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No space and time for creativity or "doing it right", just do it fast, like yesterday also that feature we talked about three months ago? yeah, client also needs this added ...
Or even better: this is what up to 20 years of technical debt does to people
Also we don't make anything cool: just soulless corpo widgets for counting other widgets
Hey I'll have you know I create tech debt all the time ... Oh you said cool
This is gonna be my new answer to "What do you do?"
I've been on my project for 23 years. I haven't written production code for ten of those years. There are still commits in the production branch with my name on them. Is both gratifying and mortifying.
I was talking with two other "old-timers" today about our inability to pay off tech debt because our teams are never given the time to do it
Thank you for writing this. You make me feel better about my lack of writing code.
Or the quantitative "x bugs per week" KPI....
It's easier to fix bugs that you just introduced to be able to cover that KPI, too 🌚
Well, we're getting laid off en masse, while our employers report record quarterly earnings. So there's that.
Yeah absolutely.
I would go a step further and point to how a lot of companies these days supplement their workforce with low skill contractors from places like India who are like 13 hours ahead, do not have any actual investment/commitment to the project/company.
Why pay high prices for competent developers that can work alongside each other when you can have a just few competent ones and outsource the rest for those competent workers to corral, right? 🙄
Generally this results in more work for the full time devs. When you ask for senior developers and get a team of ”seniors” that write code like juniors…. That’s just more work for the full time devs. Ask me how I know.
Maybe I just need to stop working for Fortune 500s
TFW half my development time is stolen by helping this guy who I strongly suspect is just an interface for chat gpt.
He's just stating the obvious.
Our jobs have no meaning. I didn't become a software engineer to work on some bloated piece of crap software implementing shoddy code just to make a company manager happy do the CEO can make more money.
I wanted to work in open source and democratize software for the masses.
Hey man wanna start a coop?
... as in fuck off into the woods and farm chickens?
Shit.. I meant a co-op. But also free range chicken farm.. Train them to attack on command.
Knowing chickens, it's more like training them not to attack except on command.
A software dev co-op would be sick 👀
A part of it is horrible practices and a work culture which incentivizes them.
Who can be happy when the code doesn't work half the time, deployments are manual and happen after work hours, and devs are forced to be "on-call"?
Introduce Test-Driven Development, Domain-Driven Design, Continuous Deployment with Feature Flags, Mutation Testing and actual agile practices (as described in the Agile Manifesto, not the pathetic attempt to rebrand waterfall we have in most companies) to the project and see how happiness rises, along with the project's reliability and maintainability.
Oh, and throw in a 4 day work week, because no one can be mentally productive for that long.
IMO the biggest problem in the industry is that most developers have never seen a project actually following best practices and middle management is invested in making sure it never happens.
Oh, and throw in a 4 day work week, because no one can be mentally productive for that long.
Personally i'd go with a 5-day week of shorter hours, but if my company wants 4 days (they won't) then i'm game. Bonus points for full remote.
IMO the biggest problem in the industry is that most developers have never seen a project actually following best practices and middle management is invested in making sure it never happens.
Managers, like most animals, strive for self-preservation.
I'm hoping for a 4-day 6-hour work week in my lifetime, but it seems the world isn't ready for that quite yet, even though I'm 100% convinced productivity would not be impacted in any significant way, at least when it comes to software dev.
even if it impacts productivity, who gives a rat's ass? companies are making obscene profit, they can damn well eat that lowered productivity. CEOs will have to live with the horrors of only affording 15 yachts.
Fair point!
Out of interest, do you think that this would be a natural occurrence in the industry if a company were to say "right, no more managers, you self-manage and build this ting, and if it doesn't work we go bust", would software engineers look to build the best possible thing to their knowledge?
It's something I occasionally think about, because various companies like Valve and Fog Creek a decade or so ago did try similar stuff - and they had some great success with some absolute duds.
It is truly impossible to be motivated in a fortune 500 commercial insurance company. My tech lead gets absolutely heated about issues and I end up in meetings wondering how anyone can feel any emotion at all about middleware APIs in a gigantic corporation
I’ve actually taken up to doodling in my notebook. I’ve learned to describe what I’m imagining using words instead of drawing actual pictures so at a glance it passes inspection.
Sometimes you just need to get yourself into it to survive
I first worked in construction, then I worked in electrical engineering, now I do software, and there's things about software that I find inherently dissatisfying. There's little physical movement or location variety, your code is published quickly but often deleted quickly, there's little interaction with coworkers outside of your very specific domain, and the entire field of software has more money than they actually deserve to have based on how hard they work or actual value your code provides to society. Some companies produce very necessary products that do very necessary things for all of society to function, most of the software jobs are instead working on bullshit marketing apps that waste people's time or just enrich some financial services company or other societal middle man that doesn't actually need to be any better or richer.
The main upsides are the immediate return (some buildings take like a decade to build, most code is published that month), the remote work / hours flexibility, and the aforementioned undeserved pay and benefits.
I've written it countless times before, but software engineering desperately needs to do some engineering.
What you're describing is absolutely true, but compare the way you're working with an actual engineer. No sane engineer would start investigating the production process of a steel beam just to build a regular old warehouse. The steel beam has certain characteristics and unless you have very good reasons, you don't need to question that.
We are software developers however need to know a lot of our steel beams and can't rely on many of them. That means even simple stuff takes forever and we tie ourselves to it way more than we should.
Again, I used to work doing actual electrical engineering, working at an architecture firm designing bridges and buildings, and what you're describing as "actual engineering" is the whole reason I went into software.
Because if the actual engineering you're doing is just combining a lot of well defined parts to fit certain acceptance criteria, then you don't really need a person doing that, software can do it.
Not even just bullshit marketing, rather on making someone rich a smidge richer. For weeks and weeks of figuring out how to solve a problem that the client could solve by just not insisting they can export every single view to excel and re-import from excel "because that's what I'm used to".
Because they keep putting Javascript in things.
It would be interesting to see if there is difference between countries with proper labor laws and countries like USA
How does this compare to average human happiness? Aren’t humans famously dissatisfied?
My dissatisfaction is legendary.
Yeah, the previous iteration of the matrix wouldn't cut it.
We're all always dissatisfied with something
fr the system is in such a deep terminal crisis that talking to people in their 20s feels like talking to pensioners since in countries like the US or UK the life expectancy is declining due to not being able to afford healthy food, stressful and precarious work, mental health crisis and addictions, worsening healthcare, climate change, moldy cramped housing, proliferation of larger and thus more dangerous cars, new zoonoses etc. etc.
Private equity ownership sucks balls... publicly traded companies are only marginally better.
Government work doesn't pay as well but I can literally say the stuff I make makes my local area a bit better. It's a new feeling. I used to work in healthcare. It kills your soul.
Does it have anything to do with the fact that most useful code that will be written has been written and most of the hard problems are now security related?
In addition, they’ve been telling people to learn to code long enough the upper hand devs used to have for salary negotiation is largely gone.
Am I the only one who read the title as "Youtube is the reason 80% programmers are not happy"?
I mean... Not YouTube specifically but YouTube is representative of why us programmers are unhappy. The era of feeling like the tech industry and the internet are making the world better is over. All of them media platforms exist to co-opt our social interactions and replace them with ads for microwavable meals. They're spying on us, and for what? They control major elements of how we live out lives, and WHAT THE FUCK DO THEY EVEN GAIN? A lot of them are going bankrupt because it wasn't profitable. Their ads are less effective than the oldest forms of advertising. Ultimately, these platforms were about control, not about... Any other stated goal. And us programmer? We got tricked into thinking we were developing platforms to connect people and create a global culture of interconnectedness. Turns out we were building the infrastructure to implement genocide
No surprise there. What are we even doing? I haven't written something important at work since the beginning of my career. It is/was a learning experience for sure - I'm not dumber for it, but nothing I wrote had to be written. The world could've done without any product I helped develop.
I'm so tired....
I'll watch it
