any civilization pays money, which allows
| you to buy food, a place to sleep, and resources to
| attract a partner, so I disagree.
| hdjdbtbgwjsn wrote:
| Yeah OK. But you see my point?
| hellofunk wrote:
| Not all desk jobs, well certainly not all jobs where you are
| always sitting down, cause the same long-term strain on the
| eyes, however. A bus driver is at least focusing on the
| distance for most of the day, which is much more natural than
| staring at a computer monitor and its artificial light and
| small text for hours on end.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| There are still many many many good projects. Even with Web
| technologies. However in my observation Web stuff brings in a
| lot of people doing things they don't understand even
| fundamental things. Observing JavaScript or Node forums is
| generally a pain. Regularly there are people asking basic
| questions and all they want is the next library stick into
| their pile of things they don't understand.
|
| Sure, one doesn't have to be able to write an operating system
| from scratch and there is value in high level libraries not
| requiring to reinvent the wheel all the time, but basic
| understanding of HTTP or such should be there for web
| developers as well as basic understanding of data structures or
| algorithms (while computers are fast enough and data sets small
| enough that so many people get away without knowing for quite
| some time)
| x87678r wrote:
| I remember fondly tasks like writing my own collections and
| logging pipelines. It wasn't as efficient as connecting
| libraries but it was more satisfying when you built your own
| way from the ground up.
| jordache wrote:
| If it pays well for as a job, what else can you ask for? Unless
| you are independently wealthy, how can one be so picky as to
| complain about the nuances of software development at the
| tooling/dependency management level? Sheesh
|
| Look at the broader job market. Compare the pros n' cons of any
| career against software development. Compare the barrier to
| entry, demand, and other market conditions. Software dev comes
| out pretty well.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| I will complain about whatever I want. I will not force
| others to hear/read it or agree with me. But I will do this
| and I will not care about other describing it as a picky and
| entitled.
| jordache wrote:
| ok snowflake. You put your opinion on a public forum. Do
| not respond with such an attitude. In the context of this
| discussion, no one cares about your personal feeling when
| confronted with a feedback of being picky and entitled.
|
| We simply want an exchange of opinions from both columns.
| onion2k wrote:
| I don't think it's unreasonable to want to be paid to solve
| software problems creatively. _A lot_ of people get in to
| software for the creative challenges rather than (or as well
| as) the money. The problem is that most software isn 't
| actually doing anyting new so it doesn't need much creativity
| to build. It just needs people to glue together the right
| combination of parts that have already been built to solve
| generic problems in order to solve the specific problem
| they're making software for. That's usually pretty boring.
| gridlockd wrote:
| You must be in your twenties. Software development can be a
| uniquely depressing kind of work. All the complexity, which
| can be compensated for with youthful vigor, can eventually
| become so overwhelming and exhausting that you will need a
| break.
|
| Money isn't everything. If you can do a job that pays less
| but doesn't depress you as much, you probably should go for
| it. You won't keep your job as a developer forever anyway,
| age discrimination is very real in the industry.
| jordache wrote:
| >Money isn't everything
|
| At the top of the requirements list of any job, is How Well
| It Pays.
|
| Having comfortable amount of money frees you to to enjoy
| other aspects of life/personal passion/family building.
| That's how the global economy works, for the time being.
|
| For a job that doesn't require overtime, consistent
| schedule, a solid 9-5 type position. What is there to
| complain? Looking at the big picture, the economy is filled
| with people who are barely getting by, laid off due to
| pandemic, and working overtime or multiple jobs, to
| generate enough income in attempt to sustain life.
| gridlockd wrote:
| Having a "comfortable amount" of money means nothing if
| you're burned out to the point where you _can not enjoy_
| the rest of your life.
|
| If "I no longer build software" doesn't resonate with
| you, you just haven't "been there". Again, you're
| probably in your twenties. Don't expect your
| rationalizations to last you into your forties.
|
| If you're still a developer at the end of your forties,
| chances are you will lose your job and your spouse
| anyway.
|
| > That's how the global economy works, for the time
| being.
|
| Curiously, people in the less affluent countries report
| being happier. Also, in the US, most of the money you
| earn goes into someone else's rent: Your lease or
| mortgage, your car, your insurance, your loans, your
| taxes, and so on. It's the American Dream!
|
| > Looking at the big picture, the economy is filled with
| people who are barely getting by, laid off due to
| pandemic, and working overtime or multiple jobs, to
| generate enough income in attempt to sustain life.
|
| If you think those are your two options, that's fine. I'm
| not telling you to quit your job.
| marvin wrote:
| Huh? What does the spouse have to do with things?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The trap is that the youthful vigor leaves but you still
| need the money. I find myself growing tired of the constant
| churn and needing to learn new stuff to keep up with what's
| going on, and then pretending I know enough of what I
| barely learned to be able to talk to a room full of clients
| about it, but I need the money (I am nowhere near the
| valley so I make a mnerely average amount of money for
| where I am in life) so what can one do? Just keep plugging
| away because I can't not have the money.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Money isn't everything, but without it there isn't much
| that you can do to sustain yourself. I'm privileged to be
| where I am today, and I keep this at the forefront of my
| mind as I see people struggling in jobs that are all about
| physical labour or the service sector, if they have a job
| at all (or are on zero-hour contracts). Choosing a job is
| something that only select people have as an option, in the
| grand picture.
| misja111 wrote:
| Pre-2000 it was also plumbing, the difference was that you were
| mostly plumbing someone else's homegrown cruft. Occasionally
| you got the chance of building some framework by yourself,
| probably to the dismay of the developer who had to maintain it
| after you left. I like today's plumbing better.
| lazyjones wrote:
| It can still be fun if you don't follow fads and have no
| feedback ticketing system/forum/e-mail.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _The old days pre-2000 were arguably a lot more enjoyable._
|
| Yes. 1 monitor running the editor full screen, no constant
| interruptions from IM, documentation in books that actually was
| accurate, programming the actual machine not piecing together
| other people's crapware libraries.
| criddell wrote:
| > piecing together other people's crapware libraries
|
| This is my biggest concern about the state of my profession.
| It might not be the right analogy, but it gives me a house-
| of-cards type vibe.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| > Today it's just digital plumbing and dealing with all sorts
| of issues that are not creative. The sheer complexity is
| frankly absurd as well.
|
| Is this not a contradiction to you?
| vbsteven wrote:
| I feel the same way. The plumbing required has become so
| complex these last few years (if you use new technology).
|
| 10 years ago we uploaded the server/backend binary to a VM,
| installed postgres/mysql and configured nginx/haproxy as a
| reverse proxy/ssl termination.
|
| Now, if you want to deploy a modern SPA while using some
| buzzwords like k8s and devops you need:
|
| * complex frontend build process with things like webpack
| which have huge config files
|
| * Build docker images for all components (each microservice,
| frontend, etc)
|
| * Build zips for deploying your lambda functions
|
| * Configure docker repository for storing images
|
| * gitlab/bbpipelines/githubactions/whatever pipeline
| configuration for automating all this building
|
| * Setup a production-ready k8s cluster
|
| * Write the kubernetes yaml files for describing your
| services
|
| * Figure out how to hookup a cloud load balancer to your
| kubernetes ingress
|
| * Figure out letsencrypt certificate renewal and make your
| ingress aware
|
| * Figure out CDN configuration (and invalidation) because
| apparently we don't serve the frontend from the backend
| server anymore
|
| * Some network config so your lambdas can access the backend
|
| * Since we're using microservices we're going to need some
| service discovery, and depending on which SD solution we
| choose we might need to build this into each individual
| microservice (Consul)
|
| * And probably lots more as I haven't even touched service
| meshes, or JWT authentication, caching and cache invalidation
| SahAssar wrote:
| If you are doing that and do not want to do it then you are
| probably at the wrong company or not speaking up about it.
| miltondts wrote:
| All this for something that can be handled by a single
| server. This constant waste of time and energy, both the
| devs' and the machines', is what bothers me the most. I'm
| constantly reminded of the quote "anybody can build a
| bridge, but it takes an engineering to build one that
| barely stands". Maybe I should go into games or embedded.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| I suppose your argument is that most applications could
| and should be handled in a monolith.
|
| But I think it would be a terrible idea to be reliant on
| just one server because downtown, latency are real-
| troubling issues.
| jcranmer wrote:
| What you're complaining about is basically that certain
| features have become simpler to the point that it's
| feasible to have them in more situations--and adding those
| features adds a certain amount of complexity.
|
| There are three overlapping issues in what you talk about:
|
| * Moving from bare metal servers to VMs to containers, with
| cloud deployment optionally thrown in there somewhere.
|
| * Moving from hand deployment to continuous integration.
|
| * Moving from monolithic applications to microservices.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| This systems you just described are virtually infinitely
| scalable.
|
| Lambdas expand infinitely, k8's can easily autoscale
| stateless docker containers out forever.
|
| All for starting under a 500 dollars a month?
|
| 150$ for EKS, lambdas first X million are free, and are
| cheap as hell from there, cloud LB is 50 bucks a month,
| etc.
|
| Not to mention all the other benefits that containers
| provide Infrastructure as Code, no dev environment
| incompatibility problems, etc..
|
| That is UNHEARD OF historically.
|
| I think you may have some rose colored glasses or I'm just
| idealistic and naieve, but it's insanely exciting what's
| possible for a small enterprise nowdays.
|
| The problem nowdays imo is management. The business people
| have taken over tech instead of tech people running things.
| And people without knowledge of tech, running a tech shop
| always makes the job suck.
| ux-app wrote:
| none of that is _required_. chasing fad based development
| would make you think that it is, but there are a lot of
| successful products that aren 't burdened with all this
| cruft.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| The plethora of tools to make "devops" simpler and cheaper
| made it much more expensive.
|
| You cannot simplify something by adding overly complex
| layers of abstraction on top of it.
| square_usual wrote:
| They make it cheaper at scale. Most of us don't need that
| scale, so for us it's expensive.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| To me, no. A significant amount of the complexity that I
| generally deal with is "accidental complexity" caused by the
| current general approach of mixing up a ton of random
| dependencies of unknown quality or pedigree and the subtle
| flawed interactions between them. Coming up with ugly
| workarounds is creative I suppose, but ton in a sense that
| makes me at all happy.
| lowmagnet wrote:
| It's not a contradiction to me. Things can look like plumbing
| from the surface, require no creativity at all, and run some
| ML model below the surface that only a handful of
| mathematicians can understand. The upside: powerful tools
| that just need to plumb in place, the downside: god help you
| if it breaks.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| Not at all. Plumbing can be very complex, digital ot
| otherwise. It's not as easy as "connect input to output and
| done", there are constraints on the system that need to be
| accounted for, and meaningful design decisions to be made
| especially with respect to expected volume.
|
| But that doesn't mean it's creative. Plumbing, like web
| development, may have all of these complexities and
| constraints, but typically there is really only one solution
| that can be considered "right" and your job is to go through
| the steps and do the math to find it, there's not a lot of
| room for creative thinking, despite the complexity of the
| problem.
| protomyth wrote:
| I think a lot of the pre-2000 programming was a bit more
| enjoyable because most of us were not programming for the web
| and actually using platforms that were designed for application
| development. The web is a very poor fit for what most people
| want designed.
| ifend wrote:
| Agree 100%.
| protomyth wrote:
| What really still bugs me, was that it was much easier to
| build an application on NeXTSTEP in the early 90's than it
| is today with the modern web.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Application development on the web is much more pleasant than
| what we were doing on any pre-web platform, and possibly even
| now.
|
| I've wanted one-way data flow (React, Elm) forever.
|
| We just have rose colored glasses because we were younger,
| dabbling, all tech was new and non-web tech was just what was
| available. And we confuse that for some sort of obvious tech
| superiority. I'd say those were the worst times for
| application development, not the best. Makes me wonder how
| many people actually worked on a production client
| application back then.
| wvenable wrote:
| > I've wanted one-way data flow (React, Elm) forever.
|
| How is that different from MVC patterns in desktop
| development?
| protomyth wrote:
| _Application development on the web is much more pleasant
| than what we were doing on any pre-web platform, and
| possibly even now._
|
| The platform that the web was designed on (NeXTSTEP) was
| much nicer to develop on. VB programmers had a much easier
| time than web development now. The web was designed as a
| document delivery platform and it continues to show how
| hard it is to get basic functionality going.
| adzicg wrote:
| My guess is that it has nothing to do with pre-2000 (or non-
| web), it's just that people enjoy a rote activity a lot more
| at the start of their careers when things are still new and
| interesting. When you've done 50 web sites, the 51st isn't
| nearly as exciting as the first ten.
|
| I got burned out badly by a string of gigs that effectively
| came down to helping clients fight some self-inflicted
| business complexity and connecting yet another stupid website
| to yet another stupid database, but instead of quitting the
| industry I decided to slowly fire clients that wanted that
| kind of work, and build my own products. It took a while to
| get things rolling since I did this as a gradual shift, and
| financed it by doing smaller and smaller consulting gigs, but
| I strongly recommend that as an alternative to quitting
| altogether to anyone who feels the pain outlined in the the
| original post.
|
| For me, immersive coding is an activity that brings a lot of
| joy. Building software is the closest thing to modern magic -
| you turn ideas, keyboard clicks and caffeine into something
| that people actually use; potentially making a positive
| impact on someone's life/work/day.
|
| By building my own stuff, at my own pace, I rediscovered the
| joy of coding. As much as it was in pre-2000 work and before
| web.
|
| If you build your own stuff, then there's nobody to tell you
| to connect a RSS feed to a RDBMS system. For me, the key to
| keep programming enjoyable is to be able to control the pace
| and business requirements. In my case, this translated to
| focusing on business-to-consumer products at a very low cost
| to the consumer, so I'm in charge of the product, not the
| customers. With B2B, especially at a high single customer
| price, people feel entitled to ask for stupid shit, and
| whoever manages the product feels compelled to accept it.
| With low average lifetime customer value, saying no is very
| easy. I assume that's not the only way to keep full control
| of the product, but it worked for me.
| Ziggy_Zaggy wrote:
| This. All SW pplz I work with that ultimately experience
| this I recommend to spin up their own project in order to
| channel their own creative energy into.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| There was nothing enjoyable about ActiveX.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > The web is a very poor fit for what most people want
| designed.
|
| The web is an application development platform that's split
| into two pieces with a critical security boundary in the
| middle, which causes basically all of its problems because
| every web app has to be a distributed system. If you can
| constrain what you want to build to _either_ a set of pages
| and forms _or_ a single client-server app that sits in a
| sandbox and uses the browser as its display buffer, that
| makes it manageable.
|
| The default (and indeed only) language for the web not
| enforcing type safety is also a handicap. People will
| eventually build a shell inside it where compile time type
| safety can be mostly enforced.
|
| On the other hand, the alternative is worse: a proprietary
| platform which shifts unpredictably and from which the owner
| can ban you.
| protomyth wrote:
| _On the other hand, the alternative is worse: a proprietary
| platform which shifts unpredictably and from which the
| owner can ban you._
|
| I'm not sure that's the only alternative. I would actually
| describe the web as shifting, unpredictable at the behest
| of one company with the controlling browser and search
| engine.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| ^On the other hand, the alternative is worse: a proprietary
| platform which shifts unpredictably and from which the
| owner can ban you.
|
| Linux might "shifts unpredictably" too (looking at you
| Gnome ;) but at least the owner can't ban you.
| city41 wrote:
| I think there is a lot of truth to this. I started
| programming in C++ and then Java. But for about the past
| decade I've done web dev. Recently I've found myself back
| working on some non-web projects and it's a breath of fresh
| air in many ways.
|
| True, a lot of that could just be the change in scenery. But
| I really appreciate that just about everything about the
| platform exists in order to create software, rather than
| trying to jump through the bizarre hoops that browsers
| created. Not dealing with Webpack is an absolute god send.
|
| But with all that said, I think wasm has the potential to
| bring us sanity again. And if not wasm, then possibly tools
| like Rome will make web dev a bit more sane at least.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| Pre-2000 you actually had a hope of understanding everything
| your computer software was doing. These days there's no hope,
| everything is too complicated for the best of minds. You'll
| only ever know a small portion of it. Maybe that doesn't
| bother some people, but it's a big demotivator for me. I miss
| being able to truly understand my computer.
|
| Now I feel like I'm always spinning my wheels. Even worse,
| I'm more capable of learning and understanding than ever, but
| the amount I need to know is increasing faster than my
| abilities to learn it.
| jnwatson wrote:
| I've been programming for over 35 years now and have mostly
| avoided doing web stuff. It is quite possible.
| [deleted]
| lukaszkups wrote:
| how? SAP/ERP consulting?
| archi42 wrote:
| I'd imagine embedded being relatively far away from that
| kind of work (that's until you've got to add WiFi and/or
| IoT-cloud web interface - and happen to be one of the
| only few software people in the company).
| sercankd wrote:
| You also do web stuff when necessary with SAP though
| collyw wrote:
| That sounds like the worst of both worlds.
| varlength wrote:
| It absolutely is. Just look at SAP UI5 (their JS
| framework)
| jnwatson wrote:
| Embedded, then systems, then offensive, then systems.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Ugh. I hate web programming, but I'd rather churn out yet
| another javascript library than write a single line of
| ABAP.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Pre-1985 could have been scientific/high performance
| computing, Cobol-type business application programming,
| or something defense-related.
| fsloth wrote:
| Not OP but I've focused on C++ , computational geometry
| and graphics programming for over a decade. That field is
| still quite thriving. You just need to work actively to
| find the right employers - and they are not as common as
| 'more regular type' of programming gigs.
|
| Not sure if I would make more doing webdev, but am not in
| US so it would be normal middle-class income anyway.
| detaro wrote:
| Games, embedded, desktop apps, "infrastructure" software
| (OSes, networking, orchestration, developer tooling),
| mobile apps (depending on how picky you are about using
| APIs being "web"), ...
| amyjess wrote:
| I can't speak for GP, but I do behind-the-scenes
| networking stuff for an enterprise ISP.
|
| My team's responsibilities include configuration
| management, fault management, and certain KPI monitoring.
| We don't need to write webapps for that (though we do
| integrate with them) :)
| lsaferite wrote:
| I cannot tell if this is a joke or not. If it is not,
| there are entire industries out that that depend on
| software development that are NOT web related.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Embedded programming i.e. automotive, industrial,
| aerospace. The problem is they pay poorly in comparison
| to web dev but are a lot more stable long term.
| raverbashing wrote:
| It's a nice area
|
| However some places are 10, sometimes 20 years behind
| into best practices, be that in coding, tools, PM
| practices, innovation, etc.
|
| There's a reason a lot of mobile phone companies closed
| down (as an example).
|
| As much as I like the area I don't miss staring at a
| hodge-podge of C/C++ code done in weird style that might
| or might not have been auto generated and will as many
| memory bugs as possible.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I have done almost 0 web development at 3 of the FAANGs
| and am quite satisfied with the pay. I don't think web
| would have paid better. I've done OS type work (system
| daemons, libraries etc), embedded, mobile, etc.
|
| Then there are people who work on compilers, image
| recognition, AI, browsers, server work of all kinds, etc
| etc. the variety, depth, and scale of work is much larger
| than web and can pay better as it can require a deeper
| level of expertise. I'm sure there exist web developers
| who make more than people who work in these spaces just
| as the converse is true. I don't think it's possible to
| say which pays more. Web dev may be an easier avenue to
| break into things with a low amount of experience though.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| That's cool but the thing is FAANGs are absent in most
| countries outside of the 2 US coasts and a few major tech
| hubs in Europe. Everywhere else, most of the SW industry
| is just CRUD/build-an-API-for-this-shitty-JSON type of
| work.
|
| Compiler/AI work and the rest exists where I live as well
| but it's strictly in academia, not in private companies
| and has a high barrier of entry as it's mostly PhDs or
| post-docs and is also paid poorly.
|
| Web dev work you can find in pretty much any major city
| in the world.
|
| For example, in a city nearby to me there's a major VR/AR
| headset company which I'm pretty sure solves really
| interesting problems. The issue is, what happens when you
| want to change jobs but want to stay in the same city as
| that city has no VR/AR hub so there's no other demand for
| specialists in this specific niche.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Don't know why this was downvoted. As someone living in
| Europe, this comment is exactly why I stay in my cushy,
| very well paying and super boring and frustrating backend
| job. In the backend world, there are dozens of employees
| who would be happy for me to come work for them, while
| market for interesting work with similar is very shallow
| here (a very limited selection of FAANGs, what else?). I
| don't want to move to the US (mostly because the US visas
| seem designed mainly for people in much worse situations
| that I currently am) and the European market is just too
| shallow to build any more advanced coding career - unless
| you're ok with low salaries, little savings and coding
| until you're 60+ years old. I don't love coding that
| much.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Where do you live in Europe if I may ask that pays well
| enough for backend dev as not to work until you're 60?
|
| Genuinely curious as I'm open to a move.
| shynrou wrote:
| I live in germany here you can earn a decent salary if
| your in one of the mayor cities.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| What's a decent salary in numbers and can you afford to
| buy a house there with that amount?
| burntoutfire wrote:
| I'm from Poland. Of course, everything depends on the
| conditions of the retirement that you're comfortable
| with. For me, it's 5000 PLN ($1300) a month till I'm 85
| years old + paid-off house. The 5k PLN should be very
| comfortable assuming no children, which I don't want.
| Assuming ultra-safe investing to only protect the
| principal (i.e. no return above inflation) and wanting to
| retire at 40, you'd need around 2,500,000 PLN ($650,000)
| to achieve that + buy the house to retire in. Let's call
| in 3,000,000 PLN ($780k) in total.
|
| If you look around a bit, as an in-demand (meaning -
| chasing the latest tech fads, maybe some tech lead
| experience as well) senior backend developer, you can get
| take home 250,000 PLN per year on a long-term (meaning
| usually multiple years) contract basis. Assuming 60,000
| PLN of that goes to living expenses, it takes less than
| 16 years to save up the required 3m PLN to retire. And,
| if you're really hot in terms of CV, you can take home
| much more than 250k per year. Also, there are options to
| contract in Western Europe or get six figure remote US
| job (this one's harder than the other options) for more
| pay.
| zerr wrote:
| You're way underpaid, even by Polish standards. You can
| easily get a remote job e.g. at German company that pays
| 70K-90K+ EUR.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That's true. Outside Silicon Valley there's probably not
| as much non-web dev work. I still think it's out there.
| Banks exist everywhere and my brother has worked in a
| European bank for a long time. FAANGS also have offices
| all over Europe (London, Paris, and Berlin) doing non-web
| work and even before COVID if you were senior and
| talented enough remote work was an option. Now remote
| work for all companies has simplified drastically.
|
| I have worked on mobile OS, PC software development, web,
| machine learning problems, and now VR. I'm not
| particularly worried about getting pigeonholed because
| any company I'd want to work for can recognize the value
| of a generalist - I'm not going to solve hard domain-
| specific problems but I can architect the SW and plug all
| the pieces together and dive into domain-specific
| problems when necessary. To be fair though I've heard
| this concern from other people who want to move back to
| Europe, but the framing was different - how do I explain
| to them what I do in a recognizable manner.
| non-entity wrote:
| And how many of those are going to let you in without at
| least a decade of experience in the specific domain, and
| real world experience with whatever guidelines or
| practices they use (i.e. MISRA for X).
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Maybe all of them? I worked in Automotive right out of
| university and they trained you for everything you need
| to know including C programming tricks and MISRA and they
| hired pretty much anyone with generic programming
| knowledge as long as you were willing to learn.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| It's digital plumbing, but it pays well. My parents did
| physical work, and frankly I'd rather earn my keep with a
| keyboard than with my hands.
| shrubble wrote:
| What do you use to strike the keys on your keyboard?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| My fingers, of course. Are you seriously comparing hard
| physical labour to typing on a keyboard? One of those is
| back-breaking and seriously dangerous to personal health,
| depending on what you're lifting/operating. The other may
| earn you RSI or carpal tunnel syndrome if you're not
| careful. There's a whole world of difference between these
| two.
| goto11 wrote:
| There was a thread about what you learn when you get older. One
| thing I have learned is that nostalgia is bunk. It is just
| selection bias and bad memory.
|
| Music was not better back then, people were not any more
| polite, educated and rational, and trying to fix bug in some
| big-ball-of-mud visual basic codebase on a 640x480 screen
| without access to Google was not any more enjoyable than
| debugging an overdesigned React application is today.
|
| If you enjoy a challenge and have a great team in a well-run
| organization, developing is enjoyable, then and now.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I'm in desktop development (not games, not cross platform - old
| school document based apps) and it's bliss. I do 95% actual
| programming algorithm/data structures/domain problems and only
| a tiny bit of wrestling package managers, deployments and other
| plumbing.
| eloisant wrote:
| Some memories of pre-2000 that were not that enjoyable:
|
| - Most of the teams were not using SCM, but connecting to the
| same network drive and daily copying the whole folder as a
| backup. For those who did it was CVS (ugh). Even during the
| 2000's the best you got was SVN.
|
| - So many Visual Basic projects
|
| - For web projects: deploy by copying the files with FTP,
| getting shouted by a colleague because you override the hotfix
| he did using SSH and VI on the production file
|
| Now there were good projects back in the day, and there are
| good projects today. You just have to take control of your
| career and not just follow the flow of the first company who
| hired you in your area.
|
| Also remember that you can pivot within software development,
| there are so many different kind of software, you just have to
| accept to get out of your comfort zone.
| shekharshan wrote:
| I don't miss pre-2000 days when an admin would bounce the Linux
| servers and not bother to add a startup script for our JBoss or
| Tomcat servers in their service startup scripts. Our web
| servers would disappear for no reason from time to time and we
| would run around chasing the cause.
| christophilus wrote:
| I was just starting pre 2000, but it was not much better. I had
| to deal with a legacy COBOL system. I had to write C++. VB6 was
| actually pretty great for doing quick plumbing. And C# +
| WinForms which succeeded it was also great. But in the end, I'm
| still solving problems today, just like I was back then. I
| still enjoy programming as much or more than I did then. Some
| super tedious things have gotten substantially easier, too,
| such as building telephony apps. I had to do things like that
| pre-Twillio, and I don't miss it.
| knute wrote:
| In the early 1990s and early 2000s web development was a
| nightmare. Having to test not just in different browsers, but
| different versions of different browsers, because they had
| substantially different behaviors. There was no "Inspect
| element", JavaScript debuggers were entirely absent or
| incredibly crude. Getting a decent looking web page to render
| and function correctly across all the different browsers you
| supported was a real achievement. You spent most of your time
| fighting browsers, not making actual progress.
| gorbachev wrote:
| It was, but it was also much, much simpler. You couldn't
| shoot yourself in the foot as easy as you can now.
| christophilus wrote:
| Definitely. I generally wrote jscript and didn't support
| non-IE. That aspect of things is miles better today.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Software can still be a lot of fun, even more so today, when we
| can make huge stupid mistakes and things still mostly work.
|
| You just have to work on things you like, instead of what's
| fashionable or high paying.
| draw_down wrote:
| Yeah. Obviously there are those who enjoy it, but this line of
| work is kinda the pits. Best you can do is try to be well
| compensated so you can hopefully stop doing it soon enough.
|
| Can't wait to do anything else.
| calamityjam wrote:
| Spent the last few days building monkey bars for the kids to play
| in the backyard. It's really satisfying building something
| physical that others can use. It's similar to the feeling of
| building software that you see other people using and enjoying.
| grandinj wrote:
| I'd suggest finding a smaller company to work for, one that makes
| products, as opposed to doing integration or consulting.
|
| The money is less, you typically have to work on older stacks,
| and you don't get to learn a new technology every year, but the
| upside is you get to work across more of the (vertical) tech
| stack, and you get to be deeply familiar with the technologies
| involved.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I used to build software, back in the days of MS-DOS... wrote it
| all in Turbo Pascal, used pkZip to make archives of the source
| code every day, saved them on floppy disk. Towards the end,
| Windows was starting to be a thing, but I didn't have to deal
| with it. Delphi was fun.
|
| Then I was a system admin for about 2 decades, and only
| occasionally did I do the odd bit of programming.
|
| I took a detour into making gears, until the plague hit.
|
| I've had a side project for the past year, Initially I tried to
| do it in Python because where was a good charting library for
| it... but it turned out that building a GUI for the user was an
| exercise in masochism. There just was nothing like the
| interactive GUI builder in Delphi that I could find for python.
| After months of banging my head against the wall.. it worked, but
| changes that should take 30 seconds were taking 20+ minutes
| because I had to tweak all the python code for every little
| change in the GUI. I tried out Lazarus/Free Pascal, since Delphi
| is out of my price range.... it's buggy... but it took a pretty
| intense weekend, and I had everything replicated, and the pace of
| development went back to reasonable.
|
| The focus on C++ and the weird class factory thing, Java and the
| madness there... so much wasted time and effort when things USED
| TO BE BETTER.
|
| GIT, on the other hand... is awesome.... way better than ZIP
| files. 8) It took a while, but GUIs work much better for users,
| and they are almost trivial to build in Lazarus. You can bang out
| a CRUD app in a few hours.
| dbuder wrote:
| If any of you soon to be woodworkers are in Sydney, let me know.
| aogaili wrote:
| Here is the same conversion happening other the side between
| woodworkers: https://thewoodwhisperer.com/articles/why-i-dont-
| offer-woodw...
|
| The lesson: things are not much greener on the other side, work
| is not fun, it is not a hobby, and adult life is not easy :)
| axegon_ wrote:
| Strangely enough, to a degree I envy this guy. I've been at my
| current job for over 8 years and up until a few months ago I was
| pretty happy. However politics caught up and I decided to leave.
| At the moment I have a few offers on the table, one of which is
| from a company somewhere in the FAANG realm. Senior software
| engineer, awesome conditions, very generous paycheck, lots of
| benefits. So tempted by all this I said I'd take it. A few days
| later I got an email from a third party company, which had been
| tasked to do a background check on me. Which is fair - employment
| history, criminal records, education history - sure, I can
| understand that. However I got really suspicious when I saw their
| form and how much detail they required for what are otherwise
| simple checks. I decided to investigate the company before I move
| forward and it turns out their background checks involve a lot
| of... Background. As far as digging through social networks and
| message boards and pulling comments and likes on things which can
| be considered "inappropriate" and "offensive". That alone is
| enough for me to turn down the offer and move on with the next
| one. But looking at the extreme alternatives in this scenario, I
| take chopping off my finger in a heartbeat - at least I get the
| chance to keep my pride and dignity.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| > pulling comments and likes on things which can be considered
| "inappropriate" and "offensive"
|
| > That alone is enough for me to turn down the offer
|
| > I take chopping off my finger in a heartbeat
|
| You would rather lose a finger that work in a company that has
| strict very rules around offensive behavior?
|
| ...
| axegon_ wrote:
| > You would rather lose a finger that work in a company that
| has strict very rules around offensive behavior?
|
| As I said, in a heartbeat. I was born behind the iron curtain
| and still live in a place where it casts a dark shadow.
| There's a fine line between "strict rules" and full on
| dictatorship. Frankly I never understood the fuss around the
| so-called "offensive behavior". I spent 5 years of my life
| studying abroad. As an eastern European, if I had a cent for
| every time someone called me a car thief ALONE, I would have
| made enough money to buy the entire VW group(and never have
| to steal a car again ho-ho-ho). Do(/did) I care? No.
|
| I have a relative who was fired from their job in the 80's
| because he said a joke about the dictator at the time and
| wasn't hired up until the entire regime collapsed almost a
| decade later. Do you not see the problem with this? It's a
| question of self-respect and dignity. I don't care what
| anyone at work does or says, so long as work is being done.
| Their personal lives are none of my concern. A several-
| hundred page report which contains likes of a tweets like "A
| priest, a rapist and a pedophile walk into a bar... He orders
| a drink." with an "inappropriate" flag is a gross violation
| if you ask me.
| DarkWiiPlayer wrote:
| Uh... I don't think you understand the problem. A company
| going though your private social media is a big no-no. It's
| as if they'd call your friends and family and ask them "Has
| OP ever said or done anything offensive?".
|
| It's none of their concern and the fact that they even try
| this shit is a massive red flag. If they don't respect your
| privacy before they hire you, they won't magically start
| respecting it afterwards.
|
| Even setting that aside, a company policing what employees
| say in private, regardless of whether or not they find out
| about it actively or passively, is absurd. An employer does
| not get to decide what you say, do or think in your free
| time.
|
| -----
|
| EDIT: As a small extra, here in Germany something like this
| would be very much illegal, as you're not allowed to
| discriminate against job applicants based on their political
| opinion.
| axegon_ wrote:
| > EDIT: As a small extra, here in Germany something like
| this would be very much illegal, as you're not allowed to
| discriminate against job applicants based on their
| political opinion.
|
| Same here but laws are a subject of interpretation. I'm
| sure there is a loophole somewhere in there and it can be
| used against you.
| giantDinosaur wrote:
| It's pretty clear that there's offensive behaviour as
| generally understood (antisocial stuff, mostly) and whatever
| reign of terror this company is, from the OP's perspective,
| prosecuting.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > I take chopping off my finger in a heartbeat
|
| I wouldn't make so light of that.
| snazz wrote:
| Totally off-topic, but the automatic blade brakes on modern
| table saws are really cool. It runs a current through the
| blade, so when something moist like your finger or a hot dog
| gets too close (maybe using capacitance?), it automatically
| drops the blade and instantly stops it with a single-use
| brake mechanism. Better to destroy the $100 blade-and-brake
| assembly than to lose a finger.
| Igelau wrote:
| How am I supposed to cut my hot dogs now?
| DarkWiiPlayer wrote:
| Completely dry them first, cut them, then let them soak
| in water overnight. Can't guarantee they'll taste 100%
| the same, but you get around buying dedicated hot-dog
| cutting hardware.
| roel_v wrote:
| Those videos show up in my Youtube feed the last few weeks
| too (although these saws have existed for many years now),
| but I still wonder - why do they always use hotdogs in the
| demo videos? Can't they find anyone who's willing to risk a
| finger, or is it something much more boring like OSHA rules
| or something?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >or is it something much more boring like OSHA rules or
| something?
|
| I think it's more like if you understand the tech well
| enough that you are willing to risk it you likely
| understand how not to stick your hand in a saw in the
| first place, don't see the value add and don't wind up
| working for these people.
|
| Also there's probably a pretty big social aspect of it.
| The guy willing to stick his hand in the saw for the demo
| video is gonna get shunned by most of the kind of people
| who want to work on tech like this.
| grumple wrote:
| There's a video of the guy who makes them using his
| finger. There's another on their website, search for
| sawstop. But as for others, tech can always fail so why
| risk it? Also it costs $100 each time you do it so it's
| not like a ton of people want to waste the money.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Technology can fail, so why risk it? I'd not trust my
| fingers to someone else's design either, no matter how
| good, though I'd be happy to have that system installed
| on every table saw. But we'll have to wait until the
| patent expires. Even table saw blades that are protected
| like that should still command healthy respect and
| anybody that wants to show off that capability is
| throwing the dice. It's a bit like driving into a wall at
| 50 Kph to prove that airbags work. Sure they do. But you
| may still get injured.
| Unklejoe wrote:
| > something moist like your finger
|
| I wonder how well this would work in a real life scenario.
| My dad does autobody work, and his hands are like dry,
| cracked stone. They probably have very high electrical
| resistance. I'd imagine a wood worker's hands to be
| similar.
| jagraff wrote:
| Once the blade started cutting through the skin and got
| to blood vessels, the resistance would go way down, so it
| would probably still work - just with a larger/deeper cut
| than more conductive hands.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The first nick will conduct plenty due to the blood.
| wmeredith wrote:
| These saw brake systems aren't on "modern table saws". This
| system is branded and patented and only exists on Saw Stop
| table saws (no affiliation). If I recall correctly, the
| inventor took the tech to the big saw makers when it was
| first in invented and was turned away, because of some
| combination of he wanted too much money and they didn't
| want the liability of marketing a "safe" table saw. So he
| started his own company.
|
| The tech is truly something incredible. It uses a
| disposable cartridge with a shotgun-sized charge to ram an
| aluminum matrix into the bottom of the spinning blade if it
| detects current (oily skin touching the blade closes the
| circuit). It stops it in thousandths of a second and your
| left with a nick instead of maimed. It ruins the blade and
| the cartridge. You're out ~$150 if you trigger it. Small
| price to pay for keeping a finger.
| yetihehe wrote:
| > You're out ~$150 if you trigger it. Small price to pay
| for keeping a finger.
|
| You can also trigger it if your wood is too wet. That was
| one of reasons given against using it everywhere.
| snazz wrote:
| Huh! Thanks for the correction. I was under the
| impression that it was more widespread. I forget the
| brand of the table saw I used most recently, but I do
| know that it has that feature.
| emerged wrote:
| Yea there's absolutely no way I'd give a company or their goons
| permission to invade my privacy like that. Disturbing that
| companies are even allowed to get away with that without a
| class action law suit.
| axegon_ wrote:
| They get away with it because officially they don't do that.
| Some guy got a hold of his report and that's how he found
| out. Officially it's employment history, criminal record, and
| education history, nothing more. But the fact that such
| things ended up in their report(which, mind you, was almost
| 400 pages) raises many red flags.
| techsin101 wrote:
| keep stalling when week into job tell hr you aren't doing it.
| get you a simpler version.
| lizardking wrote:
| I agree that software is not always glamorous or fulfilling work.
| The same can be said for building in the analogue world. However,
| you will be hard pressed to find a career that will grant a
| higher standard of living for yourself and your family while
| offering the level of flexibility that can be found in software.
| DarkWiiPlayer wrote:
| It seems like nowadays you just can't make money building
| interesting things anymore.
|
| Most of the available programming work is really just writing
| glue code to make big software systems work as intended, to the
| point where it can feel more like writing configuration files
| than actual programming. Put simply, 98% of programming these
| days is scripting.
|
| On the other hand, you have lots of fun things one can do with
| code, from building weird experimental things that lack any real-
| world application but are very interesting to think about to
| simply recreating some of the giants of the software world in
| creative ways or in different languages to get a better
| appreciation of their inner workings and the principles behind
| them. None of that has any value from a busyness perspective and
| nobody will pay you for it.
|
| The way I feel about programming is in equal parts as an art and
| as engineering. The weird obsession of the IT industry with
| treating code as a resource that has no purpose other than create
| wealth is absurd and, I believe, one of the reasons why many
| programmers end up disillusioned and simply drop programming
| altogether, both as a job and as a hobby.
| bbrree66 wrote:
| > 98% of programming these days is scripting
|
| LOL. What a silly comment.
| mistahenry wrote:
| I've spent the last 3 years building the whole solution suite
| for 2FA banking devices. We have our own hardware devices with
| secure elements that use your computer as an internet proxy
| (connected via bluetooth low energy or USB). If you find a
| small company doing interesting work, your job looks very
| different than just writing configuration files. Especially
| when hardware is involved and the firmware is written in house.
|
| From my experience, if you find a post startup small business
| with fewer than 10 developers, you end up wearing many hats.
| Both times I've been at large corporate jobs, though, it's
| exactly as you describe.
| analog31 wrote:
| This could just be an outgrowth of complexity. As the number of
| pieces increases by O(n), the number of relationships between
| pieces goes as O(n^2). As a result, any endeavor is going to
| tend towards the _majority_ of people working on connecting
| pieces.
|
| This is true in plenty of occupations. I've seen it in
| mechanical and electrical design, for instance. With that said,
| I know a lot of good people who actually enjoy the work of
| piecing things together, so I wouldn't disparage it. Something
| for everybody.
|
| A pleasure of working on something for fun at home, or maybe in
| an R&D setting, is that it can start out a lot simpler.
| samatman wrote:
| O(m x n), where n is the number of pieces and m is the number
| of systems it needs to interconnect with. O(n^2) is the
| asymptotic upper bound, which is never reached, because a
| piece needn't be connected to itself: m < n for all n, but
| m/n can approach 1 as n goes to infinity.
|
| It wouldn't be Hacker News without such ponderous pedantry!
| anticristi wrote:
| Very nicely put. I mean look at a car: It's essentially a lot
| of 3rd party components put together coherently. I don't
| think any part of my Peugeot has a Peugeot label on it,
| rather Bosch, Autoliv, Michelin, etc.
|
| Same thing with airplanes. Boeing is pretty much
| Honeywell+GE+Liebherr to name a few.
|
| I am unsure why people find componentizing and integrating
| unrewarding in IT. I didn't hear my dad (a sound engineer)
| complain that he no longer spins a wire onto a metal to
| obtain a speaker. :)
| analog31 wrote:
| One issue I've seen is that a person who devotes 100% of
| their time to integration can lose their quantitative
| engineering skill -- it's a "use it or lose it" phenomenon.
| The folks who manage to cling to that work end up becoming
| the only ones who can do it, resulting in a sort of caste
| system with no relation to actual productivity.
|
| However, in my experience, the best integrators are worth
| their weight in gold. It requires a mental organization,
| patience, and discipline that I don't possess. The ones who
| do it badly are the ones who are racking up dependencies
| and technical debt.
| smolder wrote:
| Let me work with your analogy a bit. What if your dad's job
| was to install sound systems designed around poor quality
| speaker components, using expensive DSP systems that add a
| lot of latency to the signal and draw lots of power?
|
| He knows he could build better components than the ones he
| uses if he put the time in, and create a better overall
| system design with a better price/performance by applying
| state of the art knowledge, but people prefer to pay him to
| combine commodity parts of questionable design in the
| standard, _proven_ , but clearly suboptimal way.
|
| Now where is his job satisfaction?
|
| If you really wanted to stretch the analogy, maybe imagine
| the expensive DSPs he is expected to install all forward a
| record of any audio played on them to a shadowy government
| agency.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I think so. That's why eventually you shatter your monolith
| into micro-services and then have 1000+ people work on
| coordinating how these services deal with each other.
| bserge wrote:
| That's the case in most industries. Find me one that isn't just
| about the daily grind and making money.
|
| In construction, you could do cool stuff, and do things
| perfectly, but people want "normal" and time is money so you
| need to work fast.
|
| If you have an auto repair shop, you could build an EV from
| scratch. But you're getting paid to fix other people's cars.
| Even if you do tuning and modding, it's all just standardized
| shit that you buy and install.
|
| Woodworking, farming, networking, accounting, anything really
| is 90% grind, with a select few getting the chance to have fun
| while getting paid.
| krageon wrote:
| So what you're saying is that it's indeed shit, just like
| everything else?
| cpursley wrote:
| > Most of the available programming work is really just writing
| glue code to make big software systems work as intended, to the
| point where it can feel more like writing configuration files
| than actual programming. Put simply, 98% of programming these
| days is scripting.
|
| It's that the entire purpose of programming, though? To
| abstract away the repetitive stuff? I personally see this as a
| good thing.
|
| Even with all the configuration and scripting, there are still
| plenty of lower-level programming tasks involved in piecing
| together systems.
|
| I'd rather save the difficult programming for the actual
| difficult tasks instead of re-implementing the already solved
| problems like CRUD.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> the already solved problems_
|
| If I had a dollar for every time I've heard the phrase "
| _XXX_ is a solved problem, " indicating that there's a
| dependency that "solves" it, I'd be rich.
|
| People think that, just because we can google up a dependency
| that does what we want (sorta/kinda/mostly), the "problem is
| solved."
|
| It's been my experience, that, when our "solution" is to
| bring in a massive dependency to address a very basic issue
| that we could solve, ourselves, by banging out a bit of code
| in a day or two, our problems are just beginning. In some
| cases, that's exactly what I have done. For example, I use
| dependencies to handle SOAP (yuck), for ONVIF work, and
| keychain access for login Face/TouchID validation. These are
| small, atomic dependencies, written and maintained by
| reputable authors. The SOAP thing would have taken me a
| couple of months to write something not as good, but the
| keychain thing is something I could write, myself, in a
| couple of days. I just find that I don't really need to, as
| there is an acceptable alternative.
|
| In fact, when I have been dissatisfied with the choices, and
| have decided to write my own solutions, I have encountered
| derision.
|
| I feel for the OP, but I am sad to hear they are leaving the
| industry. Maybe it's for the best, or maybe they will always
| look back in regret.
|
| In my case, I have just realized that I can't look to others
| to validate my work, and have to work on my own. It is not my
| preferred choice. I worked on (often, huge) teams, my entire
| career. But I won't compromise my personal ethos to be "down
| with the kids." If writing good software is no longer in
| fashion, I guess I'll be unfashionable. I won't deliberately
| write bad software. I couldn't live with myself.
|
| For me, I'm never leaving, but that may mean that I'll need
| to work on my own. I have a pretty good record of creating
| stuff that other people value, so we'll see how that goes.
|
| More will be revealed...
| vbezhenar wrote:
| You don't need couple of months to implement SOAP, unless
| you want to make a framework. SOAP is just an XML passed
| via HTTP. You can build everything from the ground up in a
| matter of few days. And if you can re-use any HTTP library
| and XML parser, it's a matter of few hours.
|
| May be there's some layer above SOAP which requires more
| implementation. I have no idea about OVNIF. But SOAP itself
| is pretty simple. Basically you're firing SoapUI, figuring
| out protocol details and write code to deal with that
| particular XML-based format.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Thanks for that. I based my estimate, looking at the code
| for SOAPEngine[0], which is the library I use. It's
| pretty complete, and that guy knows his stuff.
|
| I tend to be fairly anal about testing; especially low-
| level stuff. It can be a bit excruciating, working with
| me, as I insist on pounding away at everything. That's
| why it's taken a week and a half to get to the place I'm
| at now. I'm working on the login and initial user edit
| stuff. Basic (but critical) stuff, and I keep
| encountering edge cases. I'm also debugging the backend
| SDK.
|
| [0] https://github.com/priore/SOAPEngine
| henrik_w wrote:
| For most companies where the software is the product, there
| is some part of the system that is the core logic. Working on
| that part necessarily means actually developing, not just
| gluing pieces together. I have always been able to find work
| where I could work on those core parts, instead of composing
| existing systems, libraries and frameworks.
| spurdoman77 wrote:
| > It seems like nowadays you just can't make money building
| interesting things anymore.
|
| So what? Then it becomes just a normal job. Most jobs out there
| arent that interesring, just problems or doing tasks that
| people don't want to do themselves.
|
| Getting interesting tasks while being well-paid is not any way
| normal or common, and I also think hasn't been ever.
| chpmrc wrote:
| I can order a comfy car anywhere I am with the tap of a button.
|
| I can order food from hundreds of restaurants and have it
| delivered in less than 30 mins with the tap of a button.
|
| I can book flights and hotels with the tap of a button.
|
| I can play with friends in virtual reality and actually sweat.
|
| I can watch a live stream of SpaceX launching reusable rockets
| in space.
|
| I could buy a car that is almost fully "self driving".
|
| I can exchange value with anyone in the world anonymously and
| with no delays or censorship thanks to cryptocurrencies.
|
| I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by step
| directions to wherever I need to go.
|
| I can translate almost any language in real time, be it in
| writing, spoken or taken from an image.
|
| And so on...You can (and most of the time do) get paid to build
| interesting things. It's just that most of us are unable to
| look at the big picture and not realize that the combined
| effort of a team is more valuable than the sum of the
| individual efforts. And if you do actually work on stuff you
| don't find interesting there is enough demand that switching is
| not that hard.
|
| And if you want to solve puzzles for the sake of solving
| puzzles then there are plenty of resources for that.
|
| Plenty of choice in my honest opinion.
| plazmatic wrote:
| All this, yet the world is unquestionably getting worse.
|
| Crazy times.
| jlangenauer wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure the world is getting worse, but I am
| certain that it's becoming more complex.
|
| And when the finite cognitive capacity of every human being
| must manage that complexity just to survive (let along
| propser), it sure feels like it's getting worse.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| - Global Warming - Loss of topsoil - Extinction of
| species - Thawing permafrost - Rise of far right in many
| countries - Reinstated nuclear arms race - Corrupted
| government and financial institutions ...
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| Is the world really getting worse or is the amount of
| negative information we digest daily affecting our
| perception of how good or bad things actually are?
| chpmrc wrote:
| Except it's not. Books like Factfulness show it quite
| clearly. We have our fair share of problems but quality of
| life has been steadily improving almost everywhere and
| almost exponentially in some areas.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| Quality of life is improving, but condition on the planet
| are rapidly decreasing/
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| No, it's not. Life has been much better overall. What
| things are you seeing that is getting worse? I would say
| things are getting exposed and change is taking place. And
| you are just being introduced to the harsh reality that
| exists outside your initial bubble.
| cambalache wrote:
| Not if you dont have enough money
| bluntfang wrote:
| >I can order food from hundreds of restaurants and have it
| delivered in less than 30 mins with the tap of a button.
|
| Where do you live? I would say the same but in under an hour.
| Is this a little hyperbolic?
| Sevii wrote:
| Yes, you can get paid to build interesting things. But the
| work you will be doing is not going to be interesting.
| Working as part of a team with the 1000s of engineers on Uber
| or Office or Alexa is going to be tedious no matter how
| valuable you think the product is.
| notacoward wrote:
| Aren't most of the examples you list kind of orthogonal to
| the issue at hand? They seem more related to living in a
| world where software exists than to actually being the one
| who builds it.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think you may have missed the point that _someone_ had to
| build all that stuff, and the universe of software in the
| business world (where people are employed to write
| software) is large.
| notacoward wrote:
| Did I miss the point, or did you? Someone has to clean
| out the sewers too. Somebody does, and maybe they make
| good money to make up for the unpleasantness - I
| certainly hope so - but that doesn't make it a fun job.
| If software development has become sewer cleaning, isn't
| that something worth talking about?
| nescioquid wrote:
| Reading this litany of technologically-enabled consumer
| achievements, I thought of David Graeber who visited the
| disappointment we sometimes feel for how things actually went
| from mid-century to now.
|
| "[...]Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the
| force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity
| sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and
| all the other technological wonders any child growing up in
| the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now?
| Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge--like
| cloning or cryogenics--ended up betraying their lofty
| promises. What happened to them?"
| (https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-
| declini...)
|
| Kinda makes your list seem like an indictment. Today's world
| is the world capital wants to make. When you do open your
| awareness to the scale of effort and the broadest results,
| technological optimism in the future is deflated.
| vikramkr wrote:
| I think its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress
| because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy
| grounded in what people thought in the 1950s. A lot of
| those ideas are "thing that exists, but more magic." We
| have helicopters, but it turns out zoom calls work just as
| good to meet people, without the air traffic control
| nightmare. We have the internet at our fingers, an advance
| so monumental that its nearly impossible to imagine life
| before this. Teleportation and antigravity - I mean - at a
| point- thats just plain magic. I will grant the space stuff
| though, we should have been way further along there. But
| this willfully ignores the mind bending amount of
| technological progress that we've made in the most rapidly
| technologically changing period in human history in
| computation, biotech, nanotechnology, etc etc just because
| we didn't achieve some of the magic that soft sci-fi or
| science fantasy writers envisioned.
| nescioquid wrote:
| > its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because
| we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in
| what people thought in the 1950s
|
| That wasn't really the claim. The idea is that the ends
| of technology have been chosen by corporations, rather
| than what would have been most generally useful to
| humankind. Hardly an earth-shattering observation.
| vikramkr wrote:
| Sure, but those examples that you gave seriously undercut
| that. Antigravity, teleportation, those would be _wildly_
| profitable. And we 've got an entire anti-aging industry
| investing billions into immortality drugs. In fact, the
| investments into immortality drugs right now is a perfect
| example of your statement that the ends of technology are
| chosen by corporations instead of what is most useful to
| mankind. Curing neglected tropical diseases and investing
| in equitable healthcare availability is what would have
| one of the (if not the) biggest impacts on humankind's
| health. Right now, what is most generally useful to
| humankind isn't science fantasy, we've got a few rungs to
| go up the hierarchy of needs before we get there. In
| fact, something like flying cars would absolutely be a
| net negative - more pollution, a new type of congestion,
| more types of accidents, all to solve a problem that
| would be solved better by functioning public transit. And
| in terms of usefulness to humankind - since when are
| innovations that are profitable orthogonal to human
| benefit? There are cases where its either or, but does it
| really make sense to go and tell someone with a disease
| that the treatment for the disease can't help them
| because it was developed by profit motives? Setting aside
| questions of logistics/funding models/regulations (since
| if we started bringing in those real world aspects then
| all of those sci-fi technologies fall apart) - looking
| purely at the technology, commercial motives developed
| things that are a net good for the world. There is
| overlap, and an overly cynical view ends up making no
| sense. We have it so much better than people did 100
| years ago because of technology.
| baddox wrote:
| I don't really see it as an indictment that we don't yet
| have a short list of things from science fiction. The
| reason authors wrote about those things is because the are
| so beyond our technological capabilities--that's why they
| make for interesting science fiction!
| samatman wrote:
| Half of those things are simply impossible, as far as our
| model of physics is concerned.
|
| The other half _mostly_ exist in a century after the 21st,
| in most Sci Fi.
|
| The nonexistence of tractor beams is no cause for pessimism
| about immortality drugs, since even when the trope of
| tractor beams was invented, we knew that physics as we know
| it allows for no such animal. By the same token, we know of
| no hard reason why effective immortality isn't in reach.
|
| I don't expect to see it before entropy takes me. But
| that's just realism, not pessimism.
| Defenestresque wrote:
| >Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to
| as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on
| all the technological changes that never happened? The
| question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars
| movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn't help but
| feel impressed by the quality of the special effects.
| Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties
| sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties
| audience would have been if they'd known what we could do
| by now--only to realize, "Actually, no. They wouldn't be
| impressed at all, would they? They thought we'd be doing
| this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more
| sophisticated ways to simulate it."
|
| >That last word--simulate--is key. The technologies that
| have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical
| technologies or information technologies--largely,
| technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what
| Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the "hyper-real,"
| the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than
| originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we
| had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical
| period in which we understood that there is nothing new;
| that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation
| were meaningless; that everything now was simulation,
| ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche--all this
| makes sense in a technological environment in which the
| only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to
| create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of
| things that either already existed, or, we came to realize,
| never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic
| domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion
| plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would
| ever have been talking like this. _The postmodern moment
| was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be
| felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as
| something epochal, exciting, and new._
|
| This occasionally strikes me as true when reading some of
| the comments in this thread about how it's easier than ever
| to deploy because of a new tool, easier to create a website
| or app because of a new framework, easier to order a car,
| easier to buy an airplane ticket..
|
| I can't help but consider that we expected so, so much
| more.
| vikramkr wrote:
| I think a lot of HN in general is made up of programmers
| at big tech companies working on what seem like small
| problems, but from the perspective of someone working in
| the biotech sector, let me assure you there's a lot going
| on outside of silicon valley's open offices. I mean
| first, lets appreciate that tech companies have actually
| majorly impacted the world in ways sci-fi authors
| couldn't have imagined, and for all the negatives,
| there's a reason the tech sector was (prior to recent
| times) so widely loved - the fact that I can reconnect
| through facebook with a friend I haven't seen in a decade
| that I may never have meet again otherwise is straight up
| magic and that matters. And google search and smartphones
| - don't underestimate them! But yeah, the valley seems to
| have this "hardware is hard" mentality (even though it's
| built off of the semiconductor industry...), but just
| look around. We've got for the first time ever a
| potentially sustainable spaceflight industry blossoming,
| biotech is making strides like you wouldn't believe in
| tackling some of the most complex diseases, your inkjet
| printer is a marvel of microfluidics, green energy
| sources are becoming cost competitive to the fuels that
| have fueled our entire development as a species from an
| agrarian to an industrialized civilization, we've got
| vaccines that might be ready to defeat a global pandemic
| within a couple years of the first case recorded. I do
| work in the printing and inks space. There, just
| recently, there's been a transition away from using UV
| cured or dried inks that release volatile organic
| compounds into new inks that are cured with electron
| beams - i mean, the amount of technological complexity
| and innovation that goes into making the packaged product
| you pick off the shelf have the color that it does! And
| these have real impacts - eliminating huge sources of
| pollutants and improving health and the planet. There
| could and should be more, especially more investment into
| R&D, but don't underestimate what's happening outside the
| Silicon Valley bubble, and don't underestimate what's
| happening inside the bubble either.
| coldtea wrote:
| So we've mostly solved trivial non-problems if/not
| regressions?
|
| People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to call
| a travel agency to get a ticket, or, god forbid, to actually
| meet friends and not in VR space...
|
| I'll give you "self driving cars" -- well, I would if they
| could work today, which they don't...
| tombert wrote:
| This seems like an awfully reductionist take, and is
| demonstrably wrong.
|
| > to actually meet friends and not in VR space
|
| Nintendo released the Virtual Boy in the 90s, a (somewhat
| unsuccessful) attempt at a semi-VR thing; they were (and
| are) a pretty big business, and I don't think that they
| were just doing it because they thought it was cool; there
| was demand for something like virtual reality at the time.
|
| > People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to
| call a travel agency to get a ticket
|
| This is also wrong; anecdata, but at least one person (my
| dad) _hated_ having to call up travel agencies in the 90s
| to book a plane ticket. I remember as a kid him yelling at
| the travel agent because he (having done a lot of business
| travel in the past) knew how much they were marking up the
| ticket and they wouldn 't meet him halfway. Eventually he
| started calling the airlines directly to purchase tickets,
| and he complained a lot that there was not an easy way to
| compare prices between airlines. To stress, this was in
| roughly 1995.
|
| Obviously this is just one person, but I seriously doubt
| that this was a unique experience.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _This is also wrong; anecdata, but at least one person
| (my dad) hated having to call up travel agencies in the
| 90s to book a plane ticket._
|
| Yeah, and I hate scratching my head when itchy. Doesn't
| mean an "automatic head stratcher" is the best use of our
| innovation, or adds anything significant to humanity...
| tombert wrote:
| Why does everything have to "add something significant to
| humanity"?
|
| It's not like "innovation" exists in a vacuum; if I
| figure out, I dunno, a new motor design for an automatic
| head scratcher, there's no reason that it can't later be
| used for something you deem to "add something significant
| to humanity".
|
| Also, who gets to determine what actually adds to
| humanity? If you really didn't like scratching your head,
| or it took you a really long time to scratch your head in
| the morning, then wouldn't having something automatically
| do that for you be useful?
|
| Travel websites are an example of something that did
| solve a problem; despite what you said before, people
| _didn 't_ like having to deal with travel agents (I
| googled around); they didn't like having to book tickets
| during office hours, they didn't like how hard it was to
| compare prices, they didn't like how much of a cut the
| agents took, etc. Buying tickets online save consumers
| time, money, and probably helped businesses book flights
| more easily. Businesses that "add significantly to
| humanity".
|
| I know you didn't say this, and I'm not trying to put
| words in your mouth, but I think that the binary
| mentality that you either are working on "useless" or
| "revolutionary" things is really harmful. I think it puts
| a lot of pressure on newbies with the thought that they
| have to change the world, and they might withdraw from
| STEM stuff because they don't feel like they're making
| significant enough contributions.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Why does everything have to "add something significant
| to humanity"?_
|
| Everything doesn't have to.
|
| A lot should have, though. Most, if possible.
|
| And the reason is opportunity cost.
| tombert wrote:
| Ok. I stand by my points; innovation isn't in a vacuum.
| Plenty of things seem useless initially, or are just
| built for fun, and turn out to later be incredibly
| valuable later.
| baddox wrote:
| So your argument is as follows:
|
| 1. People didn't mind meeting with travel agencies.
|
| 2. Actually people hated meeting with travel agencies.
| Never mind number 1.
|
| 3. Automatic head scratchers are a waste of time.
|
| 4. Therefore online travel websites are a waste of time.
| CptFribble wrote:
| innovation doesn't always look like a steam engine or a
| polio vaccine, with immediate and obvious impact on
| society.
|
| sometimes innovation looks like 1000 small improvements
| that only save us 30 seconds of our day, but once they're
| all built we suddenly have whole hours freed up that used
| to be taken up by things like spending an hour on the
| phone with a travel agent
| throwawaygh wrote:
| For every 30 seconds the average person saves on misc.
| Tasks, there are whole minutes spent doom scrolling on
| social media apps.
| bialpio wrote:
| So? If I get to pick how I waste my time, then that time
| is not really wasted.
| samatman wrote:
| I actually had a Virtual Boy. My father thought it was so
| cool that it's the only piece of tech, let alone video
| games, that he ever gave me without my requesting it.
|
| We returned it, because it sucked. It was more than
| somewhat unsuccessful; it is the paradigm case of
| overpromising and underdelivering.
|
| The only sweat you'd work up with a Virtual Boy would be
| after puking because of the induced motion sickness. It
| was impossible to move around, wasn't designed for that,
| instead you'd hunch over a table and it would force you
| to take breaks every fifteen minutes in a futile attempt
| to prevent waves of nausea from ruining your experience.
| slingnow wrote:
| Wow, "demonstrably wrong" are incredibly strong words
| given the lacking counter arguments you provided.
|
| I remember when the virtual boy came out. It was a
| disaster. From wikipedia: "The Virtual Boy was panned by
| critics and was a commercial failure, even after repeated
| price drops."
|
| And the second one, bringing up that one time your dad
| was annoyed to book a plane ticket. Not much more needs
| to be said.
|
| What exactly did you demonstrate was wrong with his
| original take?
| tombert wrote:
| I agree, the Virtual Boy was a disaster, but maybe I
| didn't illustrate my point very well, and that is my
| fault; I'll give you an upvote to help counteract the
| downvotes because I probably didn't explain myself
| correctly.
|
| What I was trying to say that clearly the was _some_
| demand for the virtual reality of some kind; I 'm sure
| Nintendo did some level of market research; concurrently,
| Atari and Sega was also working on VR projects, these
| demos were pretty popular in expos, so my point was that
| it's not a _recent_ thing to want to VR in the home.
|
| I disclaimed that me using my dad as an example was
| anecdata, but (assuming I'm not lying), it does prove the
| existence of at least _one_ person 's demand for such a
| product. The post I was responding to said specifically
| "People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to
| call a travel agency to get a ticket", and I was giving a
| counter-claim to that. The last time I checked, my dad
| was a person, and did feel "that bad" calling a travel
| agency. Also, it wasn't "one time", it was throughout
| most of the 90's, though I mostly remember this from
| 1995-1997 because I was previously a bit too young to pay
| much attention to this stuff.
|
| Now, fair enough, I didn't link to studies proving my
| point, so I probably used the word "demonstrably"
| incorrectly, and I apologize for any confusion that might
| have resulted from that.
| kube-system wrote:
| Anyone remember spending hours at AAA getting TripTiks and
| a highlighted route on a vague map for a (now) simple road
| trip? And the ensuing argument about the passenger's
| navigation obligations when you inevitably miss an exit
| halfway into the trip? And spending significant time
| preparing the (unreliable 80s domestic) car for a road
| trip?
|
| I recently did a ~1000 mile trip that I used to do as a kid
| in the 90s. Back then it was literally a weeks worth of
| preparation. In 2020, I did the same trip on 1 hour notice
| with no concerns about my transportation, navigation, food,
| or lodging.
|
| Sure, we made do with what we had in the 90s, but stuff is
| just incredibly more convenient and accessible now.
| YZF wrote:
| I remember doing pretty good with a decent map book. I'm
| not sure traveling these days is really that much
| simpler. I did some pretty big trips before the age of
| always on and it worked just fine. Also me and my wife
| still argue navigation in the Tesla with its futuristic
| built-in navigation (that's not always perfect). My
| "reliable" not-80's Subaru Outback broke down on me in my
| last big road trip (which indirectly led to getting the
| Tesla, so far so good).
|
| Not to knock down all the real progress, but things were
| fine 20+ years ago as well...
| samatman wrote:
| > _I 'm not sure traveling these days is really that much
| simpler._
|
| I arrive in a foreign country.
|
| My phone works as soon as I turn it off airplane mode.
|
| I already have lodging, which didn't involve any long-
| distance calling or navigating foreign accents over a
| scratchy submarine cable.
|
| I don't know how to get there. Is public transit an
| option? One short map query later, I determine that it
| _is_ , but that would involve more hauling luggage than
| I'd like, besides, that 20 minute wait for the bus at the
| end looks dodgy.
|
| Rideshare it is. They pick me up at the airport and I get
| where I'm going.
|
| vs.
|
| I arrive in a foreign country. I have the Lonely Planet
| guide. I circled a hotel that sounds good. A hawker comes
| up to me and hassles me about staying at their hotel
| instead; I pass.
|
| The guide has some instructions for how to take public
| transit, but it doesn't sound easy, and I don't speak the
| language.
|
| First, I convert some currency, and get enough change to
| make a local call, and call the hotel. I _think_ I just
| got a reservation? I definitely have enough left over to
| pay for a taxi, so down to the taxi stand it is.
|
| The first few taxi hawkers strike me as excessively
| aggressive, eventually I find someone calmer. Time to
| negotiate a rate; Lonely Planet helpfully informs me that
| it's one of those countries where this is how it works.
| Once that's done, I get my ride to the destination, and
| the cabbie asks for twice what we agreed on. I calmly
| insist on the original price, which he agrees to after a
| couple passes; I tip anyway, because I'm an American.
|
| Now I'm at the hotel. I'm in luck! I either do have a
| reservation, or the room and price that I agreed on over
| the phone is the same as it was then. Not like last
| time...
|
| Yes. Traveling these days is really that much simpler.
| zymhan wrote:
| Even the improvements over the last 15 years have been
| immense. Remember using printed directions from Mapquest?
| Judgmentality wrote:
| These wouldn't have been so bad if they were accurate.
| More than once I'd have to drive across multiple states
| to somewhere that wasn't a giant metropolis, and it would
| take me through a random field and tell me to turn left
| at a street that _definitely_ did not exist.
| kens wrote:
| > Anyone remember spending hours at AAA getting TripTiks
|
| I'm glad to see someone else mention TripTiks. I went on
| long road trips with my family when I was a kid and
| TripTiks were the coolest thing. A TripTik was a custom-
| made flip-book assembled from pages that were map
| segments with everything of interest noted along the way.
| Your route was marked with a highlighter. It was bit like
| turn-by-turn guidance in handheld paper form.
|
| >> People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have
| to call a travel agency to get a ticket
|
| Travel agencies were awful; people don't realize how good
| they have it with online tickets. The way they worked is
| you'd ask for a flight from X to Y. They'd spend a whole
| minute typing some cryptic database query into their
| terminal and come up $1000 leaving at 6:45 am. You'd ask
| if there's a better price and they'd spend another minute
| typing a slightly different query before coming up with
| something slightly better. Repeat for 10 minutes, and you
| feel guilty every time you ask a question because they're
| doing you a favor with so much typing. Then ask if
| there's anything better if you leave Wednesday and the
| whole process repeats. Finally they obtain a semi-decent
| flight after a huge effort, but you're left with the
| feeling that you probably could have saved a bunch more
| if you'd known the right question to ask.
| derefr wrote:
| > or, god forbid, to actually meet friends and not in VR
| space...
|
| These technologies really do solve _problems_ for some
| people. Ignoring the temporary problem it's solving for
| most-everyone right now, VR lets quadriplegics and house-
| bound invalids go places that aren't accessible, e.g. the
| middle of the jungle. And VR is also useful for assisted
| visualization in the treatment of PTSD and other associated
| disorders.
|
| This is also the thing that everyone who makes fun of those
| "as seen on TV" products needs to be reminded of: they're
| not really _for_ you. For many products, there's a smaller
| core of people who actually _need_ the product, and then a
| much larger halo of people who _might want_ the product if
| you sell it the right way. For the As-seen-on-TV products,
| the core market is usually "old people who don't move
| around well, or have the grip strength /dexterity necessary
| to operate hand tools."
|
| But even the core market doesn't like being advertised to
| in a way that points out their problems. They'd rather that
| you wrote your pitch to target the larger halo market, and
| then they will see that ad, and notice the particular
| benefits to themselves as a core-market member.
|
| So in the end, you get things like the ad for the Snuggie
| (whose real point, IIRC, is that it's a robe that someone
| can put on an infirm person without having to lift them to
| get it around them) that instead markets it as a sort of
| weird throw-blanket with arms; or ads for VR headsets that
| market them as being for Beat Saber. In both cases, the
| advertising is ignoring the core market with a _need_ for
| the product, knowing that they'll discover it on their own
| once they see the advertising aimed at the larger market.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _These technologies really do solve problems for some
| people. Ignoring the temporary problem it's solving for
| most-everyone right now, VR lets quadriplegics and house-
| bound invalids go places that aren't accessible, e.g. the
| middle of the jungle. And VR is also useful for assisted
| visualization in the treatment of PTSD and other
| associated disorders._
|
| Yeah, that's a valid market. But they're touted as some
| ultimate revolution / need, to everybody, when they're
| trivial in utility (outside that niche), few asked for
| them or would care about them without heavy marketing,
| and all at the same time basic needs (like health, a job,
| housing, education) get increasingly shitty...
| derefr wrote:
| The thing nobody likes to mention in casual conversation
| about the benefits of VR, is that there's a whole
| industry working on VR _sex simulation_ games, with big
| FOSS extension ecosystems, control of modern sex toys
| through open-standard teledildonics APIs, etc. There's
| _Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020_ levels of effort and
| detail put into these.
|
| (And the _further_ thing that nobody likes to mention in
| casual conversation, is that many people--men, almost
| always--have an addiction to visiting prostitutes, that
| can be as costly as a drug habit; and that a good VR rig,
| coupled with this extensible, customizable VR sex-sim
| software, can manage--much more-so than regular porn--to
| mostly sate the same psychological needs that made them
| retain the services of escorts in the first place; and
| thus _save_ such people a lot of money over the long
| term. These people tend to become big proponents of VR.)
|
| Anyone who is into this sort of thing, but doesn't want
| to [or can't] mention it by name in the social milieu
| that pertains, will just say they're "really impressed by
| VR" and "think you should give it a try, too." You can
| differentiate this sort of person, because they struggle
| to come up with any examples of the VR games/experiences
| that so impress them.
| the_af wrote:
| > _have an addiction to visiting prostitutes, that can be
| as costly as a drug habit; and that a good VR rig,
| coupled with this extensible, customizable VR sex-sim
| software, can manage--much more-so than regular porn--to
| mostly sate the same psychological needs that made them
| retain the services of escorts in the first place_
|
| Two thoughts:
|
| 1- Are men _really_ replacing flesh & bone prostitutes
| with VR sex sims?
|
| 2- Is this really a "good" development? At least with
| prostitutes there are two human beings involved. With VR
| sims, aren't we going to a Brave New World kind of
| situation, and would this be a good thing at all?
| bialpio wrote:
| How do you define "good"? One criterion that comes to my
| mind is: prostitution is illegal in plenty of places, so
| reducing the need for it reduces crime. If by "good" we
| think "good things are the ones where no-one gets hurt",
| it can also be seen as an improvement - black market for
| sex is probably not always a safe space (w/o even
| considering cases of human trafficking).
| the_af wrote:
| I'm not sure how I define "good", but consider this: not
| all prostitution results in somebody getting hurt -- if
| it does, that's _definitely_ a serious thing to be
| addressed -- and when it 's consensual, it's about two
| people connecting (money involved, of course). I know a
| cliche is to consider every customer/prostitute
| relationship as predatory in nature, but I'm not
| convinced this is _always_ the case.
|
| People sating their urges with some VR simulation doesn't
| seem like an improvement to me. It feels alienating, out
| of a work of dystopian scifi: people no longer even need
| to touch other people, they engage with simulations. I
| don't know, it feels terrifying to me.
|
| Someone else mentioned Real Dolls. It made me think of
| the pretty good and touching movie "Lars and the Real
| Girl". We like and pity Lars in his delusion that his
| Real Doll is a real woman, but the character definitely
| has issues.
| bialpio wrote:
| The main problem is that since it is illegal, there's no
| easy way to address abuse (victims will not want to talk
| because they are potentially at risk of being punished).
| So if VR can reduce the amount of sex workers (less
| demand -> less supply), it may (?) lead to less cases of
| abuse. That sounds to me like something Better, but maybe
| not as Good as some other alternatives.
|
| It's also interesting: why is human connection considered
| good? People connect because it makes them feel
| something, but if you could achieve the same result w/o
| human connection, would it be that much worse? It feels
| worse to me, but not sure why. :-)
| ClikeX wrote:
| > Are men really replacing flesh & bone prostitutes with
| VR sex sims?
|
| Considering people are already buying Realdolls. I don't
| doubt it.
|
| > Is this really a "good" development?
|
| Maybe in some niche cases. But I'd say it wouldn't be
| good considering how damaging porn/sex addiction can be.
| cultureswitch wrote:
| I can't comment on 1.
|
| About point 2 though, prostitution and even just hookup
| culture is actually more BNWish than sex sims are. If you
| are using a sex sim, the taboo is still very much
| present. And that opens up having actual relationships
| whereas having systematic, mindless sex with random
| people will give you the illusion of that being all there
| is to it.
|
| Everyone belongs to everyone else is the primary
| difference between the world of Huxley and our own, not
| that we don't have sex chewing-gum.
| the_af wrote:
| Fair enough. Though I can't see how VR sex simulations
| can bring us closer to the real thing. They seem more
| alienating to me. Prostitutes are real human beings with
| actual feelings and needs, at least.
| chris1993 wrote:
| BNW == brave new world?
| cultureswitch wrote:
| I'm definitely in that crowd and I suspect you are too,
| because as you said this doesn't come up in organic
| conversation. However I can also say I'm a big fan of
| Beat Saber, clocking around 20 minutes every day on
| average. And then obviously VR with racing games.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| Most of that VR and AR stuff, which while being eminently
| more suitable for people with real accessibility issues
| (either due to physical disabilities or environmental
| constraints), is locked up behind almost entirely
| unaccessible interfaces in a gamers' world. Why? Because
| you can sell more that way. The technology and the people
| who can build it certainly exist; the desire to do
| something useful with it rather than something cool and
| highly profitable isn't.
| derefr wrote:
| Frustrating in the short term, sure; but it might be the
| optimal strategy for getting VR out to precisely those
| people, in the long term. Selling more VR headsets means
| more revenue plowed into R&D, more consumer demand for
| sanding off sharp edges, and a larger industry-wide push
| toward gradual commodification of the technology.
|
| The cheaper, more reliable, and easier-to-build VR is,
| the more likely you'll see stodgy old companies (of the
| kind that build and go through FDA-certification for
| accessibility aids) becoming interested in working with
| it.
|
| Sort of the same idea as Tesla: sell people a Veblen good
| (fancy EV cars), to fund the development of a technology
| (batteries) to drive the commodification of the EV
| industry, such that everyone non-fancy EV vehicles will
| become affordable, and such that EV technology will
| become something "obvious" to even the stodgiest auto-
| maker.
|
| Or, to put that another way: you'd never have seen a
| direct evolution from mainframe computers to the modern
| PC, because the grass-roots demand for doing what a
| _mainframe_ does on your desktop just wasn't there (until
| it was.) The industry needed to start with calculators,
| evolve those chips _up_ into microcomputers and kit them
| out to play games, and sell those as whiz-bang consumer
| electronics. Progress in that game-playing microcomputer
| space then carried PC technology along for the ride,
| until they just-so-happened to become able to do what
| mainframes could do.
| tombert wrote:
| I agree, I've always gotten frustrated when people say
| "but it's mostly used for games so it's not useful",
| acting like games don't have huge R&D potential.
|
| Games give a relatively straightforward "pass-fail"
| criteria to test out new tech. Instead of a nebulous
| "does this tech directly help people", it's much easier
| (and more objective) to say "can I get this graphics API
| to push N fps to make the gameplay more pleasant?".
| Virtually any time I learn a new programming language or
| toolkit, the one of the first projects I do to get my
| grips with it is usually a simple 2D platformer just to
| stress out edge cases. Is this 'useful'? Not immediately,
| but it _is_ useful for me to have learned how to code
| well enough to make a game perform well.
|
| It's not like these optimizations and tools can't be
| useful for other things _after_ they 're developed for
| games; Unity was primarily made for games but I have
| friends who use it for developing "useful" iPhone apps
| now.
|
| If the technology for VR gets good enough (and cheap
| enough) to get into the hands of the average gamer, I
| cannot see how that won't be a net win for people with
| disabilities in the long-run.
| danShumway wrote:
| > to actually meet friends and not in VR space...
|
| This comment is being made in the middle of a pandemic.
| Does anyone believe that video chat hasn't made modern life
| better? You have a plan to do remote learning with 1990's
| technology? Talk to my parents about that, or anyone who
| has children that live more than an hour or two away. Talk
| to anyone who's wheelchair bound or who lives in a rural
| community.
|
| > I'll give you "self driving cars" -- well, I would if
| they could work today, which they don't...
|
| Fully autonomous cars don't work now, but the extra warning
| systems, backup cameras, lane shift systems, etc... are
| saving lives every single day. I like that my car helps me
| monitor my blind spot when I put my turn signal on. And if
| anybody ever figures out how to get self driving cars to
| actually work, they will save a massive number of lives in
| the process.
|
| > I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by
| step directions to wherever I need to go.
|
| This was such a common problem that there were entire
| movies based on people getting lost in tourist destinations
| and road trips. I grew up reading paper maps inside a car.
| Nobody would ever want to go back to that. I can think of
| at least one instance over the past couple of years where
| having a cell phone with almost universal reception
| potentially saved my life.
|
| > ...
|
| Netflix didn't exist until 1997, Youtube didn't exist until
| 2005. Imagine wanting to replace a laptop keyboard, or
| change an obscure car part, and not being able to find a
| video that explained how to do it. Ask my parents whether
| or not they like being able to find videos demonstrating
| new crochet patterns or woodworking techniques. Ask my
| parents whether or not they'd prefer to go back to a time
| when they couldn't realistically pick up any new hobbies or
| interests unless there was a local community that already
| existed in our rural town to teach them.
|
| The parent comment here is inscrutable to me, how can
| anyone be this nostalgic for the early 90s? I grew up in
| the 90s, it wasn't good. We wanted better technology. There
| are a lot of problems to solve with modern technology, and
| a few regressions to address as well, but talk about
| throwing the baby out with the bathwater...
| kazinator wrote:
| Wow, Netflix existed in 1997?
|
| In 1997, you were _avant garde_ if you listened to MP3s.
|
| Apparently, Netflix was an online DVD rental operation
| then, haha.
| chpmrc wrote:
| "Trivial non-problems"...What does it remind me of? Oh
| yeah: Dropbox is just a nice UI on top of rsync.
| madamelic wrote:
| "Everything that has ever been invented has already been
| invented", said in 1899.
|
| It's very hard to think of future inventions at large. We
| are absolutely not done and programming + Computer
| Science has just started.
|
| Imagine civil engineers giving up their craft in ancient
| Rome because everything that will ever need engineering
| has already been engineered.
| ClikeX wrote:
| Yeah, that argument gets used any time new technology
| arrises. Sure it wasn't hard, doesn't mean you need to stop
| working on making it even simpler.
|
| > So we've mostly solved trivial non-problems if/not
| regressions?
|
| While I agree some developments have worsened the
| experience of particular things. What developments would
| you rather have seen?
|
| By the way. VR was already a thing in the 80's. It's hardly
| new, only improved as the tech came available. And
| popularity of sci-fi also shows the common dream for many
| of these technological improvements.
|
| As a fun reference. When the mobile phone got introduced in
| the 90's here in the Netherlands they did surveys in the
| street[1]. Everybody was brushing it off as unnecessary.
|
| - "I don't need one"
|
| - "Oh, then you get called while riding a bike haha"
|
| - "I have one at home, and if I'm stranded there's always a
| landline somewhere"
|
| - "They can send me a letter, and if they need me urgently
| they can call me on my landline"
|
| [1] => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNwhIHqM60g
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Yeah, that argument gets used any time new technology
| arrises. Sure it wasn 't hard, doesn't mean you need to
| stop working on making it even simpler._
|
| Why not? Technology has opportunity costs. Usuless
| "easier" technology makes us slaves to it and to
| increased infrastructure.
|
| Opportunity costs, diminishing results -- all those are
| good questions to ask.
| ClikeX wrote:
| Considering the amounts of flights, I'd say that being
| able to book your travels without calling elimited the
| costs of needing phone operators. And allows me, as a
| user, to also easily book outside of office hours.
|
| I agree that there's a lot of useless tech around.
| Especially in this startup world where it seems to be all
| "Uber but for x".
|
| You also haven't answered my question. What would've been
| a non-useless tech that should've been developed on in
| the meanwhile?
|
| And just because some commercial companie (travel
| agencies) spent their profits streaminglining their
| booking process doesn't mean it's all been useless these
| last 30 years.
| falcolas wrote:
| Two thoughts.
|
| For one, advances in VR have come from hardware advances,
| not software.
|
| For two - cell phones are not so much useful because
| they're phones, but because they're miniature computers
| with (near) worldwide connectivity to the internet.
| yibg wrote:
| I mean people were also "fine" with washing clothes by hand
| until the washing machine came out. Just because it was
| done one way that was accepted, doesn't mean there isn't a
| better way.
|
| Having navigation on my little device I can fit into my
| pocket and work pretty much everywhere is a huge
| convenience. I no longer have to plan trips carefully,
| drive around hoping I get to the right place or stop 3
| times to ask for directions.
| kevlarr wrote:
| > So we've mostly solved trivial non-problems if/not
| regressions?
|
| This. I get called a Luddite because I rant about the
| vastness of useless tech, but I love tech. I simply think
| most of what people focus on is useless and that "the
| immediacy to which I can do anything" now is actually very
| psychologically harmful.
| rellekio wrote:
| You should watch the Cube and it's sequels.
| leothecool wrote:
| We can do all this amazing stuff but we can't allocate cloud
| resources by simply calling a constructor. Wild times.
| qz2 wrote:
| To be fair we could do nearly all of that before without much
| of an issue.
|
| Now we inherit the overhead of the software, demand pricing,
| apps that are made of shit and string (uber eats I'm looking
| at you) and zero customer service...
| ekianjo wrote:
| > To be fair we could do nearly all of that before without
| much of an issue.
|
| Only if you were born fairly recently.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Uhh. Before I didn't even have Internet, much less a screen
| on which I could tap on a button.
| derefr wrote:
| I think the implication is that ride hailing, delivery
| ordering, and flight/hotel booking were possible to do by
| _calling the company on the telephone_. Which-- _if_ you
| already know precisely what you want--has almost as
| little friction as opening an app and tapping a button.
| (And to make that apply more often, these companies used
| to distribute fliers containing their "browsable UI.")
|
| "Live streams" of rocket launches were on TV :)
|
| And driving, step-by-step directions, and translation
| were services provided by human beings. For the richer of
| us, they still mostly _are_ services provided by humans,
| because the machine versions still aren't quite as good.
|
| There have been VR systems at arcades since the 80s. The
| main difference today is that they're consumer
| electronics you can bring home. (Not that that's
| necessarily better for everyone; not every home has the
| room.)
|
| Cryptocurrency is fairly novel in the universality of the
| access it provides to such services. Before, you and your
| counterparty had to both have fancy Swiss bank accounts
| or Bahamian shell companies to exchange the funds
| through. Still possible, but you couldn't just send the
| money to _anybody_ , so it limited what you could do with
| dirty money. Now dirty money is almost as useful as clean
| money! :P
| PinguTS wrote:
| We had even Uber without having to phone someone in the
| 1980s. It was called black taxi market and you really
| just hailed a car in the street.
| chpmrc wrote:
| Calling has absolutely not the same friction as using an
| app. It's orders of magnitudes less efficient, more
| expensive and sometimes just impossible (good luck
| calling radio taxi in some countries where you don't
| speak the language). I think comparing what we could do
| 20+ years ago with what we can do now and saying "meh" is
| outright absurd. But, hey, everyone is entitled to their
| opinion.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| Not to mention the experience of calling a cab as a
| foreigner and having the driver take advantage of you by
| price gouging you or taking you on unnecessary detours.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| Not my experience.
|
| I used to buy the new Thomas Guide (the 1 inch thick
| paper map book to find my way around Los Angeles). Having
| Google Maps on my phone has massively changed that. In
| the middle we had Nav systems but even then I now live
| somewhere where public transportation is the norm and
| being able to ask Google Maps how to get somewhere as
| been a life changing experience. As one concrete example,
| from 2000-2010 I pretty much never took the bus except
| for the one that went by my house. Now, since Google Maps
| will tell me which bus to take it's so trivial just to
| take whatever it tells me.
|
| As for VR in arcades in the 80s they were remotely as
| good as 4 yr old VR today. not even in the same league.
| That's like comparing a 1970s calculator to a smartphone.
| derefr wrote:
| Like I said, "getting directions" used to be a service.
| Specifically, back then--and still today, in many places!
| --you'd be expected to retain the services of a _guide_
| when you were in a foreign city /country. Who would often
| double as your translator, and potentially as your driver
| as well.
|
| Machine directions are still not as good as the service a
| good guide provides in navigating an unfamiliar city.
| Especially, no navigation app I'm aware of has an inbuilt
| intuition for avoiding the "bad parts of town" in its
| routing, that differentiates between what's safe to drive
| through vs. walk through, and differentiates between
| safety levels at different times of day.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| The value add is not that the machine guide is better
| than the human, it's that the machine guide is available
| to everyone, at all times.
| derefr wrote:
| One might describe technology in general as the way to
| take the scarce resource of manpower/hired help, and make
| it plentiful through a narrowing of scope, formalization
| of the narrowed scope, and then automation of that
| formalization.
|
| But this misses the finer point of how much is lost in
| the process of scope-narrowing, formalization, and
| automation. Or rather, of how losslessly you can truly
| make such a conversion.
|
| For each well-established technology, it's interesting to
| ask this question: given an unlimited budget, is the
| technology still used? Or is raw manpower used instead?
| Or some combination of the two?
|
| Truly useful technologies, to me, are the ones that are
| still used _in some capacity_ even by the ultra-rich,
| either directly, or because the manpower they hire will
| themselves use the technology to make their job easier.
|
| A good example of a truly-useful technology is a washing
| machine. Nobody is hand-washing (cotton) clothes any
| more, no matter how rich you are. Even if you have a
| professional laundry service, _they're_ putting your
| clothes into a washing machine.
|
| Navigation isn't quite at that level yet. Your Uber
| driver uses a GPS auto-nav, but a city guide usually
| doesn't, because a city guide is asking a different
| question -- not "how to get there" but rather " _which_
| well-known route would the client favour, if I took a few
| hours to lay out the differences in fine detail." Which
| is a question both of subjective inference of the
| client's tastes, in a way that would require _learned
| personalization_ in an automated equivalent; and of a
| bunch of context factors unique to every city, in a way
| that makes it hard to reproduce in a narrowed-scope app
| (rather requiring individual city-by-city coverage, the
| way only a monopolistic behemoth can achieve.)
|
| So, theoretically _possible_ , but not likely something
| we'll see done for a long while, at least until we see
| some other meta-technological advance (e.g. GPT-4) that
| makes one or the other part dead simple.
| vageli wrote:
| > Like I said, "getting directions" used to be a service.
| Specifically, back then--and still today, in many places!
| --you'd be expected to retain the services of a guide
| when you were in a foreign city/country. Who would often
| double as your translator, and potentially as your driver
| as well.
|
| So previously, travel to foreign destinations was
| something few could afford, since it required sourcing
| and hiring a local guide. It would seem our current
| solutions scale much better and at a lower unit cost,
| opening up the world to more people than could have
| experienced it before.
| derefr wrote:
| Yes, correct. But that's moving the goal-posts, kind of:
| "making something available to a wider audience" isn't
| the same thing as making something _possible_. The
| original claim was that we're now in a world where these
| things are _possible_. But really, we're "merely" in a
| world where they're more widely-available. They've been
| _possible_ for a long time.
|
| What I wanted to highlight, was that technology making
| something _possible_ , that was previously _impossible_ ,
| is actually quite rare.
|
| There really aren't all that many innovations that come
| along and change the world in such a way that a time-
| traveller from the past, would need to learn an entirely
| new conceptual framework to understand how we do things
| now. Almost always, what we do now, maps in an obvious
| 1:1 way to what we used to do. Hailing a cab? You could
| hail a cab in Ancient Greece!
|
| In fact, it's pretty hard to think of genuinely-novel
| things humans only started doing in the last 100 years,
| due to some technological enabler. Playing single-player
| interactive story-games, maybe -- even the progenitor of
| the medium, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, is AFAIK
| a 20th-century innovation.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| The super rich framing isn't useful IMO, much of the
| advances in technology function to make things possible
| for people for whom that function was impossible for
| before.
|
| > You could hail a cab in Ancient Greece!
|
| Depends on who the "you" is. And choosing a super rich
| person as your point of reference is a pretty arbitrary
| choice (with underlying assumptions about society that
| are worth examining, I might add).
| david_draco wrote:
| There used to be telephones (with buttons). You could
| order all of the above through it, given a credit card.
| ekianjo wrote:
| This is not something you can order:
|
| > I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by
| step directions to wherever I need to go.
| StillBored wrote:
| All these apps/etc work fine in, large top tier urban
| cities across the world. They fail miserably everywhere
| else, there are huge swaths of the US, where you don't be
| able to hail an uber. In those cases your falling back on
| the same methods used in the past.
|
| So, its still fairly common to see people hawking
| guiding/etc services inside or just outside of airports
| in central/south America, Africa, etc.
|
| If your going to places where the cell phone service is
| spotty, or your going outside the the main urban areas
| hiring a guide/translator might be the only way to get
| around.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| 20+ years ago, a sizable chunk of the software workforce was
| dedicated to converting legacy systems from 2 digit year codes
| into 4 digits.
|
| The notion that all the interesting work was done in yesteryear
| is just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. At
| any time in history most software work was glue code. Because
| the low-hanging fruit is always going to be taking existing
| systems and applying small tweaks to extend their functionality
| to a slightly different domain.
|
| Truly innovative software has always been done by the tip of
| the spear. Building something new and valuable is risky and
| difficult. 95% of the time the end product is worthless. And
| that's assuming that everyone on the team is highly competent.
| You either have to be willing to take a lot of personal risk,
| or have a good enough reputation that someone's willing to pay
| you to take crazy risks. In other words, work that never has
| and never will be done by the median engineer.
|
| But this is pretty much true of any job in the knowledge
| economy. The average lawyer is just writing templated
| boilerplate contracts, not arguing Constitutional law before
| the Supreme Court. The average accountant is just filing
| personal and small business taxes, not uncovering high-level
| corporate fraud. The average doctor does the same simple
| procedure all day long, not working on a cure for cancer. The
| average academic does by-the-number meaningless research to get
| his publication count up, not research deep breakthroughs in
| his field.
| cptskippy wrote:
| 20 years ago I was writing one of the first online
| endorsement engines for producers (independent insurance
| agents) to allow them to make endorsements on insurance
| policies over the internet rather than having to speak to an
| underwriter on the phone. We built a single web front end
| that was to be used by both the underwriters and the
| producers.
|
| I remember showing off the role based permissions structure
| we had in place to allow an admin to control what sort of
| endorsements users could make. I quipped something like "this
| is so granular that we could even allow insureds to make
| endorsements to the policy." The response I got from the head
| underwriter was "we will _never_ allow insureds to make
| endorsements on policies ".
|
| When was the last time you had to speak to an agent or
| underwriter on the phone to make changes to your insurance
| policy?
|
| 20 years ago was a very exciting time as many businesses were
| going online for the very first time. We were getting away
| from writing websites in C with CGI and using higher level
| languages like Perl, PHP, and ASP.
| holtkam2 wrote:
| This is the best reply on this whole thread.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| > It seems like nowadays you just can't make money building
| interesting things anymore.
|
| Sounds like you haven't tried or you haven't stumbled on an
| actual issue. There are lifetimes of problems out there, and
| many existing solutions are poor or non-solutions.
|
| I run into them all the time and cannot possibly dedicate my
| one lifetime to all of the problems I see viable commercial
| solutions to.
| wiremine wrote:
| This made me sad... Software is a job, so on one hand we
| shouldn't expect it to be all roses. And software is difficult:
| it's nontrivial, complex work.
|
| On the other hand, it's sad how many people resonate with this.
| I'm all for following your passions and doing what you love. But
| it would be nice if more people were able to maintain their love
| for programming.
|
| I've been writing code since I was 14, so I'm going on close to
| 30 years, and I still love it: the challenge, the creative
| outlet, the feeling when a bug is identified and a elegant fix is
| applied.
|
| My question is: how do we change things? How do we keep people of
| all ages loving it (if that's what they're called to?)
| retiredpoor wrote:
| After a decade of experience in the industry at 4 different
| companies, I quit my 6 figure devops job in 2013. I think back to
| all the meetings, emails, pagerduty alerts, and bruised 25 year
| old egos over the merits of Chef vs Puppet and have to laugh. I
| now run a landscaping business, make less money, have more time,
| and I can actually avoid working with toxic people/customers.
| devwastaken wrote:
| This is what Ive shifted to as well. Trades are much more useful
| in life, because you can't pay to get a job done right, and
| paying anyone else at all is far too expensive.
|
| For most people you have the reality of needing a 40 hour week
| job to live, and there's plenty of people who spent the 4 years
| to get a bachelor's in compsci and nobody cares to hire them.
| Software is volatile, you can spend plenty of time making
| something that will not work and won't be at all useful.
|
| Reality is the software job market sucks, and people have to
| learn how to build their own houses or else become stuck as rent
| slaves.
| nicbou wrote:
| I disagree. I really enjoy woodworking, but it's definitely not
| to save money. Same for working on motorcycles. The former is
| rendered useless by economies of scale, the latter by the cost
| of my garage and tools.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Woodworking is apart of a series of skills that transfer to
| other useful trades. Hard to make buildings if you don't know
| how the basics of how wood works.
| nicbou wrote:
| I didn't pick up woodworking to build a house. If that was
| my goal, sticking to programming would be the fastest way
| to get a house built. My ability to make money from
| programming far exceeds my ability to save money by doing
| anything else. If it was about the money, I wouldn't rent a
| garage, fill it with tools and spend my weekends building
| subpar furniture for twice the cost (a common woodworking
| trope). I'd just have it shipped to my door.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Okay, good for you, as I said in my original post the job
| market for software is not generally that good, and the
| vast majority of people work low paying jobs.
| nicbou wrote:
| This is why I used the first person, as in specifically
| me and not everyone.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I probably average to about $50/hour programming. Last
| time I hired someone to fix something in my house I ended
| up paying about $350 for 1.5 hours of work. Physical
| materials was just a low voltage cable.
|
| I had a plumber quote me $1300 to replace a $250 part
| that just screws on/off. I did it myself in a few hours.
|
| Since I work on salary, one of the best ways for me to
| get more money is to save mine by not paying overpriced
| contractors to fix things around my house.
| nicbou wrote:
| That's of course assuming that you are already skilled
| and equipped enough to do the job yourself. If you're
| starting from scratch, you'll end up saving below minimum
| wage by doing it yourself.
|
| Besides, if you're already working 40 hours a week, the
| remaining time is much more valuable, because it's
| relatively scarce. Not everyone is comfortable spending
| their evenings doing extra work.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I had the same exp. I had a house with copper pipes and I
| thought well I don't want to learn welding....
|
| What does the plumber do? Exactly what I would have done
| after watching a couple youtube vides -$500 in labor.
|
| He didn't even try to repair the pipe he just cut it and
| used push on PEX connectors something I could have done
| myself.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| I'll seek to balance this conversation by providing another
| perspective. I've been working in the software industry for 10
| years. I think it's a bit extreme to dismiss the industry
| entirely because of your experience or because it isn't what you
| thought it would be. It's possible to find a company that is a
| better fit, allowing you to do programming in a way you enjoy.
| It's also possible to start your own company doing it a better
| way. I worked as a freelancer on my own terms for awhile, and
| frankly, the pay was terrible and the 'freedom' wasn't all it's
| imagined to be; you still have to work for somebody if you want
| to get paid. Honestly, I've been much happier in corporations,
| especially ones that value teamwork, and camaraderie.
| jeremy151 wrote:
| An aside: I'd be curious to see some statistics on the number of
| software developers who have an interest in woodworking. I was
| once in a project meeting that involved two external vendors, and
| the topic of woodworking came up in casual conversation. It
| turned out that every technically oriented role in the room was
| not only interested, but had a wood shop in their home. Something
| like 8-10 people. There seem to be a number of parallels between
| development and woodworking, but anecdotally the number of people
| I've met with an interest in both is very high.
| GoToRO wrote:
| The problem is the software was open source, zero income. I bet
| the woodworking will not be free.
| roadbeats wrote:
| A naive question: is it still a real thing to be entrepreneurial
| software engineer?
|
| After reading this thread, as somebody who quit comfortable and
| well paying job for a startup being founded from scratch, I feel
| like I'm alone in this sort of path now.
| christophergs wrote:
| Not at all. It's called being an Indie Hacker:
| https://indiehackers.com
| trey-jones wrote:
| I've recently wondered how the stresses of software development
| would compare to the stress of knowing my family might starve if
| the crops fail or that we could be set upon by brigands and
| murdered.
|
| I mostly make this comparison in jest, and probably as a result
| of having read several novels in the last 12 months that deal in
| various ways with the decline of civilization. However, our
| ancestors also probably slept better than we do and dealt with
| the stress naturally as part of their daily physical
| requirements.
|
| I'm not suggesting it would be more fun, but I wouldn't argue if
| you told me it was healthier, and maybe even happier.
| hajderr wrote:
| In physical work you have a natural outlet for that stress.
| Confining everything to your upper body, and even one part of
| it (the head) is gonna cause even more stress.
| eloff wrote:
| Yes, I think that physical exercise helped a lot. I go the
| gym every weekday at 3pm, and do heavy (for me) weight
| lifting for an hour. That has a great way of burning off the
| stress and resetting the mind. I highly recommend software
| engineers specifically plan some time in your day to get out
| of your chair and get some exercise.
| yetihehe wrote:
| I think they think about this like we think about making an
| error which will delete whole database of our client. It
| happens to us, but there are some safety nets everywhere.
| Several families in the world may be so unlucky as to get
| killed, but it's not day to day worry for everyone.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I lost hours of my life last week trying to set up motioneyes +
| android + a pi + a vps + wireguard + ip webcam pro + tasker + an
| old smartphone + an online API for events for simply getting a
| notification when someones walks in my alley.
|
| I should have gone the Alfred route and just shell out 15 bucks
| but instead I am crying tears of rage over framerate settings,
| screen lock issues and pro version validation.
|
| /rant
| InfinityByTen wrote:
| I've been mulling about building furniture from wood already. Not
| as a substitute, but as an add-on after my 8 hour mark.
| jedimastert wrote:
| My family actually has a long history of woodworking and
| furniture making (my last name means woodsmen, several
| generations of at least hobby woodworking, etc.) and as soon as I
| can move into a house (we were going to before the apocalypse but
| credit requirements shot up and being poor earlier in life has
| lifelong consequences) I'm going to pick up a few tools and work
| down Rex Kreuger's Woodworking for Humans series.
|
| That's not to say that I've lost my joy of making computers do my
| bidding (yet, I suppose...), I just also really enjoy working
| with my hands.
| mythz wrote:
| Seems to be a heavy "all modern software development sucks" vibe
| in this thread, when the issue is more "software I get paid to
| write sucks". What software would you write if you could write
| whatever you wanted using whatever language/technology you
| wanted?
|
| Unless all the joy gets sucked out beforehand, pretty sure I'm
| going to move to be developing Mobile Apps after I retire. It was
| the most fun I've had writing Apps & my kids loved playing with
| them.
|
| We're now able to target super computers in everyone's pocket
| with an unprecedented array of capabilities using sophisticated
| high-level productive languages & tools with effortless access to
| global distribution, we've never had it this good.
| krosaen wrote:
| Agree that the job matters a lot. I was working at a job where
| the domain was really fun but the tech work itself was getting
| repetitive for me (web and native apps, rdbs backed servers
| etc). It took a couple of years willing to make way less money
| but now I'm working in robotics and enjoy my day job
| technically very much, and the pay is back up to market rate
| (in a more lucrative field). And the journey during which I
| made zero (summer studying) and then 1/2 of previous pay
| (engineer in university lab) was both fun and rejuvenating.
|
| I think it's important to save up some of your money as you go
| especially early on when you get that first software job where
| it feels like you are making a lot of money. Start saving for
| your future transition(s) as you may not be happy working in
| the same field for your entire career.
| allenu wrote:
| I do mobile app development and I love it. At work I do that
| and a little bit of backend and web frontend development and I
| just don't enjoy those as much. There's more overhead in
| getting things done there, whereas with iOS development, you
| have a more constrained space where there's generally just one
| way to do things, so you spend more time thinking about the
| problem you are solving vs. dealing with technology issues.
| Yes, there are still things you have to figure out on iOS that
| don't have the greatest documentation, but I find it's much
| more straightforward than the other spaces I mentioned.
|
| If I could write whatever I wanted to on whatever platform, I'd
| do what I'm doing now as a side project: a flash card app on
| iOS and macOS. [1] I'm finding it lets me deal with the entire
| "stack" of interesting product problems: technology, user
| experience design, solving a real user problem, and even
| marketing. I'm not treating it as a serious job, so it is
| mostly fun to work on, although I am getting close to releasing
| it, so it can be a slog. (This reminds me of what I read about
| the author of Stardew Valley and how after working on his game
| for several years, he did find it difficult to keep working on
| it, which is a problem you really can't get away from.)
|
| [1] See https://www.ussherpress.com/blog/ for some posts about
| it if you are curious
| driverdan wrote:
| I hate mobile app development because of the gatekeeping store
| process. Apple and Google, but especially Apple, make arbitrary
| decisions that can have a major impact on your revenue and
| sanity. No thanks.
| nicbou wrote:
| > What software would you write if you could write whatever you
| wanted using whatever language/technology you wanted?
|
| The sort that solves problems I'm interested in. I love the
| idea of treating software as a home-cooked meal [1]: something
| you prepare with love for a small crowd of people.
|
| For instance, I added a recipes section to my personal website.
| I also added achievements to it some time ago[2]. Both were
| completely pointless, but I enjoyed doing it the same way I
| enjoy cooking.
|
| [1] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
|
| [2] https://nicolasbouliane.com/achievements
| abawany wrote:
| I agree - the job that one is in makes a gigantic difference
| that is sometimes falsely attributed to software development
| but really just applies to the workplace in question. I have
| mentioned in other threads how working at places with bad
| technologies and suck-driven processes brought me down so much
| that I used to wait in the parking lot on arrival at the
| workplace and contemplate the misery of the day that awaited
| me. I am happy I was able to pull out of that tailspin and make
| necessary changes, even if they made my job history look sub-
| optimal, and discover that software development remains a great
| place to be if one makes an effort to find one's niche.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > What software would you write if you could write whatever you
| wanted using whatever language/technology you wanted?
|
| What does it matter? After a 40+ hour work week developing
| bullshit, plus all the other demands on a modern adult's time,
| very few people, even those who like writing software, are
| going to want to sit down and write more.
| xigency wrote:
| I think it's more the point that it isn't the profession that
| sucks but the job.
|
| There are a lot of writers out there but few New York Times
| best selling fiction authors. We can't saying earning a
| living as a writer sucks because most people write for blogs.
| draw_down wrote:
| I think that's the wrong frame- the two problems for me are the
| corporate environment (which is hellish and always getting
| worse, but also applies to any other office job) and the "never
| finished" nature of software.
|
| I don't want to keep adding features to the same thing, I don't
| want to keep being the expert on how it works and how long it
| will take to do x and sit around planning out roadmaps and do
| user research and all this shit. I want to work on something
| for a while and have that be enough and then do another
| project.
|
| It's the nature of the work, not "I'm building websites when I
| could be building mobile apps".
| bob1029 wrote:
| Modern software development is incredible if you are able to
| avoid the buzzword bullshit and focus on delivering cool
| solutions that solve real problems.
| sli wrote:
| I've never worked a development job where I get any say in
| avoiding buzzwords or delivering solutions I would call cool.
| I typically get caught up in clients bikeshedding irrelevant
| details and managers enabling and promoting it.
|
| I hear so much on HN and on reddit about jobs that give
| programmers some level of autonomy but I just don't see it.
| My entire experience is very much the opposite, and I
| absolutely loathe this awful industry.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I would recommend finding for smaller companies to work
| for, or better yet, doing your own consulting. Being able
| to fire customers is the only reason I still enjoy what I
| do.
| person_of_color wrote:
| The average Staff SW Engineer salary at Google is ~750k. The race
| is worth the reward.
| buttholesurfer wrote:
| I miss the self hosted monolith.
|
| It was so simple to maintain, deploy and share. Then someone
| wanted a service... then we added a microservice, then we added
| another, then we addeded docker, then we added 10 more services,
| then the build was so complex we hired a devops guy... then the
| builds were too complex, so we started dedicated devops team...
|
| Then we moved to the cloud...
|
| Gah we've done this to ourselves.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| This weekend I started building a plain old server-side rendered
| web application.
|
| It felt really good to stop dicking around with APIs and graphql
| and resolvers and other bullshit and just get a working product
| that's fast. Lovely.
|
| Also write a largish project in Nim, clean and simple. Lovely.
|
| You don't _have_ to run the hamster wheel that is modern web
| technologies. That's what is sapping your energy. React, webpack,
| thunk, memos (lmao) and other churning blog-driven-developments.
| Don't do it!
| Jenz wrote:
| I've a feeling the HN crowd has been in a good mood recently. I
| wonder why.
| [deleted]
| pklausler wrote:
| I'm nearing 60 (decimal) and have spent a programming career in
| what we used to call supercomputing. I will spare you "old guy"
| stories, but I will share one insight: I've worked for companies
| who made money selling hardware, companies who made money selling
| advertising, and companies who made money selling software. It's
| always been the most fun working as a software guy at a company
| selling hardware to solve hard problems in the real world. If
| you're bored as a software person in a software or advertising
| company, consider being a software person elsewhere.
| zacharyvoase wrote:
| what is the deal with the software engineering -> woodworking
| pipeline? is it that programmers get so fed up of working with
| abstract concepts that they immediately pendulum-swing to the
| most concrete form of building (that can still be done by only
| one person) that they can find?
| jk700 wrote:
| It's likely not as common as it seems. Personally I only ever
| heard of some mythical software engineers from the US pursuing
| woodworking, but not from anywhere else. Maybe in the US it's a
| lucrative field and it's common for software engineers in the
| US to live in houses with plenty of space to do woodworking and
| where the products of woodworking might actually be useful, so
| it's something they can play with at home and consider a nice
| skill to have in case they get fed up with software industry.
| droptablemain wrote:
| I still enjoy building software. What I don't enjoy is dealing
| with a barrage of tech-bro/founder types that are convinced their
| niche CRUD app is going to revolutionize industry X. Among other
| things.
| devy wrote:
| In a serious note, Woodworking is a great rewarding craft. It
| bears the same builder mentality, creating physical objects via
| reduction manufacturing and most importantly, you build for
| yourself and for the people that you care about.
| ricksharp wrote:
| I've been building software for around 20 years. It's more
| enjoyable to me than it has ever been. One of the reasons is I
| have my own playground repo + site where I put all my experiments
| and write whatever I want.
|
| I can now make more in a day than I could have made in a year 15
| years ago.
|
| In the past few months, I have:
|
| - built a serverless website/ code playground that enables me to
| host all my experiments and costs me essentially nothing - parsed
| the original zork code into typescript and then made a zork style
| game for my family - made about 5 educational mini games for my
| kids - learned how to do systematic math proofs with the lean
| language - created a serverless and database-free user data
| storage service on aws - created a serverless websocket service
| and a real time party game on aws.
|
| This morning I started building a serverless mesh-like network on
| top of websockets and webrtc to further reduce infrastructure
| dependency.
|
| Oh yeah, last year I was part of a corporate competition to build
| and program a self-driving RC car.
|
| Now, of course, I do most of this on my own time by getting up at
| 4:30 so it doesn't interfere with my family and my work - and at
| work I sometimes have to do boring tasks - but that's life.
|
| If you aren't having fun, you simply are not playing with all the
| technology we have at our fingertips.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| _[Peter and Lawrence are working on the crew cleaning up the
| burned Initech building]
|
| Peter Gibbons : This isn't so bad, huh? Makin' bucks, gettin'
| exercise, workin' outside.
|
| Lawrence : Fuckin' A.
|
| Peter Gibbons : [nods] Fuckin' A._
| FpUser wrote:
| I build my own products and I get hired to create products for
| others. All in various different areas: desktop, web, firmware
| etc. So no I do not want to stop it. Sure I get board every once
| in a while when all design is done and now it is time to just
| write a lot of code (sometime budget allows me to subcontract)
| but overall I am happy and not planning switching to woodworking
| any time soon even though I am an old fart. I do lots of physical
| activity though to keep in good shape and this I think helps with
| programming part as well.
| teddyh wrote:
| " _I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit
| of time shorter than a season._ "
|
| -- Josh Rosen in _The Soul of a New Machine_
| katsume3 wrote:
| I find myself writing less code these days, not because I'm lazy,
| but because I can borrow so much already-written code from people
| now, thanks to things like Github and the Internet in general. I
| am a firm DRY[0] enthusiast, and also, a /Don't Repeat Other's
| Efforts/[1] enthusiast and it pains me to solve an already-solved
| problem.
|
| Sadly there are people out there calling me a 'Stack Overflow
| developer' in that I copy and paste code, but I find immense joy
| in challenging most of that code and tinkering with it to find a
| solution that fits my needs. In other words, I rarely use a
| snippet of code _ad verbatim_.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_the_wheel
| DarkWiiPlayer wrote:
| DRY is a good principle when you're aiming for effective
| product development, but that doesn't mean it's the most fun. I
| often find myself reinventing the wheel in my private projects,
| not because I couldn't easily find a library that already does
| what I want, but because I enjoy that sort of "DIY-
| Programming". I _want_ to think about all the messy details
| because it 's one of the things that makes programming fun for
| me.
|
| Maybe this depends a lot on the individual. Some might find my
| way of enjoying code very boring, as I'm just messing with low-
| level stuff and not getting that much done. To me it would feel
| very exhausting to be writing glue-code all the time without
| messing with the internals of the systems I'm working with and
| recreating them myself every once in a while.
|
| As a general advise to new developers: Find out what you enjoy
| about coding and always keep that in mind, be it while looking
| for a job or starting a new private project.
| Havoc wrote:
| I'd say don't repeat it if you could do it yourself. Tinkering
| and learning invariably involves covering some ground others
| have trodden on before
| kps wrote:
| "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of
| time shorter than a season." -- Tom West quoted in Tracy Kidder
| _The Soul of a New Machine_
| rrss wrote:
| - Josh Rosen. West was there to the end.
| meowzero wrote:
| All these complaining is funny. I was building software since the
| later 1990's. I'm not tired of it. Sure, most of the jobs out
| there are your standard CRUD stuff. But I still like it.
|
| A lot of people complain about not having interesting stuff to
| work on in the day job. Well, that's why it's called a job.
|
| I was burnt out from my software job as well until I got a shift
| in perspective. I picked up a photography hobby and got pretty
| good. In fact, I was seriously contemplating changing careers and
| was gaining steam. But I realized the more clients I picked up,
| the more uninspiring crap I had to shoot. This wasn't your
| everyday wedding or family photos. It was fashion photography
| where the industry was seen as more "creative" and "edgy." But
| once you get down to it, it was the same crap as any other job.
|
| Sure I shot a lot of my own personal projects as well (like open
| source projects for software engineering). In fact, in that
| industry it's more required to have a huge portfolio of test
| shots where you're constantly evolving. In software engineering,
| that's not as required. But even that became a grind since you're
| pressured to constantly hone your blade while new, younger, more
| creative people were coming up.
|
| Is it hard dealing with your manager, product managers, changing
| requirements, etc. in your software job? Well it's the same stuff
| in commercial fashion photography. Change their minds constantly.
| Sometimes I doubt they know what they want either. Budgets
| change, scope changes, a ton of politics, and so on. It's all the
| same.
|
| This is when I realized I actually liked software engineering
| better. I found it more fun solving "boring" problems and
| learning the new technology of the day instead of hustling hard
| in the photo industry.
|
| I get people complaining about not doing interesting work in
| their job. But that's what 99% of the industry is. You'll most
| likely create another CRUD app or work on stuff that is the least
| interesting to you. Only the lucky/elite 1% (just like in other
| industries) gets to do cool, interesting stuff.
|
| Grass in greener on the other side. But I've stepped my toes on
| the other grass, and it's the same shade of green. I learned to
| enjoy my job as a software engineer. I'm in the 40's, and
| hopefully I'll have enough energy to keep it up for 20+ more
| years.
| Igelau wrote:
| Interesting approach to issue resolution: propose workarounds,
| well-actuallys, and nitpicks for three years and maybe the
| reporter of the issue will eventually switch careers.
| one2know wrote:
| I started doing similar changes because software became a
| shitshow. Corporate software shops are just a bunch of IT people
| trying to get their friend's products in use in the company for
| kickbacks. So what you have are multiple IT teams with more power
| than developers trying to tell everyone which tools they MUST
| use. Developers at the last place I worked had no access to
| production, could not deploy code at all, could not test their
| own code, could not even push code, could not see other team's
| code, etc, etc. But, the company had a devops team, a team called
| "app ops", a "SRE" team, an IT team, an "infra" team, and a
| security team that strangely was dictating which tools were used
| to deploy code. NONE of these teams did anything remotely close
| to what their team name did. They would do visibility projects
| which, oddly, sometimes involved developing software but not the
| kind that generates revenue. "dev ops" would deploy software to
| production, if they had time between their projects. "app ops"
| was supposed to handle support incidents, if they had time
| between their projects, etc...
|
| It is useless to try to build software in this environment. It is
| far easier to build a hunk of wood and say, "here you fucking go,
| take it or leave it" than to deal with dozens and dozens of
| people trying to extract money from the development process while
| suffocating the company.
| Ziggy_Zaggy wrote:
| Say more. I think you're onto something here.
| microcolonel wrote:
| LoL, just go build some software dude. In the last two years I
| wrote a compiler, a brand new log store, heaps of other things,
| and I did them while doing my job.
|
| If you actually care about your craft and can say _no_ from time
| to time, the amount of interesting work you can do is limitless
| from the perspective of human capability.
| robjan wrote:
| But that's not what he wants to do.
| microcolonel wrote:
| Whoopse, didn't mean this as a global comment.
| jamil7 wrote:
| The golden handcuffs are real, good on him for getting out.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| I'm the OP on that github issue. Put it this way: I'm building
| furniture for money, but I can't claim to be making a living at
| it yet. I'm fortunate to have a supportive partner and that
| we've moved to somewhere with a lower cost of living than
| Boston.
|
| We ran through a budgeting exercise a couple of years ago
| before I made the career change, and besides housing, our
| single biggest expense is health insurance.
|
| I've always lived cheaply, and it's let me take advantage of
| opportunities as they come up (I paid for school with money
| saved from working in software), but it's still a big
| transition going from two white collar jobs to one. I'm
| grateful that my partner and I both value the flexibility we
| get from living frugally.
| ed312 wrote:
| I'm also in the Boston area and seriously considered this!
| Would love to hear more about how you worked though health
| insurance, where to move, etc.
| k33n wrote:
| The dude lives in Indonesia. Not sure he ever saw much of a
| reward for writing software, sadly.
| princekolt wrote:
| From personal experience moving from South America to Europe
| for a developer position: Not true.
|
| A developer making even a small salary working remotely from
| a "third-world" country is still making much more money than
| the average person. Just as an example, on my first remote
| position I was making as much money as each of my parents who
| were on 10+ years careers in corporate sales. It's nuts.
|
| Of course the quality of life outside work made it worth
| moving to Europe, but to this day I still wonder if I should
| move back to stay closer to family while keeping a great
| salary.
| czechdeveloper wrote:
| I see Boston, MA on his github profile
| 101008 wrote:
| If you get a remote job living in a 3rd world country you are
| in the top 1%.
| glaberficken wrote:
| That is an exaggeration. Don't forget that most "3rd world"
| countries also have their own pornographically wealthy
| elites blocking out the top 1%. The differences are in the
| distribution of the middle/bottom tiers. A remote job gets
| you at most into what should be a confortable middle class
| position.
| koolba wrote:
| Doesn't his profile say he works (worked?) for Teradata. I
| doubt he was doing that for tips.
| W4ldi wrote:
| > saw
| vbezhenar wrote:
| From my experience, writing software in 3-rd world country is
| a reliable way to get out of the poverty. Some example
| numbers for Kazakhstan: average salary for many low-skilled
| labour workers is around $100-$200 per month. Average salary
| for junior software developer is at least $500 and you would
| quickly reach $1000 and very skilled developers might get
| $2000+ per month.
|
| The same is true for Russia or Belarus or Ukraine, AFAIK.
| Wages are even higher there.
|
| And I'm talking about building software for internal clients.
| Outsourcing or remote work allows for even higher salaries.
|
| I'm not entirely sure why the market works this way. It's not
| like any random software developer can go remote and compete
| with the rest of the world. But it works.
|
| I'd really be interested to learn whether Indonesian
| situation is similar or not.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| It would be a bit higher in Indonesia, but not too far off.
| FWIW somebody earning $1500 USD/month, living in Jakarta,
| would be very comfortably middle class.
| silveroriole wrote:
| Out of poverty, but probably not into the incredible wealth
| that American software work can generate. For example, see
| the commenter saying their house is paid off and they can
| live off passive income. I'm not in a third world country
| so I don't know for sure what salaries are there, but I
| find it hard to even imagine having so much money!
| SXX wrote:
| There is a lot of people from US here on HN so you should
| clarify that you talking about salaries after tax. E.g
| $1000 in Russia would be the same as $2000 in the US since
| employer pays 33-49% of salary as taxes.
|
| In my home town called Rostov-on-Don (10th largest city in
| Russia) I have friends who make $2500-3000 after tax for
| their software engineer and devops positions. Some of these
| people are far from being a rockstar developers, just have
| well-paid positions at large companies. Average salary is
| somewhat lower, but it's still good money here since living
| costs are low.
|
| PS: Family of 3 can basically live there for $1500 / month
| with rent, food and entertainment and if you single even
| $600 is quite sufficient.
| SXX wrote:
| Another interesting fact: if you're freelance software
| developer in Russia who work remotely for western company
| and register as entrepreneur then your efficient tax rate
| at most is 8% for fees and taxes. Then let's say 1% extra
| for banking and accounting, etc. So you basically keep
| more than 90% of income.
|
| And there is even lower tax rate options available if you
| work alone and earn between $10,000-80,000 / year. You
| just pay fixed amount of taxes every year for special
| "patent" which cost e.g $400 / year in my home city. Then
| efficient tax rate gonna be like 1-5% depend on how much
| you earn. Though unlike when paying 7% of income this
| might require more detailed accounting since tax
| department can always ask you to show some documents.
| Officially "patent" allow you to pay $400 just once for
| income up to $600,000 / year but obviously in real life
| you gonna get some tough questions from tax department.
|
| In any case tax rates for freelance software developers
| in Russia are very very low. Also unlike what western
| person might expect all government services are available
| online and accounting is no-brainer because Russia have
| some of the best fintech in the world.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Anyone doubting the fintech claim, have a look at this
| https://www-ft-
| com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/content/38967766-ae...
|
| TLDR: Russia's IRS/HRMC equivalent digitized VAT
| collection (similar to sales tax). Basically every 90
| seconds all tills/cash registers across the country
| report back the sale to the taxman, so you don't even
| have to manually submit any VAT returns.
|
| Russia started with 20% tax gap between revenue due and
| revenue collected (while e.g. UK is at 9.1%), and now
| after this they are on 1%.
|
| My understanding it's almost real-time tax reporting with
| millions of tills acting as IoT devices sending data up.
| SXX wrote:
| Russia also have instant payments for consumers between
| all major banks which are free for first ~$1400 / month
| (100,000 RUB) and it's should be soon available for
| businesses as well. It's all run by central bank.
|
| For fintech there is Tinkoff bank which is more advanced
| than Monzo / Revolut / N26 / etc as well as two "virtual"
| B2B fintech banks that even do accounting for
| entrepreneurs on their own. And to be honest even Russian
| largest state-owned Sberbank is far more advances than
| most of institutions in US and EU.
|
| So as long as your business can't be forcefully taken
| away and there are no political risks it's quite
| comfortable to be freelancer when it's come to taxes.
| kranner wrote:
| As a developer in a third world country, I have to disagree
| that it is a _reliable_ way for everyone. Not everyone has
| the programming skills, communication skills, confidence to
| reach out and negotiate for jobs above cost-of-living
| wages, and there is immense competition. Prospective
| employers will start out assuming you 're not as good as
| programmers in the first world, you will get lowballed and
| the odd unscruplous employer will skip out without payment.
| It's a hard slog; not impossible if you're lucky enough to
| be born into better circumstances than others and have
| enough support to go the rest of the way; but definitely
| not something that anyone can do.
| kukabynd wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. A fellow Kazakhstan native here with a
| similar sentiment.
| sbarre wrote:
| > It's not like any random software developer can go remote
| and compete with the rest of the world
|
| This is actually becoming more and more of an option. At my
| last (small) company, we hired several individual remote
| developers from various parts of the world that most would
| consider "third world".
|
| We were introduced to them via referrals from contract work
| done elsewhere, and we did a paid trial period at first.
|
| Not all of them worked out, but the ones that did were
| quite good, and we were paying them an excellent wage for
| their cost of living.
| seanwilson wrote:
| > > It's not like any random software developer can go
| remote and compete with the rest of the world
|
| > This is actually becoming more and more of an option.
|
| To do this though, you generally have to know how to
| market yourself, put together proposals, gather
| requirements, design and project manage, on top of
| coding. Not every coder is good at this or wants to be.
| sbarre wrote:
| This is not necessarily true. In a large enough
| organization you can have a lot of that done for you, and
| you just basically "pull tickets" (to be reductive about
| it) and deliver the work.
|
| You have to be able to interview well of course, but do
| design and project management? I'm not talking about a
| freelancer who delivers an end-to-end project here, I'm
| talking about hiring a remote developer to join an
| existing team and deliver features.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Even at CoL "corrected" salaries, a remote position usually
| pays very well in 3rd world countries.
| vibrolax wrote:
| I stopped working at age 59 to help with an illness in the
| family. I was afraid that I would miss exercising my mind and
| interacting with people the way building software often did. I
| had a decent job with interesting work, good pay, and good
| working conditions. But I haven't regretted walking away to take
| advantage of our life-long prudence and hard work.
| irjustin wrote:
| This goes hand in hand with "On the Use of a Life"[0].
|
| Please, do what _you_ truly want. Many if not the majority of
| individuals on this forum have the opportunity to do so.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24537865
| 1f60c wrote:
| I'm clearly missing some context. Who is ebd2?
| ayewo wrote:
| I think that's part of the point. I intend no offense towards
| @ebd2 on GitHub, but ebd2 can be said to be a "noname"
| developer turned wood worker.
|
| I'm guessing the reason why ebd2's story struck a chord with
| the HN community is that he has figured out a way to manage to
| do what a lot of people here aspire to be able to do with their
| time _some day_.
|
| The working assumption (which he has graciously corrected
| upthread as @mauvehaus on HN) is that his software career has
| afforded him to switch careers to something he is far more
| passionate about, a trait shared by many engineers who are
| forced to collect paychecks from work that is considered not
| very meaningful or fulfilling.
|
| The trades, specifically stuff like woodworking, metalworking,
| farming etc involve a certain kind of craftsmanship that can be
| applied on real world objects but which was honed by years of
| coding on imaginary software objects. It's a visceral thing to
| be transfer the skill of using your hands to build virtual
| stuff to build physical stuff.
| dionidium wrote:
| Reminds me of jwz's line about leaving Mozilla to run a
| nightclub:
|
| _" But in 1999 I took my leave of that whole sick, navel-gazing
| mess we called the software industry. Now I'm in a more honest
| line of work: now I sell beer._"
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Holy shit, this is me!
|
| A couple things to clarify:
|
| I posted the original issue as a minor complaint about the docker
| cli and promptly forgot about it. I never expected it to get any
| traction or follow-up. At the time I posted it, I was working as
| a contractor for my former full time employer. I had left full-
| time work there in early 2017 to attend the full-time program at
| the (sadly now-defunct) Furniture Institute of Massachusetts[0].
|
| I finished that program in early 2019, and split my time between
| commission work and part time work for other woodworkers. Like
| software, in woodworking there are things you learn at school and
| things you learn doing it for money.
|
| In early 2020 (which now feels like a million years ago), my
| partner and I left the Boston area for her to take a job in the
| northern hinterlands of NH.
|
| It's been an interesting year to say the least: A lot of the
| opportunities I was hoping to have to publicize my business have
| been canceled (craft shows and fairs, open studios, etc) due to
| the pandemic. I'm fortunate to have brought a couple of paid
| commissions with me when we moved. Owing to the pandemic, the
| schedule on them has been protracted. I was going back and forth
| to Boston to fulfill a teaching obligation until early March.
| Then the pandemic hit, and all of my suppliers and my shared shop
| space[1] closed down for a couple months.
|
| Just before the shared shop closed, I grabbed my workbench and
| set it up in my living room. The place we're renting doesn't have
| a basement, garage, or anything resembling shop space, so that
| was the least bad option. I bought wood for a couple of house
| projects, and got going working _entirely_ by hand. The first
| project was a desk for my partner. I built it following the
| design for a staked work table from the Anarchist 's Design
| Book[2]. She's been working at it since, and we've been doing our
| best to manage my noise and her Zoom calls separated by perhaps
| as much as 20 feet.
|
| Sometime in late May or early June things started opening up
| slowly. I bought wood for those projects, and the shared shop
| space began operating with extremely limited hours. I've wrapped
| up those couple of projects, and honestly, the next thing on my
| TODO list is to spend some time doing some business planning, re-
| shooting some of my earlier work, and updating my website[3]. Bad
| timing on the pithy github comment on my part; had I known it'd
| hit the top of HN, I'd have made it _after_ I updated the
| website!
|
| If you're in the Boston area and would like to see some of my
| work, the Cabinet on Stand shown on my website is on display at
| the Fuller Craft Museum[4] in Brockton, MA through November 8th.
| It feels a bit weird to mention it, but that piece is also for
| sale through the museum. Purchasing it supports not only me, but
| also the museum. They were closed for a long time this year as a
| result of the pandemic, and like a great many of our cultural
| institutions, they're hurting. They laid off the curator for the
| exhibit my piece is in due to budget issues.
|
| If I can offer everybody only one thing to get out of this, it's
| that our cultural institutions live a fairly fragile and perilous
| existence, particularly the smaller ones. The Wharton Esherick
| Museum[5] in the Philadelphia area is also taking a beating.
| Please, please, please take some time to support these
| institutions. A lot of our shared culture doesn't make it to the
| MFA. Those headline institutions show a limited subset of stuff;
| there's so much of value in the smaller museums, galleries, and
| historical societies.
|
| [0] http://furnituremakingclasses.com
|
| [1] https://claremontmakerspace.org
|
| [2] https://lostartpress.com/collections/books/products/the-
| anar...
|
| [3] https://longwalkwoodworking.com
|
| [4] https://fullercraft.org/event/2020-biennial-members-
| exhibiti...
|
| [5] https://whartonesherickmuseum.org
| bmc7505 wrote:
| Where in NH are you based? Anywhere near Whitefield/Lancaster?
| imglorp wrote:
| Wow, nice stuff. This resonates because I'm pondering the same
| move, have a small shop, and have started with small
| traditional projects. I even live 20 minutes from Wharton
| Sherick but have never been, thanks for the links!
| fmajid wrote:
| Reminds me of the hardware engineer in Tracy Kidder's _The Soul
| of a New Machine_ who burns out and resigns with:
|
| > I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit
| of time shorter than a season.
| lightelement wrote:
| I'd love to know your thoughts on woodworking in a living
| space. Before the pandemic I took classes at a local art
| school. I'm considering upgrading to a two bedroom apartment
| (in a large apartment building) and using the spare bedroom as
| a workshop. I'm guessing I'll have to go all (or almost all)
| hand tools. Do you think this is feasible, or will I regret it?
| I'm worried about dust management and noise for my neighbors.
| Chiseling in particular seems like it would reverberate through
| the building.
|
| Any tips would be much appreciated!
| wrycoder wrote:
| Use hand tools, when possible.
|
| If not, use Fesstool tools and one of their dust extractors.
|
| I built a wood bed for my truck in the living room some
| decades ago. And also a clavichord. Hand tools generate
| shavings, but little dust.
|
| I have a very good collection of hand tools in a large tool
| chest. And, I have a very solid, large workbench. Both of
| these look great in the living room when not in use.
| 2mol wrote:
| I did basically this for a year, except in my main bedroom
| (didn't have a spare). You're right to be worried about dust
| and noise.
|
| For the dust I had a pretty powerful airfilter, but I would
| still have clouds of dust coming out of my pillow/sheets.
|
| I would have said that general noise during the day was ok in
| my case, but that was before everybody worked from home.
|
| For chiseling you can actually do a lot without hammering. If
| your chisels are sharp enough, you can push them through the
| wood for most techniques. That's what I did when I worked in
| the evenings.
|
| It helps to have a very heavy workbench that doesn't move too
| much. Sawing still makes noise though, and planing kinda does
| too.
|
| All in all, less than ideal, but for me it was great for a
| while! It really depends on what size and type of things you
| want to make. Feel free to specify and I can give more
| details.
|
| I think it makes sense to explore other options as well:
| renting a garage, finding a community workshop, etc.
| lightelement wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughts. Were your dust clouds the result
| of hand tools, or were you using power tools? I've mostly
| used power tools, but my impression is that hand tools
| might make less of a mess? Hopefully being in a separate
| room I can isolate things...
|
| That's good to know you can sometimes get by chiseling
| without a hammer! At the moment I'm interested in making a
| Danish Modern style chair, likely in walnut or oak.
| ojilles wrote:
| Hey, while you are reshooting the pictures, have a look at
| David Hobby's material over at Strobist [0], especially the
| lighting 101 series [1]. Hope you find them as helpful as I
| did!
|
| [0] https://strobist.blogspot.com/ [1]
| https://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/lighting-101.html
| gigatexal wrote:
| Kudos to you for having the wherewithal to make such a choice
| for your quality of life. The rest of us should take this
| opportunity to think how our requests and demands on OSS
| maintainers are perceived and be more empathetic: if you aren't
| paying for something you can't demand anything get done, this
| after all, is a collective effort of hackers working toward
| some community good. If you or a company directly benefits from
| a project monetarily think about supporting those projects --
| but even then you don't get to demand anything. ... something
| something, honey vs vinegar or the however the saying goes.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Replying to say that I'm heading to the shop. If anybody has
| questions, I'll check back in in the evening (US Eastern) and
| do my best to answer them then.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I know at this point it's basically echoing what others have
| said, but wow! That chandelier is amazing, I've never seen
| anything like it!
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| What made you interested in woodworking? My father retired a
| short while ago (though not from software) and took up
| woodworking.
|
| How do you price items?
|
| How do you handle shipping, or is the work all local?
| vthommeret wrote:
| Some really beautiful pieces. Some unsolicited advice... if you
| haven't already considered Etsy (I used to work there) it can
| be a great place to sell your work.
|
| I've bought a lot of furniture (some custom) on Etsy and people
| have been surprised by that / think there isn't necessarily
| high quality work there.
|
| In addition to the larger pieces, if you have work that's
| easily repeatable you can make a lot with e.g. tissue boxes or
| cutting boards, etc...
|
| For example this shop made these beautiful boxes with brass
| inlays and I was able to commission a custom box with dividers
| for individual tea packets:
| https://www.etsy.com/shop/SawdustProductionsCo/sold
| biztos wrote:
| Great comment!
|
| Two things I noticed a couple years ago:
|
| 1. There is a quite expensive furniture maker near where I grew
| up -- in the more "genteel" area of course.
|
| 2. If I still lived there I'd totally shell out three grand for
| one of their chairs!
|
| I've never spent that much on a piece of furniture, but it sure
| looks like it's worth it:
|
| http://ericksonwoodworking.com/furniture/seating/sumi-chair-...
|
| Your work is beautiful and I hope you find many buyers. I
| humbly suggest you include prices on your web site, as many
| people have no idea what handmade furniture costs these days,
| and many of those can actually afford it.
| blueyes wrote:
| Those are some beautiful pieces you've made!
| devilduck wrote:
| You are an inspiration
| genericallyloud wrote:
| I just recently bought the anarchist's design book and toolbox
| book! I'm just just getting into though - haven't built
| anything yet. Need to get tools and set up a shop.
| atonse wrote:
| Good luck with all you're doing. Your work looks incredible. As
| a budding woodworker (I hesitate to even call myself that,
| mainly making boxes and shelves at this point), I can
| appreciate the amount of work that goes into such pieces.
|
| When I look around, I feel woodworking now is what photography
| was 10 years ago to software people. A hobby that lets you get
| away from the computer into the physical world, but still
| tingles all the engineering/math/maker mindset that attracts
| people to software. Although I got into woodworking because of
| my grandfather, I see a lot online of software people doing the
| same just to "get away."
|
| From an economic perspective, I hope you're able to capitalize
| on that trend of people with lots of disposable income willing
| to commission this sort of thing (or even classes), if that's
| partly your intention.
| SamBam wrote:
| Your Cabinet on Stand [1] is gorgeous.
|
| 1.
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/fuller_craft/49837847346/in/al...
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Thank you!
| ohitsdom wrote:
| Seconded! Can you give a ballpark for how much you'd charge
| for a piece like this? Seems like an insane amount of work
| at incredible quality. I want to own it.
| eternalny1 wrote:
| Price is on this one ...
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/fuller_craft/49837855711/in
| /al...
| cinntaile wrote:
| It looks great, it looks like it's priced as art and not
| furniture. Is this a correct interpretation?
| dewey wrote:
| A lot of "designer" furniture is priced in that range so
| that doesn't seem that unusual especially if you consider
| all the manual working hours going into a piece.
| p1necone wrote:
| I suspect once you price in the hours of labor required
| to make something like that by hand the price actually
| seems sensible.
| justinclift wrote:
| Looks pretty cool. :)
|
| Have you tried out CNC stuff yet? It seems to be a popular
| thing for people into woodworking too. :)
| RonanTheGrey wrote:
| This is probably one of my favorite comments in the history of
| HN :)
| foureyedraven wrote:
| Do you have social media where we can keep up with your work?
|
| Congrats on the exciting career change, hope you're staying
| sane while out in the country!
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The running joke at my old company was "It will be done, assuming
| this time next quarter I haven't quit this job to assume this
| chaotic world of software development for the predictable life of
| the humble dairy farmer."
|
| ... the joke, of course, being that there's nothing predictable
| about being a humble dairy farmer... Cows get sick, years are
| better or worse, and the market is constantly fluctuating.
| ki66le9its wrote:
| I too make things out of wood these days; although I am hoping to
| get back to software soon. time to go warm up the shop...
| luord wrote:
| My last full time job made me consider leaving too. Alas, since I
| have no other marketable skills (or any type of skills) beyond
| software development, for now[1], and I realized I just disliked
| that particular project and its process, not software in general,
| I'll continue for a few years more.
|
| [1]: I'm learning and practicing creative writing, hoping to
| publish books some day.
| christiansakai wrote:
| The grass is always greener on the other side. Let's see.
|
| I have 3 degrees in unrelated field (Industrial Eng, Theology,
| and CompSci), and worked in on a few careers, white collar jobs
| like being a sales engineer at a biodiesel company, helping
| running a cafe for a family business, being a church
| administrator before the current software engineering. I also
| worked on low paid labor jobs such as laundry, dry cleaning,
| deli, restaurant. All with their own physical risk, tiredness,
| stress from customers, etc.
|
| The current job which is software engineering is far better than
| any other jobs that I had. It is pretty stable, great income,
| great benefits, stress free, not limited to space and time, can
| WFH, more flexible schedule, etc. I like software engineering a
| lot so I did side projects on the side, learning various
| programming languages, programming techniques, reading
| programming books, etc.
|
| Now I am bored of all of those as well, and right now just
| focusing on my hobbies. I am focusing a lot on my musical skills
| right now, and that's the only thing that captivates my mind
| daily, not programming books, programming podcasts, etc anymore.
| Software is just another job. I'm not changing the world, not
| saving lives, not helping solving global warming or pollution or
| the declining flora and fauna that we have, or ending wars. It's
| riddled with churn mentality in this industry, politics, etc.
|
| Somedays I dream of making it in the music industry, or creating
| a small cafe with aquascapes that I create as decorations, or not
| having to work at software anymore, or not having to work because
| I need income.
|
| But in the end, I still work as SWE. The grass is always greener
| on the other side, and that depends on one's position in life
| like age, economic situation, etc. Right now I don't have the
| luxury of leaving my SWE jobs, and no I don't do this for myself,
| but for my family members.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| wait... your software engineering job is stress free? That
| surprises me.
| nicbou wrote:
| Every software engineering job I've had was stress-free. In
| 10 years, I never had to do overtime. Quite frankly, if
| something can't get done in 40 hours per week, that's not my
| problem. That's the company's problem, and I will work on
| that problem in the hours I agreed to sell to said company.
| christiansakai wrote:
| Yeah it is. Maybe stress is relative for people.
| war1025 wrote:
| I've been in software for a decade now and I would
| absolutely call my job stress free.
|
| My broader family is almost entirely working class though,
| so maybe it's just a matter of perspective.
| marcinzm wrote:
| As I see it, it's mainly a question of what you look for when
| interviewing. If you look for money then you'll likely get
| more stress. If you look for calm then you'll likely get less
| stress. You'll also get less money but nothing in life give
| you everything. I've turned down multiple offers when it was
| visible they valued workaholism or had bad processes.
| christiansakai wrote:
| This.
|
| I am paid pretty well at my company right now, but there
| are always my colleague that I know get a higher offer for
| some other role. I can choose to get salty about it or just
| try to transition with that role but with less satisfaction
| and more learning.
|
| There are more to life than just chasing money. No matter
| who you are, peasants or kings, you are only given a
| limited time to live. We trade 40 hrs of our life for some
| numbers on the computer that can go up or down, meanwhile
| the rich just gained a lot of money due to this pandemic.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Yeah. You don't need to make bad money if you want a lack
| of stress but generally the difference between good money
| and great money is going to be a lot of stress.
| christiansakai wrote:
| Yes in the another profession but thankfully not so much
| in SWE world.
| fraktl wrote:
| Software development is not your calling, it's just another job
| for you. A very good job, but still: just a job. I'm not
| critcizing you, just stating how I understood what you wrote.
|
| Difference between something that's your calling (music,
| judging by what you wrote) and a job is that you don't invest
| emotion into the job.
|
| When you invest emotion into what you do, when your craft is
| sacred to you - then you experience disappointment when you see
| other people in the field not caring as much as you do.
|
| When you follow the industry and the trends and when you
| understand that most of what you get to read is fake - a huge
| pile of disappointment creeps up. I'm in the same boat as the
| OP, and oddly enough - I'm preparing for the same line of work
| - woodworking :)
|
| Honestly, I can't wait to leave this world of software
| development where most of what's available is fashion or just
| pure bullshit sprinkled with lies, but I have to pay the bills
| and mortgage so I can't afford to leave right now.
|
| It's not about grass being greener on the other side, it's
| about not having to put up with other people who are often dead
| wrong and completely impervious to any kind of reasoning.
| Leaving software development business does not necessarily mean
| one stops writing software. I can't see myself stopping writing
| code or thinking in code when I finally leave IT, but I can't
| wait when I get to stop to absorb fake content from linkedin
| and when I don't have to read emails that are 99% white noise
| and 1% useful information.
| christiansakai wrote:
| Indeed, it is not my calling. I think earlier in my career I
| thought that way. But I also don't know what my calling in
| life anyway for now.
|
| I think I'm pretty good at my craft because I spent time
| after work honing it. I am in the same boat as OP and you,
| already went through the disillusionment, but I have other
| things that satisfy my creative side and physical side,
| besides I need the money as well.
|
| In regards to social media, I stayed away from Facebook,
| Twitter, Linkedin (pretty satisfied with my current job I
| don't need other roles). I still use Reddit, Youtube, and
| probably other visual/audio social media for reasons related
| to hobbies.
| [deleted]
| fabien-h wrote:
| I really want to do this too!
|
| But a wife, two daughters and a mortgage... I love them more than
| my life, but think a lot about your life before you attach a
| millstone to your feet.
| [deleted]
| notacoward wrote:
| Totally on board with not building software any more. In fact, at
| 55 this is my last week of it. For real. Basically, everything
| sucks more about building software nowadays more than I remember
| it sucking before, from the mere mechanics of navigating through
| an obscenely large pseudo-object-oriented codebase to the WRONG
| constructs/idioms people use to build distributed systems to the
| way software is packaged and deployed to the horrific attitude
| toward testing or documentation to the biased interview processes
| to ... I could go on forever. I know _some_ of that perception is
| mere nostalgia or other effects of my own age, but by no means
| all and I honestly feel less than half.
|
| Building software was never simple or easy. We've gained a lot of
| knowledge that makes it easier because you don't have to build
| quite as much from scratch, but we've more than made up for that
| by making it unnecessarily hard in every other way. Taking the
| simplest change from idea to production involves _so_ many steps,
| and not even the steps that assure it 's correct or maintainable.
| It's feeding the beast we built ourselves rather than the one
| born of necessity.
|
| I sincerely feel bad for people who have to stay in it. Some day
| most of you will get over the dollar-induced Stockholm Syndrome
| that seems universal among junior developers, but by then you'll
| be stuck on that train to hell. Good luck to you.
| Accujack wrote:
| Nice. Best of luck in your future endeavors.
|
| Me, I'm about to turn 50, and I don't see being able to retire
| until... well, ever at this point.
|
| I might change careers some time, but I doubt I'll entirely
| give up on software. Maybe just do it for fun.
| holtkam2 wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| I think it's worth mentioning that I'm 27 and almost 4 years
| into my career in software. I am convinced I have the best job
| of any of my friends, or just about anyone I meet at my age. I
| make more money and work less hours than >95% of my (all
| college-educated) friend circle. I don't feel stressed at work
| ever. My team supports me, my manager encourages me to expand
| my skillset to whatever interests me.
|
| My career trajectory is looking phenomenal, and I find software
| development generally fun & rewarding (although certainly not
| all the time!).
|
| But who knows, maybe that will all change by the time I'm 55
| and I'll hate that I spend my career in software dev. Seems
| unlikely.
| meshenna wrote:
| I saw this joke in a thread somewhere:
|
| _Junior engineer: thinks they know everything_
|
| _Intermediate engineer: thinks they know nothing_
|
| _Senior engineer: hates computers_
| mumblemumble wrote:
| After having read the article _Built to Last_ [1] from the
| latest issue of Logic Magazine over my morning coffee, and
| spending breakfast pondering my coming day of figuring out if
| we can disentangle some stuff I'm working on from the
| increasingly complex and inscrutable Big Data ecosystem, and if
| it's even going to be possible to get management to approve it
| when the requests to stick RSS feeds into DBMSes are forever
| piling up, and generally thinking about my own mid-career
| situation, and, this comment really hit me like a punch in the
| gut.
|
| This quote from _Built to Last_ is going to stick with me for a
| while: "... many people don't even see the preference for
| complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one's
| status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that
| assist newcomers."
|
| I'm not leaving the industry any time soon. At least in the
| abstract, I do like what I do for a living, and believe that
| there are still some habitable spaces left in the field of
| informatics. But there's a part of me that is beginning to
| wonder if the best and most comprehensive literary (sort of)
| analogy for modern software engineering culture isn't the Orks
| from Warhammer 40,000.
|
| [1]:https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/
| someguydave wrote:
| Alternatively, one could take the view that low-abstraction
| languages are designed to turn programmers into replaceable
| parts. This benefits the "low-quality for low-price" software
| vendor culture at the expense of programmer's pay and status
| and also at the expense of the customer's ownership and
| quality experience.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| This attitude, both from the business side and from the
| developer side, has always struck me as an egregious
| misapprehension about where the value in software
| development lies.
|
| It's never about the code. It's about getting the job done,
| and the code is just a tool for getting it done. And
| getting the job done is ultimately about domain expertise,
| or design skill, or engineering acumen, or any number of
| more abstract skills. When developers get all protectionist
| about complex technical tooling instead of focusing on
| perfecting their ability to get the actual job done, that's
| a moral own goal. It doesn't challenge the idea that
| developer skills are inherently low-value and replaceable,
| it takes the idea as a given, and asks, "OK, since we're
| inherently low-value and replaceable, how can we
| artificially make it harder to replace us?"
|
| Me, I don't want to respond to the idea that I'm just a
| code monkey by trying to be the fanciest code monkey
| imaginable. I don't want to be a code monkey in the first
| place.
| martinhath wrote:
| In case anyone is inclined to go read the article, let me
| (potentially) save you a click with the following excerpts
| from it:
|
| > the last thing many male computer scientists entering the
| field wanted was to make the field easier to enter or code
| easier to read, which might undermine their claims to
| professional and "scientific" expertise.
|
| > Take the C programming language: it was created in 1972,
| but as one of the current COBOL programmers I interviewed
| pointed out, nobody makes fun of it or calls it an "old dead
| language"
|
| > There's an old joke among programmers: "If it was hard to
| write, it should be hard to read."
|
| > it's perhaps no wonder that a committee-designed language
| meant to be easier to learn and use
|
| And, of course, the quote from the comment to which I'm
| replying:
|
| > many people don't even see the preference for complex
| languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one's status
| by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that
| assist newcomers.
|
| If any of these quotes even resembles something you _might_
| think about this field, maybe you'll get something out of
| reading the whole article. Personally, these quotes are so
| backwards to me that the author could just as well have
| written "Programmers can breathe under water" or "grass is
| the cornerstone of a well balanced diet".
| notacoward wrote:
| > "... many people don't even see the preference for complex
| languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one's status
| by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that
| assist newcomers."
|
| Don't forget the ones who jump onto a _new_ language or
| framework so that by dint of experience they can be the
| gatekeepers for the next generation. This was staggeringly
| apparent with both Java and Go, each in their time.
| codazoda wrote:
| This is interesting, and it may be partially true, but I'm
| not convinced it's malice, as that statement seems to
| indicate.
|
| Last year I wrote a small book called "Splash of Code", which
| teaches newcomers to code (in JavaScript) in a way that
| similar to the way I learned 30 years ago. I selected
| JavaScript because the barrier to entry is low, you just need
| a browser. Many programming ecosystems are daunting to setup
| these days but there are still some easy systems we can use
| to introduce newcomers without all the modern complexity.
|
| Browsers have come a very long way in the last 10 years and
| are a pretty amazing platform for development. Once you learn
| a little bit you can start to write amazing software for a
| cross-platform worldwide audience.
| leothekim wrote:
| > Building software was never simple or easy
|
| I think it's gotten a whole lot simpler in the past 10 years.
| People used to have to rack their own hardware, install PDUs,
| check temperature gauges, plug wires, configure the switches,
| setup RAID and backups, make sure you have that serial cable
| plugged in so you can telnet in in case the switches don't
| work, and lock the data center doors without forgetting their
| keys back in the day. And this is before actually developing
| and deploying your application software.
|
| Now you can just buy a bunch of db cycles and scale to >10000
| qps without batting an eye (though you've got to watch your
| wallet).
|
| I think because some of the hard stuff got a lot easier, the
| easier stuff got unnecessarily complex. And there are so many
| ways to scale things that some of these constructs and idioms
| used over time stopped being used because they mattered less if
| you could just turn a knob to scale your crappy code.
| senko wrote:
| > People used to have to rack their own hardware, install
| PDUs, check temperature gauges, plug wires, configure the
| switches, setup RAID and backups, make sure you have that
| serial cable plugged in so you can telnet in in case the
| switches don't work, and lock the data center doors without
| forgetting their keys back in the day.
|
| Yes, and other people did this job, not programmers. People
| that loved tinkering with hardware, low-level OS stuff,
| networking, etc. We even had a name for them: "system
| administrators" and "network administrators".
|
| Nowadays everyone's expected to tweak CSS and configure
| kubernetes in parallel.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| We still exist. Our job titles just changed and more
| responsibility was put on our plates. Now we do the above
| work, plus manage automation (Jenkins pipelines, Ansible
| playbooks, etc) among other work. Not that the increased
| responsibility is an issue, just that the title makes us
| seem fancier than we are. I think that is part of the
| problem, everyone needs some ridiculous title now, a
| "lowly" sysadmin gets looked at sideways.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| That does depend in some areas of technical /systems
| programming back then you normally developers where
| expected to know the basics and be able to do all that -
| the original full stack developer OSI 1-7.
|
| Trouble is they tended to be interesting but poorly paid
| jobs
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Yes. Although I worn that and other hats before and often
| together, I disliked being a sysadmin. I don't like being
| on call, it causes me to wake up at two in the morning to
| check a website. I do not like worrying about when to
| install a new patch.
|
| So when my job title switched away from programmer to some
| kind of DevOps thing and I was shoved _back_ into the sys
| admin role, I was unhappy about it.
| notacoward wrote:
| > People used to have to rack their own hardware, install
| PDUs, check temperature gauges, plug wires, configure the
| switches
|
| What you describe is what used to be considered sysadmin
| work. I too did quite a bit of it, but most of it went to
| people who specialized in those things. And no, I don't do
| any of it now. On any given day I'll probably deal with
| machines in at least a dozen geographic locations across two
| continents, and if I tried to enter any of them I'd be
| stopped at the door - no, at the _gate_ before I even got to
| the buildings. Instead, I write code to interact with the
| deployment system and the provisioning system and the
| multiple monitoring systems and the automatic remediation
| system and so on. Is it better? It _scales_ better, but as a
| matter of personal satisfaction and avoiding fury at other
| people 's crappy code I think I'd rather be plugging in
| cables and configuring switches.
|
| > I think because some of the hard stuff got a lot easier,
| the easier stuff got unnecessarily complex.
|
| There's a lot of truth to that, and I don't think we
| necessarily disagree on the outcome. However we got here,
| whichever specific things make modern software development
| more unpleasant, it seems that it _is_ more unpleasant than
| it used to be.
| leothekim wrote:
| Re: the sysadmin work, app developers have to worry a whole
| lot less about it, oftentimes not at all. In startups,
| that's a huge plus. I still remember servers going down
| because some workloads were destroying the RAID arrays s.t.
| that they were drawing down too much power and overloading
| the PDUs in their racks. I ended up having to hardwire the
| distribution of jobs to other servers while we (actually it
| was me, I was at a startup) got the PDUs upgraded by
| talking to a sysadmin on the phone. (Amusingly at some
| point we had to fix some DNS while restarting one of the
| boxes so I had to tell the guy what to do by dictating vi
| commands.)
|
| But yeah it's like over time we ended up scaling the
| crappiness of software along with the software itself. At
| the same time, I'm inclined to believe that software
| development at large is in a much better position to solve
| a whole bunch of other problems than ever before. That
| keeps me motivated personally, though I get the
| frustrations for sure.
| kls wrote:
| I think it is funny you mention 10 years because I would
| agree with you, in the last 10 years we corrected a lot of
| the sins that we did in early web dev, but I think the lament
| reaches further back. Move back 25 years ago and it was much
| easier. A kid in his room could singlehandedly write the next
| big thing. Things in a lot of ways where much simpler then,
| it's hard to not look back on that period without a lot of
| nostalgia.
| leothekim wrote:
| I was around 25 years ago pushing bits around SunOS boxes
| and when people were still figuring out CMSes. FTP and
| BBEdit ftw. Definitely some things were simpler, but stuff
| would fall over in a heartbeat. I still think of the day of
| 9/11 when major websites couldn't serve their homepages
| because they were bombarded by traffic.
|
| Kids in their rooms still do write the next big things. The
| difference now is they now raise a ton of money along with
| it. They scale a whole lot further, and much faster. There
| are more entering the engineering profession through Lambda
| School and bootcamps and what not. They also leave around a
| lot of shitty code that usually ends up building some
| business value. Much of this was true back in the day. It's
| just gained a whole lot more momentum IMHO.
| Akronymus wrote:
| > an obscenely large pseudo-object-oriented codebase
|
| It shocks me, just how often OOP is just not nearly the best
| approach to something. I certainly still lack in experience
| though. But why use OOP for something like putting data from a
| sensor onto a bus? And stuff like that.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| People used to really hate farming too. How do I know this
| isn't more of the same?
| hpen wrote:
| Have you ever worked as a manual laborer? I spent most of my
| life working as a lawn keeper, warehouse laborer, retail
| associate and construction worker. Building software is such a
| breath of fresh air. Even the bullshit that comes with it is
| still better than the day to day bullshit of any of those other
| jobs.
|
| It may not be perfect, but man is it better than what so many
| people do.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I keep saying it. Building software in tech sucks. The process,
| the people who complicate everything, all the unnecessary
| features that bloat the code, spending all your day reviewing
| pull requests, etc. But building software in general is fun.
| For me it's also not so much about the software but about the
| business. When the business motivation is clear and I believe
| in it, then I'm motivated to build software. And when I say
| business motivation it can even mean me wanting to learn
| something.
| fabio8085 wrote:
| I'm in agreement with you that it's about the business and
| having the passion and motivation to solve the problems of
| that business. When I look back on my software career and
| think about the projects where I didn't have an interest in
| solving that particular problem, I would always revert back
| to just learning the technology for the sake of learning. For
| me, just learning and not applying was never as fulfilling as
| doing both.
| jjice wrote:
| I'm sorry you don't enjoy it anymore, but this being your last
| week is pretty great. Enjoy your next endeavors!
| binyu wrote:
| I disagree with you. Today's scenario is certainly much more
| interesting than the post dot-com boom years, maybe not as
| interesting as the very early days of computing, but certainly
| ripe for innovation, and a test-bed for innumerable
| breakthroughs that are yet to come. We are currently living the
| post "Big data" age and advancing fast toward the pre quantum
| computing era, with a renaissance of AI and machine learning
| technologies. Cryptography is ripe for disruption and the past
| years have seen the introduction and deployment of novel
| concepts and semi-old ideas that have finally found application
| with cryptocurrencies and distributed systems. There are
| several projects at the forefront of technology with defined
| goals in mind, and definitely solving real world problems, like
| privacy in cloud computing, for example. Software stacks have
| matured intro fully fledged products and there is plenty of
| choice for every use case, one just need to delve into the
| enormous amount of information available and do his homework.
| Operating systems have also advanced a lot and I love, for one,
| how easy is to operate Ubuntu nowadays, and the level of
| freedom it offers to users. Maybe you need to think a bit
| outside the box? respectfully, have a great one!
| erikbye wrote:
| Software development is like building a house with a hammer
| that continually change its shape and hence how it's used.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I still build software. Every day. I delivered my first
| commercial product in 1978. I cannot recall a day that I've
| never written some form of code. Even if only a line or two.
| Made notes about writing code. Thought about how to solve a
| problem and the code involved.
|
| I don't think I've ever worked a day in my life.
|
| Well, not strictly true, I've had several jobs that start out
| with interesting problems to solve and then became "it's
| another CRUD app." I quickly left those jobs to find other
| work.
|
| I'm not cheap but then I'm not well compensated. I don't make
| FANGMAN income, but I am financially comfortable. I've found
| joy every day in my work, even if there are many days where the
| work in utter frustration, by simply seeking out the kind of
| work that makes me happy. With an interesting problem I will
| work all the hours my mind and body can muster. With a 9-to-5
| "what's the point/what am I learning/this has been done eefore"
| regular work-a-day job there is no amount of money on this
| green Earth that could get me to focus or be happy. Well okay,
| there would be a certain amount, at which point, after 12
| months, I'd quit, take the money and go do a different job that
| pays less but is more interesting.
|
| This course of action isn't for everyone, not everyone has the
| privilege of saying "F __* it! I 'm out." when they are doing
| something they don't find joy in. I've just made sure that I
| never put myself in a position where I couldn't choose that
| course of action. The road has been hard some days, and money
| has been tight more often than I want to recall, and I won't
| die a wealthy man, but I will have had adventures along the way
| that keep me still striving to build software every day.
|
| Footnote: My job last year consisted of writing kernel drivers
| to speed up SSDs. My job at the beginning of this year was
| control a radio controlled car from your cellphone. Then I
| built a dashboard for my home that tracks my phones and my cats
| and the weather. My job, right now, consists of building a
| stupid simple app (with a lot of screens and moving parts) on a
| mobile device that talks to OpenWRT to put a pretty and
| simplified user interface on what is a complex piece of
| software. I've never had to build a mobile app that tries to
| simplify a complex router interface before. It is a learning
| experience. But once I've learned that lesson, I won't be
| building another one. I'll go find something else to do.
|
| Life is what you make it.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| It goes without saying that your feelings are personal ones,
| totally valid, and nobody can really question them.
|
| I'm 20 years behind you, and I don't know what effect that will
| have on my views. But I don't really recognise the picture
| you're painting. Compared to the first steps I took as a
| developer about 15 years ago, almost everything about software
| development seems better to me. I find developing software to
| be easier, more consistent, and less frustrating than it used
| to be. Good development practices--things like testing, CI,
| coding standards and so on--seem more prevalent than they used
| to be. It's easier to get code out to production than it ever
| was. Everything in the ecosystem--like tooling, libraries, and
| services--feel far more open, consistent, and accessible than
| they used to.
|
| I am almost _certain_ that on the whole I spend a far greater
| proportion of my time now actually writing code that _does
| interesting things_ , as opposed to code that hacks together
| some junk to try and make it work with other junk.
|
| I think I'd draw the conclusion that everybody's opinion on how
| the industry works is going to be heavily influenced by their
| individual experiences. Maybe I just enjoy software right now
| because I've now got the technical competence and confidence to
| avoid some of the frustrations that I experienced earlier in my
| career, and in another 20 years I'll be right there with you
| lamenting the state of the industry. Who knows?
| jamesbfb wrote:
| > opposed to code that hacks together some junk to try and
| make it work with other junk.
|
| I think you work for a better company than me :)
| thothamon wrote:
| I started programming on an amateur basis in 1984,
| professionally in 1997. I'm 52 now. My experience is that
| coding has become more and more interesting and pleasant. In
| the early days, I had to deal with under-powered languages
| that either couldn't do certain things or that made them very
| difficult. Then I encountered languages that were much more
| pleasant to use, but had other problems such as not scaling
| well to team-level development -- sometimes even I couldn't
| figure out what I had been doing. Languages are clearer now,
| they make thinking about problems easier, and while this
| issue has not disappeared, it's less bad for me than it used
| to be.
|
| For me, tools, including languages, do matter. I can well
| imagine that programming in Java would be soul-deadening
| (although Java is still better than some languages of the
| past).
|
| Incidentally, I am not dunking on languages of the past. Lisp
| has been around for a long time, as has Smalltalk or Haskell
| or ML. Many of those languages were not accessible to anyone
| without a mainframe or expensive workstation. This situation
| has improved greatly in the past decades, which to me is
| another reason to prefer coding today versus the past.
|
| Obviously, most of us are not able to cherry-pick our toolset
| for work. We use whatever our employer says to use, or
| whatever the demands of our project require. This may be part
| of why many people find coding to be an uninspiring
| experience. Also, the problems that people work on might be
| dull, it's hard to get motivated about a basically tedious
| problem.
|
| Last, it's worth acknowledging that some people just don't
| love coding all that much. It's hard to imagine doing really
| well at something you don't deeply enjoy day in and day out.
| And your passion can change over time: you might really enjoy
| something in one part of your life, and not derive much joy
| from it at another part.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Compared to the first steps I took as a developer about 15
| years ago, almost everything about software development seems
| better to me. I find developing software to be easier, more
| consistent, and less frustrating than it used to be. Good
| development practices--things like testing, CI, coding
| standards and so on--seem more prevalent than they used to
| be. It's easier to get code out to production than it ever
| was. Everything in the ecosystem--like tooling, libraries,
| and services--feel far more open, consistent, and accessible
| than they used to.
|
| All true points.
|
| As an individual developer, if you are working on what you
| want to be working, we are in a great time. You can pick from
| a selection of outstanding tools and we have, for all
| practical purposes, access to infinite hardware.
|
| As a developer that's part of a team... it sucks.
| Expectations are getting ever more unrealistic - probably
| because so many things are quickly done, but other things are
| just as slow or even slower. Most people's jobs consist of
| wiring together 150 libraries across 30 'microservices'
| (which are rarely microservices, but often distributed
| monoliths) and that's after spending a lot of time
| bikeshedding on what the tech stack is supposed to be like.
|
| At least the UML craze seems to have died down.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The challenge is that in most projects, the things that make
| things "better" also hide entire galaxies of technical debt.
| The MongoDB debacle is an example of that problem, as is the
| outcome of Docker (images full of vulnerabilities, difficulty
| in making even the most quotidian tools like strace, etc. run
| easily, converting a known and enforced-common production
| userland environment into a hodgepodge of 'whatever', etc.)
| and so on.
|
| Supportability, risk-mitigation, debuggability, etc. are all
| thrown away in most of today's environments. An awful lot of
| tech companies are running mostly on hope.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'm ~23 years behind GP, and I feel the same way as them
| already. Goes to say, this may be a matter of personality.
|
| There were few and brief moments in my career as a software
| developer when I was truly happy at my work. Most of those
| involved implementing an architecture or algorithm I figured
| out from scratch, or took from scientific literature - either
| as prototype or directly in the product. Sometimes as "hold
| my beer, I got this" moments. But as you can imagine, this is
| maybe 1% of the things I've been doing at various jobs.
|
| From where I sit (a backend developer, thoroughly burned out
| by webdev a couple years ago), most of coding I do is
| _software bureaucracy_. Turn this data into that data,
| ensuring module X and Y get paged in the process. Oh, half of
| the code I 'm about to write is implemented elsewhere -
| quick, figure out how to juggle the dependency graph to
| somehow route control from here to there and back. This data
| I want to convert is not of the right colour - oh, I need to
| pass it through three sets of conversion layers to get back
| essentially the same, but with a correct type tag on it. Etc.
|
| It's utterly and mind-numbingly boring, unless you
| architectured the whole codebase yourself, at which point
| it's somewhat fun because it's _your_ codebase, and who doesn
| 't like their own Rube Goldberg machines?
|
| At this point, I've learned a coping strategy: just forget
| the project scope and focus on your little plot of land.
| Doesn't matter that the software I wrote half of is going to
| help people do exciting stuff with industrial robots. What
| matters is that the customer changed some small and
| irrelevant piece of requirements for the 5th time, and I now
| have to route some data from the front to the back, through
| the _other half of the code_ , written by my co-worker (a
| fine coder, btw.). So a bunch of layers of code bureaucracy
| I'm not familiar with, and discovering which feels like
| learning how to fill tax forms in a foreign country. If I
| start thinking about the industrial robots I'll just get
| depressed, so instead I focus on making the best jump through
| legacy code possible, so that I impress myself and my code
| reviewer (and hopefully make the 6th time I'm visiting this
| pit easier on everyone).
|
| Maybe it's a problem of perceptions. Like in the modern
| military - you join because you think you'll get to fly a
| helicopter and shoot shoulder-mounted rockets for daily
| exercise. You get there and you realize it's just hard
| physical work, a bit of mental abuse, and a lot of doing
| nothing useful in particular (at least until you advance high
| enough or quit). And so I started coding, dreaming I'll be
| lording over pixels on the screens, animating machine golems,
| and helping rockets reach their desired orbits. Instead, I'm
| spending endless days pushing people to simplify the
| architecture, so that I can shove my data through four levels
| of indirection instead of six (and get the software to run
| 10x faster in the process), and all that to rearrange some
| data on the screen that really should've been just given away
| to people on an Excel sheet with a page of instructions
| attached.
|
| (Another thing that annoys me: a lot of software I've seen,
| and some I've worked on, could've been better and more
| ergonomic as an Excel sheet with bunch of macros, and the
| whole reason they're a separate product instead is to silo in
| the data, the algorithm, and to prevent the users from being
| too clever with it. Also because you can't get VC funding for
| an Excel sheet (unless you're Palisade).)
|
| Got a bit ranty here, sorry. I guess my point is: I accept
| the industry is mostly drudgework, but I refuse to accept
| that this is all essential complexity. Somehow, somewhere, we
| got off track, because all this shit is _way harder_ than it
| should be.
| reggieband wrote:
| > I've learned a coping strategy: just forget the project
| scope and focus on your little plot of land.
|
| I get what your are saying and you are getting a lot of
| positive reinforcement about this. I would suggest to you a
| caveat.
|
| I've worked in some orgs where this mentality becomes
| entrenched. In these new-fangled tech startups with people
| changing roles and even companies every two years this
| probably happens less. But I've seen people entrenched into
| their own kingdoms for decades. An individual, or small
| team, creates a moat around their "little plot of land" and
| they become intransigent. This leads to two bad outcomes:
| they resist any change to their systems or process, going
| so far as to obfuscate it to protect it. They also don't
| pay attention to holistic concerns, caring only about
| maintaining some idyllic vision for their own "plot of
| land" to the detriment of any larger objectives.
|
| I think this is a real concern when divisions within a
| larger org compartmentalize around code or system
| boundaries. It is not something to shrug off as if it
| couldn't happen to you.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Thanks for the warning.
|
| Honestly, I've used an unfortunate turn of phrase in my
| original comment. "Your little plot of land" indeed
| implies a fixed, entrenched moat. What I meant was
| something different - the area of code I'm currently
| working on. That may be a different place with every new
| task. My coping mechanism isn't building little kingdoms
| - just focusing on the code a given task involves while
| purposefully forgetting about the global context of the
| application, in order to not think about how minuscule
| and irrelevant the task is to the exciting things the
| company is doing. That context is usually not useful when
| doing the changes I've already planned beforehand, and it
| is emotionally distracting.
| phaedrus wrote:
| I like how you describe focusing on your plot of land as a
| positive coping strategy. I had been doing it instinctively
| (or necessarily), but had thought of it as some kind of
| failing. Your comment makes me feel better about it.
|
| The end goal of software I work on is to help airplanes
| land safely. But actually, I work on the software which
| presents the user interface that displays and sends
| configuration settings to a device on the ground that helps
| achieve that.
|
| So my day to day is figuring out whether two bytes in a
| serial buffer an ad hoc protocol are _actually_ transposed,
| or if the comments are in 20 year old code are lying about
| which is which. Or trying to figure out whether a Win32
| font setting command from two decades ago is still
| interpreted the same on Windows 10.
|
| The rabbit holes and yak shaving just go on and on. I have
| it in me to enjoy doing the work, but when I think about
| how many steps I am removed from the actual airplanes and I
| feel badly for filling my brain and my workday with trivia.
| milesvp wrote:
| Oh man. I've dealt with so much legacy code I avoid
| reading comments as long as possible, they lie more than
| I'd like. Sadly something like bit fields are the one
| place I feel I have to trust the comments god help you if
| they're no longer accurate.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your story!
|
| Yeah, I also initially felt this is some kind of failing
| (I'm usually the "big picture guy"), but ended up
| accepting this as a coping mechanism. It's not that I
| forget about the purpose completely - just learned to
| think about it more when planning and designing, where
| the wider perspective also affects the task in a
| meaningful way. When deep in the codebase, I try to put
| it aside, so that I don't get in a depressive session of
| thinking "why do I have to shovel this garbage back and
| forth to satisfy some low-level requirement, instead of,
| I don't know, talking to people who'll use this on-site
| and getting some real feedback from them?". Rationally, I
| know that shoving garbage is an important part of getting
| quality software that helps others do exciting things.
| Emotionally, I just wish I was in their shoes (probably
| just as much as they wish they were in mine).
|
| You seem a bit more positive than me when facing this
| reality, so I'm glad you have it in you to enjoy this. I
| _almost_ have it, so I find ways to cope, and enjoy the
| opportunities to do something less mundane that come
| every now and then in such projects.
| curryst wrote:
| > but had thought of it as some kind of failing. Your
| comment makes me feel better about it.
|
| I do it as well; I think organizationally it's a failure,
| but it is an effective personal coping mechanism. In
| other words, it's bad for the organization that their
| codebase isn't really a melting pot of different
| developers' ideas but instead, if you zoom in enough you
| notice that it's really a series of hundreds of small
| fiefdoms each with their own slightly different customs
| and semantics. This is what creates that software
| bureaucracy.
|
| For employees though, it works. It's about the only way
| that I really derive any sense of satisfaction from
| software engineering. When I can stand back and say yes,
| this package is mine, I made it and I will take care of
| it. With the melting pot packages it feels more
| ambivalent; some portion of the code is mine. Probably
| not the clever bits, they're probably bugfixes. So I
| don't have enough mindshare to get satisfaction from
| achievement, I don't have the satisfaction of at least
| solving one of the hard problems. No, those people have
| come and gone, and I'm left with the shale oil of
| satisfaction: fixing bugs, writing unit tests, and adding
| documentation. Like shale oil, the joy it brings is very
| close to the effort it takes to extract it. This isn't
| the "I accidentally hit an oil vein while digging a
| garden" joy of really getting to solve something.
|
| Some people derive a lot of joy from doing things that
| help others (like unit tests, bug fixes and
| documentation); I'm unfortunately not one of them.
| Sometimes I wonder if it isn't at least partially because
| it's so hard to feel the impact. I know HN hates the idea
| of gameification, but I wonder if it couldn't be applied
| to good effect here. If someone could make an integration
| with CI, and with major editors, we could scrape data
| regarding how many times your unit tests have caught
| bugs, and how many times your function/class
| documentation has been viewed. There could be a
| leaderboard for people that are into that. But for me,
| just the raw numbers is enough. "Unit tests you have
| written have exposed 137 bugs in PRs, and documentation
| you have written has been viewed 138,476 times" would be
| a huge motivator. It gives me that warm and fuzzy "I
| actually productively contributed" feeling. Right now I
| get nothing back; I have no idea if anyone has ever read
| the documentation I spent hours writing, or if my unit
| tests have caught any issues.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| I resonate with this rant very strongly!
| notacoward wrote:
| > who doesn't like their own Rube Goldberg machines?
|
| Love that. Yes, the 1% (of which I've been a part) often
| get to control both the structure and rate of change for a
| large codebase, and in perfecting the fit to themselves
| they almost inevitably make the experience worse for
| everyone else.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Right. And I'm not angry at the person who drives the
| shape of the codebase; working with code designed around
| a different philosophy than your own is something that
| one can get used to. But I do feel that the large
| codebases I've been dealing with were often _way_ too
| large for what they 're doing - even though I couldn't
| always pinpoint what was superfluous. It's probably just
| entropy at work, but I can't stop thinking - there must
| be a better way!
| resonious wrote:
| I definitely agree. It's quite easy to look at a large
| codebase and feel like it's way more complex than it
| needs to be. That line of thinking often leads to
| rewrites, and in my experience rewrites often lead to
| newfound understanding of why the codebase was complex in
| the first place.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| True. I've learned to resist the urge to rewrite code
| just because it feels too ugly/complex to me - except in
| the cases where I know I can get tangible benefits
| (performance, better API) and the scope of rewrite is
| limited and guarded by extensive tests. It's true that
| some of the cruft accrues because of changing
| requirements and the ongoing process of learning that is
| a good chunk of our work.
|
| And yet accepting that, I _still_ can 't shake the
| feeling that things are more complex than they should be.
| That also applies to the code I'm writing myself (which
| is immune from the "rewrite because I could do it better"
| urge)!
| Bahamut wrote:
| I suspect it is all about perspective - I entered software
| development out of desperation for any career tract job out
| of grad school 8 years ago, experiencing 2.5 years of a
| desperate job search while enlisting in the Marine Corps
| Reserve in the interim. I was ecstatic that I entered a
| profession where I can solve problems, and I'm still very
| happy I can do so today, even while having grinded up to
| senior at a FAANG.
|
| I no longer code outside of work though & found a happy
| balance of learning on the job with my productivity. I find
| the amount I do get to spend coding also has gone down - a
| lot of my time is spent mentoring, in meetings, writing
| planning docs, and just thinking about projects, or
| occasionally researching what's the best paradigm for my
| problem. I am ok with this, as I am taking more joy in
| being a leader than directly coding necessarily. I
| recognize not everyone shares the same perspective though.
| [deleted]
| Igelau wrote:
| We're all on the great curve of programmer productivity
| through the ages. All we can see are the local maximums and
| minimums we've encountered.
|
| From my journey on the chart, things have only gotten better
| since the time I crashed a C++ compiler just because I was
| using std::map.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| _I 'm 20 years behind you_
|
| Me too. And all I can do is point at Javascript in webpages.
| Which, as a Java dev (if I can still call myself that 15
| years into doing all sorts of other stuff too), I want
| nothing to do with but somehow get dragged into all the time.
|
| I can really relate with the idea that we're feeding the
| beast we built rather than the one borne of necessity.
| Unfortunately, which I'm sure the latter still exists, it's
| the former that always seems to pay the bills.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I'm at the end of my software development life cycle, but
| I've got the opposite perspective on java vs javascript.
| There's just so much boiler plate and unnecessary typing to
| implement solutions in java relative to javascript. The
| amount of stuff I can accomplish per line of code is
| significantly higher than any other language I've worked
| with, with possible exception being python.
| blueterminal wrote:
| I completely agree. Docker, amazing frameworks (Laravel,
| Django, ReactJS etc.), git, CI, amazing IDEs, etc. It's
| absolutely magical compared to what we had 15 years ago.
| Entry level is much higher though for sure, you definitely
| need to learn and know a lot. But once you do know certain
| things at a certain level, you become a very powerful
| individual.
| lmarcos wrote:
| And here it lays the paradox. All the tools you have
| mentioned have little to do with programming (one
| individual solving problems by writing code). The tools you
| mentioned have to do with software engineering (a bunch of
| individuals solving problems by writing code, plus a bunch
| of constraints).
|
| The joy is in programming, not in software engineering. At
| least that's how I interprete the GitHub comment (and all
| these stories about developers that cannot take it any more
| and burn out).
| genidoi wrote:
| I think it's easy to forget that modern tooling
| (+AWS/GCP/Azure) let's one dev match or exceed the
| productivity of 15 developers and a couple of PMs in
| 2005.
| mattmanser wrote:
| It's a laughable claim to say one developer has replaced
| 15, and obviously not true. The vast majority of code was
| business logic and still is.
|
| Today's 'process' is no more efficient than, say,
| deploying rails to heroku in 2007. And even before that,
| you'd spend half a day writing an automatic deployment
| script, and then deployments would take a couple of
| clicks and you'd never think about it again.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| That's a very specific meaning, like in terms of scaling
| maybe? But in terms of actually meaningful problems
| solved for end users... But there very nature large scale
| systems aren't very common, but everyone is chasing that
| unicorn startup which can serve 10 million users; so
| scalable APIs are more "practical" then simple workflows
| phkahler wrote:
| Scalability seems overhyped. If you write small efficient
| systems they can handle a lot of work. If you use big
| clunky frameworks that convert simple things into map-
| reduce style problems of course you're going to care
| about scalability and how much your AWS bill is going to
| be.
| ditonal wrote:
| I could not agree more.
|
| In many technical interviews, they want to talk about
| "scalability", using fancy big data software for
| horizontal scalability etc
|
| But I also know from experience that many, many of these
| problems would be more elegantly solved by more
| traditional tools like Postgres, especially since servers
| have gotten more powerful, the cloud service options more
| plentiful and reliable, and the software more optimized.
| The "scalable" approach can lead to massive amounts of
| wasted person hours unless you're sure you really need
| it. But if you say, "just use RDS or CloudSQL, or maybe
| BigQuery", you get perceived as a newb by the 24 year old
| who just got his MS doing Spark work on toy problems.
| oalae5niMiel7qu wrote:
| I spent all day today and Friday just trying to get a
| Google Cloud Composer project to run locally. I'm still
| waiting for that increased productivity that modern
| tooling supposedly grants me.
| SahAssar wrote:
| I'm not sure if you think all devs 15 years ago where
| stupid or all devs today are awesome, but either way I'd
| say you're wrong.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| He means that tools have improved.
| SahAssar wrote:
| If tooling means a 15+x improvement then it seems like it
| is one or the other.
| blueterminal wrote:
| I don't need to worry about many many trivial things I
| had to worry about before these tools, and now I can
| actually work on the problem I'm trying to solve almost
| immediately.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| For some people solving business problems is boring. But
| tinkering with those things that you're calling trivial
| is what brings joy.
| pdimitar wrote:
| You and me both.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Is that true tho? I mean, I love programming, but I hate
| React. I love thinking about data structures and their
| relationships, but I don't like Docker. I spent hours
| thinking about how can I solve a problem (just for fun)
| and I absolutely don't need GCP nor Azure. I like coming
| up with cool algorithms (or reading about them) but I
| find Laravel (or Django) really unelegant and not worth
| my time.
| ativzzz wrote:
| It depends on the problem you're solving of course. All
| of these tools are built to be able to solve larger, more
| complex problems more effectively. You are still welcome
| to ignore all of them and write a cool program for
| yourself for fun, just don't expect to get paid for it.
|
| Ultimately, we get paid to solve business problems, not
| to have fun with programming.
| stevedonovan wrote:
| This is of course true. But is a particular fashionable
| technology the best way to solve that business problem,
| or is yet another layer of fun? I suspect that being able
| to deliver simple scalable solutions without bandwagon
| dependencies is going to be a differentiator, in
| _business terms_
| neya wrote:
| > Compared to the first steps I took as a developer about 15
| years ago, almost everything about software development seems
| better to me.
|
| If you mean this is better, I hardly agree with you:
|
| https://twitter.com/thomasfuchs/status/810885087214637057?la.
| ..
| z3t4 wrote:
| Thats actually clean. Throw in some PHP, more JS transpiler
| code, and CSS frameworks into that screenshot and were
| talking.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| I don't think that this _absolutely microscopic slice of
| the overall software development ecosystem_ is really
| representative of anything interesting.
|
| But yes - I do think React is a pretty good approach to UIs
| compared with many things I've used in the past. There are
| good and interesting discussions to be had about the
| different possible techniques that can be used; this isn't
| an entry into one of them.
| klodolph wrote:
| Honestly, this IS better.
|
| Separating the HTML, JS, and CSS is an approach that works
| up to a certain size/complexity app. When I'm working on
| some functionality, I need to be able to understand the
| relevant parts of the HTML, JS, and CSS. With a smaller
| app, one person can more or less grok the code base well
| enough to find everything they need. With simpler apps, you
| might have fairly uniform or boring styling and not a ton
| of CSS rules. If I'm setting something up with Bootstrap
| and just getting it working, I can probably ignore CSS for
| a LONG time.
|
| If you're working on something larger and more complicated,
| you really want to have all of the HTML, JS, and CSS for a
| particular piece of functionality right in the same place
| so you don't have to go searching for it. It's how you
| survive in large/complex apps. You'll think, "The margins
| in this box are too large" and you want to be able to fix
| that without trying to grok some massive set of CSS rules,
| and when you do get the CSS rules that you want, you want
| to know that they'll be delivered to the client--something
| that is easy if you deliver all of your CSS rules to every
| client, but hard if you want to split your CSS.
|
| I think the only real tragedy here is that too many people
| are copying "the way Facebook does it" without wondering if
| Facebook might have a completely different set of
| priorities than they do.
| gagege wrote:
| I agree. I came to realize a few years ago how arbitrary
| the HTML, CSS, JS separation is. It makes sense if you
| think of the web as simply a set of documents (with
| progressive enhancement and all that), but we've gone way
| beyond that metaphor. If you're building a web app,
| separating the three is cargo-culting.
| wakawaka1 wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I think it's amazing to see CICD tools which make it super
| easy and quick to deploy web apps-- such as Vercel, for
| example.
|
| Simply by booting up a github project, and starting from a
| template, I can deploy a SSL-secured site within minutes-- as
| a frontend example.
|
| On the backend, using infrastructure-as-code solutions, to
| again, "templatize" a starting point, such as an AWS service
| or set of connected AWS services.
|
| Whereas up until recently, I'd typically go rent a chunk of a
| server to run Linux, and setup NGINX-related security
| features myself. Not that tough, especially the more I
| learned NGINX. However the 3-click deployment via tools like
| Vercel take away so much headache. That said, at times, I
| think it's can be necessary and easier to simply setup a
| linux server, so as to have full control over the process.
|
| It's just nice to have the additional options.
|
| I love how much the software-supporting ecosystem has
| evolved.
|
| It lets me focus more on development, and less on devops. And
| that what I want, as a developer-- To get to coding ASAP, and
| not worry about tangential concerns-- as a matter of
| specializing.
|
| (Disclaimer: I only have about 2-3 years of professional
| experience, but prior to that, was teaching myself for about
| 5 years off and on. In that timespan of 7-8 years, I feel so
| assured and emotionally secure given the reduction of
| headaches due to the fact that I no longer have to learn so
| much ecosystem related stuff, and can focus more on
| programming)
| notacoward wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your perspective. It honestly warms my
| heart to see that some people believe the trajectory is still
| upward.
|
| > Maybe I just enjoy software right now because I've now got
| the technical competence and confidence to avoid some of the
| frustrations that I experienced earlier
|
| Just as some but not all of my (mostly negative) perception
| is surely personal, might I suggest that some but not all of
| your (mostly positive) perception is not? Perhaps the
| industry really has improved in _some_ areas that you care
| about _during that interval_. Yay! OTOH, that doesn 't
| necessarily put your perception and mine in opposition. There
| are other areas and other intervals, and other priorities as
| well. It's great that your experience has been positive. I
| hope it remains so.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| I think that's a good way to think about it. Everyone's
| individual perspectives are valid, and they're a mix of
| real things that have happened in the industry and their
| own experiences.
|
| I'm very much aware of how bad some parts of the industry
| can be (particularly having recently dipped my toe into
| some machine learning work and discovered an entire sub-
| field in which nobody has ever heard of documentation,
| testing, coding standards, or things like _releasing
| software that actually works_ ).
| devilduck wrote:
| The issue isn't so much the trajectory, but the people in
| the industry. I've been repeating for a while now that
| there are too many people who are not team players, who are
| basically still cowboy coders, looking to scratch their own
| personal technical itches rather than working together to
| build good software. This has been my experience for the
| last 5 years at least. It definitely reminds me more of the
| 90s, when the industry was a mess because it was new and
| growing. My issue is mostly with the people though, not the
| actual work. Lots of self-righteousness. Lots of people
| wanting everything to be on 'hard mode.' And as someone
| else commented, there is definitely a Stockholm Syndrome
| with the money involved since I now can not do anything
| else and maintain my life. Nor has this industry made it
| easy to change jobs. Nobody wants to train, everyone seems
| very cheap, but they want to hire Kobe. I am counting the
| days before I get broken.
| jlangenauer wrote:
| I think you are right to say that the methods are vastly
| improved, but the ends to which those methods are applied
| have become ever more uninteresting (for a lot of people),
| and often morally suspect. We have built exquisite tools, but
| we use them to extract profit, to manipulate behaviour and
| often for no discernable purpose at all.
|
| Programming has become joyless.
|
| There are ever-shrinking spaces where a developer gets to
| build something novel - something that's state of the art,
| that's creative, that taxes their intellect and brings the
| pleasure of achievement forth. It seems that for every
| developer working on rocket guidance systems or self-driving
| cars there are a hundred toiling away on yet another CRUD
| app, or wrestling with a hydra of microservices. It pays
| well, but fun it is not.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| _There are ever-shrinking spaces where a developer gets to
| build something novel_
|
| I think it might be possible to say that _relative to the
| entire industry_ the space for novel or interesting work is
| shrinking - possibly. But I don 't think that actually
| means there's less interesting stuff to work on. If
| anything, the spaces for that are growing - maybe more
| routine work is growing faster, but I can't really say. I'd
| wager that the majority of software for its entire history
| has been pretty boring.
| ativzzz wrote:
| I agree. Though because of the growth of the industry,
| these spots where actual cutting edge work is happening
| are insanely competitive, and I would bet that many of
| the programmers (not all of course) who worked on the
| cool stuff 20 years ago would not make the cut for the
| cutting edge today, or are simply not interested in the
| particular niche of that edge.
| jfim wrote:
| How much of it is actual competitiveness and how much of
| it is the artificial barriers people put in the form of
| technical interviews?
|
| There's a big gap between software craftsmanship and the
| algorithmic trivia interview expectations nowadays, and
| it seems to keep widening.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Working on the cutting edge implies some sort of
| combination of greater talents and ability to work harder
| than others (hence increased competition), which means
| that the artificial barrier is a mere pittance.
|
| The people interested in doing cutting edge work will
| find a way to be there no matter what. The vast majority
| of people overestimate themselves.
| biztos wrote:
| > Programming has become joyless.
|
| Over the next year or two I hope to develop a mobile app.
|
| After 15+ years of big messy corporate server programming I
| think this might be the place joy is hiding.
|
| I accept that I will probably not make the money I have
| made gluing clouds together the past couple years. But
| maybe I can make something useful that people like to use.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| I had a great amount of fun working on my debug visualizer
| extension for vscode that was trending on hn a couple of
| weeks ago. And on other open source extensions and
| projects. I felt visionary and proud. That is what I want
| to do.
|
| But it pays for nothing. I make more money as a street
| musician than with my open source projects that have more
| than 100k users. But I got paid a lot for improving some
| online gambling site. This is how it is.
| bad_user wrote:
| No, programming became useful for the mainstream.
|
| I program ever since you had to restrict arrays to 64k in
| Pascal's 286 real mode. It was definitely fun, but other
| than building really limited games and freaking text areas
| (that would regularly crash with out of memory errors,
| losing your changes), along with bad accounting software
| build in MS Fox, there wasn't much you could do.
|
| And I remember people literally leaving the industry when
| the migration from MS-DOS to the Win API happened, which
| was forced around the time of Win 95. Because everything
| was terrible.
|
| But I love it when seeing young, privileged, overpaid
| software developers complain about joy. Keep at it.
| jlangenauer wrote:
| I may be privileged, but I am neither young nor overpaid.
| I started programming on something called the Commodore
| 64, so my opinions have been refined over decades. And if
| I say programming has become joyless, it's because I've
| been around long enough to remember when it wasn't.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| The joy someone can get out of programming seems like
| such a subjective feeling that I find it hard to believe
| you're generalizing your experience to all programmers.
| ecpottinger wrote:
| My solution was to dump the Windows environment for my
| personal use.
|
| I program in Arduino where I only have 2.5 K for my
| variables, programming with so little memory really
| forces you to think about your program methods.
|
| I built small projects using 74LSxxx chips, building
| logic instead of programming it can be refreshing.
|
| When I need more space I program in C++ on a Haiku
| machine, 32 GB of ram and 12 CPUs gives you the power,
| but the lack of frameworks means it is all your own
| coding.
| abraxas wrote:
| What is a "Haiku machine"?
| non-entity wrote:
| Haiku is BeOS derived opetating system.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)
| djhaskin987 wrote:
| While we should not discount your experiences, and while
| there are many complainers out there about nothing, I
| think the poster to which you replied has a deeper point.
|
| I too am relatively young. When I was a kid, Bill Gates
| and windows was the devil. Nowadays I realize I judged
| him too harshly and that he does a lot of good in the
| world, but at the time Microsoft was the bridge troll.
|
| Looking back, everything seemed so simple. Programming
| open source things had meaning to it. People didn't
| program open source back then to my knowledge as part of
| a larger corporate strategy. They did it because it was
| fun.
|
| Corporations entered open source programming as far as
| I'm aware en masse in the early 2010s late 2000s. Around
| the same time Facebook and Google reached their peak of
| popularity. It felt awesome to have corporations join in
| the fun and it felt like the software got much cleaner
| and much higher quality.
|
| After a while though it just felt like corporations took
| over the place. Software is better now but it's tailored
| to corporate needs even in the open source world.
|
| Now that our apps have millions of users, and we can see
| how they interact with the app in near real time, there
| is a constant push to manipulate the behavior of the
| user. Like our app? Leave a review! How likely are you to
| recommend our product to a friend or colleague? And so
| forth. To your point, we have always been asked to do
| things like this but in the 90s there wasn't nearly as
| many ways to do so. Seeing the greater capacity of our
| code being used for yet more greed is disillusioning.
|
| I get it, everything is terrible, and it always has been.
| But I do wonder if we haven't lost something from the
| '90s to now. I feel like there have been several Eternal
| Septembers, but instead of our communities getting
| flooded with trolls they have been flooded with corporate
| interests in communities that didn't used to have these
| interests at play.
|
| To try and combat this feeling, I have tried to find
| those communities for programming that try to get back to
| our indie roots. In the '90s we didn't care or need
| corporations to sponsor us or our open source projects.
| I'm still sure there are those out there that run their
| projects without the need for GitHub Stars or corporate
| funding but it's now seen as unreliable or otherwise
| undesirable to use projects that are simply done for fun.
| I think remembering that that's all I ever used to use
| will help me find more fun like I used to have.
| Preserving the space of programming is a hobby I think is
| really what's at stake here.
| eslaught wrote:
| At least for me, this is exactly why I do personal
| projects. E.g., here's something random I did a couple
| weeks ago. It's so simple that it's almost embarrassing to
| post, but it's: 100% vanilla Javascript
| no dependencies no cookies 100% client
| side; no server side state, no ajax state is stored
| entirely in the URL state is correctly maintained
| across page loads (i.e. page edits its own URLs to maintain
| state) Javascript is 100% local, so it's instant
| and doesn't require any data fetch correctly
| detects a potentially spoiler-full page load by looking at
| the referrer (so it doesn't annoy you as you navigate
| around the site) ... and the entire thing is less
| than 100 lines of code
|
| And it was surprising to me how genuinely fun this project
| was. I work on compilers/runtime systems for a living and I
| often get stuck in large code bases. I enjoy what I do, but
| working with a small codebase that's not massively
| overabstracted is just so _fun_.
|
| https://exanderproject.com/spoiler-test/
|
| The other thing that stuck me, as I was doing this, was how
| much the Javascript ecosystem has improved over the last
| 10-15 years. It was possible to do this in a very small
| amount of code with no dependencies precisely because of
| the all the bells and whistles that have been added to
| Javascript over the years. Maybe this isn't so obvious to
| someone who has been neck deep in Javascript for 15 years,
| but as someone who has been mainly in other languages, it
| was a very noticeable and dramatic improvement. The web
| platform is way, way nicer to develop for now than it used
| to be when I first got started.
|
| Now I'm trying to figure out what other small projects I
| can get involved with.
| golergka wrote:
| "The brightest minds of our generation are working on
| making people click ads".
|
| Every time I hear this quote, I remember all the small
| businesses and ventures that only exist because of
| Instagram, Facebook and Google Ads. Housewives baking
| cakes, a leatherworker making custom backpacks, a
| blacksmith restoring antique knives - those are just
| personal friends of mine who wouldn't be able to build
| their businesses if not for what those brightest minds of
| our generation are doing.
|
| Is all of this really worthless to you?
|
| (Copied over my recent comment on this exact topic, I hope
| it's OK with the mods).
| pbronez wrote:
| There are some economic theories about non-monetary
| compensation that try to explain this. Basically:
|
| Total Compensation = Salary + Benefits + Intangibles
|
| Those Intangibles can be things like working environment or
| commute, but they can also include your affinity for the
| organization's mission. People are willing to take smaller
| salaries when they're working on something they love &
| respect. It takes more money to convince people to work on
| boring or undesirable things. It's the exception to be paid
| well for something you like.
| Kronen wrote:
| I disagree, one of those intangibles is the easiness to
| learn, so most of the time you get paid less for working
| on boring or undesirable but easy to learn things like
| one CRUD app after another. And you get paid better for
| more difficult and interesting things, because there are
| less people able to do it.
| convolvatron wrote:
| i find the contrary to be true, largely without
| exception. the boring useless stuff that no one wants to
| touch generally pays alot better.
|
| work that I actualy care about is difficult to get paid
| for
| lostcolony wrote:
| I think you need to call out bonus and RSUs/long term
| incentive plan here, too. Many places don't have them;
| talks of salary invariably leave them out, but they are
| what makes the FAANGs TC particularly compelling. And
| other companies do have them, but oftentimes it's hard to
| figure out which do, and for what roles (since it
| sometimes is dependent on seniority and perceived
| importance).
| amscanne wrote:
| I think the word you're looking for is "utility". People
| maximize for utility, which includes all of the terms
| above. Utility of money also has diminishing returns,
| etc.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Not to mention that those CRUD apps have been done, exactly
| the same, 10000s of times before and 10000s of people are
| doing the same work you are doing now at this moment.
|
| Everyone thinks they are productive but value is being
| burned all day, every day in most companies all over the
| world. The level of reuse is depressing and people,
| especially here, firmly believe we need to use the latest
| frontend and backend crap to rebuild what was working
| perfectly fine before.
|
| More and more everything appears resume driven and to
| extract more hours billed or even higher LoC or commits per
| day. It is a nightmare and I refuse to play more and more.
| The over architecting for shit one off projects burning
| 10000$s a month 'in the cloud' so it probably, maybe it
| won't crash with the 5 users per day it has using it.
|
| Yes the tooling is better but the drive to use every latest
| tool and tech really makes no sense for almost any project.
|
| Fitting anecdote; a company from LA was contracted to build
| a crud app for a big corp; they used react, typescript,
| node, express, aws, aws lambda, redis, dynamo and rds. For
| a crud app. They got $50k for it. For a crud app. Costs
| were through the roof running it as you need actual good
| people to run it. It failed a lot of times for such a setup
| as it was all the latest of the latest architecting wise.
| Brittle as hell even with all the tests and resume driven
| busywork. I rewrote it 1 php + bootstrap and jquery file in
| 1 day with a perl script to migrate the data and running on
| a 1.99$/mo server. Cheap, easy and no worries; handles a
| lot of traffic for the cost of a cup of coffee, does not
| need devops and they paid $2k for it to me. This is not the
| only story; microservices + serverless + the cloud really
| are excellent for making money, but as you say, no fun and
| in my experience, no benefit. Just added complexity.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > The level of reuse is depressing and people, especially
| here, firmly believe we need to use the latest frontend
| and backend crap to rebuild what was working perfectly
| fine before.
|
| This seems overly cynical to me; the reason software
| developers are well-paid (overpaid, some would argue) is
| that what they build is measurably better that what was
| there before (at least in dollar terms. I'm not getting
| into the moral quagmire of automation replacing human
| jobs ATM)
|
| Code reuse is often a red herring, when taken to
| extremes. Here's a thought experiment: all software
| developers are now required to implement all CRUD
| software in SAP or Peoplesoft (pick one). How much of the
| code do you think will be re-used, and how much will be
| in the customizations?
| rabuse wrote:
| I'm so tired of React being thrown into every single web
| stack as of late. You don't need some large React
| boilerplate mess, that could've been done with some
| simple PHP+Jquery stack. It's caused this SPA nightmare
| also, where you have a large delay in page loading, when
| it's a site with basic functionality.
| thothamon wrote:
| $50 is kind of cheap actually. I've seen people pay $200K
| and more for basic CRUD websites with a little extra this
| or that.
|
| In fairness, if your web app does more than CRUD, or if
| you expect it will in the future, then PHP and jQuery
| wouldn't be my first choice. I'm very familiar with how
| much of a mess an app can become when pursued that way --
| a nasty soup of callbacks and conflicting states. As
| tooling around React improves -- and it's already quite
| good -- it will be easier to cost-effectively write a
| React CRUD site.
|
| If you just want a CRUD site that works, and you want it
| fast, a Rails site with scaffolding will probably give
| that to you in an hour or two -- with almost the whole
| hour being spent thinking about your data model.
| jnsie wrote:
| > Not to mention that those CRUD apps have been done,
| exactly the same, 10000s of times before and 10000s of
| people are doing the same work you are doing now at this
| moment.
|
| I recently worked for an org that had quite a large
| software suite (internal system) that was 99% CRUD. For
| every single CRUD operation, there was a front-end call,
| to a back-end service, that called a specific stored
| procedure. So pretty much 4 stored procedures for any
| construct stored in the database. No ORM, very little
| dynamic building of queries, _thousands_ of database
| tables. Releases were a nightmare, change management for
| database objects is its own complexity, especially with
| so many objects. I think people were open to change, but
| with a decade of existing data structures+data, and a
| long list of projects, nobody wanted to make a change...
|
| My one regret, with respect to that org, is not driving
| the necessary change.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| The recent (modern startup, hip and happening and VC
| invested company) I built a CRUD frontend for has a
| lovely system: mysql but the db is not relational: 1000s
| of tables matching the Objects in their OO code. I have
| so many scripts and generators and, especially for mysql,
| introspection tools it was not that much work but what a
| horror show.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| > Not to mention that those CRUD apps have been done,
| exactly the same, 10000s of times before and 10000s of
| people are doing the same work you are doing now at this
| moment.
|
| And yet now OP is making wood furniture, which has been
| made before the same thousands of times. Some people need
| originality some don't. Some just like the work for its-
| own sake. For those who need originality they should find
| a job working on something that's not a CRUD app. Not
| everything is a CRUD app. That's on them.
| [deleted]
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Sure that is true, but then again I have written many of
| employee directories, cms's, erps, social networks,
| running apps, banking fronts and backends, insurance
| fronts and backends which were all exactly the same
| except forced in a different tech because of the taste
| du-jour. We wrote a massive insurance monolith system in
| c# and my new client wants it microservice and in
| TS/node. We will be doing exactly the same as 2 years ago
| and make a boatload of money while we have a working and
| tested solution. Almost all of this is CRUD with some
| calc sheets in excel which we did in the 80s, 90s, 00s
| and again now. The functionality is completely the same;
| even the screens have the same ux; ui is a bit updated.
| But the MS foxpro version was fine almost 30 years ago.
| Not my money though so what can I do.
|
| Not sure how it fits wood furniture; you cannot copy a
| chair in a nanosecond; you can software. I am not saying
| there is no space or need for bespoke and unique software
| but if you are doing LoB apps for/in a big corp, as many
| of us do daily, chances are there is a) a perfectly fine
| version already running in your corp somewhere and b) a
| completely identical product in all the companies around
| the block.
| Sodman wrote:
| > chances are there is a) a perfectly fine version
| already running in your corp somewhere
|
| You and I have very different experience with big corps
| :)
|
| My experience is closer to "There's a half-finished
| version running somewhere that was cut short because of
| budget/deadline constraints. The team that worked on it
| is long gone, and it has been maintained by an outsourced
| team of junior resources for 3 years".
|
| Re-writing a customer-facing system to be closer to the
| "modern" web experience they're used to on their everyday
| apps and sites _can_ make a substantial difference to
| customer experience, and ultimately the bottom line.
| altdatathrow wrote:
| Unfortunately there are a lot of people around these
| parts who have arrived at the conclusion that the only
| way to build software today is using all those services
| and more (I mean, where's kubernetes in that stack?).
| They will aggressively defend their role which is no
| longer about creating software but instead entirely about
| weaving together a myriad of components.
| Whatanacc123 wrote:
| This is because the labour market demands people build
| resumes, not software.
| outworlder wrote:
| Kubernetes is amazing when engineers need it.
|
| Kubernetes sucks when managers need it.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Never underestimate the number of engineers that convince
| themselves they need something because it is trendy and
| sounds cool.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Playing with legos is easier then delivering value.
| kennu wrote:
| Playing with legos _is_ delivering value. Reinventing the
| same wheel over and over again is not.
| allo37 wrote:
| Is it the same wheel? It sounds like you wanted a Honda
| Civic, but you used the wheels from an Abrams tank. So
| obviously the solution is to invent a tank wheel <> Civic
| chassis adapter layer?
| jschwartzi wrote:
| What's often missed here is that the problem the lego is
| slotted in to is often subtly different each time. So you
| have a guy building an 8x2 lego brick that slots
| perfectly into his mansion and then someone else really
| needs to cut a corner off of it to fit their problem. But
| the original designer never gave you the option to do
| that so now you have to write an adapter to plug the 8x2
| into an 8x2 without a corner.
|
| It only looks like reinventing the wheel every time if
| you're completely ignorant of the subtle differences of
| each problem domain. And if you make a bunch of changes
| to create arbitrary lego bricks then now everyone has to
| learn your brick framework before they can make an 8x2
| brick.
| kennu wrote:
| I agree. You have to know your lego blocks well and
| understand where they fit and where they don't. But if
| you choose to remain ignorant of the available lego
| blocks, and instead write everything from scratch every
| time, you're wasting a lot of effort.
| Igelau wrote:
| > But if you choose to remain ignorant of the available
| lego blocks, and instead write everything from scratch
| every time, you're wasting a lot of effort.
|
| That's a good seam upon which to filet this analogy. A
| quick Google search turns up uncertainty as to how many
| different bricks there are. It could be in the 3000s,
| 6800s, or over 12000. We are all ignorant of the
| available lego blocks.
| kennu wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure what you mean. But if we're talking
| about AWS cloud services, there are certainly AWS experts
| who know how to develop software in a cloud-native way
| and utilize most or all of the relevant services. That
| knowledge is what we are paid for. It's also true that
| there are a lot of AWS services available and expertise
| is divided into different specialty areas, like ML, IoT,
| etc. Hard to be expert at everything.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Agreed but that is not what is happening though ; people
| do both; they use legos and reinvent the wheel. Making
| everything, imho, worse.
|
| The authentication thingy you got as lego block did not
| quite fit and now you are using more code than the module
| has in it to add what you need for it to do, making the
| original module probably impossible to upgrade without a
| lot of work and creating a problem for maintenance. Now
| you can fix this by telling your client; ok, I won't do
| this because your idea of auth is wrong. But then the
| client might kick me out (probably not a bad plan if they
| are doing trivial things significantly different than the
| rest of the world). I can just implement it like I
| mentioned above and make money maintaining it (risking
| having also to maintain the original lib). Or I can just
| make a new lib and for which I know it does what it was.
|
| Then, my favourite option, is just take something that
| just works already, deploy that and adapt a few people
| their habits around it. It fits 95%, stop whining. The
| least popular option ofcourse, so there we are, creating
| slightly different wheels with millions of almost the
| same LoC and unused andor unmanaged libs that should not
| have been written or used, again, imho.
| kennu wrote:
| I have different experiences. My "lego blocks" are AWS
| services. Each service is a black box that maintains its
| API backwards compatible forever. My custom stuff is
| built around the API and keeps working forever. ( * ) In
| my view AWS has been very successful in maintaining this
| backwards compatible model even when they often add new
| features to services.
|
| There are sometimes edge cases that are not possible to
| implement, but they are rarer and rarer as the service
| portfolio grows. In those cases the only option is to
| write your own container and deal with the usual package-
| level dependency issues in whatever programming language
| you use.
|
| ( * ) The only thing that doesn't work forever is
| Node.js, which is deprecated every few years and needs to
| be upgraded to a new major version. I'm looking forward
| to the possibility of WebAssembly/Deno replacing Node.js
| as an "evergreen" application platform.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| What are you paying though? The most common reason I get
| pulled in is because of exorbitant aws bills which
| eclipse dev bills... This sound expensive.
| kennu wrote:
| In the past 5 years all my projects have been based on
| AWS Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB and other
| serverless technologies which are only billed for actual
| usage and network traffic. So they don't cost much unless
| they actually get heavy load from users.
| [deleted]
| altdatathrow wrote:
| I love how the justification of numerous AWS services is
| always "so it can scale" but if and when that scale ever
| happens, a new architecture is necessary because the
| costs become untenable.
| kennu wrote:
| I haven't seen this happen myself. In projects that I've
| been involved with, the justification of using serverless
| services has been to reduce development costs, because
| you don't have to setup and develop everything from
| scratch and spend effort maintaining the infrastructure.
| The ultimate goal is to avoid doing anything else than
| define the business logic that is unique to the project.
| [deleted]
| aarongough wrote:
| Unfortunately I agree with this. A great quote I saw a
| while ago:
|
| "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to
| make people click ads." -Jeff Hammerbacher
|
| Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way
| involved getting people to click on ads. Either directly
| making a product where ad click rate is a measured metric,
| or products that helped people make products where clicking
| on ads was a metric...
|
| I have usually been able to find a lot of joy in solving
| the problems in the smaller areas where I was focused, but
| whenever I took a step back and looked at what I was
| helping work towards it felt very meaningless.
|
| I think finding a job today where you feel like the work
| you do does genuine good for the world is an incredibly
| rare and difficult thing...
| orbifold wrote:
| The quote should be
|
| "The best minds that I know are thinking about how to
| make people click ads."
|
| There is a considerable number of exceedingly intelligent
| people in pure mathematics and (theoretical) physics that
| don't work for Google, Facebook etc. and never would.
| Those that do often have nothing to do with Ads even
| three to four edges removed (think Martinis or the people
| at MSR).
| ska wrote:
| This is true, but don't overestimate it. I know first
| rate math & physics types who gave up on academic work
| and now work at a FAANG or similar; and I know second
| rate ones who stayed. So it's a mixed bag.
| treis wrote:
| >Unfortunately I agree with this. A great quote I saw a
| while ago: "The best minds of my generation are thinking
| about how to make people click ads." -Jeff Hammerbacher
|
| They're not really though. Ads may be the revenue stream
| but it's not like the top engineers at Google were on
| ads. They were building the search engine.
| jpxw wrote:
| The search engine built to make people click on ads
| (/tongue-in-cheek)
| crawlcrawler wrote:
| >> were
|
| If you meant to say that Google's top engineers _used to_
| work on the search engine but nowadays they work on
| making people click on ads because that's were the money
| is, then I wholeheartedly agree with you
| treis wrote:
| No, it's like saying the best athletes of our generation
| use their gifts to get people to buy stuff. That's how
| they make their money, but ultimately it's not what they
| spend their gifts doing. They work to be at the top of
| their sport and other people figure out how to make money
| on that.
| crawlcrawler wrote:
| Successful/rock star athletes spend 99.9% of their time
| honing their athletic skills and the rest on advertising
| deals. Google on the other hand spend 99.9% of its time
| on making people click on ads. Because that's their
| athletic skill? No. Because money.
| adventured wrote:
| It's an amusing quote in the sense that it gets used by
| two people on opposite sides of it, and they're both
| wrong.
|
| People that hate ads love that quote because they like
| using it to lambast the tech industry (in general, and
| advertising in particular), even though only a small
| percentage of engineers or other tech industry employees
| work on ads.
|
| People in the ad space love that premise. You know what's
| worse than that premise? Admitting to themselves that
| they're not the best minds of their generation and
| they're still stuck doing work trying to figure out how
| to optimize ad clicking - the worst combination. At least
| they get to pretend they're the best minds of their
| generation, if they buy into the quote, that's a
| consolation prize.
|
| The best minds are largely not working in advertising
| (maybe a small share of them are). They're figuring out
| how to leverage CRISPR to cure and prevent disease, or
| trying to figure out a therapy for Alzheimer's disease,
| or working on immunotherapy. They're the kind of minds
| that were working at Pharmasset figuring out how to save
| tens of millions of lives by curing hepatitis C. They're
| designing and building the next generation of
| semiconductors at ARM, Apple, TSMC, Samsung or Nvidia,
| pushing against the boundaries of what's physically
| possible. They're working on electric cars at Tesla or
| VW. They're trying to solve our battery problems. They're
| launching rockets at SpaceX or Rocket Lab. They're
| designing the next airplanes for Airbus. They're at NASA,
| ESA, JAXA, CNSA, heading to the Moon and Mars, or working
| on James Webb, figuring out if Venus contains life, and
| so on. They're designing the next generation of nuclear
| reactors, ITER or maybe working at LHC. They're working
| at Illumina, Boston Dynamics, Intuitive Surgical. They're
| in national and university labs all over the world,
| trying to solve very hard problems on a daily basis.
| They're even working on hypersonic weapons, military
| drones and designing nukes. And that's not meant to
| exclude the rest of this giant world, as the world is
| filled with examples.
| ci5er wrote:
| > Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way
| involved getting people to click on ads.
|
| That's an amazing fact.
|
| May I ask how old you are?
|
| I've been designing SOCs, DSPs, Control Systems and a lot
| of software for various systems since 1985, and I can
| only recall one that might have been close to "clicking
| on ads" (it was a personalized "on hold" system for dial-
| in to major retailers (like JCP), to replace Muzak with
| offers and information and stuff). I was the VOIP-to-
| Enterprise-Telecom integration guy, so not directly tied
| to the ad-part, but the company pushed couponing to their
| clients pretty hard.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| Ads are only the way of making money, or are you saying
| it only matters what the end result is? It's possible to
| sell ads and also do good with the work.
| crawlcrawler wrote:
| Businesses have a tendency to optimize for making money
| so if the only way for them to do so is by having people
| click on ads, guess what they'll eventually become great
| at.
| jerf wrote:
| Have you tried... looking for one that isn't?
|
| I've been in the biz for coming up on 25 years and I've
| _never_ tried to make anyone click on an ad.
|
| It also may help to downgrade "doing genuine good" from
| "solving the world's biggest problem once and for all" to
| "helping people get food reliably" or "keeping this
| industrial process that provides value to thousands of
| people going" and so on. Sometimes I do lose a bit of
| track of what I'm doing, but in the end the jobs I've
| worked still end up helping people do useful things, or
| protecting people, not making them click on ads.
|
| There's a lot of jobs in programming that don't involve
| making them click on ads. Even in the heart of Silicon
| Valley, there's going to be a lot of jobs that don't boil
| down to that.
|
| But you may have to, you know, change jobs.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I've never had a job convincing people to click ads
| either in about the same amount of time. But when I look
| at the salaries being paid by those companies trying to
| get people to click ads I think I must've made a mistake
| somewhere. Not that I want to have a job getting people
| to click ads, but those jobs pay like 2X to 3X the
| highest salary I've ever made (or more).
| spenczar5 wrote:
| You haven't made a mistake. Those jobs pay highly because
| they _have to_. The phenomenon of soulless, not-great-
| for-the-world jobs being really highly paid is not a new
| one, and not at all unique to software - compare a
| celebrity plastic surgeon versus a doctor who saves lives
| after disasters, or a corporate attorney at a weapons
| company versus a pro bono lawyer who works for virtually
| nothing.
| jerf wrote:
| Full disclosure, I'm doing OK (not living in SV helps a
| lot), but, yeah, I'm not pulling down half-a-mil a year.
|
| But I don't want to hate my job. I don't always love my
| current job... as I like to say, they're paying us
| precisely because this isn't what we'd be doing of our
| own free will... but I don't want to hate it.
|
| Because it's more than just the hating the job. It's
| coming home every day to your family in a bad mood. It's
| your children associating you coming home with the guy in
| the bad mood coming home. It's being on hair trigger all
| the time despite your best efforts. It's living in a
| place I don't want to live.
|
| The funny thing is, I look at that and I don't feel like
| I should be willing to pay $300,000/year for that... but
| apparently I am.
| notacoward wrote:
| I sort-of know Jeff, and I think he comes here sometimes,
| so: hi! Funny thing: the same company "inspired" both of
| us. The best minds of my generation are figuring out how
| to get two broken systems to talk to one another.
| Diederich wrote:
| > Every paying software job I've ever had was in some way
| involved getting people to click on ads.
|
| This is interesting, thanks for sharing that.
|
| Of the nine organizations that have paid me to write
| software since 1993, only one of them would fit in your
| criteria.
|
| Note: I am in no way doubting your claim, and I actually
| appreciate your perspective and the quote you cited.
|
| I will more deeply consider that when categorizing
| companies in my mind going forward.
| Accujack wrote:
| It's neither rare or difficult, exactly. The problem is
| how you look for the job.
|
| Most corporations in the US that are for profit aren't
| about doing good, they're about making money, and
| publicly held corporations are even legally encouraged by
| US law to put the shareholders' bottom line first and
| foremost.
|
| Non profits can care a lot more, but they generally (at
| least the ones that exist not) don't focus on something
| abstract like software, they generally serve an immediate
| need like affordable housing or surplus food distribution
| or job training.
|
| Until the business climate in the US changes, about all
| anyone can do if they want a job where work actually
| helps people is either work somewhere they get paid
| enough to use surplus cash to help people or work for a
| non profit.
|
| I think an idea that hasn't really been tried yet is
| building a non profit for software... not fitting a non
| profit base to an existing package, but building a
| corporation that is made to produce software for the
| public good.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > I think an idea that hasn't really been tried yet is
| building a non profit for software... not fitting a non
| profit base to an existing package, but building a
| corporation that is made to produce software for the
| public good.
|
| Mozilla? Unfortunately, they weren't successful at
| creating new things of value (with maybe Rust being the
| exception).
| dahfizz wrote:
| I'm going to take a wild guess that you are a web
| developer.
|
| I'm a happy low level systems developer. I solve hard and
| interesting problems that have nothing to do with ads.
| agumonkey wrote:
| This whole dillution would be worth a book or two. How
| culture, economy, technology all evolved to both progress
| and regress oh so subtly.
| vmception wrote:
| check out crypto, especially the "defi" space
|
| building there is a creative process and it pays better
| than big tech
|
| The onchain codebases arent that big because they cant be.
| microtherion wrote:
| I can't judge whether the actual programming there is
| fun, but I can't imagine an environment where bugs get
| exploited to the tune of tens of millions of dollars can
| be all that fun, and the entire field seems to be built
| on fraud, scams, and finding greater fools.
|
| I suspect a nontrivial number of programmers in that
| field will find themselves making license plates or
| exploring harbors with concrete shoes a few years from
| now.
| vmception wrote:
| The bugs don't affect the programmer or the company,
| assuming there even is a company
|
| And the programmers have easily translatable skills, so
| nice try at making a point but it doesn't make sense when
| there is a real conversation to have
|
| But you werent actually here to debate the differences in
| how that could affect programmers in that industry vs
| other industries
|
| Your preconceptions are a random incoherent mixture of
| things that are oddly excusing bad actors or bad
| companies by ignoring them and conflating it with blaming
| a specialized skillset or sector
|
| You could have kept all that in your head because this
| was clearly a copypasta rebuttal prepared for any
| conversation about crypto
| friendlybus wrote:
| The joyless is across the west culturally. It'll take 20
| years to build up again.
| bluejay2387 wrote:
| I think what has changed is the expectation that work
| should always be 'joyful'. I don't the majority of
| employees working in any industry have ever been involved
| in cutting edge or creative work.
|
| Can you imagine what the medical field would be like if the
| majority of general practitioners started complaining about
| the fact that they don't get to work in neurology research?
| chubot wrote:
| I totally understand people who are burnt out on building
| commercial software. The incentives are often to create systems
| that work poorly for both users and are hard to work with for
| developers. It's a miracle when that's not true!
|
| However if you're really burnt out, and still want to exercise
| your skill, take a break and give open source software a try!
| I'm still having fun building http://www.oilshell.org/ after
| many years.
|
| If you're building it for yourself, open source software can be
| fun, and it should have the side effect of being useful to some
| others as well.
| someguydave wrote:
| How do you make money? Do you live on savings?
| chubot wrote:
| Yes, although I worked on open source while employed for
| 6-10 years too (sometimes it was my job, but usually not).
|
| I'm not saying that it's the way to spend the least time at
| the computer :) I'm saying it is a way to avoid being burnt
| out.
|
| If you are building something for yourself, and others
| incidentally get some use out of it, you'll be less likely
| to burnt out than killing yourself for a deadline made-up
| by a VP. And then the whole project gets through away, and
| no customer ever cared about it. I've seen that a lot.
|
| -----
|
| Related story: Many years ago I got burnt out by my job,
| and I took a woodworking class at night (lol, definitely a
| programmer thing). It was great, and I'm typing on top of a
| desk I made in that class right now.
|
| However I bought a bunch of magazines about woodworking,
| and I noticed that everyone had 8 or 9 fingers, so I didn't
| go further with it :) The thing that the OP pointed out is
| real!
| tootie wrote:
| I've been doing this for over 20 years and feel the exact
| opposite. The process for getting an idea turned into working
| software is faster, easier and better than ever. You are
| looking at it from the inside. All the mechanics have changed
| from how you were trained and now the process is no longer
| bottlenecked by the kind of problems you are used to solving.
| From a higher-level perspective, businesses are 100x smarter
| about how to think about digital problems and solutions, what
| kind of talent they need to execute and how much it costs.
| Nothing will stop executives from trying to squeeze budgets and
| timelines, but that's human nature. But now there's a chorus of
| experienced people who can speak the truth, who know when to
| build vs buy, who know what quality looks like, who know that
| user experience is paramount. Software development has become
| commoditized which sucks for developers, but it's great for
| software.
| Reedx wrote:
| Plus there's a massive amount of pollution, growing by the day.
| Everything is built on an increasingly shakey foundation and
| starts rusting right away. More time is spent on trying to
| figure out why X isn't working, less time on actually building.
|
| A couple recommended talks about this subject.
|
| Preventing the Collapse of Civilization:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk
|
| The Thirty Million Line Problem:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk
| rbreve wrote:
| How I miss the old days simplicity. One php File you just
| uploaded with ftp and that was the deployment. Now you need to
| know so many frameworks and processes to deploy a simple web
| app. It's overwhelming and I get anxious because It's so hard
| to choose what to learn.
| mhaberl wrote:
| You can still do that. There is no need to use a complicated
| stack when the problem is simple.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| My current project is one file with html,css,js all in one. I
| am using Vue, stripe, and three.js. To deploy I git push and
| then render handles all the rest (including provisioning a
| free certificate).
|
| Honestly it's easier now to do things like that than 15 years
| ago when I first started.
| coliveira wrote:
| I am not so old, but I also remember a time when software
| development was much more enjoyable. The difference is that at
| the time software engineers had more autonomy to decide what to
| do. Nowadays everything seems to revolve around fads. If you're
| not into the latest fad or have some ideas that differ you'll
| suffer resistance all the way around: in the job, online, when
| doing hobby projects, etc. Even open source nowadays has to
| conform to some well-supported online fad, otherwise people
| will complain of what you do.
| mettamage wrote:
| Self-determination Theory predicts this. It's my favorite
| theory on about intrinsic motivation.
| lallysingh wrote:
| I'm not far behind you in age, but I started crazy early in
| life.
|
| Well, I think the big question is, are you /developing/ or
| /hacking/? Hacking is fun, developing is a job. Hacking is in a
| language and stack that's probably a bit unstable, that most
| shops wouldn't let you use in production. Developing is writing
| code at about 30% of your ability to express yourself, to avoid
| someone half-reading your code later from misinterpreting it.
|
| Sometimes you can intermix the two to make the job better.
| Sometimes not.
| neya wrote:
| Wow, that resonates quite a lot with me, though I'm not 55 yet.
|
| I started my career as a software engineer with web development
| in the 90's. Everything seemed simpler. Literally.
|
| Then, fast forward to 2020. I'll cite you an example of what
| happened EXACTLY yesterday. I have a web application which is
| complete and ready to be deployed. It's a backoffice
| application for one of our e-commerce sites. It's built using
| Phoenix, so there is a separate assets folder which contains a
| webpack config and its own _package.json_ as well. The frontend
| updates require me to update the assets manifest as well. So,
| we 've setup CI for it to automatically do that for each
| deploy. So, as usual, it simply runs _npm install_ , but,
| suddenly, everything broke. Remember, this was fine until our
| previous deploy. It was some weird error from node about not
| being able to do something with Babel. I had to spend about
| almost an hour to figure out it was coming from some other
| package that was making use of Babel. (If you're interested the
| error is this one[1])). OK fine, we upgraded the babel version
| as indicated in that issue thread. However, it wasn't
| compatible with some other package on the OS we were running
| on. So, now I had to downgrade the entire node version itself
| to something we knew that worked.
|
| We lost a good amount of engineering time simply because of
| this unwanted complexity. Remember, all I wanted to do was JUST
| deploy. Our backend code was perfectly fine. Just for one new
| added feature, we had to pay a price with our time. This is
| hardly an exception, this is becoming in the norm.
|
| [1] https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/32852
| etblg wrote:
| You may want to use `npm ci` instead of `npm install` on
| automated processes like CI. `npm ci` will install the
| package versions from `package-lock.json` that presumably
| worked while developing, `npm install` will try to install
| the latest that match the criteria in `package.json`
| mabbo wrote:
| > Some day most of you will get over the dollar-induced
| Stockholm Syndrome that seems universal among junior developers
|
| We aren't working hard because we just want money. We want to
| save up enough money so that we can retire at 55 and stop
| working. Then we can start spending all our time complaining
| that the software industry is going in the wrong direction.
|
| Because in any other industry, the effort:earnings ration isn't
| nearly as good, so we'd have to work into our 60s before we
| could do that.
| notacoward wrote:
| > We want to save up enough money so that we can retire at 55
| and stop working.
|
| If that's what anyone takes away from my jeremiad, then I
| actually think that's pretty great. Except ... why not 45?
| Maybe if more people could use software development as a
| quick route to _something else_ that created more personal
| satisfaction and /or social value, that would actually be a
| good outcome. A bit more "it's just a job" and a bit less
| "it's my holy calling" is a necessary ingredient in that
| formula.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Not everyone here works for FAANG companies in silicon
| valley. Retiring by 45 is _possible_ in much of the rest of
| the country but one has to go _hard_ to do it.
|
| For myself, I simply wanted to be free from financial
| worries and financially independent. I hit that at 35, and
| yes, I'll probably be able to retire by 45, but I'm a bit
| too frugal for my own good. For someone living a more
| 'balanced' lifestyle I think 50 or 55 is a fine goal.
| gorbachev wrote:
| I've been able to, most of the time, work on (somewhat) novel
| problems, at least within the organizations I've been working,
| and certainly interesting ones to me.
|
| But I've always enjoyed tinkering on non-productive personal
| projects more. Exponentially so. I'm with you on most of the
| things sucking in software development.
|
| I spend so much time on shit. Politics, presentations to
| justify spending 0.000001% of our budget on things I need,
| convincing others that maybe we should leverage well
| established best practices, not even controversial or cutting
| edge kind, but the actual ones people everywhere use, rather
| than re-inventing the wheel every time.
|
| Right now I'm expected to inventory our software catalog,
| again, because someone doesn't want to get that information
| from the place we are using to already document it.
|
| And it's only Monday. This week will be long, so very long.
| grishka wrote:
| I'm only 27 but I'm already dissatisfied a lot with most of
| what the software industry does and the decisions it makes.
| I've been 1.5 years without a job at this point and wherever I
| look for one I'm very disappointed.
|
| - The arbitrary deadlines that serve no purpose. Example: we
| have to update our app every week/month because _reasons_.
|
| - The utter lack of understanding of the concept of feature
| completeness. Example: operating systems that update every year
| for no good reason whatsoever. What's the point of updating
| from Mojave to Catalina as a user? What new does it bring? How
| does it empower the user in a way not before possible? No one
| knows because it does not. It merely moves things around for
| the sake of change.
|
| - No one wants to understand what they're abstracting away.
| People keep piling abstractions upon abstractions yet can't
| answer the basic questions about how their operating system
| works at low level.
|
| - Fashion. A lot of it. Basically, if you're doing Android, you
| _MUST_ want Kotlin and Jetpack and Compose. Same for web -- SSR
| is soooo 2010, gotta make that news website a single-page
| application because how come would we not use React. IMO,
| fashion has no place in engineering.
|
| - This "we'll always be able to ship an update" attitude. This
| is the worst. No one wants to make high-quality software any
| more, they want to move fast and break stuff at the expense of
| the end-user sanity. I can't understand how this way of
| thinking came to exist tbh.
|
| - Business incentives. They ruin everything, but it's
| especially felt in software engineering.
|
| - Priorities in general. No one is considering what they're
| making a tool to help the user achieve something. They're
| making these monstrosities that _always_ put their own
| interests before those of the user. Dark patterns, purposely
| inconvenient and awkward UIs, spammy notifications that don 't
| correspond to real events, you name it. In my book, that's not
| the way to go.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| To me, this sounds like developers who are too far away from
| the business. Either they don't understand the context, or
| they aren't given the latitude to express their concerns
| about product direction.
| grishka wrote:
| IMO "the business" is the root of the problem. Businesses
| tend to put money before literally everything else, and
| thus we end up with the awfulness that is the modern social
| media for example.
|
| No matter how visionary, proficient, and user-respecting
| you are as a developer, if you aren't complicit in earning
| all the money in the world at all costs, you're gonna get
| replaced by someone else who is.
| pier25 wrote:
| No offense but I think you're being dramatic and a bit
| naive.
|
| There are plenty of small companies chasing a dream other
| than total economic world domination. Obviously if you
| look at Facebook etc that's all you're going to see.
|
| Also, good luck running a business, any business of any
| size, without caring about money. Once you're responsible
| for the the livelihood of your employees and yourself
| (and maybe even SO and your progeny) your perspective
| changes radically.
| grishka wrote:
| > There are plenty of small companies chasing a dream
| other than total economic world domination.
|
| That is until they are pressured to "grow" by their
| investors that they do have more often than not.
|
| > Also, good luck running a business, any business of any
| size, without caring about money.
|
| I've worked at a company that was alive and well without
| chasing profits. It did a bare minimum of monetization to
| cover its expenses and get a little extra, and that was
| it. Users were happy, we were happy too. Then the
| investors decided they've had enough of it, sold their
| shares to others and those forced the CEO to leave. It
| was then acquired by a big corporation. I quit in around
| two years after that when I realized there's no going
| back and it's only going to get worse over time. It took
| a lot of effort to make myself go to HR and tell them I'm
| resigning. I still miss the spirit that was there when I
| joined. And I'm not sure there are any more companies
| like this, especially in 2020.
| pier25 wrote:
| If you had put a couple of millions into a company you'd
| probably expect to get your money back, no? Would you be
| happy giving your money away?
|
| Another point you are missing is that not all companies
| work that way either. Many people start their own
| business with their own money and don't have to answer to
| investors. Look outside of tech: restaurants, design
| studios, stores, etc.
| grishka wrote:
| > If you had put a couple of millions into a company
| you'd probably expect to get your money back, no?
|
| Yes and you will eventually get it back if your company
| turns profit -- any profit. That doesn't in any way imply
| growth at all costs which is what the world is obsessed
| with today because stocks. Practically, it doesn't make
| much sense to earn hundreds or even thousands times more
| money than what you spend, yet most companies do just
| that. It ends up laying idle on bank accounts, not
| benefitting the end users and society at large in any
| way.
|
| > Would you be happy giving your money away?
|
| Yes if that meant making the world better.
|
| > Many people start their own business with their own
| money and don't have to answer to investors. Look outside
| of tech: restaurants, design studios, stores, etc.
|
| And those usually respect their users/clients.
| markbnj wrote:
| > I sincerely feel bad for people who have to stay in it.
|
| Truly? Or do you mean you feel bad for people who still have to
| work for a living? Because if you still have to work for a
| living I can think of 9000 jobs that suck more than working on
| software. Btw, I'm turning 60 next month and have been doing
| this for a living since about 1992, before that I did lots of
| other things, so I have several points of comparison.
| aprdm wrote:
| I think for some people building software became about making
| the most amount of money they can possibly make, it became
| about grinding leetcode to get that sweet package at FAANG.
|
| Startups became about flipping crud apps that try to get users
| addicted to them.
|
| There are still cool and honest jobs out there! Work in a space
| you care about and have fun, filter out anything with VC money
| or FAANG. Usually older companies can be more rewarding from a
| career perspective, you also get to work in bigger projects
| with more responsibilities as well as you aren't competing
| against 50k's of software engineers to climb the ladder.
| bsg75 wrote:
| What are you moving on to ? And can I come along (52) ?
| [deleted]
| Diederich wrote:
| > I sincerely feel bad for people who have to stay in it.
|
| I'm in my 50s, and I've been getting paid to build software for
| over 27 years now, and started programming on a near daily
| basis on a TRS-80 in the 1970s.
|
| Please don't feel sorry for me. I still very much enjoy
| building software.
|
| I won't necessarily disagree with the particular challenges you
| cite.
|
| The total complexity is enormous now, but the tools and
| abstractions, which themselves have variable quality, and bring
| their own complexities, are tremendously powerful, and, though
| it often doesn't feel like it, effective.
|
| Beyond the specifics, I acknowledge that 'the industry' has
| evolved in many ways and directions, not all of which are
| positive.
|
| I face non-technical challenges today that, had I known about
| them 30 years ago, would have probably caused me to switch
| careers.
|
| So, I acknowledge what you're saying, and to it I will only add
| this: each of us exerts a great deal of control over how we
| perceive the world around us. It's possible that the difference
| in the way you and I 'grade' the software industry is that I
| am, for no knowable or particular reason, more fundamentally
| optimistic about things than you. It's also possible that,
| primarily for reasons beyond our control, I've ended up working
| in more positive organizations.
|
| To other people reading this far: two specific anecdotes about
| how the software industry has changed over three decades
| provides very little concrete indication for how your personal
| experiences are likely to go.
| bobbytuck wrote:
| Another TRS-80 fan here. I learned programming by sitting in
| the back of a Radio Shack where they had a Model I Level II
| and a Model II with those big 8" drives. This was probably
| around '81 or so. A year or so later they eventually had a
| Model III in the front of the store.
|
| Whenever I get burned out on software (in my case, Vue and
| React) -- and build complexity -- I always remind myself of
| those TRS-80 days. The only learning references around were
| the books for sale by the TRS80's -- a couple books on TRS80
| graphics, Rodney Zak's 'Z80 Assembly Language', and William
| Borden's Z80 books. And of course the Tandy version of Zork
| in the little plastic baggie hanging from a wall hook beside
| 'Eliza' and 'Dancing Demon' -- and then the wall of brown
| folders of 'Scripsit' and 'VisiCalc' on TRSDOS 1.3 (?). Maybe
| the editor/assembler at the time, too -- 'EDTASM'. Don't
| remember if that was in a baggie on the wall hook or in a
| Tandy brown TrapperKeeper with the cassette insert and
| several tapes.
|
| Those were great days -- and everything (for me, at least)
| was new and exciting. Nothing was ever too daunting or too
| complex -- even as daunting (and as complex) as Z80 assembly
| seemed to me -- a 13 year old at the time.
|
| That's a feeling I always try to recapture in very deliberate
| ways these days. It's good remember how it all started.
| Diederich wrote:
| This was my first computer:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer Got it
| for Christmas in 1980. Second computer was
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 and third
| was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000 I have the
| Model 100 in storage, and it still works just like new,
| taking four AA batteries.
|
| Complexity is daunting today. I believe, however, that the
| power available far outweighs the total difficulties.
|
| I am still inspired by the basic possibilities that most
| anybody can, with nothing but access to a computer and the
| Internet, write some javascript and html in a simple editor
| and make it available to most everyone in the world.
|
| Objectively speaking, that's simple and approachable, far
| more so than anything I ever did or was aware of.
| leptons wrote:
| I'm also in my 50s, and I can't imagine ever losing interest
| in programming.
|
| A computer contains practically infinite possibilities, and
| people who lose interest in that are really just lacking
| creativity, and maybe some cognitive ability.
|
| I don't only program though, I am creative in other ways and
| I build many things that have nothing to do with computers,
| but I do often incorporate programming into these creative
| pursuits, because it sometimes pushes the project to the
| "next level".
|
| If someone only writes "glue code" then yeah, that will get
| boring. There are so many other kinds of programming though,
| that many never even explore. 3D is a whole entire
| interesting field that is far removed from "glue code". Home
| automation is one of my latest obsessions. The list goes on
| and on.
| Diederich wrote:
| > but I do often incorporate programming into these
| creative pursuits
|
| I'd love to hear a couple of examples if you have a few
| moments. (:
| [deleted]
| spamizbad wrote:
| I tend to agree but I think what's driving this stuff lies in
| the changing software product- and project - culture, and the
| glue-like nature of modern work is an outgrowth of that.
|
| On the engineering side we've fully embraced the ephemeral,
| disposable nature of code, which tends to run counter to
| business needs which may require hastily constructed code hack
| jobs to stick around indefinitely. Really makes taking pride in
| workmanship impossible. You're allowed to feel good about what
| your company is doing, but if you feel good about your code
| then perhaps you're indulging yourself on company time and
| could be more productive... so you end up feeling guilty about
| doing good work.
|
| I also think over the last 20 years there's been a concentrated
| movement to remove technical expertise from the product design
| process. Engineers are present to provide estimates and gauge
| feasibility, but aren't granted much leeway beyond that.
| Decades ago, you needed dev skill to actively shape technical
| projects since there wasn't even that much user-level
| experience with computers and technology to make judgements.
|
| This loss of balance tends to mean software is driven forward
| almost exclusively by either new features or redesigns.
| Technical enhancements are rare, unless they exist to support
| existing features. Nobody wants to spend a few sprints on "Make
| this thing feel 30% faster" or "Deal with our memory usage
| issues in these cases" until it reaches crisis levels or
| customers complain. So you get bigger, bloated software that
| runs slowly because nobody is authorized to make anything
| faster or use less resources _until_ a product market position
| is threatened because of such technical deficiencies....
| although sometimes the answer by product leadership to such
| problems can be even more features.
| bobbyz wrote:
| A younger developer might think the tools that suck. A younger
| developer might think that the older developer's reluctance to
| embrace change or recall the time when they were beginners is
| part of the reason why they suck. Like git. Git sucks.
| etripe wrote:
| If you think git sucks, which VCS sucks less? I've only tried
| TFS and SVN myself, but I find git the best option among
| them.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Mercurial is a contender
| jlos wrote:
| >> I sincerely feel bad for people who have to stay in it
|
| This seems a really sheltered perspective without a real idea
| of the kinda struggles that exist for a lot of other careers.
| Not unlike some doctor/lawyer/scientist/executive talking about
| the profession as a "train to hell" because it doesn't satisfy
| some sense of technical purity.
|
| Before building software, I was stuck in dead-end sales jobs
| with a humanities degree that had no career prospects.
| Switching to software development has required a great deal of
| sacrifice, and I'm genuinely thankful every day I get to write
| code for a living I'm thankful.
|
| - I'm thankful I can get paid well enough to live comfortably.
|
| - I'm thankful I work in clean, climate-controlled offices.
|
| - I'm thankful for a profession full of interesting people to
| work with.
|
| - I'm thankful I can engage my mind and excercise a certain
| amount of creativity in my work.
|
| I really hope 55 year old me can remember to be thankful.
| smoyer wrote:
| I'm 56 and STILL love building software ... I started coding as
| a hobby when I was in 6th grade, built my first computer (a
| COSMAC Elf) when I was in 10th grade and spent 20 years doing a
| combination of electronics and software engineering. For the
| last (almost) 20 years, I've been only doing software
| development with a small amount of consulting on hardware
| design and hobbyist projects. (And the weirdly political
| intersection with these disciplines while working on a
| committee that wrote part of the DOCSIS cable modem spec). I
| have no intention of throwing in the towel and am really
| enjoying the Go language (and happy to see that Java is taking
| steps to reduce the complexity of the JakartaEE framework).
|
| But ...
|
| I used to code for fun in my spare time and more recently I'm
| finding myself working on "shop" projects. I sold my pocket-
| cruiser (a small yacht) and I'm building a couple of small
| wooden boats. I have a '71 Saab Sonnett III I'm in the process
| of restoring and a '71 VW Karman Ghia that's next on the list.
| I thoroughly endorse the idea of doing something with your
| hands - it's so much more satisfying than sitting in front of
| the TV.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I believe the main thing that changed is that 10 years ago,
| "building software" meant you would work with (presumably
| reasonable) engineers. Nowadays, it means you do web busywork
| for some newly rich kid chasing a startup lifestyle, who may or
| may not have any idea about what's easy/difficult
| possible/impossible.
|
| Also, the whole industry has been strongly commercialized.
| Before, people would share source code on the internet just for
| the fun of it. Nowadays, that is a surefire way for someone
| else to take your source code and sell it as theirs. I mean
| that's basically what Cloud providers do. They rent out access
| to open source software.
|
| The insane pressure of money also makes sure that most software
| nowadays is not build to any reasonable engineering standard,
| even when it really should be (like Boeing MCAS). Instead,
| every piece of software nowadays is optimized for the sweet
| spot between sucking so bad that nobody buys it and not
| spending a penny more than what is necessary.
|
| The goal of software development has changed, and I think $1
| phone apps nicely illustrate the new commercial landscape. It's
| the bare minimum quality at the bare minimum price.
|
| BTW, on a related note, most bicycles made in 2000 still had a
| much more stable frame than the 2020 models. The marked
| switched from costly steel to cheaper aluminum so that you can
| make $300 supermarket bikes. And obviously, the quality has
| suffered.
|
| It appears that in general, there's always a race to the lowest
| possible quality in the hopes of reducing costs, thereby
| increasing profits. Does anyone have any suggestion how we
| could reverse this trend in general?
| tarsinge wrote:
| It was always like this except in the hobbyist world, and I
| think maybe you and some developers are confused because the
| corporate takeover of the web is relatively recent. When I
| think of software development in the past I think of Office
| Space (the movie), not some idyllic times.
| cpursley wrote:
| Your overall tone is negative and elitist.
|
| Thee $300 supermarket bike (I have one and put over 40 miles
| on it weekly and it's help up fine for four years) provides
| access to folks who otherwise can't afford the fancy $1,500
| aluminium/carbon machines. Fancy bikes are still getting made
| and even getting better.
|
| Newly rich kid or VC funded startups distributes money from
| wealthy people to an every growing software industry. It
| allows people like me to work in software; something that was
| previously only available to elite educated people who
| happened to live in the correct zip code.
|
| tl;dr: The pie has increased in size and become much more
| inclusive. Yes, there is a lot of low-quality pie out there.
| But there is also plenty of high-quality pie for those who
| can afford it. This is good for everyone except the very
| elite entrenched class.
| cpursley wrote:
| The downvotes are fun. I guess some people are just against
| inclusiveness?
|
| I'm very grateful to be in this industry despite not having
| the "correct" background.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| What is the correct background? our industry is hardly
| one of those those where you have to go to a white shoe
| ivy or Oxbridge.
| fortran77 wrote:
| You won't find a higher percentage of "gatekeepers"
| within a community than the Hacker News community.
| blamefaang wrote:
| Open source as an art is inclusive. Or at least as a
| social model for developing software, has greater
| potential than startups, which are exclusive to those
| with financially viable skills
|
| A working culture tuned to movement of a minority of
| capital "haves" isn't much different mathematically than
| a monarchy and his lords and barons, etc.
|
| There's a gentler temperament, but "work the jobs we will
| pay for, while deflating your buying power to maintain
| historical human narratives" isn't exactly fostering free
| flow of capital, labor, and ideas.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| I don't get the downvotes.
|
| You have a very solid extremely valid counter point and I
| think the person you're responding too created a false
| dichomtomy.
|
| Cheaper does not eliminate the quality. They can both co-
| exist and indeed do.
|
| The lower tier just opens the door for a group of people
| who never had access before.
|
| Thank you for your input.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Ignore the downvotes. Initial votes are misleading, and
| if the comment is substantial, they'll stabilize to a
| reasonable value over the following couple hours.
|
| > _Cheaper does not eliminate the quality. They can both
| co-exist and indeed do._
|
| It sometimes does, if it eliminates quality out of the
| market. Say a quality frame costed $500 before; then you
| have a new, cheaper technology that can achieve similar
| performance by cutting out more extreme loads / road
| conditions; as manufacturers jump at it to save money,
| suddenly the whole $100-$800 range uses just that, and
| the quality frame rises to $1500 due to collapsing
| demand. Can't say whether it's good or bad on the whole,
| but it annoys the hell out of me in cases where I could
| afford the quality product but I can't, because nobody is
| making it anymore.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Sure That's a good point. Things can tend to extremes.
|
| Instead of middle range products you get low tier and
| high tier products and those absorb their different
| shares of the market from the middle.
|
| This type of extreme seems to happen in all facets of
| human society over time including jobs, housing, cars,
| etc..
|
| The middle becomes pushed out.
|
| That's been a big issue for a long time.
|
| Alot of access is given to people who previously had no
| access but the middle is somewhat eliminated.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I'm not sure I deserve the "elitist" label, but yes, I find
| this development very negative.
|
| While I agree with your point that hobby startups
| distribute money and enlarge the market, I was trying to
| point out that people working under management with no
| experience will probably not learn their craft well. In my
| opinion, the old apprentice system used for jobs like
| becoming a carpenter would be quite appropriate for
| software engineers. But it only works if there are enough
| master level programmers around to teach everyone else.
|
| As for the pie analogy, I don't share your opinion. When
| the market moves towards lower quality, that usually makes
| high quality more expensive or even outright impossible to
| acquire. Case in point, I'm not aware of any bicycle that
| is rated for 200kg+ for driver and luggage. Not only are
| there no cheap bikes at that stability level, but also
| nothing in the $2000+ premium range. So something that used
| to be easy to buy for everyday folks 20 years ago is now
| too expensive even for rich people. And all that only to
| drive the price of the cheapest bikes down from $500 to
| $300, which I presume won't make much difference to anyone
| because a good bike will last you 10 years, so it's <$1
| monthly in either case.
| samatman wrote:
| Xtracycle Edgerunner.
|
| Not only will it easily take that weight, it's designed
| to comfortably carry a passenger and cargo. Or the Yuba
| Mundo, there are a few other brands. And you can get them
| in electric, if your thighs aren't made of steel cable.
|
| Yuba Mundo is $1800, which sounds like a lot, but with
| inflation that's well under a grand at the time when more
| bikes were heavy and over-engineered. With the nice side
| effect that they could carry a lot of weight....
| cpursley wrote:
| Sorry about that, I didn't mean it to come across as a
| personal attack. I mostly agree with your paragraph about
| hobby startups. And I secretly lust after a nicer bike
| and might go for one soon :)
| plazmatic wrote:
| You have no data to support "the pie has increased in size
| and BECOME MUCH MORE INCLUSIVE." Become much more
| inclusive?
|
| You're crazy.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| Yeah this doesn't deserve the downvotes.
|
| If you don't like rich kids, don't work for them.
| ditonal wrote:
| That's fair, but before I spent a lot of time in
| industry, I thought most tech entrepreneurs were genius
| engineer/business types.
|
| I was shocked that a LOT of startup founders are well-
| connected rich kids who have no skills or ability to lead
| a tech company. I learned that, while saying that you
| have a huge trust fund isn't very cool, saying that
| you're a tech entrepreneur CEO is perceived as cool. So
| the rich family uses their connections to raise a few
| million (often indirectly) and suddenly the kid is an
| "entrepreneur", despite lacking any relevant skill sets.
| It's not like there's any expectation for these companies
| to make a profit anyway.
|
| Yes, you can avoid these companies, but it's worth
| warning younger engineers that this is maybe 50% of tech
| startups. It's more of a problem with NYC based companies
| than SF based companies (as NYC has more old money and
| less emphasis on tech companies actually building real
| tech) but I've seen it in both cities.
| logicslave wrote:
| This is kind of true. Young tech entrepreneurs are mostly
| either harvard/stanford/other top college grads, or
| theyre from wealthy families. But entrepreneurship has
| always been this way, its not a middle class career path,
| and arguably, tech has increased the number of middle
| class/raw talent trying to start their own companies.
|
| If you were to look back at the early 1900s, or even
| 1980s, its much better today than back then
| neilk wrote:
| I think you might be experiencing what it's like to have, er,
| experience.
|
| Like, I could make the exact same complaint except I'd
| situate it about 10 years earlier, around the first dot-com
| explosion.
|
| And somewhat earlier than that, I remember grizzled
| programmers from the 1980s who hand-tuned their C and
| assembly and who thought we were flagrantly wasting computer
| resources on garbage platforms like the web.
|
| (However, bringing it back to the 2010s and beyond, you're
| right that open source development has been completely co-
| opted.)
| qz2 wrote:
| Your first paragraph nails it completely. The entire software
| ecosystem is like having infinite layers of train crashes to
| fight through every day.
|
| The purpose of a lot of software is to make software, not to
| solve problems.
| lazyjones wrote:
| There's nothing stopping you from getting an FPGA board and
| rolling your own CPU, system, software stack from the ground.
| It's easier than ever before to walk in the footsteps of Woz
| or so if you like the idea.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| How did you escape?
|
| Asking for a friend.
| eikenberry wrote:
| You sound super burnt out and taking a (possibly permanent)
| break sounds like just what you need. On the other hand I, at
| 50, am looking forward to another 25 years of programming with
| any luck. I think almost everything has improved since I first
| started with much improved processes (no more waterfall), new
| and interesting programming languages (with jobs using them),
| free software becoming firmly established, much better tooling,
| more interesting work (cloud and distributed systems have added
| much fun, including improving those distributed systems),
| enlightened views on testing and documentation being very
| important (I remember when simple unit tests were frowned upon
| as wasted time), nearly everything in the software process is
| automatable (CI, CD are great), etc.
|
| I obviously am at a different place than you but I don't think
| everyone who enjoys the work has Stockholm Syndrome and needs
| to be pitied. Some of us honestly enjoy it and I plan on
| working as long as possible as I really like the external
| supply of ideas to create.
|
| Though had my carrier taken a different path than it did I can
| easily see being as burnt out as you. I worked briefly at a
| large enterprise company (not software makers, think greek
| sneakers) which was so terrible.. if that sort of job was my
| only option I wouldn't have lasted a decade in this business.
| That place was seriously depressing.
| nobody2323 wrote:
| Stop building web apps. A terribly wrong turn was taken about
| two decades ago. Your problem is you're building web
| applications.
|
| Desktop development is the Once And Future King of computer
| functionality and personal productivity.
| notacoward wrote:
| FYI, I have built a great many things in my career but not
| one of them was a web app. Mostly, it has been data storage
| systems, from single host to few hosts to many hosts to one
| of the largest three or four such systems in the world. But
| hey, great guess.
| [deleted]
| laurentdc wrote:
| I used to work in a kitchen for a while. My back hurt most of the
| time and I always had burns or cuts somewhere, but I was
| definitely way more happy. Mentally for sure. Also the feeling of
| building something, I feel like peeling a potato is more
| enjoyable than shipping modern frontend.
| allenu wrote:
| I still enjoy writing software. I mainly do mobile development on
| iOS.
|
| However, after 20 years in the industry, I grow tired of the
| corporate life and how projects are run. I can't complain about
| the pay or the hours, though. I've managed to hold jobs that
| generally don't have crunch or any type of regular overtime.
|
| What I grow tired of is the endless cycle of performance reviews,
| planning for the work ahead (short-term and long-term),
| discussions about what will be done and what won't be done,
| seeing how hard it is to come to consensus on some things, and
| how some of it doesn't even matter.
|
| When you're younger, you have more of a fire in your belly and
| will passionately argue for certain decisions or directions, but
| after you've worked a while, you realize a lot of those things
| that don't make huge differences in how well your product
| actually does out in the field. There are decisions above your
| head that have greater effect and worrying about those is just a
| waste of time, and so you detach a bit.
|
| The technical challenges themselves can also be the same ones
| you've encountered again and again, so that becomes sort of
| same-y.
|
| As others have suggested, I highly recommend working on your own
| side projects if you are looking for a creative outlet. That's
| what I've ended up doing over the years and it's helped a lot.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I see a lot of comments here from folks wishing they were working
| on something more fulfilling than a CRUD app. Maybe the problem
| isn't what kind of software you work on, but what it means, and
| what it can help accomplish in the world.
|
| Building easy to use software that solves real problems for real
| people is hard, regardless of whether it's a CRUD app or
| something more exotic.
|
| And building easy to use software that solves real problems for
| real people _feels good_ and meaningful.
|
| Those real people don't know and don't care about the difference
| between Rust, Clojure, or PHP, they just know that you're making
| their life appreciably better.
|
| Don't find a new career. Go find work that actually carries
| meaning and worth for you.
| buitreVirtual wrote:
| A colleague recently discovered by chance that his goat cheese
| vendor at the farmers market in his local town is, or was, a zfs
| developer.
| ghoward wrote:
| I made this decision as well.
| https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/the-software-industry-is-bro...
| rdevsrex wrote:
| As a self taught dev, looking to go back to college, I'm always
| debating if I should major in CS or something else like Math or
| Stats in case software gets old to me and I want to transition to
| a quantitative field.
|
| But then I don't know what those kind of jobs are like and the
| chances are that I might feel the same way after n years.
|
| I think it's good to have something that's strictly a hobby where
| there are no real stakes to the game, so it is play. Work always
| means responsibility and largely doing it how someone else wants
| it done, even if you are an entrepreneur.
| pantulis wrote:
| Is this an official Docker repository? Why hasn't any other team
| member answered?
| mrtbld wrote:
| The person is not a maintainer of the project but the one who
| opened the issue.
| WillAdams wrote:
| It's kind of interesting to me that at least one other notably
| talented programmer, Glenn Reid, formerly of Adobe and author of
| "The Green Book" and developer of Touchtype.app and PasteUp.app
| chose to move on to building furniture by hand.
|
| By way of contrast, I've been trying to puzzle out how to do
| woodworking programmatically which has been an interesting
| exercise, since traditional CAD/CAM is quite limited in its
| assumptions, and the tools which are accessible to me (in terms
| of them matching how I think/work and having an immediate,
| applicable preview): BlockSCAD and OpenSCAD are rather limited in
| their ability to export files (DXF, SVG, STL) --- in particular,
| I'd like the ability to write out a text file w/ full control
| over the contents, but that's not viewed as a valid request by
| the devs.
|
| Making progress though:
|
| - http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-2/tb125adams-3d.pdf -
| https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/3d-project
|
| I just wish it were easier to make G-Code in 3D (unfortunately, I
| don't find the obvious tool at tplang.org very workable with my
| approaches).
| dang wrote:
| All: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this
| thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or
| click these:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964&p=3
| pliftkl wrote:
| This made me laugh, because I actually am planning on making a
| transition to woodworking. My house is paid off, and I can live
| on a fairly small income that I can probably generate mostly from
| passive income. If I can actually supplement that with building
| furniture, bonus. If not, then I still get to build furniture.
| busterarm wrote:
| Add me to the list of software developers who desires to switch
| to woodworking/machining.
| secondcoming wrote:
| I too would love to do it. It irks me to this day that I was
| taught nonsense such as latin in school instead of woodwork
| or metalwork.
| ccozan wrote:
| To be completly honest, we had a lot of classes of
| metalworking, woodworking, textiles, etc in our school
| before the '89 Revolution in Romania.
|
| I really enjoyed it and it made me love working with
| materials and building physical things.
|
| Still writing software...But renovating my house was a nice
| way to remember all that lost skills.
| non-entity wrote:
| I wish I had taken anything but latin in HS. Only reason I
| did it was because of colleges requiring foreign language
| classes, and by the time I had graduated, I didn't have any
| plans of going to college.
| mercurysmessage wrote:
| In my High School I didn't learn Latin, but I did learn
| some wood and metal working, and also a little bit about
| engines.
| busterarm wrote:
| At the end of the day, we're people who build stuff and
| problem-solving/analytical skills are transferable.
|
| The draw to these seemingly not-so-adjacent fields is
| strong.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Serious question, didn't anyone else' school have shop
| class? I was a college prep, NHS, cross country, all AP
| core courses kind of guy, and I took it all four years of
| high school.
|
| Or was there some kind of restriction on taking it at your
| school? Or maybe your parents didn't let you?
|
| Genuinely curious as to why someone with a professed
| interest would not have taken shop?
| amyjess wrote:
| I don't think mine did. Maybe. I remember hearing one
| classmate mention shop once, but maybe I misheard him or
| he was joking or something. If we did have a shop class,
| it wasn't advertised, I don't know who taught it or where
| the shop was.
| maxerickson wrote:
| At my high school shop was at the same time as band and
| other music classes, so you couldn't do both.
|
| Lots of schools don't have the classes though, probably
| mostly because of funding.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And insurance.
| nicbou wrote:
| There was a special program at my school that gave you
| more shop classes. They did everything to discourage me
| from joining it, because it's where they shoved the
| struggling kids. I really enjoyed it, and really can't
| see why it was just for struggling kids.
|
| This was the last year before the school reform. They
| ended that program. In fact they ended shop class
| altogether.
| andi999 wrote:
| Primary school a little of pottery and woodworking.
| Secondary school sewing and cooking. High school nothing.
| busterarm wrote:
| High school was 20 years ago for me and no shop classes.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| It was over 20 years ago for me, and we had shop classes.
| It's amazing how heterogeneous the US school system has
| been, and continues to be apparently.
| secondcoming wrote:
| It was only offered in certain types of secondary school.
| Mine was considered 'posh' and so we wore blazers and
| learned latin, whereas other schools didn't have blazers
| and offered 'trade' subjects.
| jehb wrote:
| Shop was heavily discouraged for college-track students
| when I went through high school, both by the
| administration in terms of guidance counseling and timing
| of the classes, as well as through heavy social
| reinforcement by peers.
| defterGoose wrote:
| Perfect example of why so many people hate high school.
| "Avoid this thing you're interested in because it won't
| help your career prospects. Also it's a waste of time."
| gwittel wrote:
| Pretty much this at my high school as well. They had a
| shop class and auto repair class. I really wish I had
| taken those (I did take shop in middle school though).
|
| Largely we had to choose -- take the college prep classes
| (AP whatever, languages) OR trades classes. There was
| definitely classism -- "trade classes are for poor kids".
| =(
|
| I would much rather schools require things like:
| financial literacy, and building/repairs/cooking. They
| are lifelong skills and very useful. There's no reason
| its an either or proposition.
| OJFord wrote:
| 'Design & Technology' (woodworking, little metal, textiles,
| food, etc.) is on the curriculum in the UK, so I did that.
| Had to take one variant at GCSE, I did electronics. (Having
| waited practically my entire school life to have a lesson
| that was electronics and only electronics!)
|
| But it irks me to this day that the language I opted for,
| Latin, was dropped that annus, because not enough others
| signed up.
|
| You can't please everyone. (I did like wood/metal work
| though, just not as much by far as electronics. I'd be much
| more interested now though - I watch an awful lot of it on
| YouTube.)
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Less machine learning, more learning machining?
| nicbou wrote:
| Less training models, more model trains
| decasteve wrote:
| Timber framing here. That's woodworking.
| amelius wrote:
| How about robotics? It would allow you to combine mechanical
| engineering with CS.
| mellavora wrote:
| I like to build synthesizers.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| A lot of modern mechanical engineering practice is building
| and using software.
|
| Source: am a mechanical engineer who works on my industry's
| software
| franky47 wrote:
| Add me too. Somehow the joy of seeing things being built from
| raw materials in the real world equates that of complex
| software being created out of nothing. But the finite element
| of the real world has that extra satisfying element: no
| dependencies to update, (mostly) no security patches,
| generally less maintenance, and it lasts longer.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No undo button. CTRL-z is the thing you will miss most in
| the real world.
| franky47 wrote:
| True, for immediate things having this ability is a
| godsend. But as software and bugs "dry up", it can get
| just as hard to chisel out as physical material.
| peterwwillis wrote:
| Damnit, that was my plan too, only I have no passive income, so
| customers (or contracting) would be important. Hopefully this
| trend doesn't continue to become a glut of Silicon Valley
| woodworkers...
| ArcMex wrote:
| Funny, I want to move to a farm and keep goats and chickens (I
| am a Systems Architect). I still want to code in my spare time,
| if only to just pass on the skills to my offspring.
| driverdan wrote:
| Have you ever worked on a farm? If not make sure you
| understand exactly what it entails. Most people who've never
| done it vastly underestimate how much work it is.
|
| That said, a small hobby farm with goats and chickens doesn't
| take much work. But going on vacation can be problematic.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The great thing about chickens is that they debug your farm
| for you :-)
| amoitnga wrote:
| :)
|
| the downside is you have to 'install' and continuously
| 'run' a shovel
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Did this 25 years ago. Never looked back.
|
| eta: Admittedly I did a bunch of design/architecture
| consulting and teaching tech courses for the first decade or
| so to pay for the farm. Consulting is a good way to keep your
| hand in, and teaching serves as a great marketing platform
| for the consulting work.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| You might find that what was a hobby is not as much fun as a
| job.
|
| I mentioned this to an actual "rock star" developer London
| session musician with a doctorate in music who moved to
| development after teaching themselves after an accident.
| StavrosK wrote:
| I have a job writing software, and in my spare time I write
| software as a hobby. The job is much less enjoyable than the
| hobby, because in the hobby I'm doing, by definition, only
| things I like.
|
| I think any hobby is less enjoyable when you have it as a
| job, since you sometimes need to do things you don't like
| doing or aren't interested in.
| chongli wrote:
| There are lots of people who generate income from some type
| of cottage industry hobby. Woodworking, candles, jewellery,
| preserves, decorations. If you've got a bunch of equity to
| fall back on (in the form of your home plus securities),
| then you're in a much better position to escape the
| pressure to do unwanted work.
|
| The above is one of the major reasons I'm such a fan of
| basic income. I think we'd see a lot more cottage industry
| shops, used bookstores, cafes, and the like, if we all had
| basic income to cover our basic needs.
|
| Heck, even software developers can get in on the game by
| working on their own passion projects. Whether it's indie
| gaming or retro computing, a new photo editor or CAD
| software, or perhaps a new sort of application never before
| seen. There's just so much cool stuff people can do with
| computers when they aren't trying to build a startup aimed
| at a big exit.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| For me its always a sign of that they have precarious
| finances or are posh enough to leverage that into high
| end clients.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I won't move away from my main job for a while, but I do want
| to move to a lifestyle where I grow all my own food. It's a
| very interesting problem, of whether a single person/family can
| be mostly self-sufficient on food while spending only a small
| part of their day growing the said food.
|
| Lots of biology, perhaps a little bit of tech thrown in, if it
| helps.
| OJFord wrote:
| I think you easily _can_ , the difficulty comes with whether
| you can be happy with what you're limited to, so more a
| question of personal tolerance for lack of variety in order
| to be happy with your food, IMO.
| fullstop wrote:
| I thought about this as well. I think that I'd be mostly okay
| on the vegetable front but I don't think that I'm up to
| plucking chickens or raising animals. I would also need a
| bigger yard!
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I am pretty okay with it. I eat meat. I have done the dirty
| work in the past, and I am willing to do it again.
| fullstop wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that the animals would become my friends.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > passive income
|
| Just curious: is this income 100% passive?
| brtkdotse wrote:
| There's no such thing, there's just varying degrees of risk
| vs leverage.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Of course there is, within a defined timeframe. If I bought
| 5-year government bond last year, then this year it's 100%
| passive income to me. I don't have to do absolutely
| anything in order to get it this year.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| As a warning, you're eventually going to run out of places to
| put that furniture if you don't sell some of it!
|
| I'm the OP on that github issue, and while my partner and still
| have some IKEA furniture I'd like to replace, we also have a
| couple of pieces of mine that don't fit readily into our lives
| that we just have around the house. The chandelier on my
| website[0] was a spec piece built for a show at the Wharton
| Esherick Museum[1]. It didn't sell at the show, and I don't
| really have a place for it. It's now sitting in a crate in a
| corner of our bedroom.
|
| Likewise, the Federal period shelf clock[2] is without a shelf
| and is also sitting in a crate until I get a chance to mount a
| shelf for it. How hard can it be, you ask? Surprisingly
| difficult in a log cabin. If the pandemic ever ends and I get
| my workbench out of our living room, I might have a place for
| it!
|
| [0] https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/#/chandelier/
|
| [1] https://whartonesherickmuseum.org
|
| [2] https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/#/federalclock/
| Jenz wrote:
| The software developer turned woodworker keeps reading HN? :P
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Yeah, it pretty reliably turns up interesting articles from
| the long tail (are the cool kids even still using that
| phrase?).
| fendy3002 wrote:
| You can checkout anytime you like but you can never leave
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| You really missed what that songs about.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there 's
| that :-)_
|
| As I told a friend yesterday: this is fashionably called "event
| sourcing" these days :).
| httpne wrote:
| I personally think programming is a terrible job. In these
| threads, there are always people who say "it isn't programming,
| it is x", where x is "poor management", "the fact that it is a
| job", "the type of programming you are doing", etc, etc.
|
| It isn't, it is programming. Anyway, I want to go one step
| further and return to a more ancient living style. I don't want
| things like artificial light, computers, etc, to be a significant
| part of my life. The best time I have ever had, even to this day,
| was when all of those things didn't exist.
| thih9 wrote:
| > The best time I have ever had, even to this day, was when all
| of those things didn't exist.
|
| Watch out for Rosy Retrospection [0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
| alexmingoia wrote:
| https://youtu.be/21j_OCNLuYg
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Every field looks mysterious and fun from the outside. Your
| imagination of the work in that field doesn't take into account
| the fact that you'll have to work with other people, there will
| be politics, cliques, pointless meetings, fads in the field,
| disagreeable coworkers, losers, unreliable people. There will
| also be, at the end of the day, a business that needs to keep
| afloat, and you'll always have to "just ship it" before it
| reaches your personal standards. And after you've done everything
| a few dozen times, on top of everything else, you'll also be
| bored.
|
| That all said, software development is by far the best career and
| I'm pretty happy with it.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| I am no longer paid to build software. I was a SWE for 15 years
| at things from startup to a FAANG. Not I teach high school CS.
|
| I build software anyway. Today I automated a workflow to turn
| zettlerkasten lesson plans into PDFs and post them to Google
| Classroom. I'm also upgrading the school timetable to sync
| everything (schools have lots of proprietary tools with their
| calendars) to Outlook.
|
| In class I wrote a one page Huffman encoder with my pupils. We
| also turned a binary tree into ascii art. I showed another class
| the mypy typechecker.
|
| Then I came home and put a final coat of Osmo 425 UV oil on my
| 100" garden dining table, and spent two hours designing a
| hardwood gazebo in the style of a mini English barn (crucks,
| beams, etc.)
|
| I told my partner about this thread and she said maybe I could
| become a commercial carpenter. The idea of having to do this for
| money made my heart sink. No thanks!
| cowmix wrote:
| Look, software always sucked and has always been enjoyable. It
| depends on where you are on your personal journey. I've been
| around long enuff to have suffered true burn-out more than a few
| time.
|
| When I take the 30K view, in the almost 40 years I've been
| tinkering with software, people have never had it so good. Super
| enterprise grade software is available to tinker with, for free,
| and can run on your freakin' phone. If you want to go super low
| level and screw with assembly language, knock yourself out.
| [deleted]
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Keep it simple, build what you need. This is so hard to get
| through peoples heads, now the most simple landings page seems to
| need react. Im 61 and still love to code but the hoops and loops
| you have to jump through these days to host a web page is absurd.
| I can not emphasize this enough, keep it simple.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I no longer build software for money or for someone else.
|
| I still love building software for myself, so that is what I do.
|
| I don't have any money, but nobody is breathing down my neck when
| I haven't made a commit in 2 days (which is rare) or if I still
| plan to stick to the deadlines when I have more important life
| events happening.
| intotheabyss wrote:
| I'm a mechanical engineer in aerospace looking to move to
| software. I like the idea of setting up an office at home and
| working for myself. Is software really this bad, as all of the
| comments here suggest? Should I make the jump to software from a
| career in which I have a decade of experience? I just find
| aerospace boring, unimaginative, stressful and low paying, and if
| I could work on just building code for web apps or whatever, I'd
| much rather do that, even if the pay was 'only' 50k per year, but
| with the benefit of working for myself.
| hamaluik wrote:
| I think the grass is always greener on the other side. I have a
| BSc and MSc in biomechanical engineering, was never able to get
| / keep a job in engineering for long but what I did do sucked--
| way more rote activities and way less actual problem solving
| than I was promised. Fell back to software development, my pay
| has gone up considerably but it is still a lot of rote
| activities and less problem solving than promised. So far the
| most interesting stuff I've gotten to do was when working
| either alone or on a very tiny team (2-3 people)--then you
| still have a ton of boring work, but you also get some
| interesting stuff too.
|
| As with any "mental" job, I find I work best when I balance it
| with a "physical" job on the evenings / weekends, such as
| renovating my house or basically doing anything with my hands.
| When physical jobs were my paycheque, all I wanted to do were
| mental things in the down time, now its flipped. Neither is
| necessarily better or worse, though I do enjoy the flexibility
| that software allows / requires.
| tumetab1 wrote:
| It's not as bad it might appear from this comments. People are
| just generally bad managing their own careers and really figure
| out what they enjoy/want.
|
| This means that you should clarify better what do you want in a
| software job. Besides working from home, what do you want?
| Relax workflow? Adrenaline rushes from doing fixes in
| live/production systems? Do you know work on technical or
| business features? Does the tech matter (new/legacy) for you?
| Do you enjoy mastering a tech or just make software work? How
| much payment is worth a worse job?
|
| My suggestion is that you write down what's your ideal software
| job and review it several times. Then it's a "simple" tasks of
| reaching for it and keep your expectations in check.
| dgudkov wrote:
| >Is software really this bad, as all of the comments here
| suggest?
|
| No, it's not. But finding an interesting project to work on can
| be difficult.
| jdreaver wrote:
| I have a BS and MS in mechanical engineering. I started working
| on simulation software, and now I work in edtech.
|
| This is an interesting thread, but my advice is to never take
| comments on the internet as any sort of representative sample.
| It is unlikely someone happy with their job would comment on a
| thread about quitting, because it makes for a boring addition
| to the thread.
|
| I sometimes wonder what my work life would be like if I
| switched back to mechanical engineering, but I'm very happy
| working purely in software. Engineering requires a ton of
| capital and fairly large teams to do cool things. With
| software, a single person or a small team on a shoestring
| budget can build pretty neat things. I also work 100% remote,
| which I'm not sure would be possible with a mech eng job.
|
| I do wish I spent more time in the machine shop at school
| though. Many of my neighbors in my HOA are either "real
| engineers" or retired blue collar workers, and they can fix
| things much better than I can. I can help reset their router
| though! :)
| fsociety wrote:
| Nope it's good. Think about musicians, when they are junior
| everything is fun and interesting.
|
| Once you train your ears and learn scales suddenly you start to
| hear music in terms of theory.
|
| Do this long enough to become "senior" and suddenly a whole
| class of music is boring - like glue-code.
|
| You need to find outlets for your experience and not just
| maintain open source projects - which are highly valuable but a
| huge pain in the ass.
| emerged wrote:
| I'm about 40 yrs old, started in software almost 25 years ago.
| I still really enjoy it. I stay away from web development
| because it's a big mess of sloppy languages and tools.
| DarkWiiPlayer wrote:
| > I stay away from web development because it's a big mess of
| sloppy languages and tools.
|
| You can somewhat get around that if you work mostly on back-
| end stuff. For the front-end, things might change once wasm
| becomes more viable.
| XCSme wrote:
| Or if you don't care about the tools and just used what you
| already know or like.
| senko wrote:
| Grass is always greener on the other side.
|
| Programming can be great, fun, challenging and profitable, but
| it can also be tedious, boring, demoralizing and hours can be
| miserable. It all depends on the company and the project you're
| working on.
|
| I agree with most of the haters in this thread yet I wouldn't
| trade it for another kind of job :-)
|
| > I just find aerospace boring, unimaginative, stressful and
| low paying,
|
| Could you expand on that a bit? To an outsider aerospace sounds
| much cooler than making web widgets with questionable
| purpose...
| intotheabyss wrote:
| In programming, it's move fast and break things. In
| aerospace, it's move slow and be methodical and never break
| things. I work in certification, and something as simple as
| re-painting interior sidewall panels requires something
| called an STC (supplemental type certificate) which requires
| updating manuals, burn testing representative samples of the
| painted panels, and design reports with constant
| communication with the local transport authority. I think the
| process is adequate, since we're dealing with machines in the
| sky, but it's the complete opposite of innovation.
| Clubber wrote:
| Software used to be, "I have a cool idea for a program / app
| that will solve the business issue x. I'll go work on it." Then
| the dev spends a few weeks working on it and has a product to
| show. If it is worthwhile, the dev will be able to clean it up
| and make it production ready. This is where the woodworking
| idea comes in. You create. You have ownership and
| accountability.
|
| Today, that is almost completely gone. Now it's Business has
| been forced to design a system for you that doesn't make a
| whole lot of sense and a bunch of stuff wasn't considered. If
| you push back, you'll get dragged into endless meetings where
| you try to explain things to people who have zero training on
| what you are explaining. You'll get pushback because their egos
| will get involved and eventually overruled on most of it. After
| that, you will get a week to work on a sliver on it, then next
| week you'll work on a different sliver but often whatever
| business decides, not what makes sense. You'll also get a bunch
| of processes to weigh you down because they hired a bunch of
| goobers cheap that keep breaking stuff. When this doesn't work,
| it will be your fault.
| throwaway8941 wrote:
| This is a privileged position to take. IT is one of the very few
| ways to have a relatively decent life in my third world (well,
| technically second world) country, especially for those of us who
| can't rely on nepotism to put them in a comfortable place.
|
| Sure, I can go make furniture out of wood for $150 a month (and I
| did at some point in my life), but I'd rather keep my cushy
| lifestyle and stare at a screen for 16 hours a day, thank you
| very much.
| carlivar wrote:
| I wonder if those making furniture are just doing it to stave
| off boredom after cashing in millions of tech stock profits.
| I've already seen exactly this sort of pattern in a few people
| I know.
| brixon wrote:
| When I was a manager for a few years I started wood working
| as a hobby. If you have the builder/creator itch then when
| you stop building software then you will need an outlet for
| your itch. When I went back into software development, I have
| not touched the wood working.
| kls wrote:
| Wood working, classic automotive restoration and several
| other hobbies tend to scratch a similar creative itch that
| software does. They each have a element of perfection above
| perfection, unlike software success in a project is easy,
| but similar to software mastery is difficult.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| There's definitely some truth to that. I've grown to _hate_
| technology over the past decade or so, largely because I 'm a
| technologist who believes that technology should exist to
| make our lives better and the entire modern industry seems
| hell bent on doing the opposite. Consequently, I'm
| considering radical lifestyle changes that I am forced to
| admit would probably not be possible if I had not saved a
| good amount of money that I earned working in technology. And
| I don't even make that much because money was never a big
| motivator for me.
| fogihujy wrote:
| I'm neither rich, nor do I work as a programmer or software
| engineer, but I have found woodworking to be extremely
| rewarding. Wood is an amazing material, and there's thousands
| of years of woodworking experience available in books, online
| instruction videos and DYI guides so it's relatively easy to
| get into. It's nice to use one's hands for other things than
| a mouse/keyboard.
| senko wrote:
| Everything's a privileged position to take, as you can always
| find shittier jobs or people that have it (much) worse in life.
|
| Doesn't mean it's not true or not relevant.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| There is a middle ground.
| notacoward wrote:
| Good for you. No, really. I wish you nothing but the best. But
| that's _now_. After some years, when you have already secured a
| relatively decent life, your perspective on the value of
| _continuing_ to do it might change. In fact, it would be rather
| amazing if it didn 't. Yes, it's absolutely a privileged
| position, but it's still how I feel and how I suspect a lot of
| programmers my age feel. You can't dismiss our reality any more
| than we can dismiss yours.
| fsloth wrote:
| I don't think you can _secure_ a decent life by programming
| outside of US - if this is understood as position of
| comfortable financial independence.
|
| I'm a programmer, my income is in the top 10th percentile,
| but that just means I'm in the upper middle class with the
| privilege to pay more taxes. I _need_ to work until I get to
| retirement to secure myself financially.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| For now the "trick of the privileged" (like myself, I
| guess) is to work remotely for an US-based company and get
| half of US salary, while living in a country where that
| salary is still 2x what you'd get on your home market. It
| probably will stop working at some point (as salaries for
| remote workers reach equilibrium), but for now, it's a good
| way to live.
| fsloth wrote:
| Ok, I suppose in that case where you can get as remote a
| salary far exceeding local market rate the situation is
| also conducive to an early retirement :)
| notacoward wrote:
| > I need to work until I get to retirement
|
| That is true by definition. No matter how much or how
| little you make, it remains true. The question is: _when_
| do you get to retirement? Making a lot of money makes it a
| lot sooner.
| fsloth wrote:
| In my country I get to retirement when the government
| says I can go - more or less. Otherwise the pension is
| really small.
|
| To explain: a large chunk of our salary goes to the
| state's pension fund - not _my_ fund. When I reach the
| official retirement age the government will allow me a
| pension that is scaled based on my payments while
| employed.
|
| At this time I'm looking at 3 decades on front of
| keyboard (am 40 and the official pension age for me will
| be around 70).
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| FWIW I think that's the same in the US as well, unless you
| strike it lucky with stock options. As obscene as Silicon
| Valley salaries are, it would take remarkable financial
| discipline to get to the point where an early retirement
| could be had.
|
| I believe that due to market forces, engineering salaries
| are set as high as they can be without producing "escape
| velocity" for said engineers.
|
| That said, I'm not in the US proper but in Canada, but I'm
| in the same position as you: highest tax band, make very
| good money, but unless I were to dump everything and move
| to an area with a much lower cost of living I will be in no
| position to retire before 65. Doing that (major cost of
| living reduction) becomes difficult once you have children.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| Id agree but can we stop using "obscene" in this way and
| TBH a average SV salary is nothing much to write home
| about compared to some other professions.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| It's very doable in Poland - see my comment above
| somewhere. At least for now, the taxes for contract work
| (even long-term one) are low and the pay puts you probably
| in 98-99th percentile in the country. Retiring in 10-20
| years is real (of course, it requires full-blown careerism:
| job hopping, going after the hottest fields/fads etc.).
| martythemaniak wrote:
| After reading a bunch of the comments in this thread, I have to
| wonder if people here have ever actually spent significant time
| outside of IT. It seems not.
|
| I had a continuous stream of manual labour PT or FT jobs between
| 15 and 23, before getting my first IT job and when I started it
| was a fucking revelation. People would _pay_ me $40k /y to sit at
| a comfortable desk and think and write?! No baking and sweating
| the hot sun, no threat of injuries, no freezing in the winter
| time, no clocking in/out, no petty criminal coworkers?! I don't
| think memory of that feeling will ever go away. And yes, I did do
| some woodworking as well.
| lxrbst wrote:
| While I occasionally dream about working on cars or motorcycles
| at times instead of sitting in front of a computer all day, I
| think we tend to forget how good of a career developing is.
|
| When we picture our dream of doing a simple trade, we only think
| of the most awesome part of that trade. If I'm a car mechanic,
| most of it too is just trivial oil and tire changes or changing a
| basic part of two - not working on engines in depth.
|
| Same with programming. We would want to build something cool from
| the ground up, but we are just piping stuff from a lib to
| another.
|
| Comparing woodworking to corporate code is unfair anyway. I'd
| rather compare working at a furniture factory to corporate code,
| and woodworking to a solo dev project.
| XCSme wrote:
| > most of it too is just trivial oil and tire changes or
| changing a basic part of two
|
| I bet that it feels better and more rewarding than updating a
| dependency and spending 2 days fixing all the errors caused by
| updating, especially knowing that you will have to do the same
| thing in a few months.
|
| There is something that feels good when you create/fix/improve
| a real object compared to a software one.
| one2know wrote:
| Dependency fixing is nothing compared to dealing with all the
| people you typically find in a software shop, IT, managers,
| pseudo-developers like SRE, infosec, or devops. Those people
| are actively blocking app developers in order to extract a
| paycheck, and sometimes it feels like the app developer and
| product manager are the only people actually interested in
| making money.
| douglaswlance wrote:
| As someone who works on engines and writes code, let me tell
| you that the feeling is exactly the same. All complex systems
| stir up the same emotions.
|
| It's frustrating as can be when it doesn't work, and it feels
| great when it finally _does_ work.
|
| As a human, dealing with complexity is all the same, no
| matter the medium.
| XCSme wrote:
| I do agree that "complex systems stir up the same
| emotions", but I was more referring to the simpler systems.
| I enjoy putting the dishes back into the cupboard a lot
| more than I enjoy moving icons on a desktop.
| driverdan wrote:
| > most of it too is just trivial oil and tire changes or
| changing a basic part of two
|
| And those types of jobs are the most likely to have higher
| margins.
| [deleted]
| nicbou wrote:
| Add me to the woodworking ex-developers. I built a website that
| pays the bills, and now I have a lot of time on my hands.
|
| I am finishing my first piece of furniture today. It's pretty
| scary to work without an undo button. The physical world isn't
| just instructions, but movements. A little twitch can ruin a cut.
| A clumsy movement can dent a piece of wood you spent an hour
| sanding. You truly experience the meaning of "measure twice, cut
| once". Resources also feel tangibly limited. You can't just spin
| up another server, you must drive across town to buy more lumber.
|
| I still enjoy coding though. My passion for it returned once I
| could do it on my own time, without stakeholders, sprints,
| meetings, deadlines or even schedules. I sit down and work until
| the coffee wears off, then go do something else. It's a hobby
| again.
|
| I don't think programming is the probkem. Anything you do 40
| hours a week for other people will get to you just the same.
| Programming is a pretty sweet gig, all things considered.
| NiloCK wrote:
| You may enjoy Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. It
| made sense of the permanent vague anxiety I've always had while
| working in a digital medium.
| dpcan wrote:
| "I built a website that pays the bills, and now I have a lot of
| time on my hands."
|
| Okay.... I assume you're not going to talk about this because
| then you'll have so much competition you won't be able to pay
| the bills anymore, but do you have any generalized background
| information about this?
| SahAssar wrote:
| Usually this means dropshipping, but it could be something
| different.
| nicbou wrote:
| Nope. https://allaboutberlin.com
|
| Isn't dropshipping extremely overcrowded since The 4 Hour
| Work Week popularised it?
| SahAssar wrote:
| I heard dropshipping still "works" if you know both the
| marketing and the dev work for it, but I'd say it is
| getting more rare.
|
| Good to hear I was wrong :)
| robryan wrote:
| What you really need is some level of exclusivity, if you
| can drop ship someones stuff into a different market or
| bring a new customer base to it. If 50 other people are
| doing the same thing it probably won't work.
|
| A decent portion of our business used to be dropshipping
| onto Amazon against others that were doing the exact same
| thing with the same terms. Margins obviously ended up
| tiny and the whole thing was at the whims of Amazon. Glad
| we don't do that anymore.
| nicbou wrote:
| You can find it in my post history. I help people settle in
| my country, in plain English. It's just not the main point of
| this conversation.
| briefcomment wrote:
| How do you monetize the site? It looks really useful, but I
| don't see any ads or payment options.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| Some of the guides have affiliate links.
|
| > "This guide contains affiliate links. When you click
| those links and buy something, I make a little money. The
| income allows me to work on All About Berlin full time.
| All my recommendations are genuine. I want to keep this
| website useful and neutral."
|
| https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/moving-to-berlin
| dheera wrote:
| > I built a website that pays the bills, and now I have a lot
| of time on my hands.
|
| It's also pretty impossible to build a website that pays the
| bills indefinitely without maintainence or upgrades. If your
| website becomes popular enough to pay your bills you WILL
| eventually have competitors, as well as new mediums of
| technology, and you'll have to constantly keep up to date.
| robviren wrote:
| Hit the nail on the head. Work is work and it drains passion
| out for most people. Obviously not all cases, but at least I
| feel of you are looking for purpose and joy from work you may
| be looking in the wrong spot.
| domepro wrote:
| Agreed. Loving something and it turning into a real job with
| all the added fluff/protocols/whatever (things like talking
| to customers, having to do marketing, having to meet
| deadlines and such) will suck up everything you think you
| love about it and make it feel bad once it's in the real
| world with actual constraints and dependencies. It's no
| longer only you and it, it's no longer exploring and playing
| in the sandbox.
|
| From what I've heard from other sources, it's kinda like what
| people call being a grown up.
| agumonkey wrote:
| > It's pretty scary to work without an undo button.
|
| sawing wood these days too I cannot keep laughing alone in my
| beard thinking how software people just don't understand how
| the world used to be and how much had to be designed to work
| before trying .. there's no way back, or to be precise, every
| wrong turns costs dearly.
| jjice wrote:
| As a current CS student on his last year, I've heard this a lot
| and it's taken some time to come to terms with. I've always
| seen people saying they can get work down by their work, which
| was really scary to me at first. How could I ever become tired
| of the think I've loved most since I was 8?
|
| Yet, this happens to everyone, including me to a small extent
| during my last internship. I think everyone can grow tired of
| anything given enough of it, and I think coming to terms with
| that is easier for some than others.
|
| I've mentally prepared myself to branch out into different
| pastimes, and for some reason, it seems we all land on wood
| working.
| munchbunny wrote:
| The problem with programming for a job is that you don't get
| to do it on your own terms. If you really focus on it and
| have a bit of luck, you can align your job with the stuff you
| wanted to do anyway, but even then every 40 hours is probably
| 30 hours of not particularly interesting work and 10 hours of
| the stuff you loved when you first fell in love with
| programming.
| burger_moon wrote:
| I went the other way into programming from the trades.
|
| Sometimes, especially when I read about people leaving this
| industry to go work in the trades it makes me nostalgic and
| miss working with my hands and building real things.
|
| But I also have enough bad memories of shitty work conditions
| and waking up sore day after day to give me a gut check to stay
| put for a little longer.
|
| > I don't think programming is the probkem. Anything you do 40
| hours a week for other people will get to you just the same.
| Programming is a pretty sweet gig, all things considered.
|
| Turning my hobbies in jobs killed off a lot of fun I used to
| have. I think it's pretty universal and why it should probably
| be more common to switch industries a couple times at least
| through your career to keep things fun and not stay in a burned
| out mentality forever.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| I've done over 10 years in the trades, and now 10 years in
| dev and am coming to the close of this chapter. I'm not
| entirely sure what I'm going to do, but I've been looking at
| a few projects that would be an intersection of the two.
|
| I'd like to have another couple careers before I retire. The
| best part of a career is learning, getting it, then doing
| something as a journeyman and looking at your work and
| thinking, 'I got it'.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Turning my hobbies in jobs killed off a lot of fun I used
| to have.
|
| Thank you. I have nothing else to add. I just needed to read
| that today.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > I think it's pretty universal and why it should probably be
| more common to switch industries a couple times at least
| through your career to keep things fun and not stay in a
| burned out mentality forever.
|
| Isn't that years of education and work to start at the bottom
| again? If one has a family to support doesn't seem terribly
| feasible.
| ptyyy wrote:
| Yeah I did the same. I went from being an avionics/aviation
| electrician to college and then to being a software engineer.
| I hated being in the elements all the time so I wanted to
| have an officer job. Overall it's been good for me but I do
| miss working with my hands more.
|
| > Turning my hobbies in jobs killed off a lot of fun I used
| to have.
|
| Yep. I haven't really worked on any of my hobby projects like
| I had before.
| SCNP wrote:
| I also went from residential/commercial framing and
| remodeling into systems engineering/sysadmin. There are
| moments that really stand out on both sides, as you said. I
| distinctly remember packing the tools up one day and thinking
| about how the second floor of that house wasn't there that
| morning. It was a good feeling that has stuck with me for 15
| years. But I also remember the days our crew was trying to
| eke out a few hours of work with a hurricane coming in
| because we needed the money. We had the walls and roof mostly
| up on a beach house so we could do some interior work without
| being directly in the rain. However, the end of one of our
| extension cords, the one running the skil saw, was sitting in
| a puddle of water that completely encircled the cutting
| bench. I remember being told to unplug it to pack up and
| having to move it out of the puddle with the handle of my
| hammer since it bit me a couple times.
|
| I think what it boils down to is that, generally, software
| engineers/coders/sysadmins like to build things. When we
| don't get to build the things we want, the way we want to, it
| leads to a desire to get into woodworking. It's building
| things; its success is purely merit-based; and it's building
| the things that you want to build. I wouldn't recommend
| anyone go into construction (especially not commercial
| construction a la Office Space) from coding. It's joy is
| fleeting and infrequent and it ruins your body.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > A clumsy movement can dent a piece of wood you spent an hour
| sanding
|
| Dents can be somewhat fixed by getting them wet and ironing
| them.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I work with wood as a hobby. It's interesting how creating
| basic objects or furniture is actually really easy.
|
| But making those things really well and flawless is so very,
| very difficult.
|
| For example, I can whip together a new drawer, no problem. But
| making that drawer fit perfectly on all sides and open and
| close perfectly smoothly. Now that takes a whole other level of
| skill.
|
| And don't even get me started on paint and varnish.
| [deleted]
| 2mol wrote:
| Welcome to this beautiful hobby! I'm sure you'll love it for a
| long time to come (as you said, it helps to not _have_ to do it
| for 40hrs a week).
|
| I want to add to your description and say that the design part
| of the work can also be hugely satisfying! I found that there
| is something similar to software engineering: you can make it
| as simple [1] or complicated as you want, but there is
| something magical about finding the simplest solution that gets
| the job done.
|
| Consider posting some photos on the woodworking subreddit if
| you make something cool!
|
| [1]: a minimalist piece that I'm personally proud of:
| https://www.juricho.me/zurich-table/
| nicbou wrote:
| Those are some fancy joints
| 2mol wrote:
| Thanks :) I take little credit, because nowadays a lot of
| this is very achievable to learn with youtube and a bit of
| patience.
|
| It's really incredible how much tacit knowledge transfer is
| made possible because of youtube. Definitely one of the
| purely positive aspects of the platform and the internet in
| general.
| shitgoose wrote:
| "but there is something magical about finding the simplest
| solution that gets the job done"
|
| if only software were written that way...
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I'm a software developer by trade. I have a lot of woodworking
| experience by choice. I am a strong believer in that every
| developer should learn how to work with wood, or metal or other
| physical materials that require you to slow down and think
| about the next step.
|
| But then I also believe that technical interviews should
| consist of putting software developers in a woodshop
| (experienced at woodworking or not) with a bunch of power tools
| and telling them to build anything they like. Those that still
| have all their fingers attached we automatically hire.
| Everybody else we write a glowing reference so they get a job
| with our competitors.
|
| P.S. This is a joke.
| Jupe wrote:
| Count me as one switching my "hobby" from programming to
| woodworking (even with the astronomical lumber prices these
| days). I started with some outdoor tables, and now I'm building
| a woodworking shop in my garage... and LOVING it. It so much
| more satisfying than figuring out another distributed TX
| compensation mechanism!
|
| But, I also don't want to start a business doing woodworking.
| The last thing I want are clients yammering for "seven red
| lines"; this is something I'm doing as a hobby.
|
| I may offer-up a few furniture items on a local for-sale app or
| a craft show app... but I will try and resist the urge to
| create a better local craft show app, or a wood inventory/cut-
| list app, or a simple CAD app, etc.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| One of the authors of "The Pragmatic Programmer" was also a
| woodworker.
| varispeed wrote:
| > Add me to the woodworking ex-developers (...) I have a lot of
| time on my hands.
|
| Be careful with that table saw...
| nicbou wrote:
| That would increase the time:hands ratio.
| slingnow wrote:
| Yes, heed the scary warning of the complete stranger on the
| internet. You might want to quit the hobby altogether. I
| heard that there was risk involved. Eeks!
| mcast wrote:
| SawStop for the win!
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| After the way they went after Bosch, I have no interest in
| ever buying a SawStop. Good for them for making safe
| technology, but shame on them for going after someone else
| who made _better_ technology. The world needs safer options
| for tools like these, and being litigious bastards helps
| no-one.
| mcast wrote:
| I've heard that SawStop's patents are expiring soon, so
| it seems we'll have some competition in the next 5 years.
| In the meantime, since there are no other saws which
| protect your fingers from being sliced off, it's the best
| insurance policy for a software developer who needs them
| the most.
| postfacto wrote:
| For those transitioning from programming to woodworking, if
| you don't understand how to use your table saw, you're not
| supposed to design and build your own table saw because you
| think you can build a better one.
| morbusfonticuli wrote:
| This made me chuckle and then suddenly realizing that you
| caught me: often enough, this is how i(t) work(s) __. E.g.
| "i don't understand (crypto) algorithm $XYZ, fu _k it, i
| 'll write my own crypto!"
|
| _*in not-so-serious side projects
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I feel like there is kinda a lot of overanalyzing in this thread.
| I'll steal a line from Drew Carey: "There's a club for people who
| hate there jobs. It's called everyone, and our meetings are at
| the bar on 5PM on Fridays."
|
| If anything, I think the tech world (and indeed most of the
| professional world) has been fed a load of bull that work is
| supposed to be personally spiritually fulfilling, instead of
| something that pays the bills so you can get personal fulfillment
| outside of your job.
| [deleted]
| Chris2048 wrote:
| The question is, _why_ is it all so BS.
|
| I think the answer is, whenever you get to any kind of scale, you
| leave the logical world of engineering discipline, and enter the
| corporate world of product infighting. Who hasn't tried a small,
| personal project just as a clean walled-garden-of-the-mind to
| relax in, free from the reality of real software. I think every
| SWEs dream is that all software will be just as clean.
|
| But Companies don't create frameworks to improve or optimise,
| they create them to own and dominate. The airwaves are bought and
| sold by private concerns. specs and APIs are hidden, "amazing
| journeys" are had by the few on the back of the many, and we end
| up as the paid expert tinkerers of the war-machines of someone
| else's empire.
|
| The FLOSS question is more important now than ever: How can we
| fix the social and economic systems of hard/soft-ware, and
| complex systems in general, to end up with flawless, frictionless
| sci-fi engineering impossibilities, rather than the janky,
| baroque "modern web".
| qw wrote:
| I think one of the problems is that a lot of the management
| methods are built for the lowest common denominator. Juniors
| and mediocre developers who "need" direction and strict
| structure. Micro management is easier than creating a culture
| where developers are empowered to make independent decisions,
| based on shared goals and understanding.
|
| At some point talented developers grow out of that role and
| start looking for an escape.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| But I see the same everywhere at many levels. There seems to
| be some effort to "commoditise" development. Nice idea, but
| only really the committed expertise and resources of
| Microsoft or equivalent could achieve this - all other
| attempt devolve to some form of micromanagement.
| progman32 wrote:
| I understand this sentiment. Software can still be a lucrative
| and fulfilling field to work in, though perhaps not as uniformly
| as back in some sort of day. Perhaps the motivators for starting
| a tech career are different today. I work in government data
| transparency, and my work directly affects (hopefully positively)
| the communities that use our product. The code part is fun, but
| wouldn't be sufficient to keep me there alone. Have I taken a
| financial hit for taking a social-impact track vs. something
| else? Without a doubt. It works for me, though, in a way that
| optimizing for "the engineering experience" would definitely not
| have.
|
| If you're feeling burnt out but want/need to stay in coding,
| perhaps it is worthwhile to think about how much "fulfillment"
| you require from coding tasks. If you find you want to reduce it,
| could think about: * Mentoring other devs. It's very fulfilling
| to help someone grow. * Take a pay cut and work at a
| nonprofit/B-corp/mission-driven regular corp. There are _tons_ of
| these. There are lists (i.e., climatescape) but ask around. *
| Traditional hobbies. Woodworking, painting, gardening, travel,
| music, etc. If you 'd prefer to stay technical, some tech-
| adjacent hobbies with vibrant and exciting communities are
| retrocomputing (say, check out Adrian's Digital Basement on
| YouTube), cosplay/prop making (check out the Role Play Forum,
| there's some extremely knowledgeable people there), security
| capture-the-flag events, 3d printing... many choices. I feel we
| live in a hobby golden age - there's so many excellent online
| communities for seemingly every niche or mainstream hobby.
| davexunit wrote:
| Seems like lots of people here can relate to this. As time moves
| on I find myself doing less programming and more gardening and
| woodworking.
| elif wrote:
| I am with him. I was a professional developer for 16 years, but
| last year I got tired of saving startup money and not using it,
| and disillusioned with the path that global productivity is
| exponentiating toward.
| bhaak wrote:
| For all the possible reasons to hate this job, adding a RSS feed
| to anything is very low on my personal list.
|
| I'd even say I enjoy adding a RSS feed to anything. There are not
| enough RSS feeds out there.
| blamefaang wrote:
| Thanks for helping make a mess and running away.
|
| Pretty typical for your generation, to be honest.
|
| Is it any shock the President embodies that attitude?
|
| There's little expertise on display here. Just a sad man who
| didn't get his nuclear powered Star Trek reality his childish
| side was promised.
|
| Get to the back of the Trail Of Tears when it comes to
| generational suffering.
|
| What an exceptional, gritty character the United Armchair
| Soldiers of America have created.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Someone mentioned this in another thread awhile back and it
| really hit home with me. It's a line by the Joe MacMillan
| character (portrayed by Lee Pace) from _Halt and Catch Fire_ :
|
| "The computer isn't thing. The computer's the thing that gets us
| to the thing."
|
| That's how programming felt when I got into it back in the 80's
| and was still there when I started doing it professionally in the
| 90's. It felt like we were using computers as tools for
| creativity and exploration. For making the world a better place.
| Increasingly, as the valuations skyrocketed, that feeling has
| diminished to the point where I don't see it anywhere anymore.
| It's not about "getting us to the thing", it's not about making
| the world better. It is about making a buck.
|
| Now, look; I don't have a problem with people earning a living or
| even with Apple having a $2T valuation. My problem is the
| influence that has had on the industry. One might suggest that
| such a thing is unavoidable and they are probably right, but
| can't we at least try to be better? Can't we at least try to keep
| in focus the goal of making lives better and less about showing
| yet another ad? People are genuinely suffering right now all over
| the world. I challenge anyone to suggest that health and economic
| hardships are less important than Facebook.
|
| On a more practical, day-to-day matter: my job as a programmer
| is, well... my GOD the amount of tooling! When I got started web
| programming I had a text editor, and FTP client, a server, and a
| browser. I made a change, uploaded the files, and refreshed my
| browser. Don't get me wrong. Having a debugger built into the
| browser is great. Having a proper version control system is
| fantastic. I think, however, we're missing the forrest for the
| trees where tooling is concerned.
|
| Here's a case in point that a good friend pointed out to me
| recently: https://github.com/thecreation/jquery-wizard It's a
| simple jQuery plugin (please let's not get sidetracked with
| "jQuery is so old|bad|blah blah blah"!) for building wizards.
| Just look at all the files needed for the various tooling in
| relation to actual source code. Babel, Bower, ESLint, NPM,
| Travis, Gulp, Karma. You have to ask yourself, how much time does
| the developer get to spend on making his/her product better
| versus maintaining tooling support?!
|
| And _that_ is what programming is like right now. I hope it
| changes. I really do.
| tmaly wrote:
| That comment just made my Monday.
|
| Seriously building software has not gotten any easier.
| Communication and attention has slipped and I think these two
| issues make development all the more challenging.
| whack wrote:
| I can't relate to any of the "software sucks now" comments. I
| started off writing code the "old school" way. C or C++ using
| vanilla vim. I spent so much time wrestling with compile errors,
| pointer logic, memory management, looking up documentation to
| figure out what methods were available in a class, and using grep
| to figure out where/how methods were calling one another. It was
| a colossal mess. I had almost no interest in programming because
| I spent the vast majority of my time yak shaving, not coding.
|
| Then ten years later, I discovered IDEs with inline compile
| warnings, autocompletions, method suggestions. I discovered stack
| overflow, and languages with automated garbage collection. My
| productivity skyrocketed. I started liking coding again, for the
| same reason I initially liked math and logic puzzles. I could
| spend more time problem solving and less time document chasing.
|
| To anyone who thinks things have actually gotten worse, I would
| suggest building a toy project using a 90s tech stack, and
| comparing that to a modern tech stack. The kind of things I was
| able to build in the last few years in my free time, I can't even
| imagine building in the 90s. If things seem increasingly complex
| today, it's only because the bar has been raised so much higher.
| fsociety wrote:
| I agree with you, tooling is better - even much better around
| C/C++. The issue I see is that programs today have more bugs
| than ever.
|
| I don't think that is just a symptom of more developers, but of
| the quality of development employers and such want to pay for.
|
| Suppose that is an issue of software becoming a commodity.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Well.. I've made that switch over a decade ago, and came back.
| Software pays better (or, a mediocre software dev like myself
| will do better than a mediocre carpenter like myself, because
| it's harder to see the mistakes I made).
|
| It turns out any passionate activity that you do as a job will
| tend to get the soul sucked out of it once you do it for money.
| Reality of having to make a profit means you work on what pays
| not what you want to work on, cut corners and make compromises.
| Doesn't take too long before you start feeling that.
|
| The very very few lucky among us (and I count myself in that
| group today) will stumble upon a situation where job and joy
| overlap -- and it has so much more to do with the people we work
| with rather than the subject matter. Seek out positions that give
| you autonomy of choice and creative freedom, having a playground
| (even if limited) helps a lot.
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