[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what...
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Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still
love about it?
There's always threads about burnout and woes about writing
software. I'm curious: what are the things you still love about it
after all these years? Let's show the youngsters what to look
forward to.
Author : sergiotapia
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-02-14 19:51 UTC (3 hours ago)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Been in it for about 9 years excluding some early non salary
| work.
|
| I just love the freedom, even before COVID. You could ask an
| employer to let you work remote for a couple of weeks.I did this
| a few times.
|
| I really like being alone, and just not being bothered. I put it
| this way at a bar yesterday, I don't need to socialize at work.
| I'm socializing right now.
|
| Plus this is one of the only fields where you can still teach
| yourself everything you need to know in order to make an insane
| amount of money. You don't need a bunch of expensive tools.
|
| At the same time, you should invest a minimal amount of money in
| yourself. I saw a post on Reddit once where someone ranted that
| their employer wouldn't let them work at home as they didn't have
| a personal computer. How are you typing things up like your
| resume ?
|
| If you invest a relatively small amount of money in yourself, you
| going to have an amazing life. But if you sit around complaining
| and whining all day about how unfair the world is, your life is
| just going to be bad
| softwarebeware wrote:
| I'm at 18 years and I still love solving the daily mysteries
| about why a system is behaving a certain way or how to optimize
| something so that it is more efficient. The whole diagnostic /
| debugging / problem-solving process is something I'll never grow
| tired of.
| errantmind wrote:
| I love writing software that directly solves business challenges
| and can be tied back to real dollars.
|
| I love approaching software development from the perspective of
| an artist.
|
| I love the feeling of gaining expertise and how that translates
| to me being able to handle just about any type of software
| project.
|
| I love directly profiting from my projects.
| danr4 wrote:
| one things I know is that there is inverse correlation between
| code I love to write and code that solves real business problems.
| SenHeng wrote:
| I type stuff and then things happen. It's really no more
| complicated than that but it's still fun to me.
| mdo123 wrote:
| I can't imagine not programming... what, am I going to do things
| manually like a cave man?
| smackeyacky wrote:
| 35 years of coding. Edit actually its 40 this year whew.
|
| Making things nobody ever saw before (current role). Inventing a
| new kind of service nobody saw before that allows farmers to do
| things that were impossible.
|
| Taking a boring, time consuming part of somebodies day and making
| it disappear so they can do more interesting things.
|
| Occasionally hiding something fun in code that makes somebody
| smile.
|
| Mastery over things. Knowing how to hook up devices and make them
| work together.
|
| Not every day is great, but being able to create software is like
| being an actual wizard, especially if you are lucky enough to
| work where software and hardware hit the physical world.
| walleeee wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what are you building for farmers?
| nickd2001 wrote:
| Having done over 25 yrs , the creativity of it, finding elegant
| solutions to problems, satisfaction of taming a spaghetti code
| mess and cleaning it up , learning arcane uber-geeky ways of
| doing things and amusing others with these tricks, intellectual
| satisfaction / keeping the brain in shape, having colleagues with
| good senses of humour and lively minds, (particularly the
| delightfully twisted silly jokes/banter people come up with after
| spending hours on weird abstract problems that are
| incomprehensible to most people) overall relatively low stress
| (compared to other jobs that pay the same) way to keep a family
| fed :).
| polishdude20 wrote:
| > having colleagues with good senses of humour and lively
| minds, (particularly the delightfully twisted silly
| jokes/banter people come up with after spending hours on weird
| abstract problems that are incomprehensible to most people
|
| How do you find coworkers like these? Haha.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| dont join faang.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| 14 years experience here.
|
| - I still love the feeling of finality when you mark a Github PR
| as ready for review. It's like you let out a breath you've been
| holding in for a day or more. The fruit of all that thinking all
| that pondering, now in tangible form. Ready to make someones life
| better. (I think this is why I don't see myself working at an
| enterprise - I enjoy having high impact in products)
|
| - I love guiding younger engineers around trade-offs to
| solutions. I tell them my recommendation and then I go through my
| reasoning and because I have 14 years I have first-hand accounts
| about what went wrong and why. It feels good. I remember in my
| early days having a senior show me the ropes was very interesting
| and very fun.
| flashfabrixx wrote:
| It starts with the simple ability to convert a blank page into
| something interactive, useful and helpful for somebody else.
|
| And it continues with the possibility to apply knowledge and
| experience. Most important to see things from a higher level,
| realizing and thinking in systems and applying these methodical
| thinking on a daily basis - and passing the knowledge on to
| somebody else.
| eunoia wrote:
| My enthusiasm for corporate work may have dulled a bit over the
| years but I still really love to program.
|
| Digging into new challenges, learning and creating still tick the
| boxes. I've found I increasingly need to partition work and
| "hobby" CS though.
|
| Currently working through 3D graphics in the "hobby" category and
| having a blast.
| eatonphil wrote:
| I'm hitting 10 years now and 10 years feels like nothing. I can't
| believe I used to look up to people with 10 years of experience
| because now I can see how many and how large are the gaps in
| knowledge I still have!
|
| But I think the work stuff gets easier and it also becomes easier
| to explore random fun topics like retro devices and internals of
| compilers, databases, browsers, etc. Not that you couldn't do
| those explorations with fewer years of experience (you can) but
| it just takes me a bit less time to dig into things now.
|
| I guess I've gotten much better at slogging through documentation
| and reading existing code (that I didn't write).
| JoeMayoBot wrote:
| Always learning something new. Software is continuously evolving
| and there's always a next version of some technology, a new
| algorithm that I haven't seen or used, or a new practice that
| improves productivity. It's more of a journey than a destination
| and I love the ride.
| minusthebrandon wrote:
| For me, I notice that I get most engrossed in the code when
| there's a problem and I need to figure out how to solve it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Basically nothing. I suppose I love having a paycheck (less than
| the US dev median) and benefits.
| jka wrote:
| The excitement between successful compilation and running a
| program -- only to find out that it emits a stream of nonsense to
| the console instead of the answer you expect: but that's no
| problem, ctrl-c and back to the code.
|
| The satisfaction of opening a perfectly-tuned merge request with
| a minimal diff and glowing momentarily to yourself as tests all
| begin to pass (before realizing that there's an embarrassing typo
| in the title text).
|
| The feel-good factor from optimizing runtime and energy usage for
| your most prized simulation library (despite the fact that it's
| only used by yourself and perhaps one other egg avatar who
| starred your repository).
|
| The endless mental battle against an onslaught of awful, awful
| code and technology decisions from employers and the Internet,
| yet paired with evident continued emergence of more reliable,
| higher quality and more freely available and equitable tools over
| time. And being able to participate in all that in a small way.
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| Money, stability, esteem, and I just really like coding.
|
| However I dont like how most workplaces are still really
| inefficiently managed and full of politics and bad decisions.
| Mo3 wrote:
| Good question. I have 10 years of professional experience under
| my belt now. 10 years before that, from the age of 10 I was
| spending 100% of my free time playing with and learning
| programming languages.
|
| I think an important piece to this puzzle lies in not getting
| attached to one specific field of application.
|
| Worked for about 3 years in a regular run-of-the-mill agency /
| website shop. Not very interesting, but good experience and
| skills gained.
|
| Worked for about 2-3 years in ecommerce. _EXCRUCIATING_. Left
| with little to no appreciation left for the craft, fell into a
| crisis of meaning. Allowed myself to be unemployed for a while
| and found appreciation again.
|
| Worked for about 1-2 years freelance. Very cool projects, but I
| couldnt take the constant stress of dealing with clients and
| managing moneyflow. Stopped.
|
| Now I've been building a venture with a business partner of mine
| for about one year, which has somehow completely evolved and
| changed into effectively managing the technical side of a
| quantitative analysis firm that runs a NYSE-listed Hedgefond.
| _INCREDIBLE_. Every day feels like christmas, noone to answer to,
| 100% decision force on anything, and not even involved with the
| regular operations, just dreaming up cool new algorithms and
| ideas for our internal system all day. But this, too, I might
| leave some day.
|
| I truly believe that a programmer is not a static definition
| especially given the insane influx of data and new concepts we
| process every day, and that the only way to truly find ourselves
| in it is to not get attached to anything.
|
| The zen programmer, so to speak. Code is not limited to anything.
| Become the code, not the job description
| polishdude20 wrote:
| What was excruciating about working in e-commerce?
| ericb wrote:
| I can make stuff that has never existed before.
|
| I can make stuff that changes businesses.
|
| I can make stuff that changes lives.
|
| I do this with my mind, with no raw materials.
|
| My ideas and time are the only limits.
|
| How could someone with creative fire _not_ love this?
| softwarebeware wrote:
| I can ride my bike with no handlebars...
|
| ...sorry, couldn't resist.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| adding one more to it, I can make stuff that can be potentially
| consumed by millions. up until turn of the century you'd need
| resources of a king or a industrialist to be able to touch that
| many people.
| m3047 wrote:
| I've always been attracted and antagonized by the recurring theme
| of irrationality just below the surface of all of this. I've
| never thought of myself as a "coder" but as someone who engineers
| how people think about problems. I just end up coding because I
| guess I love sideshows and amateur burlesque. My father was a
| shrink. He was fond of (among other books) _Zen and the Art of
| Motorcycle Mechanics_. Are you seeing how this is going? I took
| out a display ad in the back of (print) _Computer World_ which
| said "VAX Hacker for Hire", in 1984.
| bootloop wrote:
| I feels like I never stopped playing with LEGO. And I will
| continue to do so.
| gizmore wrote:
| Less is more :)
| SeriousM wrote:
| I have 20 yrs now in mainly c# but also
| js,ts,sql,ruby,etc,etc,..... I really love the way how
| programming fits into my head and how I can remember quite every
| code I wrote though the years. What I hate is that I don't learn
| anything new, no matter how much I try to explore new concepts.
| Everything is a remix... But hey, now I have much more time to
| learn cyber security and piano :) Btw, I looooove the HN
| community spirit and diversity.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I shipped my first commercial project at age 11, in May of 1978.
| 44 years later, writing code every day, I'm still trucking, and I
| don't think I have ever worked a day in my life. There have been
| days where it has been tough, there have been days where they've
| tried to micromanage me, there have been days when I was bored,
| and there have been days where the pay wasn't so great, and if
| those times lasted more than an acceptable amount, I went and
| found something else to do for someone else. I get paid money to
| play. What I have studiously avoided is getting pigeon holed or
| type cast into a singularly defining role that prevents me from
| exploring.
|
| I will note I've burned out once or twice for a few weeks, until
| I woke up and realized I was in a horribly toxic environment. And
| then I simply moved on and found some other exciting project to
| work on.
| uberman wrote:
| I love the "ah-ha moments" where the complexity of a problem I
| thought was insurmountable fades away
| wdfx wrote:
| this is actually quite hard to define for me.
|
| it's something about having the creative freedom to decide on the
| solution to a problem, and then also the satisfaction of building
| it out into something which works, works well and then benefits
| others.
|
| along that path of [requirements -> design -> implement -> test
| -> release] there are numerous rewarding moments but when the
| whole thing comes together, there's another meta-reward of
| knowing that there now exists something where there was not
| before, and that I _created_ that thing. Quite often, entirely.
|
| Another level of this, is satisfaction in colleagues taking
| components/services/entire systems I've constructed and adapting,
| extending, changing them to do more than I thought possible.
| Also, seeing colleagues start their own
| components/services/systems in the pattern/design of something I
| did, and making a success of it.
|
| After a while, it's like seeing an entire ecosystem spring up
| around seeds I created.
|
| However, to translate that into what it really is - the team I
| work with manages to build an actually useful product that real
| people use and enjoy using. I find that highly rewarding.
| ThalesX wrote:
| I have around a decade of experience.
|
| - I love solving problems. It's like solving puzzles as your day
| job; it's great!
|
| - I love getting exposed to various domains, when building
| software for it. There's also the added benefit that I usually
| have domain experts getting paid to explain stuff to me.
|
| - I love building stuff that other people use. There's something
| very good for the soul when you see something you contributed to
| solving real world issues.
|
| - I love the fact that I was involved in building systems that
| save lives.
|
| - I don't really see myself doing anything else and being happy.
|
| - Don't even get me started on building games / engines,
| basically being able to be your own mini-god.
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