[HN Gopher] Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
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Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
Author : imaq
Score : 675 points
Date : 2024-05-03 09:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (alinpanaitiu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (alinpanaitiu.com)
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| > when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we
| were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes
|
| Feels like a very outsized reaction to have to something well-
| intentioned, useful, and not-ridiculous.
| withinboredom wrote:
| It's quite ridiculous for a number of reasons, well documented
| by research and experience: software engineers can't estimate
| how long something will take with any kind of accuracy.
| rettichschnidi wrote:
| Any recommended readings on the "unable to estimate" claim?
| vedranm wrote:
| I read Steve McConnell's Software Estimation: Demystifying
| the Black Art and I can recommend it without hesitation. It
| is quite old by now so there might be something newer and
| better out there as well.
| Scarblac wrote:
| That book says the opposite though, we can definitely
| make good estimates.
|
| It's just that estimating well needs people with training
| on how to do that, and then it takes substantial time to
| make good estimates. And there will still be significant
| error bars (if the estimate isn't a _range_ , it doesn't
| count as an estimate). But it's certainly doable.
| UK-AL wrote:
| People who ask for estimates, don't consider estimates
| with huge error bars good. Literally anyone can make
| estimate with a decent amount of error.
|
| To narrow down the estimate to what they want would take
| just as long as just doing the work.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I know, but those people need the training.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| There are no good recommendations because it's wrong. GP
| has taken "software estimation is hard and very imprecise"
| and vastly misrepresented it to try to dunk on someone on
| the internet.
|
| It's this sort of disinformation that perpetuates the
| contingent of software developers that cry bloody murder
| whenever they're asked to say if something will take a day
| or a year.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I never wrote what you quoted. Please don't misquote me
| to "try to dunk on someone on the internet."
| XorNot wrote:
| I've always felt this is because estimation never gets
| treated as an exercise which might involve actual software
| engineering. You get handed a task you've never seen before,
| for a system you've never seen before, and asked "how long
| would implementing this take?"
|
| You _never_ get handed a task which is "write as much of a
| prototype of a system which would do this, so we can estimate
| how much more work we think is involved".
|
| And then when you do have enough knowledge to reasonably
| estimate, people just declare with no evidence that it
| _should_ be quicker anyway and then are surprised when it is
| not.
| withinboredom wrote:
| It's not just that, but also we tend to estimate in the
| context of "if I were sitting at a computer working on just
| this problem, this is how long it would take." The reality
| is that there are meetings, high priority bugs for
| unrelated systems, interruptions from the business,
| coworkers and life, code reviews for other team members,
| rediscovering what you were doing before being interrupted,
| etc.
|
| Using time tracking, I was able to discover I only spend
| 2-3 hours per workday actually programming, the rest was
| all interruptions and such. Thus I can estimate that one
| day really equals 3-4 workdays. Then my project manager
| throws in another 3-4x on top of that to deal with scope
| creep, rework, bug fixes, etc... and we're usually on-
| target ~50% of the time.
| peterleiser wrote:
| My friend's advisor in grad school (Physics, not CS) used
| to ask his students for various project estimates, and
| then he would double it and increase the units: 2 hours =
| 4 days; 1 day = 2 weeks; 2 weeks = 4 months; 2 to 3
| months = 4 to 6 years = thesis project. My friend's
| estimated 3 month project turned into his 4 to 5 year
| thesis project. I mean, hey, it was experimental physics
| and his project ended up using a shipping container-sized
| faraday cage, scanning tunnelling microscopes, a clean
| room wearing a bunny suit, building stuff himself in the
| machine shop, writing software. All this for something
| that literally had not been done before and no one was
| sure it would work or what exactly would need to be done
| to get there (which starts to sound similar to some
| aspects of software projects). Plus the usual overhead
| like teaching ungrateful engineering undergrads
| (guilty!), hosting movie night at the lab and making
| liquid nitrogen ice cream, etc.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'm in the wrong industry. That sounds way more fun than
| writing software.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| When I was at Amazon, I read the SDE guidelines from HR,
| where they describe their view of the role.
|
| An SDE1 was expect to spend 4hr coding a day; an SDE3
| about 2.5hr coding a day.
|
| That's normal for a job, eg, apartment maintenance (my
| college job) would have us actually _wokring_ about 4
| hours a day, between setup, cleanup, breaks, travel,
| miscellaneous tasks, etc.
|
| Convincing _other_ SDEs to assign points to stories based
| on that (4hrs of coding per point) was surprisingly hard.
| gedy wrote:
| > You never get handed a task which is "write as much of a
| prototype of a system which would do this, so we can
| estimate how much more work we think is involved".
|
| The non engineer types won't hand you that, but I've had
| some success with proposing that when there's a lot of
| uncertainty.
| m_eiman wrote:
| > software engineers can't estimate how long something will
| take with any kind of accuracy.
|
| Sure we can, it's always one of:
|
| - A couple of minutes
|
| - Today
|
| - A week or two
|
| - Probably around a month
|
| - I have no idea, could be any of the above or more
| rvense wrote:
| At my work "It'll take half a day" has become slang for "I
| have no idea"
| m_eiman wrote:
| My standard reply is "one to two weeks".
| zoul wrote:
| But sorting issues according to their rough size is precisely
| what makes at least basic sense. A scale of trivial (can make
| many of those in a day), simple (several of those a day),
| medium (roughly a day of work) or large (days) makes it
| possible to have at least basic conversation around work
| planning. I'm not extra sold about calling those by shirt
| sizes, but I'm sure we're on the better end of the absurdity
| scale here :)
| withinboredom wrote:
| At that point, you are estimating EFFORT, not time.
| Software engineers are REALLY GOOD at estimating effort.
| The fact that they translate to time (simple == several
| days) is ephemeral.
| lomase wrote:
| I think that is how Agile is suposed to work. The
| programmer stimates how hard the task is relative to
| other task he has done.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Right, but they were asked to estimate TIME, not EFFORT.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| >Software engineers are REALLY GOOD at estimating effort.
|
| The most common problem with estimates is hidden or
| forgotten complexity, which makes both time and "effort",
| whatever that means, go up.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Thanks, but this isn't my first rodeo. In the future, please
| more carefully exercise more discretion when whipping out the
| snark.
|
| > software engineers can't estimate how long something will
| take with any kind of accuracy.
|
| This is both irrelevant and wrong.
|
| It's irrelevant because t-shirt sizes, story points, and
| other abstract measures, are - intentionally - not measures
| of time. It's a measure of effort, benchmarked against other
| units of work. Yes, this can, sometimes, give a vague
| indication of time. It's also useful for other reasons, too,
| like weeding out whether or not everyone is on the same page
| with regard to what needs to be done in the first place. All
| of this is explained in literally any primer on the subject.
|
| You're wrong in saying that software engineers aren't capable
| of estimating effort (or even time) with any degree of
| accuracy. They can. I can tell you that my Python hello world
| script will take less time and effort than rewriting the
| Linux kernel. None of the "research" and "experience" that
| you so confidently refer to says what you think it does. It
| says that there are big limitations to the degree to which
| timelines can be estimated. This is entirely true. But
| there's nuance to it. You're so desperate to find a shortcut
| to being smart on the internet that you're spreading blatant
| disinformation in the process.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'm not sure you're agreeing with me and using disagreeing
| words, or you didn't read what I wrote...
|
| Software engineers can't estimate how long things will
| take: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii
| /S02637...
|
| They're wrong, 60% of the time by overestimation and when
| underestimated, so vastly wrong it's terrifying. I remember
| this one time I merely had to update a component in prod.
| Everything went fine in staging, then when I pressed the
| "button" in prod ... all hell broke loose. We spent the
| next 4 days fixing it.
|
| I never wrote that software engineers can't estimate
| effort, I said they can't estimate time, but you're
| accusing me of the former.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| I think you've linked to a study of "expert project
| managers", and we might see similar results in a study of
| whether "expert project managers" can succeed in tying
| their own shoelaces.
|
| If you're working with a system where your staging
| environment is not sufficiently close to your prod
| environment to be entirely predictive of behaviour,
| that's a "known unknown" and should be in the estimate.
| withinboredom wrote:
| The reason it failed in prod was entirely unrelated to it
| being prod. The same could have happened in staging.
| IIRC, the error was entirely due to a RST packet from
| some external system during the upgrade. It was a bug in
| the upgrading system that should have been accounted for,
| had anyone known it existed. Identifying the root cause
| of the failure, was what took the most time. Had
| deployments been idempotent it also probably could have
| been resolved in moments as well ... but here we are, 15
| years later with lots of lessons learned.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Sounds annoying, but seems like you found a bug in the
| upgrading system that could have struck anyone during any
| change?
|
| The time/work to investigate and fix it probably wasn't
| considered (or shouldn't have been, at least) part of the
| work on the component you were changing - that was just
| delayed, same as it would be in scenarios like "Dave got
| hit by a bus and he's the only one with the prod
| password" and "Our CI service suddenly went out of
| business and we need to migrate everything".
| withinboredom wrote:
| My point is that you can't estimate time with any
| accuracy. At the end of the day, even this fix and
| shenanigans was still "easy" once we knew what was going
| on. The effort never changed and we would have been dead
| on. The issue is when trying to say, "It will take me two
| weeks to do this," and it actually takes two weeks --
| there are simply too many unknowns for ANY task in our
| industry for us to actually be confident in that
| assessment.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Not to the day, but you can estimate a range based on
| experience. After that deployment issue you may add
| "release could be delayed by up to a week" to future
| estimates until you're sure it's fixed.
|
| I've written TV apps and in that world I've often given
| estimates that are 5 days of actual work but, because
| Samsung's QA process can take 6 weeks and spurious
| rejections are common, "deployment" will often take
| literally months.
|
| Time to release and time for development can be totally
| different things and it's arguable whether "waiting" time
| should be included in any individual estimate at all.
| (You're adding 4 separate features and doing 2 bugfixes
| in one release, which one gets +2 months? In reality
| "submit/release" becomes a different ticket/task.)
| XorNot wrote:
| Tell me, what is a unit of "effort"?
|
| How would we measure that?
| Scarblac wrote:
| But that's exactly why people start using things like t shirt
| sizes: to emphasise the point it's not a time estimate. It's
| a rough ordering of relative complexity of different tasks,
| which is something programmers can do.
|
| Of course, the business still needs time estimates, so
| someone will somehow attempt to turn them into time
| estimates. But that can't be helped.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > It's a rough ordering of relative complexity of different
| tasks, which is something programmers can do.
|
| Yeah, when put as an estimate of effort or complexity, we
| can be good at estimating that. But that isn't how it was
| put.
|
| > so someone will somehow attempt to turn them into time
| estimates.
|
| It works until it doesn't. I would estimate manually
| entering data as "pretty easy" but it won't be done in a
| day no matter how much you pay me. I can only type so fast.
| There are many tasks that are easy but take a really long
| time, and many complex tasks that take a very short amount
| of time.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Software engineers, when quoting for fixed priced jobs, learn
| quite quickly to estimate accurately.
|
| Software engineers, when pressured by managers to provide low
| estimates and/or to provide estimates quickly, will estimate
| inaccurately. (It can also be deliberately high as well as
| low, based on previous experience of having their estimates
| chopped in half.)
|
| Whether you use SP or T-shirt sizes or whatever, somebody is
| translating that into days because days (and thus dollars)
| are what matter to the business. If someone asks me for an
| estimate, I'll give them a range in days/weeks, and they can
| turn it into whatever nonsense unit they like.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| HN loves to make this claim but it just doesn't match my
| experience, from several teams. Estimates are not precise,
| obviously, but that doesn't mean that they are impossible to
| make or that they add no value.
| holbrad wrote:
| I mean I've routeninly seen estimates be 3-5x longer that
| projected. It's up to you if you thing that's an accurate
| enough estimate or not.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I have personally produced estimates of 2 weeks that took
| 2 months, and estimates of 2 months that took 2 weeks.
| For years, I told my boss that implementing a certain
| feature would be "very hard" and basically wasn't worth
| it. When we actually pulled the trigger on it, it was
| done and deployed in a week.
|
| I'm sure some people are significantly better than me at
| estimates, but I haven't met them. Estimating the unknown
| without serious research that borders on _just doing the
| job_ is nigh impossible. And we 're just an in-house dev
| team, so we never, ever do the same thing twice.
|
| Estimating how long to put up another wordpress site is a
| lot easier than estimating a new project with new
| requirements and new tools. I typically find that people
| who think estimating is easy are just doing the same
| things over and over for new clients, rather than doing
| new things all the time for the same client/employer.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Sure, so have I. I don't think estimates are good for
| determining a date for a contract or anything like that.
| I think they provide data about the tasks when
| prioritizing, which is valuable. Code coverage is also a
| really low quality indicator of test quality, but it is
| still useful.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Sizing is useful for one thing: making sure that two people
| are talking about the same thing.
| Aeolun wrote:
| That's true, but it's also well documented that biz likes
| having any estimate over nothing, no matter how unrealistic.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Then ask for an estimate of effort, not time. Let someone
| else take the responsibility of figuring out how long that
| will be.
| oytis wrote:
| That sounds a bit extreme? True, estimation is hard, but
| surely we can differentiate between 1-2 day work, 1-2 week
| work and a big scary project with a lot of risk. That's what
| T-shirt sizes are for.
| withinboredom wrote:
| And if a bug in a library stops you from completing your
| work so you have to develop a workaround, and adds several
| days to your "1-2 day task"? The estimate is wrong.
|
| There are simply too many unknowns in other libraries and
| systems to be accurate.
| oersted wrote:
| I agree, "T-shirt sizes" sounds absurd and provocative, but XS,
| S, M, L, XL... is a very sane and simple scale for rough
| estimates of anything.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Yeah I'm happy doing that. Trying to estimate a new epic in
| story points when I only just got told about it is
| ridiculous, but I can usually give a rough S-M-L guess.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Supporting software is the hardest job, IMHO. People ask some
| really dumb stuff -- not out of stupidity, but of ignorance; they
| just don't know what they are asking. To them, the "why is this
| broken" is "100% your fault and 100% fixable but you are too lazy
| to fix it."
|
| It's maddening, annoying, and 99% of the time, not worth dealing
| with if you can help it.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| Absolutely. People nag our customer service until they get
| redirected to us (software engineers). When you finally spend
| expensive time looking into their issue, finding the root cause
| on their end, take the time to explain it in detail, more often
| than not the answer is among the lines of "couldn't be bothered
| to read your response, it still doesn't work, fix it!".
|
| I love software development. I love building both simple and
| complex systems. But users often suck, and honestly sometimes
| even the people you're making software for suck. I just want
| people to be grateful for what I'm doing and I honestly find
| that lacking a bit in our field.
| qiqitori wrote:
| It's the same with many things. Hotel users suck sometimes,
| restaurant users suck sometimes, even museum users suck
| sometimes. Some people are grateful, some people think you're
| the hostile one.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| Same in many industries.
|
| I have friends who are restaurateurs and people are often
| extremely ungrateful, demanding and straight up mean.
|
| Most don't earn a lot, margins are slim and people are late,
| you have to perform 100% for each dish, then people don't
| show up, get mad when arriving late, want well done when they
| say rare, or think the chef can just magically change the
| recipes to accommodate bizarre allergies or lifestyle choices
| when juggling 20 dishes at a time with a kitchen that off
| course has been prepped to the max and a few dollars on the
| brink of bankruptcy.
|
| Ie. people are just people. Better get used to it, same with
| employees.
|
| I have so many insane stories about this personally.
|
| I once made a PDF processing tool for a company that saved
| them a lot of time, was pretty expensive and worked
| brilliantly until it "definitely broke" and i used 1
| stressful month back and fourth figuring out why until i saw
| it was an employe that always "personalised" the PDF's with
| cute emojis, saved it before sending it further up the chain
| actively corrupting it so TOC and links were destroyed
| because of an old version of Acrobat Reader - this was after
| i asked 10 times if anyone tampered with it in any way.
|
| It's always some human process, organisation, idiosyncrasy or
| politics taking up 80% of the time while 20% is spent on the
| actual work.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I find that after about 15 years of it I have a pretty good
| intuition for when it's a 'me' problem versus an external
| one.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| Definitely a problem on my end sometimes, but usually
| i'll figure that out if i just grind hard enough, the
| crazy time sinks are almost always from miscommunication
| somewhere in some org.
| peteradio wrote:
| Customer service for software should be high skilled and paid
| correspondingly. They should be able to take a customers
| project and reproduce the issue and likely answer the issue
| without involving software dev. I worked under a place that
| operated like this and thought that the issues we _did_ see
| were legitimate and it fostered a desire to help the customer
| rather than resent them. Customer service was not easy there.
| surfingdino wrote:
| I stay away from "civilians", i.e. companies that do not
| already have an IT department tasked with software development.
| They do not know how software works and refuse to meet the most
| basic requirements for learning how to use software or for
| entering data.
| ravenstine wrote:
| That and there's essentially no respect for the need to make
| existing software better. Product owners want feature upon
| feature and usually aren't interested in actual UX polish as
| long as the design looks pretty enough. Software engineers
| usually either don't have much power to push back against this
| or, if they do, they tend to be spineless.
|
| By and large, we are not doing a good job, and we are not often
| allowed to actually do a good job. Modern software frustrates
| me to no end, and in the last few years I've been noticing more
| non-technical folks getting frustrated. Everyone expects apps
| and websites to randomly fail in stupid ways or do things in
| ways that are not intuitive. I barely want to tell anyone I'm a
| software engineer at this point because it's embarrassing.
| pb060 wrote:
| Agree, the thing I hate most is people saying that it's "not
| user friendly", not realizing that it might be a subjective
| thing, and it's a very generic way of putting it, and how hard
| it is to satisfy hundreds of idiotic conflicting requirements.
| And most of all that it's them not wanting to put any effort in
| learning a new tool and asking developers to smoothen every
| possible use case, which is impossible.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > software dev as we know it is about to disappear soon
|
| Pushing back on this a bit. We see promises and people working on
| this. But I haven't seen anything definitive yet, and LLMs have
| their own existential threats around amount and quality of data.
| Recent article involving trying to get LLMs to reason about law
| required very fine task decomposition to get move forward. What
| we don't know is whether doing this and then handing it to an LLM
| is as beneficial to humans in speed/quality/feedback as simply
| doing it yourself. Have already seen people saying that copilot's
| interaction loop short circuits actually thinking about the
| problem.
|
| Regardless, hobbies outside of work are absolutely essential in
| this absurd time. The author made some beautiful things.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Hobbies outside work can still be coding. Code is not the same
| as it was with LLMs but it's more effective for work and
| outside work. The LLMs just help but for me they don't make
| coding less enjoyable outside modern web crap that is.
| jstanley wrote:
| Why do LLMs make working on modern web crap less enjoyable?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Too many hallucinations because changes in fast changing
| libraries. It makes up functions that were removed and
| libraries that have been deprecated. With robust stuff that
| doesn't happen. It is frustrating. Even copilot regularly
| includes some react lib that doesn't work anymore for the
| past 3 years because it depended on old stuff that is full
| of security issues, bugs or doesn't work on a new node etc
| etc. So then I spend more time on finding what is the
| newest (greatest ... cough) thing to replace it than I
| would have done just searching google.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| It's funny because a big draw of React is the sizable
| user base and library count, but that ends up being a
| double edged sword when using LLMs for codegen.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Well, if they are not up to date I guess with the latest;
| it changes so fast and there are so many examples of all
| different flavours of how to do something... I guess they
| will find a mechanism which will make newer info more
| relevant and older info more forgotten in some cases and
| also a way to draw in the latest all the time. My problem
| is more the not built/designed etc here issue; when you
| have a react WidgetBlah library and someone else also
| wrote one, there are reasons you rolled your own (often
| also not but ok), but why didn't you keep the api the
| same. People talk about features here as a reason for
| breakage but when I compare a breaking feature change
| (for instance, a react component sig changed from one
| version to another) then I hardly ever see a reason why
| that was not made backward compatible. I have complained
| about this in many GitHub issues and the answer is
| usually 'this way is better, just refactor it: it's
| easy'. Sure it's easy but it's work and this happens a
| little too often. Sometimes I would like Java standard
| bodies and voting about api changes and this is one of
| those.
| evilduck wrote:
| RAG and large context sizes mitigate this well enough for
| me. Ingest the library's docs (and maybe a sizable chunk
| of your codebase) and use that to get better LLM output
| that isn't out of date or hallucinated.
| devwastaken wrote:
| It doesn't matter, it was never about LLM's, it's that tech
| holds special political powers across nations. Big tech can
| break laws and destroy people's lives and nobody is ever
| punished or regulated.
|
| Software is in a race to the bottom because users have little
| market choice. LLM's are just the excuse, but in reality late
| stage capitalist economics demands that this happen somehow.
| Wether it be in the form of cheap labor or automated labor. You
| need to have political and physical leverage over the corps to
| force them into being sustainable.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I am working on coding stuff I like as escape for the absurdity
| of _modern_ software. I make little games, stuff for 8 bit
| systems etc. Stuff that is as far away from anything modern ,
| especially the hell of node, next, devops and 'web frameworks' as
| I possibly can. It works. It's very relaxing, like a bonsai tree.
| huppeldepup wrote:
| I wonder whether we'll see the same parallel as with cars:
| those with tech and those without - old-timers.
|
| I only code as a hobby anymore. Burnout destroyed my career and
| now I design PCBs and write embedded software without LLMs.
| lumb63 wrote:
| +1 for embedded software. I work for an IoT company and the
| web and app devs think LLMs are the saving grace of the
| universe. The firmware team just keeps chugging along,
| ignoring the noise, debugging hard problems, and writing
| unsexy low level code.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| Security student here. Just wanted to say that while not
| everyone appreciates the firmware programming at such a low
| level....it is truly a dark art to me and I find it really
| interesting and always want to learn more.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Here my take. Not a pro, but still might find useful.
|
| 1. Learn basics of electricity, learn to use
| oscilloscope, logic analyzer. You don't necessary need to
| have knowledge to design complex PCBs (that's a separate
| skill and not easily attainable) but you need to be able
| to understand existing design on high-level and do some
| debugging. For example you wrote code which does some SPI
| to talk to some device but it does not work. You need to
| analyze electricity to understand what's going on in the
| wire.
|
| 2. Learn basics of assembly. You don't need to write your
| software in assembly, but you need to read it and write
| some little snippets if necessary.
|
| 3. Learn to read data sheets.
|
| Modern MCUs and devices are really like libraries. You're
| using some interfaces, calling some functions and get
| some responses. Data sheets are library documentation.
|
| 4. Learn C, learn build tools (at least make), learn
| debugger (gdb), learn linker.
|
| Then it's only matter of time and experience. Most
| vendors supply their terrible libraries that you're
| supposed to use. Most vendors support some bad IDEs that
| you're supposed to use. Often you're forced to use
| Windows because not everyone supports Linux or macOS.
| It's not fun part and sometimes you can avoid it, but
| sometimes you can't.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > 3. Learn to read data sheets.
|
| Learn to read documentation in general. It's shocking how
| many people seem incapable of finding answers that are in
| official documentation but not on Stack Overflow.
| lumb63 wrote:
| The most humbling part is, there's always another level
| down. I thought programming code for the Linux kernel was
| low-level, until I worked on a team where there was an
| entire separate MCU on the same package underneath the
| primary cores running Linux that booted and controlled
| the whole system. I thought that was low-level until I
| worked for a team building a similar chip and had to
| participate in the design and validation efforts for it.
| There is almost always a whole world beneath the level of
| abstraction any of us operate on. Beneath the software
| world are IP blocks, which are composed of digital logic
| circuits, which are composed of transistors, which are
| governed (if you get small enough) by quantum effects...
| reaching the bottom is nearly impossible; it's very
| humbling.
|
| This is especially true from a security standpoint. Many
| analysts are worried about XSS attacks and other such
| high-level techniques. C has an entire different class of
| vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows. And beneath
| that, there are countless vulnerabilities by exploiting
| properties of the physical hardware. Most industries
| choose to ignore these problems, because they're very
| expensive to mitigate.
| agilob wrote:
| > I wonder whether we'll see the same parallel as with cars:
| those with tech and those without - old-timers.
|
| Regulation will force you to replace your car for EV and with
| more technologies for monitoring the driver and surroundings.
| fredley wrote:
| I do this too. Making games for the Playdate has been the most
| enjoyable programming I've done in years.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Yeah, programming used to be excellent and that's not
| nostalgia as I still write MSX, Amiga and Delphi (win/lin)
| software. Now, with modern stacks, I just hate all of it
| really. I do it fulltime for work with nextjs (and all the du
| jour stuff that literally changes every few months and makes
| life easier: secret it doesn't at all) but we are
| transitioning everything to my Common Lisp dsl; in one year
| even my work software will be a pleasure again. Stuff I
| should've done 20 years ago but I drank this modern tooling
| koolaid; it's more akin to the layers of hell.
| anthk wrote:
| Check Uzebox, the console and the emulator are free as in
| freedoom.
|
| https://uzebox.org/
|
| Cuzebox as the emulator:
|
| https://github.com/Jubatian/cuzebox
| tsunagatta wrote:
| > stuff for 8 bit systems etc.
|
| Seconding this; I recently wrote a game for the GameBoy Color
| in C and it was one of the most enjoyable things I've done with
| coding in a while.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| > when people started coming with so many unrealistic and absurd
| expectations and demands about what my furniture should do
|
| There, fixed it for you.
|
| People are the same just pay sucks way more.
|
| I wholeheartedly endorse woodworking as a meditative hobby to
| forget about your day work but as a career path you are going to
| have some very rude discoveries.
|
| Looking at their projects it's mostly basic carpentry level as
| well. Fine woodworking, the projects where you can charge five
| figures for a dining table (and you spend a few months making it
| full time), needs much more design vision and years of practice.
| Those 10k hours required to master a skill seem about right.
|
| Been through a burnout 20 years ago, had to take a year off and
| then discovered that if you place correct boundaries and don't
| let people mess with you, our trade can be pretty enjoyable.
| criddell wrote:
| > projects where you can charge five figures for a dining table
|
| The best way to avoid turning a meditative hobby into a job is
| to resist the urge to monetize it.
|
| Your _basic carpentry_ diss is unwarranted IMHO. I enjoyed
| reading about and seeing the projects produced with simple
| tools and some work. The author is clearly very creative and
| resourceful and I bet this inspires a few people look for a
| creative outlet of their own.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| > The best way to avoid turning a meditative hobby into a job
| is to resist the urge to monetize it.
|
| This is exactly what I meant. However OP started off talking
| about switching careers.
|
| As a hobby they are doing great, producing stuff they need
| and having fun doing that. No-one can criticize this.
|
| > Your basic carpentry diss is unwarranted IMHO.
|
| If it's a hobby sure, absolutely. I think the stuff they are
| doing is fine.
|
| But as a new career this is going to be very tough if they
| don't up their game into some direction that is either very
| efficient volume production or high quality design and
| craftsmanship. There are obviously also education and youtube
| paths but both have also tough requirements.
|
| Even famous fine furniture makers are complaining that it is
| very tough to live off commissions.
| alin23 wrote:
| Author here! Don't worry, I'm well aware that what I can
| create currently can't be sold :) what I can currently do
| is like an MVP in wood, I cut a lot of corners (literally)
| just to see the thing done, and live with the defects. A
| client would not live with the defects, they would want
| something perfect for their money.
|
| I didn't really mean "switching careers" although I see how
| that can be read that way. I meant more like leaving the
| current app income stagnate until it goes down, and in that
| time I would eventually find a more physical job to support
| me. Not necessarily woodworking.
|
| I watch youtubers that work their asses off to earn
| thousands of dollars on a piece they've worked months, and
| like I said there's no undo. A mistake can set you back a
| lot. I know we have it good in software.
|
| I don't know if I'll ever have the skills to create wood
| things that I would be able to sell. I'm thinking maybe I
| could do that with Kavals, there's less expectation and
| competition there. But furniture.. I don't know, I will
| probably end up in the same state as with software.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| You can find all the problems of Software in Woodworking, except
| that sometimes, using an axe is a legal and well-suited move.
| asddubs wrote:
| You would basically never use an axe in woodworking. It's
| widely considered bad practice, produces unstable results, and
| there are better tools available
| peschkaj wrote:
| Well, I mean you could use an adze or a froe. Axes are really
| common in green woodworking (chair making) and they're great
| for getting wood to split along the grain.
| raddan wrote:
| I second the green woodworking comment. An axe (and wedges)
| are a good way to hand-split logs into boards. And easier
| than doing it with a saw in some cases. Hand tool
| woodworking really makes you appreciate the multitude of
| weird old tools you find in antique stores and how clever
| people were when using human power before power tools.
| swader999 wrote:
| I use an axe and a draw knife on logs. This closes the pores
| and helps preserve the wood longer than if you put a sander
| on it.
| marcuskaz wrote:
| > You can find all the problems of Software in Woodworking
|
| Including the questioning of the tools you use, and people
| telling you "you're doing it wrong".
| logrot wrote:
| No.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| I've recently started gardening as an alternative to the near-
| daily exhaustion I feel as a result of hacking just too hard on
| things.
|
| Let me tell you, there is nothing more joyous than going outside
| 3 days after planting new seed varieties in a recovered-soil
| hugel-bed, and seeing brand new leafy life reaching for the
| stars. I get the same sort of buzz out of watching seedlings push
| dirt out of the way, as I used to get from checking for PR's on
| some of my repo's, lol ..
|
| Its at the point now where I have to have a desktop garden, or
| else I just don't feel complete as a human being. Lucky, there
| are tons of things I can take from my new hugel-bed's to plant on
| the desk, herbs, spices, salads and things .. its just so
| rewarding.
|
| So yeah, garden, programmers. Garden. Its _so_ good for you. And
| you can get a buzz from the methods, just like you do with code,
| too ...
| RaoulP wrote:
| Vouched for this comment. I'm not sure why it was dead.
| anthk wrote:
| There's too much fun software to play with. Even the old ones as
| an exercise of nostalgia.
| sukruh wrote:
| Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies
| alongside a software development job have chosen to work for
| well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up
| unfulfilled in their jobs.
|
| Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and
| build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen
| as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of
| managing up eats a creative person's soul.
|
| I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the
| customer" and solve their problems and get paid the market rate
| for my skills. Not prepare endless PowerPoints for my skip-level,
| who has no ownership but has to act in their own best interests
| in a swamp of principal-agent problems.
|
| This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company
| where one can have honest conversations about the customer and
| the product. How do other people deal with this?
| lucianbr wrote:
| Aren't you afraid that the "fast-growing" small company will
| soon become a large company, with all the problems you
| mentioned you want to avoid?
| t43562 wrote:
| It happens but then it's time to find the next one.
| xenocratus wrote:
| Isn't it possible to just go looking for another fast-growing
| small company when your current employer reaches that stage?
| lucianbr wrote:
| I just think that they wrote "fast-growing" as a positive
| attribute, when the logic of the comment would make it a
| negative attribute.
|
| Of course you can go looking again. But why not look for a
| slow-growing or not-growing small company, so you don't
| need to go looking so often?
| sukruh wrote:
| Yes, fast-growing companies can grow out of my preference
| zone and as other commenters said, jumping ship when that
| happens may be the correct way to go.
|
| There are other issues with slow-growing or not-growing
| companies. When the company is not growing, people are
| incentivized to take a zero-sum approach to their work
| relationships. If the pie is not growing, you need to
| guard your own slice and take from others. This creates a
| toxic environment. If the company is growing, then
| collaborating on growing the pie can become the shared
| attitude.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Oh, I think people take a zero-sum approach in growing
| companies as well. Maybe even more so.
|
| https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted
| sokoloff wrote:
| Slow growth and no growth companies tend to be under a
| lot of pressure for cost-optimization (which makes sense
| in a lot of ways, but is grueling to live through...)
| ravenstine wrote:
| At a level or two down from the abstraction of company size,
| crafting hobbies are also a reprieve from the tyranny of
| linters. So many programmers today believe that code is always
| better when it all looks identical. Consistency is a good
| thing, but not when it's expected to be absolute. Programming
| should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to
| add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important
| communication as to the significance of a particular part of
| one's code. Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years
| are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's
| often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to
| format your code in a way that violates the rules in some
| trivial way.
|
| With woodworking, you can just _do the thing_. OK, I don 't do
| woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that
| they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their
| work. The tools they use are intended to help them accomplish
| something and aren't there to prevent you from doing anything.
|
| It's possible to do personal software projects however one
| wants, but one will no doubt be faced with the modern
| compulsion to want to "do the right thing" and add a bunch of
| time wasting tooling. If you don't, and you share your code,
| inevitably someone is going to want to add a bunch of rules and
| bureaucracy to your software that was already working and free
| of serious problems in the first place.
| Arainach wrote:
| Consistency is critical for reducing mental load when working
| as a team. Format your personal projects however you want,
| but when collaborating your editor should apply the standard
| format every time you save.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Maybe I'm not articulating my point very well.
|
| I absolutely agree that consistency, in principle, is
| _usually_ a very good thing.
|
| My objection is to the idea that it's _always_ a good
| thing, which it 's not. Treating code formatting as rules
| rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of
| time and unnecessarily tyrannical.
|
| In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's
| a meaningful difference between 100% consistency and say
| 95%.
|
| It's far more important that APIs and other conventions are
| consistent. When constructs in the code aren't consistent,
| it can be an absolute nightmare. When code isn't formatted
| well, it's usually just annoying and can be trivially fixed
| with automation.
| Aeolun wrote:
| What I love, is a code formatting check on the server
| side. Just check that the code is properly formatted
| using Biome or Prettier. Everyone can set it up in their
| editor, or run it manually however they want, and nobody
| ever has to think about it.
|
| What I absolutely detest, is _any_ kind of code
| formatting comment on a PR. If it cannot be enforced
| automatically, it's not worth arguing about, and
| definitely not something to hold a PR up for.
| steve1977 wrote:
| > In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that
| there's a meaningful difference between 100% consistency
| and say 95%.
|
| I think you are contradicting yourself a bit with
|
| > Programming should actually allow for creativity, and
| where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually
| add subtle but important communication as to the
| significance of a particular part of one's code.
|
| The point being that something small might have
| significance to one person but not the other.
|
| And that consistency is probably important, but there is
| a difference between consistency _of your_ stuff and
| consistency _between_ your stuff and stuff of others.
|
| So I think what it boils down to is that crafting hobbies
| are often more fulfilling not (only) because they have
| tangible outcomes, but because you can do them _on your
| own_ and _on your terms_.
|
| If you were to do woodworking where you craft one piece
| of a bigger thing (say a part of some larger furniture),
| you would also have to produce very homogenic and precise
| output. And it probably would not be very fun and
| fulfilling.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > The point being that something small might have
| significance to one person but not the other.
|
| Yeah, that's totally fair. I think conversations can be
| had with such cases, and I think that trying to
| effectively _eliminate_ the conversation is a bad thing,
| which relates closely to my overall objection.
| Ironically, it ends up in conversation anyway unless a
| developer is always a good little goober and never
| marches out of sync.
|
| Maybe my mindset would be different if I saw great
| software around me, but I see mostly crappy and user-
| hostile software these days. I'm not sure whether strict
| formatting "standards" is of meaningful benefit for the
| users.
|
| > If you were to do woodworking where you craft one piece
| of a bigger thing (say a part of some larger furniture),
| you would also have to produce very homogenic and precise
| output. And it probably would not be very fun and
| fulfilling.
|
| Yeah, I guess you've identified where my thought in
| response to woodworking falls apart. haha If it were
| one's employment, it could indeed be as confining as
| being a programmer at BigCo.
| Arainach wrote:
| Arguing about what 5% is appropriate is a significant
| distraction. I do not believe that any benefits from
| allowing these discrepancies are superior to the reduced
| mental load in authoring, reading, and reviewing code of
| "the linter is automatic and true". If a rule can be
| written into a linter, simply have it automatically
| formatted and never argue about it again. It eliminates
| entire classes of argument.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > Arguing about what 5% is appropriate is a significant
| distraction.
|
| Yes.
|
| > If a rule can be written into a linter, simply have it
| automatically formatted and never argue about it again.
|
| That is unless one believes to have good reason to
| violate that rule, in which case suddenly time is being
| spent having practically the same conversation in this
| part of the thread that I started.
| Arainach wrote:
| The point of automatic formatters is that they are
| universally enforced. There is no violation of the rule,
| even if you have a "good reason". If you have a pattern
| of good reasons, you can write to whoever controls your
| team's coding standards/linter rules and suggest a tweak,
| but you never have one-off violations, you just accept
| the automatic format.
| thunky wrote:
| > My objection is to the idea that it's always a good
| thing
|
| If everyone doesn't follow the standards all the time
| then there are no standards.
|
| Code is not art, it's instructions.
|
| If you can't write instructions without adding your own
| avant garde whitespace brush strokes to it then yes
| coding for a professional company may not be your jam.
| digging wrote:
| > Code is not art, it's instructions.
|
| I'll slightly disagree here because code needs to be read
| by a computer _and_ by your human teammates.
|
| There are times when I'm frustrated because prettier is
| making a necessary but unintuitive choice and causing my
| code to become harder to read. But those are rare, and I
| would never trade them for the guarantee of readable code
| the other >99% of the time.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Yes, this is fundamentally where I disagree with the
| person you're responding to and what seems like most
| programmers (or perhaps mostly web developers). If code
| is just instructions, it would look barely comprehensible
| to [most] programmers.
|
| Again, maybe I came off as more extreme than I actually
| am, because I think that consistent formatting is a very
| good thing most of the time, but that last 5-10% that
| programmers in positions of power fetishize is where
| things can get frustrating and time can get wasted.
|
| The worst is when linter rules are used for things that
| should be evaluated by a human being in code review. At a
| previous workplace, someone thought it was a marvelous
| idea to try and enforce things like functions having no
| more than 6 lines or some other poppycock. My current
| workplace is OK, but even then there are some stupid
| rules like not being allowed to assign `this` to a
| constant, even though the function in-scope is being re-
| bound by some stupid middleware making it impossible to
| use fat arrows or `.bind` (in JavaScript). Sorry, but
| I'll assign whatever the f*** I want to a constant that
| isn't escaping the current scope in any way. What's also
| funny is that I've never worked anywhere that didn't have
| `eslint-disable` sprinkled everywhere. In many cases,
| these rules should be warning instead of errors, but
| because programmers love errors for some reason,
| virtually every rule violation needs to be an error.
| digging wrote:
| > What's also funny is that I've never worked anywhere
| that didn't have `eslint-disable` sprinkled everywhere.
| In many cases, these rules should be warning instead of
| errors, but because programmers love errors for some
| reason, virtually every rule violation needs to be an
| error.
|
| Well I'm quite proud of having owned a certain repo at
| work which takes exactly this approach. If I have to
| disable a rule more than once, I take a good look at
| whether we need it at all, so we have extremely few
| `eslint-disable` comments in the entire codebase. It's
| one of the cleanest and most transparent codebases I've
| worked in -- but that's also an artifact of me spending
| long stretches working in it alone and having little
| oversight of how I spend my time. So there's a tradeoff
| :)
| randomdata wrote:
| Programmers don't love errors. In fact, we see time and
| time again that even just seeing the word "error" causes
| programmers to forget how to program. It's their
| kryptonite.
|
| _But_ they don 't see value in warnings. Either you have
| a problem that needs to be fixed or you don't.
| thunky wrote:
| > I'll slightly disagree here because code needs to be
| read by a computer and by your human teammates.
|
| I still don't think that makes it art and this is why:
| art can't be simplified. Code can.
|
| Take that to it's extreme and you see that code can be
| simplified down to nothing without anything being
| destroyed. Art can't.
|
| _Maybe_ you could say that the act of programming (or
| simplifying) is an artform, but that 's not what we're
| talking about here.
|
| We're talking about the product of that process, which is
| just instructions to accomplish a task.
| verve_rat wrote:
| > Take that to it's extreme and you see that code can be
| simplified down to nothing without anything being
| destroyed.
|
| I disagree. The thing being destroyed is readability and
| common understanding with your fellow programmers.
| thunky wrote:
| My point was that removing code (not just reformatting
| it) without changing behavior is a gain, not a loss. Art
| is the opposite.
|
| That tells me that the code itself is not important; the
| task/instructions the code performs is the important
| part. Therefore code is a utility, not an artform.
|
| Yes I want written instructions to be understandable to
| humans, so my code conforms to tool-enforced formatting
| standards 100% of the time, not subject to artistic
| interpretation.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Code is not art, it's instructions.
|
| This is one of the major differences between hobby
| programming and work programming. When you're writing
| code as a hobby, it can be anything you want: code can be
| art, instructions, math, beauty, a means to an end, an
| experiment... At work, code must ultimately be a tool
| that creates profit. It has to be manageable, consistent,
| and boring.
| beryilma wrote:
| It is a mistaken idea that work programming is or must be
| boring. I think you might mean "boring" as opposed to
| unnecessarily "creative" or complicated. But not all work
| code is boring, boiler-plate code.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I think of "boring" in this context the same way my
| dentist calls me a nice, boring patient. He means no
| surprises for either of us, nothing out of the ordinary,
| just a mouth in good shape with maybe a cavity or two.
|
| That's how I like to see code. I don't want to struggle
| to figure out what you're trying to do. I want to be able
| to read your code and understand it easily and get on
| with what I need to do.
|
| The opposite of this, keeping the medical context, would
| be the orthopedic surgeon who was so excited about how
| badly my then 25-year-old wife had smashed her wrist. "I
| never see this much joint damage in someone so young.
| It's incredible." Not words you want to hear from a
| doctor!
| jdashg wrote:
| This is binary thinking and loses important nuance.
| andoando wrote:
| I think I agree. I've some seen anal linting rules that
| straight up make you refactor your code to make it fit.
| That I can't stand
| thfuran wrote:
| >Treating code formatting as rules rather than
| suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time
|
| How can it be a waste of time? The whole point is to
| avoid wasting time talking about formatting on PRs or
| seeing line noise on PRs because people have slightly
| different preferences or settings for code formatting.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Right, exactly. Code formatting should be fully automatic
| (format on save, verify on commit) so that no one has to
| waste any time thinking or arguing about it, ever.
| cjonas wrote:
| Does your company not just use an automatic formatter?
| Set a prettier config, format the entire codebase and
| never have to deal with another formatting change in a PR
| ever again.
| ravenstine wrote:
| There's formatting, and there's linting.
|
| But my issue with formatting, while great most of the
| time, is that sometimes I want to violate it, and tooling
| around automatic formatting and format validation is
| usually installed with the intention that it is 100%
| correct all the time. Sorry, but as a senior programmer,
| sometimes it really should be up to me to decide whether
| code belongs on a single line, and I don't want to fight
| against automatic formatting or the CI pipeline throwing
| a hissy fit when I desire that discretion.
| Arainach wrote:
| On the contrary, as a senior developer you should be able
| to look at and see the team-wide benefits of consistency.
| You don't have to handhold new junior devs to learn the
| style, you don't need to watch their PRs to see if
| they're being consistent, and you don't need to argue
| with other senior devs about whether something should be
| on a single line or not. You just let the automatic
| formatter do its thing.
|
| Being a senior eng isn't about always knowing what's
| right, it's about knowing how to keep the _team_ moving
| efficiently.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think you're selling you example short here. Linting
| and formatters should be about applying a minimal
| acceptable limit to code, not diluting everything to the
| same mediocrity. It's been a long time since I ran into a
| formatter that I hate out of the box.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Consistency and standards irl are even more "tyrannical"
| not less bc you can't change the thing easily after the
| fact
| makerdiety wrote:
| > Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are
| obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's
| often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to
| format your code in a way that violates the rules in some
| trivial way.
|
| Shouldn't all the lines of code uploaded in a pull request be
| automatically formatted into the coding style preferred by
| the reviewer anyway? It should be like an automatic
| translation done by some bot or something.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That desire is in conflict with a desire for the reviewer
| to see only the changes and many of the diff tools don't
| diff this reformatted code against that reformatted code
| but rather work on the pre-reformatted.
|
| It could obviously be done, but involves a yak shave that
| isn't clear that it brings enough value to be worthwhile.
| swader999 wrote:
| That's my main concern, I want to review the changes, not
| formatting opinions.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| What bot? You create a branch, you push button in github
| UI, merge request is created. There's no bot.
| Shacklz wrote:
| It's not a bot but formatters like prettier for example
| make it very easy to set them up as git-hooks, where the
| formatter is applied on commit. Meaning, unless you
| specifically commit without hooks, all committed code
| should comply with the formatter.
|
| For linting (e.g. eslint in the JS-space), this is also
| possible, however, most linting-processes tend to run
| _just_ long enough to be annoying when run on every
| commit. In the monorepo I work on we created a command
| "prep-pr" which specifically addresses this issue - run
| it before creating a PR, and the CI-pipeline will mostly
| be green, at least in terms of linting/unit-testing.
| wombat-man wrote:
| We can't check in anything that fails the linter, but we
| can also automatically format the code very easily.
| meijer wrote:
| My theory is that excessive linter rules might be a symptom
| of trying to compensate for the weaknesses of a programming
| language. I see it a lot in Python and JavaScript projects
| where the language gives very litte guarantees about
| anything.
|
| If you use a programming language that affords some
| guarantees like Haskell or even just C#, people seem to be
| less interested in linters.
| dartos wrote:
| Linting reduces the expressiveness of a language so that a
| large team can have some consistency.
|
| It's not necessarily a weakness of the language.
|
| Languages like Haskell, C#, and Java don't have the same
| amount of expressiveness as js, python, or ruby, so they
| don't benefit as much from a linter, though I know places
| that use one for C# to prevent usage of the 'var' keyword
| happymellon wrote:
| I have that at my current place with var in Java.
|
| And enforcing new lines on else or catch after the brace,
| completely different to the language guides.
|
| It looks a fucking mess.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's okay to want more.
| Shacklz wrote:
| If there's a small team, individual freedom can be perfectly
| fine, as everybody knows everyone and it's easy to talk with
| each other in case there are discrepancies.
|
| For larger projects however, not having tooling set up that
| enforces certain consistency is an absolute showstopper for
| me. I'll either introduce it or I'll quit; I simply do not
| want to waste my time with developers squabbling over
| arbitrary formatting-choices or irrelevant coding-style-
| details that can easily be enforced by some tooling.
|
| Of course, developer-experience is paramount. Meaning, the
| tooling must be easy-to-use and generally not stand in the
| way. Otherwise it can indeed create a lot of friction which
| will annoy everybody. But once this has been set up
| (properly!), it will make a lot of silly discussions and
| choices obsolete.
| josephg wrote:
| I hear you. But I've been programming for 30 years and I
| have some strong intuitions around where my code needs an
| empty line to space things out. Stuff like that. The day I
| first tried gofmt and it removed some of my carefully
| considered whitespace, I turned around, put blood on my
| hands in the old way and made a promise to the night that
| my soul belongs to me and gofmt will never sully my code
| with its corporate BS aesthetic.
|
| Some consistency in a codebase is good. Naming consistency.
| Indentation. But people go too way far with it. Who cares
| if your JavaScript makes consistent use of semicolons? It
| doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter.
| neon_electro wrote:
| This is why linters are configurable; if your team
| doesn't care about consistent use of semicolons, ignore
| that linter.
|
| Right?
| josephg wrote:
| Sure; but when I join a team and they've already got a
| linter set up with stupid pedantic rules, they never seem
| to appreciate my complaints about it. "Oh god, can we not
| have that conversation again!". I understand. But nobody
| is happy.
|
| Carpentry isn't my jam, but I've taken up piano. I love
| it.
| Izkata wrote:
| I have similar feelings as GP about Black (probably the
| most popular python code formatter), which goes by the
| philosophy that linters should not be configurable
| because that just moves conversations about styles from
| the code to which rules to use.
| swader999 wrote:
| I'm just happy to have gone six years without wasting half a
| day a month debating about formatting or whims.
| foobarian wrote:
| I curse the inferior linter formatting and at the same time
| would not have it any other way because why? Some diva would
| come in and put up a MR reformatting half the code base to
| their preferred way, mixed in with the actual change they are
| making and I would have to hunt for the actual changes in the
| reformatting noise. And then we would spend half a day
| arguing about it like in the good old days. Fast forward six
| months and there would be 6 different code styles in the
| codebase and it would just be terrible.
|
| :deep breaths:
| busterarm wrote:
| Sorry. Guilty party here. I used to be that diva at times,
| but also came around to your point of view after being on
| the other side of that several times myself.
|
| But I think the biggest thing as I move up and spend more
| time reviewing code than writing it...style preferences
| make it so much easier to review code. Linters have given
| back years of my life at this point!
| resters wrote:
| Why not just set up a rule to auto-format the code before
| it is committed so that nobody wastes time discussing
| formatting trivialities and the repo stays consistent?
| foobarian wrote:
| It would be fantastic if there was a _good_ normal-form
| formatter I could use for local work, and let automation
| format the code back to lint style. Unfortunately with
| something like IntelliJ /Java the commit-time reformat is
| not reversible. Maybe google's Java formatter is, hmm.
| kcrwfrd_ wrote:
| In JavaScript land, prettier auto-formatting the code on
| file save is quite lovely.
|
| I would not be a fan of commit hook auto-formatting.
| beryilma wrote:
| In my experience, it is not the divas who are the problem,
| but inexperienced developers (especially ones from non-CS
| background) who have a weird/no sense of formatting. I have
| seen my share of strange, inconsistent formatting in code
| reviews with junior developers.
| aulin wrote:
| I've worked in a place where reviews were obsessed with
| coding style. No one noticed serious bugs, but forget a
| space in the right place and you'd be doomed. And yet
| people still managed to rewrite stuff to their preferred
| style while managing to not violate any rule. No
| prescription about function and variable names? they'd
| change every single one their way. No prescription about
| argument alignment, they'd change it. Everything not
| esplicitly forbidden was an outlet to express their
| creativity or maybe tame their frustration.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| This has never been a problem for me. Coding guidelines,
| clang-format and precommit scripts can do this
| automatically. Also a senior should reject or revert the
| work of the diva. You shouldn't accept this at all.
| CipherThrowaway wrote:
| > Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are
| obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's
| often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to
| format your code in a way that violates the rules in some
| trivial way.
|
| Symptom of nothing better to do, I have found ;)
|
| Hard to picture someone who values their time blocking PRs on
| tiny stylistic nits.
| cdchn wrote:
| "No pre-push linter" is the hill I'll die on.
| Cerium wrote:
| Could you elaborate? My team is currently looking at adding
| a pre-push linter to replace the annoying CI linter.
| cdchn wrote:
| Linters as gatekeepers are bad in my opinion, and ones
| that prevent you from pushing as pre-push hooks are the
| worst offenders.
| 9dev wrote:
| I think you're romanticising woodworking a bit here. A large
| saw is specifically built to allow doing a single, precise
| cut, in exactly the same way, over and over again. The tools
| are absolutely made to prevent you from messing up the
| various ways, it's just that you don't use the professionals
| tools at home.
|
| And indeed that's something I'd apply to software: both
| hobbyists and small companies are tempted to use professional
| tools (as in, intended for lots of engineers collaborating)
| for small projects or a low number of collaborators that
| don't warrant such stringent rules.
| nkozyra wrote:
| > A large saw is specifically built to allow doing a
| single, precise cut, in exactly the same way, over and over
| again.
|
| Ignoring hand tools, which give you precise, tactile
| control ... I'd still argue with this.
|
| There are tools for specific things and they're meant to
| reduce error. But a router (woodworking) can be used to do
| half the stuff you want/need to do. A table saw can make
| straight cuts, rabbets, joinery.
|
| The tools themselves (outside of specialty ones) are
| generally multi-purpose and allow for experimentation and
| creativity.
| treflop wrote:
| Programming tools are no different. All tools are like
| this.
|
| OP's complaint is about syntactical differences and
| that's just because his team doesn't agree with him.
|
| And tbh, to me, the fun creative part in programming lies
| in architecture, not how I space my code. With
| woodworking, the creative part is how I put it all
| together but not the actual cutting part.
| hinkley wrote:
| Highly compensated people doing manual labor for fun _are_
| romanticizing woodworking. Full stop.
|
| Trying to de-romanticize it means you have absolutely no
| idea what motivates most of us.
|
| Signed, someone with restored antique Stanley wood planes,
| Japanese saws and who drools over Lee Valley product
| reviews.
| dfc wrote:
| Most of the stuff in the lee valley catalog is the same
| garbage you can get at rockler or any other tool outlet.
| The only thing possibly drool worthy are the Veritas
| tools. For the longest time I felt the same as you, I had
| assumed everything from LV was the same quality or at
| least close to the Veritas line. The truth is most of the
| LV stuff is garbage. On the other hand everything from
| Lie Nielsen is phenomenal, it's just not always in stock.
|
| I spent a lot of time searching for and restoring old
| tools. I finally realized I was spending way more time on
| the tools than actually using them.
| hinkley wrote:
| That's not the arrangement of the words "Rockler" and
| "garbage" that will get you upvotes in r/woodworking.
|
| If you had a Woodcraft in town you'd only go to Rockler
| for things you can't find at Woodcraft. Which is largely
| cabinet-making and air handling equipment.
|
| Lee valley and veritas are mostly making reproductions of
| golden age Stanley tools before the race to the bottom
| (what the kids call enshittification) started, with a few
| omissions or improvements. They aren't garbage, they're
| low volume. That makes them less appropriate for people
| being paid by the hour or piece.
| dfc wrote:
| I live equidistant, 15 minutes, from a Rockler and two
| Woodcrafts and I am not concerned about what would get
| upvotes in /r/woodworking.
|
| I went to rockler this morning to get a reamer because
| the only reamers at Woodcraft are for pen making. With
| the exception of big brands like festool or powermatic
| most of the tools they sell at rockler are not great
| tools. This reamer is not great.
| 9dev wrote:
| That's kind of missing the point here (I actually do
| enjoy woodworking as a hobby! :)
|
| OP complained about all the strict rules software
| engineers have to abide by, while woodworkers get to have
| all the fun with sharp tools, nobody telling them how to
| use them, and generally freedom at how they do stuff. But
| that's precisely the perspective of a highly compensated
| person doing manual labor for fun, not the one of a
| professional woodworker. It's like someone cooking fancy
| once or twice per week saying chefs have such a great job
| because they get to dice the onion the way they like. Ask
| any professional chef how well that works.
|
| Something you do as a hobby will always seem more
| fulfilling, because it's a hobby. Anyone doing it
| professionally very likely also has strict rules to
| follow, you just don't know about them - because you're
| not a pro.
| patrick451 wrote:
| Note really. A table saw is incredibly versatile tool. Yes,
| it has a bog standard purpose of ripping stock to width,
| but there are scores of uses beyond that. E.g., removing
| the fence and freehanding a 20 foot piece of baseboard
| through it to cut a scribe. There are plenty of
| professionals who do that. Source: I used to be one.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually
| add subtle but important communication as to the significance
| of a particular part of one's code.
|
| Isn't this part of the problem? If the purpose of code is to
| be understandable, the important communications shouldn't
| also be subtle. Your intention that the extra empty line
| before a block of code signals "This is the important part"
| is likely to be entirely lost on a reader of the code
| (especially in a codebase where the formatting isn't
| consistent so those spare lines are littered everywhere).
| Much better to leave a comment saying "there's a subtle but
| important thing going on here".
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Much better to leave a comment saying "there's a subtle
| but important thing going on here".
|
| Sure, but don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Well-
| meaning engineers frequently don't document their code at
| all. It's why I advocate programmers at least use
| descriptive variable names and function names; what I call
| "self-documenting code".
|
| It still falls short of well-documented code but, as I say,
| gets you "good".
| InitialLastName wrote:
| For sure, well-written code often doesn't need comments
| to explain itself; my point was that "there's an extra
| space here so you know this bit is important" is pretty
| much the opposite of that.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I do use whitespace (empty lines) to "group" parts of a
| function the way paragraphs group thoughts in prose. For
| a function it might be as simple as param-check, setup,
| loop, tear-down. But it makes it a little clearer that
| some lines of tightly-grouped code represent an
| "activity" (sub-activity?).
| Izkata wrote:
| As an example, your own comment three above is split into
| three parts (quote and two sections of your own). Plus my
| comment here, split into two.
|
| Code has its own flow and natural groupings just like
| human language, and adding spacing to match makes it
| easier to understand even though it is subtle.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > tyranny of linters
|
| Thank you for that: "linters" (but as a person's role, not as
| a tool).
|
| Pretty sure that contributed to my early retirement from the
| industry. It didn't used to be that way -- perhaps because
| there were fewer cooks; perhaps because of a more cavalier,
| cowboy-style approach to coding.
|
| I definitely preferred the days of the open range....
| jimbokun wrote:
| How you choose to add whitespace to your code is not a
| meaningful outlet for creativity. Linters are a great tool
| for eliminating bike shedding.
|
| I don't think wood working per se gives you more flexibility
| than building software. It's wood working as an individual,
| not part of a team, so you can make your own decisions and
| not answer to anyone. If you were a one man software
| consultant you would have the same amount of autonomy.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's devex. Not for you, but for the reader. It's part of
| the craft. We can argue about whether craftsmanship is
| creative or skill, but at the end of the day it's
| satisfaction that they are chasing. Satisfaction they are
| denied at work.
|
| Not that they can't find at work. It's actively taken away
| from them.
| mbeddedartistry wrote:
| As a one man software consultant, I just want to point out
| that you are working with clients, in their systems, on
| their problems. You provide advice, they make the decisions
| they deem best for their company.
|
| You get to choose the problem spaces and teams, which is a
| degree of autonomy. But it is not quite so free as "making
| your own decisions and not answering to anybody."
| jimbokun wrote:
| If you want to sell your woodwork you would have similar
| issues.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _How you choose to add whitespace to your code is not a
| meaningful outlet for creativity._
|
| I'd like to mildly disagree. Using whitespace to group
| functionality together in "paragraphs" and aligning the
| horizontal indentation in the clearest possible way is not
| too far away from editing a short story to make it flow
| better.
|
| Earlier today my linter rearranged multiple "key: value"
| one-liners into two-liners and the end result is both
| objectively _and subjectively_ worse.
| Teever wrote:
| Yeah, it's proto-editing, but with such limited degrees
| of freedom in the activity your creative options are
| pretty limited and as time goes on and on the endeavor
| starts to look like this: https://xkcd.com/915/
| Zababa wrote:
| Interesting, I can't tell if the comic is about "people
| will become obsess and develop taste in what they see
| every day", or "people will develop preferences to
| separate themselves into groups".
| gknoy wrote:
| I normally just auto-apply `black` to my code, but
| occasionally I feel the need to have things arranged in a
| way that is easier to read -- e.g. a list of several
| dictionaries. In that case, I just put a comment telling
| it to stop reformatting at the start of the block, and
| another at the end.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Aside from edge cases, Black is life. Saves brain cells
| for the important stuff.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| This is why I like when formatters give you some wiggle
| room in how the rules are applied.
|
| Like, in Prettier, adding a trailing comma to a short
| list of items will tell the formatter to put each item on
| it own line, while removing the trailing comma will keep
| each item in a single line (if the line length is not too
| long).
| Petersipoi wrote:
| > objectively
|
| I do not think that word means what you think it means
| tstrimple wrote:
| Yep. Imagine being a woodworker on a massive project like a
| large sailing vessel or Japanese castle. Suddenly
| coordination and collaboration requirements go right back
| up. Now you can't just wing your project. You've got to
| make sure the part your building matches the agreed upon
| spec and hope the teams you're "integrating" with have also
| followed the spec. When one of those teams gets "creative"
| suddenly things aren't fitting together and progress on the
| ship crawls to a halt.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| When I think of going multiplayer with my hobby and doing
| something big, I'm not thinking about what you described
| - that's just walking into bullshit and letting
| everything interesting about your work be suffocated. No,
| I'm thinking Skunkworks, or Xerox PARC. I imagine others
| are too.
| patrick451 wrote:
| This happens literally every single day in residential
| construction. Aside from the building code, there isn't
| typically a "spec" for construction. The plan doesn't
| specify "this wall shall be plumb to within +/- 0.001
| radians". Somehow, cabinets still get hung even though
| the framer framed a crooked wall on top of a crooked stem
| wall all because foundation guy was hungover that day.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| > the tyranny of linters
|
| This is a take I don't think I've seen before. Is someone
| actually mad prettier is changing their single quotes to
| double quotes? Are they mad some line is breaking at some
| word?
|
| Certainly I've never been. I use linters / formatters even
| when I'm working solo because the mere concept of having to
| think where to break lines is meaningless disruption from the
| actual goals I have.
|
| If you _really_ want to break a line somewhere, just add a
| comment in between and your linter will comply.
| plugin-baby wrote:
| > Is someone actually mad prettier is changing their single
| quotes to double quotes? Are they mad some line is breaking
| at some word?
|
| Yes, both of these.
|
| Obviously there are huge benefits to auto-formatting in
| large teams and popular open source projects, but some
| people also find benefit in having control of alignment,
| line breaks, indentation etc.
| chasd00 wrote:
| for some people talking about whether it's best to put a
| curly brace on its own line or on the same line as an if
| condition is like talking about which religion is the one
| true path to paradise...
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Strict adherence to formatting rules can impair
| readability, yes.
|
| Before back-tick strings in JS, it was useful to employ
| both single/double quotes for strings -- you'd use one most
| of the time, and then if you needed to embed a bunch of
| that quotation mark in a string literal, you'd switch to
| the other one. 'my string' 'my
| other string' "insert values ('foo', 'bar',
| 'baaz')"
|
| A formatter with naive "single quotes only" rule would
| obliterate the last one to: 'insert
| values (\'foo\', \'bar\', \'baz\')'
|
| unless you remember, before you hit save, to add a
| directive like: // linter pwease preserve
| my qwotes
|
| I still use linters and formatters every day, and on
| balance I think they're good to have, but it's ridiculous
| to pretend they don't have downsides, or that there isn't
| room for the occasional dash of human intervention in the
| automation; hence, the linters which have // linter pwease
| directives.
| frenchy wrote:
| The key point here is that the formatter has to be
| sufficiently advanced to know to do the right thing the
| vast majority of the time. Once it gets there, and once
| you've gotten used to the code it produces, it's better.
| Note that the "prettier" formatter will do the right
| thing in JS here, at least with the default config. It
| will even switch "\"string\"" to '"string"' for you.
|
| Linting is a bit of a different beast, because linting
| includes changes to the code behavior itself, not just
| syntax. In JS there are so many footguns, that linting
| can often be pretty involved/strict. I think most of the
| people who don't like linting in JS either aren't aware
| of the footguns, or don't do very much code review and
| haven't worried themselves much with "what sort of bizare
| and unusual ways can this fail" sort of a thing.
| Sevii wrote:
| If you use linters without auto formatters you are choosing
| tedium.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Seriously. Python Black is a godsend. I don't have to waste
| brain cells on formatting minutiae, just right-click and go
| "format my code, please." It's consistent, it works, and
| IDGAF about the details.
|
| The only formatting that drives me up the wall is people
| using K&R braces in C# or Java. It's not 1970 anymore, and
| we're not all typing on green-screen terminals. It's like
| people fetishizing vim or emacs over modern IDEs.
| neonsunset wrote:
| ..huh? But either way, should you ever be annoyed by K&R
| again next time you work with C#, you can trivially
| change it by setting csharp_new_line_before_open_brace =
| none in .editorconfig and running dotnet-format tool
| against solution files.
| kbolino wrote:
| K&R doesn't just mean the opening brace isn't on its own
| line, it also means single-line blocks have no braces at
| all. Always using braces but not putting the opening one
| on its own line is 1TBS (not the best name, but I don't
| know what else it's called).
| neonsunset wrote:
| You can omit them too (at the risk of legibility in some
| conditions).
|
| All these are configurable (and not enforced by default
| but you can definitely do so with .editorconfig).
|
| It is also fairly popular in C# to use expression-bodied
| members where they have just a single
| expression/statement e.g. class Test {
| public int Property => 42; public void
| Method() => Console.WriteLine(42); }
| kbolino wrote:
| Yeah, I think OP's point is that nobody should be
| omitting braces in this day and age. Maybe there's a
| setting to force the use of braces too.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| You know what annoyed me as a C/C++ programmer? People
| using Microsoft style braces... But OK, if you are using
| Microsoft-Java, then Microsoft rules apply.
|
| AFAIK there is no rule in K&R requiring no braces for
| single-line blocks. In that situation, braces are
| optional.
|
| The K&R style was hugely influential on Java and many
| other languages, it has nothing to do with green-screen
| terminals (I used those, as well as white and amber), it
| is just a style. I also moved on from vi, and use
| IntelliJ and Sublime most of the time.
|
| The only difference between K&R braces and Java braces is
| that they combine lines on if-else. The Java guys did it
| because it enabled them to fit more code on to overhead
| slides. Overhead slide projectors predate green-screen
| terminals BTW...
| dilyevsky wrote:
| You dont like kitchens where every cabinet is different
| slightly different size/color/material?
| hinkley wrote:
| When code formatters were new, they insisted on vertical in
| addition to horizontal spacing rules, and that pissed a lot
| of wise people off.
|
| These days they are pretty good at preserving vertical
| separation if it already exists and adding it if it's
| missing.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I'll take the tyranny of the linter tool over not having it
| at all (and I've had both). At least with my current project,
| it's single-handedly helped catch tricky React re-render
| bugs, because it warns me when I'm missing a dependency, or
| also warns me ahead of time if I'm likely to encounter a re-
| render every frame (and what's causing it), etc.
|
| Also it's helped keep unused garbage out of the codebase
| also, which people tend to leave in there otherwise.
|
| Also prettier has helped in me no longer reviewing MRs where
| every single line shows up in a file because their local
| machine has a different tab indent set or a different way to
| handle newlines (like with or without carriage returns,
| IIRC).
|
| Sure it styles some things that aren't my preference, but I
| don't have to do it myself, it just automatically changes it
| all, so I can deal with it.
|
| And if something is especially annoying or causes issues, I
| can usually get an exception added to the configuration, at
| least on my current team.
| shuntress wrote:
| > they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing
| their work.
|
| They would if their woodworking projects spanned decades and
| involved thousands of other woodworkers.
| bumby wrote:
| It seems like you're making a distinction between types of
| work.
|
| For hobby or artisanal pursuits, homogeneity isn't the goal.
| Often the uniqueness is a feature. But for mass production or
| large coordinated efforts, uniqueness is a bug. You don't
| want your car to be manufactured by someone who just felt
| like a 3mm panel gap felt more right than the 4mm gap the
| specs called for. Standardization makes coordination easier
| and that's why some products are better when they are
| homogenous while others are better when they're allowed to be
| "creative."
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't
| do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know
| that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing
| their work.
|
| This is why woodworking is actually a poor analogy for
| software development. A better analogy is carpentry. And when
| it comes to carpentry, it is much more important to ensure
| whatever you're building is extensible or follow certain
| specs. The cabinets you make, for example, need to fit into a
| certain space under or over the counter, and need to be
| homogenous to a large extent.
| patrick451 wrote:
| > a reprieve from the tyranny of linters
|
| Consistency is dramatically overrated. We all read through
| comment threads on HN where each is written in it's own style
| and nobody has a problem understanding it. I read through
| open source repos all the time, which all have their own
| styles and which are often not self-consistent; my
| comprehension is not impaired. I have worked with teams that
| enforce linting with a religious fervor and teams where
| anything goes. The anything goes team is probably more
| productive and with a comparable rate of bugs (but I don't
| have the metrics to prove it). Personally, I don't feel like
| my comprehension is better or worse in one setting or the
| other.
|
| The difference I do notice is that when there are no linters,
| nobody wastes time trying to figure out how to work around it
| for a few lines. A great example is Eigen matrix
| initialization through the stream operator overload [1]. You
| _really_ want to manually format that so each row is on it 's
| own line. If you use clang-format in such code, it will be
| littered with MatrixXf mat(2, 2);
| // clang-format off mat << 1, 2, 3,
| 4; // clang-format on
|
| which adds a ton of unnecessary noise which _does_ impair
| reading.
|
| [1] https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/dox/group__TutorialAdvancedIn
| iti...
| tayo42 wrote:
| >We all read through comment threads on HN where each is
| written in it's own style and nobody has a problem
| understanding it.
|
| That's not true. Walls of texts get ignored or complained
| about. Grammar nazis show up if you use the wrong to/too.
|
| If your typing on a phone autocomplete more or less
| enforces grammar and punctuation.
| usrnm wrote:
| What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and
| then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be
| the best way to do it to me
| Aeolun wrote:
| Doing the boring job at all is a waste of 50+% of your waking
| hours? By all means, do it if it makes the remaining 50% more
| enjoyable, but I think it's possible to have both.
|
| I want to have my cake and eat it too.
| vincnetas wrote:
| But you know, at the end there should be someone who is
| cleaning the toilets and taking out garbage. You eating the
| cake and having it is a bit selfish.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Me living in a 4 BR house with only our 4 family members
| instead of us taking in a stranger is also a bit selfish.
|
| Everyone does some level of selfish things; trying to
| shape work so that you find it enjoyable (and therefore
| likely something that others would also find enjoyable)
| is an acceptable form of selfishness to most.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Just because someone's cleaning the toilet doesn't mean
| that everyone must struggle. Yes, life's not fair to
| everyone, some people starve right now, while other throw
| away kilograms of food. Some people clean toilets while
| other people were born with gold spoon in their mouth and
| will enjoy whatever they want for the rest of their
| lives.
|
| Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the
| worst offender to the world fairness, I think.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the
| worst offender_
|
| But there is something to be said that some people are
| born into situations that force them to adopt a very risk
| adverse posture. If you don't have any safety net,
| "daring to work at a place that does not suck" takes on a
| different risk profile and doesn't necessarily generalize
| well as a strategy.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| Why can't we just automate the terrible jobs out of
| existence? There's no good reason why we can't have a
| machine that cleans the toilet or takes your trash out to
| the street. Plus a self-driving machine that picks up
| your trash.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I think it was Joel Spolsky, who said one of his
| responsibilities as CEO of a new startup was cleaning the
| toilets until they could afford to pay a janitor.
|
| I thought it was a good reminder to have an attitude of
| just seeing what needs to be done and doing it.
| digging wrote:
| Possible, but unlikely today. I think the advice being
| converged on is not to let the _possibility_ of 100%
| enjoyment ruin one 's actual, real-life situation. Attain
| it if you can, but don't spend your life rueing its
| absence.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's more so true today than ever before, where there are
| more companies than ever willing to consider allowing
| software developers, and some other kinds of knowledge
| workers, to work any where in the world.
|
| It gives you more opportunities to find that combination
| of work you find meaningful, coworkers you mesh with,
| flexibility, and decent compensation, than any other time
| in history I'm aware of.
|
| It's still not easy. Just easier than in the past.
| digging wrote:
| I completely agree. As you stay, it's still not easy,
| especially in the post-ZIRP economy. Do I _deserve_ to
| work with a team of interesting people, on a product I
| can be proud of, on a team that gives me flexible work
| hours? I sure do. But finding it is a big challenge for
| me, so I 'm still going to celebrate the freedoms my
| current job gives me until I can find the right one.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It is risk assessment/management.
|
| The non-boring companies I've worked for have had problems
| of wanting to work you at 150% of your schedule, quite
| often illegally. It is insanely rare that you'll get a job
| that keeps you busy (only) 8 hours a day constantly. Either
| the place is always on fire and has 12 hours of work a day,
| or you'll have it better managed and work will be bursty
| with the majority of the time under utilized. Spend that
| extra time being taught stuff on the company dime.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Sometimes jobs aren't just boring, but one is constantly
| stressed by absurd deadlines or communication efforts with
| bosses/customers whose expectations are both in line with
| business practices and out of reality. You surely get back
| home with a nice check, but no energy or will to spend it on
| anything fun. Being good at forgetting the workplace and
| associated problems when one walks out of there is an art not
| everyone can master, especially among those who actually love
| their jobs.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I have a hobby that involves metalworking and building and
| it was strongest and I was at my most hobby-productive
| during a time I worked for a soul-destroying FAANG full of
| unreasonable expectations, stress, awful management, and so
| on. I think for the sake of your mental health, you really
| need to get good at "forgetting the workplace" and
| switching to fun mode. It's a skill like anything that you
| can practice. I know people who can't separate, and they
| take their misery from work and spread it into their home
| life. It's awful, especially for their family.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I fully recognized that would be required when I was in
| that situation. The TV show Severance kept coming to
| mind. I think I only saw a couple of episodes and the
| basic premise of dividing your mind between work and home
| was too real and I had to stop.
|
| Thankfully I had an alternative and went back to
| startups. I could absolutely never accept dividing my
| brain like that, steeping in cognitive dissonance and
| just letting myself rot inside. Once you've felt the good
| life - where work is play and learning happens all day
| long - there's no amount of money that can be accepted to
| lose that.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| At Google I started to forget if I could even build things
| anymore. Doubted I would be able to pick up the skill of
| solving problems again if I left the company. I had strange
| and hard to interpret nightmares after realizing the
| company's PR department had sold me a lie. At this point
| they _are_ a traditional company.
|
| Thankfully I quit and the new job has been great.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Because it's soul destroying knowing your talents are wasted
| for 40+ hours a week
| azemetre wrote:
| It's only soul destroying if you let it be. As someone who
| grew up in poverty and spent most of my 20s working at a
| call center and pawn shop, I feel like the luckiest person
| in my family with my soul destroying corporate job.
|
| It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind.
| You don't have to wait for something in the future to be
| happy now.
| spacephysics wrote:
| The illusion paradigm
|
| By saying you _want_ to be happy, you're already telling
| yourself there's a gap between your state currently and
| that you wish to accomplish
|
| "I'll be truly happy WHEN"
|
| When comes and goes, rarely have I heard someone say
| "well I said I'd be happy when this happened, it's
| happened, and now I'm happy. All done"
|
| Fully agree, it's a state of mind.
|
| I'd also add most people who say they want to be happy
| don't seem to be looking for happiness but rather
| contentness, but I digress
| bccdee wrote:
| > rarely have I heard someone say "well I said I'd be
| happy when this happened, it's happened, and now I'm
| happy
|
| I've heard this, but only from people who had been in an
| very shitty situation and then got out. Happiness is a
| state of mind, but misery is a set of circumstances, and
| the latter precludes the former unfortunately.
| mlsu wrote:
| These conversations where highly paid software people
| complain about insanely minor things (the _code linter_
| is the worst part of your job??) are actually kind of
| nice to read, in a funny way.
|
| The privilege of having pixels be the most stressful part
| of your life... it's actually really nice to read that.
| Having perspective from hardship is good, and everyone
| will have at least some perspective at some point in
| their life when hardship is forced upon them. But
| hardship in and of itself isn't good. I'm happy it is
| being completely eradicated from life, at least for some
| of us.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, that linter thread was wild! Sometimes I think we
| are totally pampered and out of touch!
|
| I've cleaned McDonalds bathrooms, worked in a plastics
| factory where the chemical stench left my nose
| nonfunctional for weeks, hauled heavy sacks of shingles
| up onto a roof in 100+F degree summer temperatures.
|
| I am utterly grateful and consider it a lucky privilege
| to now be typing into a computer in a climate controlled
| office, where my biggest stressor is a deadline.
| mlsu wrote:
| Yeah. Amazing, isn't it?
|
| I will say: I don't necessarily like to say "lucky," or
| even "privileged". Luck incites tricky emotion because
| there's an implication with luck that you didn't deserve
| it. A gambler who won at the slot machine should have
| lost his money -- luck carries that "should have"
| connotation with it. Likewise, privilege carries a zero-
| sum connotation, because we always mean someone is
| privileged in relation to another, which introduces
| almost an adversarial tone to it.
|
| For me, a better term is fortunate. I am fortunate that I
| have a job in a nice office, solving interesting puzzles
| all day, getting paid (relatively) a lot of money doing
| it. Fortune has come upon me. I work hard, although not
| really harder than any other reasonable person. I was
| born in the right zip code, to the right family, had
| access to an amazing education, had the stability in my
| life to pursue it. Fortune.
|
| I will never look down on anyone who is fortunate. I wish
| most people could have fortune in their lives. If the
| price we pay is a few complaints that the soda machine is
| down today, so be it!
| chasd00 wrote:
| I don't mean to pile on but i feel the same when software
| devs here talk about how becoming a farmer is their
| salvation from their workplace suffering. As a kid I
| remember watching my cousin lie on his back with a stick
| welder underneath a horse trailer in 105F Texas summer
| heat. No thanks, i'll stick with my coffee, desk, and
| computer.
|
| edit: different strokes for different folks, i don't want
| to sound too presumptuous. For some people what i
| described is exactly what would bring them joy.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| A lot of the folks working in these bigger tech companies
| didn't grow up this way. A lot of them grew up in wealthy
| families, lived in wealthy neighborhoods, were pushed
| into an elite tech career by their parents, went to elite
| pre-university schooling, elite universities, etc and
| have never had to feel monetary scarcity. Just look at HN
| comments and see how many 3rd generation programmers
| there are. As an adult with savings working at bigger
| tech companies and never having experienced hardship or
| poverty as a child, the prospect of following your dream
| feels alluring.
|
| I grew up in poverty myself but my partner and many of my
| friends at bigger tech companies grew up the way I
| discussed earlier. Most of them were pushed through their
| parents' social circles into a tech career and never were
| wanting for money. They feel the grind inherent to being
| paid for your time as opposed to volunteering your time
| and think of it as an injustice. My partner and friends
| complain constantly about tech and their jobs but other
| than a handful who briefly worked service jobs in their
| teens, they have nothing to compare it to. I spent my
| summers as a teen moving heavy boxes/furniture, often in
| 100F+ hot weather, and being paid in cash (hoping to
| become a cabinetmaker!) barely making ends meet and I
| know what it's like to keep a job a job.
|
| I left Big Tech (I had joined it as a startup and ended
| up staying much longer than I expected) so I understand
| the complaints about heavily bureaucratic jobs where most
| of your time is spent coordinating rather than building,
| and while I'm always unhappy at something or the other
| with my job, I know how good I have it. I do a job that I
| don't hate, working with generally smart people,
| alternating between a cushy office and my home where
| outside of my work I mostly just complain about minor
| office perks. It's fantastic.
| uh_uh wrote:
| As a counterpoint to that, I grew up in a blue-collar
| family under modest circumstances and I still feel like
| bigcorp software development is soul-crushing. Surely,
| you appreciate it for a while. But eventually the reality
| of it sets in, and can't ignore the BS anymore.
|
| I know I'm luckier than most humans on Earth, but still
| hedonistic adaptation is a thing, even if you grew up in
| a poor family.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Because it's soul destroying knowing that to get medical
| insurance, it is directly tied to your employment. If not
| for that, people would gladly pursue their interests and
| passions without the fear of a bankrupting medical
| incident.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That's not "soul destroying", it's real life. The vast
| majority of people in this world have to do a job that they
| aren't in love with so that they can pay the bills. Anyone
| who is privileged enough to be in a highly paid tech job
| should be extremely thankful. Not only do we get paid well,
| we have to work 1/4 as hard as the people busting their
| asses for a living. We have a real sweetheart deal even if
| our jobs aren't always everything we would like.
| jimbokun wrote:
| There's something to be said for being able to look back
| and see a bridge or road or house of piece of furniture
| or an automobile you built, and see it's still being used
| and providing value to someone. Even if the monetary
| compensation was only mediocre.
| jimbokun wrote:
| There's something especially soul destroying about doing
| work you know is useless and meaningless:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf3SGGAJWbA
| jwr wrote:
| It sounds like modern day slavery, or perhaps more precisely
| "corvee" labor. You have to toil away on your master's land
| before doing your own thing. I find it unbearable, but sadly
| much of the world has to deal with it.
| Scea91 wrote:
| You don't "have to", you "choose to". There are plenty of
| paths out there. Slaves or serfs actually didn't have a
| choice.
| ghaff wrote:
| But I could only make a third the money doing the thing I
| really want to do! /s
| jimbokun wrote:
| You are mocking the suffering of actual slaves by comparing
| a modern highly compensated office job to slavery.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| In corporations is not a lot of money, almost never the
| market rates. In my big non-IT company I am paid at rates
| lower than any external company we contract for projects,
| even if their people are always lower qualified.
|
| Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with
| "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT,
| but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career
| interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many
| countries.
| sukruh wrote:
| If you were comparing what the other company was charging
| your company for their developers: Labor and software
| services have different markets. Because, among other
| things, tax/insurance regulations and the expectations of
| contract longevity are not the same. A software shop needs
| to charge 2-3x salaries to be profitable. I was referring
| to a theoretical free market for labor.
|
| If you were comparing salaries, either your company was
| compensating you with extra prestige, job security, etc. or
| you were underpaid.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I am comparing manager/architect positions in Europe with
| long-term (5+ years) contractor positions in India. Yes,
| I know contracting is more expensive than employees, but
| not to this level. We use contractors because internal
| developers would be paid so bad, nobody would apply (and
| they don't).
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'd say they pay bad so they don't have to have the local
| employees that would be protected by strong local laws.
| Contracting is effectively cheaper, mostly because the
| company doesn't care about the health of the local
| company/economy.
| moooo99 wrote:
| There is a difference between a job not being fun/being
| boring and actively dreading to do a job because of
| deadlines/management/etc
|
| The former is tolerable for many, the latter usually isn't
| for long
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Willing to bet that most people who take up something that
| pays much less don't have kids
| martindbp wrote:
| 8 hours is a long time to be bored every day.
| surfingdino wrote:
| I learned to play the game. I too really enjoy being able to
| talk directly to the client while building, but I also learned
| to play the game of cogs, where I am separated from the client
| by layers of increasingly clueless management. I balance the
| insanity with pursuing photography.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| All of this is hitting too close to home!
|
| I work for a large company , and I love people I'm with and
| had some great challenges and accomplishments, but yeah...
| There's still a creative urge that's left not completely
| filled. So I ran a photography business for a decade!I loved
| interacting with happy and involved clients, and creating
| something that brings them immediate joy :). I don't have
| time anymore to do it professionally but I still do it for
| friends and family ( while I work with my therapist to
| survive my day job :)
| darkwater wrote:
| I was in a fast-growing company (although adjacent to Tech),
| that grew "big" and went though tons of extra bureaucracy where
| you will spend months fighting for some stupid change that
| makes all the technical sense. Now the company is sinking, I
| hope I will be fired and with the severance package I can enjoy
| life for 6-8 months and then go find again a company where I
| can fix things and impact someone's life in a mostly positive
| way. Wish me luck.
| demondemidi wrote:
| I worked for big companies, startups, and freelance. If you
| don't take control of your career you will be unfulfilled.
| Software has the pick of the litter. The winning combination is
| a big company and a role you chose. Security, compensation, and
| creativity all in one. Startups are 90% likely to fail,
| contracting will set you back late in life if you don't hustle
| all the time. YMMV but nothing beats a blue chip.
| Difwif wrote:
| One man's garden of eden is another's hell on earth. I've
| gone back and forth between big and small. I'm genuinely
| happy at small companies with tight knit teams (getting
| abused by csuite for shit pay ofc). At big companies I get
| extremely depressed in a corporate hell scape mostly
| surrounded by people that have maintained sanity by
| dissociating from the job and collecting a paycheck.
|
| I'm trying to start my own business now without going down
| the consulting route. At the very least I tell myself that
| the spoils of the hustle go to me. Let's see how this phase
| goes.
| demondemidi wrote:
| This entire thread is full of "well for me...". So I added
| mine. It's obvious this is purely anecdotal for everyone.
| soco wrote:
| Another idea: work for an IT services big company. Then you'll
| have a lot of change, will be much less of a cost center (only
| at times) and talk directly to the customer to solve their
| problems. Not the same as a startup of course, but at least on
| paper it looks like checking your points with slightly less
| stress or risk.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > This is why I am very happy [...] where one can have honest
| conversations
|
| Cheers! Nonsense is tiring, nonsense breeds _detachment_ , and
| I daresay most humans will _detach_ from sources of constant
| _nonsense_. (As well as from _economies of constant nonsense_.
| See: advertising, social media)
|
| > endless PowerPoints
|
| We can agree that PowerPoint is a lossy encoder for instances
| of Conway's Law.
|
| But to your point about Small versus Large entities...
|
| > ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.
|
| There are many well-travelled roads to _Unfulfillment_ in the
| software business. Both Small and Large entities have the
| problem known as _people_.
|
| Although it's true that corporations tend towards uncalled
| functions and _structured madness_ , small shops can amplify
| the oddities, mistakes, and loyalty-antipatterns of _principal
| 's exclusive control_. And people at a small shop will often
| work longer hours just to sort these problems.
|
| > people [...] who pursue creative/crafting hobbies
|
| These people are lucky and are doing what is healthy. They are
| the _tool-maker_ sort of person and are fortunate to have the
| _time_ to extend their skills and knowledge.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech
| company where one can have honest conversations about the
| customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?"
|
| I am very good at designing and creating software products from
| scratch. Was doing it for few years a an employee of smallish
| company that served numerous clients. I then went on my own and
| kept doing the same. I have my own product that brings in some
| money. Also I design and develop software product to various
| clients. I've had ups and downs but in average am very happy,
| not overworked, have more than enough time for myself and like
| my job which is basically a hobby paid for by the clients. My
| client are usually small to medium size that are not really in
| software but for one or another reason software runs their
| business.
| jwr wrote:
| I run my own self-funded solo business. I talk to my customers
| and make a meaningful difference in their daily work. If I do
| my job right, they gladly pay me subscription money. I'm pretty
| happy with this, especially given that I choose my tools and
| technologies, and that my customers are smart engineers.
| filleokus wrote:
| I think there is something special about physical creativity
| that scratches a certain part of your even if you have a very
| fulfilling day-job.
|
| "Even" Chris Lattner (of LLVM and Swift fame) which I as an
| outsider at least would say have a fulfilling job dabbles in
| the occasional woodworking:
| https://nondot.org/sabre/Woodworking.html
| conductr wrote:
| I think those people also are more likely to have the work life
| balance to pursue hobbies where most people doing fast
| growing/early stage startups are off balance. I personally
| don't care what I spend my time on at work, I've found even
| when I enjoy the work, it doesn't increase my fulfillment in
| life over the long term. So I try to optimize the life part of
| the ratio as much as I can, at times at expense of the work
| side of the ratio.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| When you are young and especially when you don't have a family
| to support, you move to some place where you like to work. When
| you are older and opportunities are rare (and agism is huge in
| the industry), you just take what you can and escape any way
| you can, like video games or side passions of any sorts. I
| bought a motorcycle when I was over 30 years old for commuting
| (heavy traffic, the bike was saving hours), but after a few
| years I started to take motorcycle trips in the weekends and,
| once in a while, across Europe. But it can be anything that you
| find enjoyable, the point is that you have to try different
| things and see what you like, when I was 20-25 years old I had
| no desire to ever buy a motorcycle. Now, if it's a light rain,
| I am happy to take it for a ride.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but for the author of the article it
| seems the opposite issue. He seems to (mostly) live from his
| own software products, and his two main points of stress are
| unreasonable customers & his own inability to let things go
| when fixing/working on stuff.
| vlozko wrote:
| > Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting
| hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to
| work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and
| ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.
|
| Depends on the industry. I've been doing iOS for over a decade.
| You're right in that there are different dynamics with
| enterprise that can wear you down. I find that to be less so
| the case with jobs in the retail sector. Things are always
| fluid and changing there.
|
| Still, this is a very subjective statement. As someone in my
| middle ages, I've come to appreciate and understand how views
| change over time. The 20-something me would have jumped over to
| new jobs every 2-3 years. The 40 something me recognizes value
| in work/life balance, stability, and a more defined and often
| opportunistic growth path in larger companies. And it's at this
| stage that while I may not fully comprehend the occasional
| stubbornness of 60-something devs, I can at least approach
| their way of thinking as not wrong. When you have a spouse,
| family, and mortgage to support, the potential upsides of a
| smaller, more nimble company just don't overcome the peace of
| mind of being in the corporate world.
| RobRivera wrote:
| Vigorous exercise and a love of food gos miles for managi g the
| creative soul.
|
| Side projects and meditation supplements.
|
| Each year passes and O learn more about myself so hurray
| growth?
| gspencley wrote:
| I'm one of those creative types. I have woodworking shop, I'm a
| musician, my wife and I are part-time performing magicians.
|
| I've only ever worked for small start-ups. Including my own
| which paid the bills for 15 years.
|
| Working for start-ups does not solve the problem for me.
|
| The problem for me is that I need to give a shit about WHAT I'm
| creating. And I find that after 25 years of working in the tech
| industry professionally, as an _end user_ the older I get the
| less interest in modern technology I have.
|
| It's hard for me to not see the negatives. I want a car that I
| can maintain myself and that does not talk to a network for
| critical functions. I want a fridge that just cools my food and
| doesn't come with an app or "smart" features. I have zero
| interest in AI. I love writing code, and I'm already over-
| burdened by poor code quality that I've inherited and that was
| written by inexperienced devs. I don't need AI generating code
| for me that I then need to review and refactor. It's faster and
| more fulfilling for me to write it myself. I never got on the
| smart phone bandwagon. Yes, I own one, but I often forget where
| I left it and when I find it the battery is usually dead
| because I haven't touched it in days. I don't want a "smart
| home." I'm not a gamer.
|
| So in my off hours, I find that I spend my time doing things
| that don't touch modern tech at all.
|
| So yeah, I find myself constantly planning my exit strategy
| from the industry. I enjoy coding, making things and solving
| problems but I don't enjoy modern technology the way that I
| used to. And making products that I wouldn't use myself is what
| I find soul crushing.
| sandspar wrote:
| As an aside, high skill and low excitement is a great recipe
| for composure. It makes me think of a veteran I once knew. He
| once talked us out of a sticky situation because seeing his
| calm demeanor, the authority figures had no reason to suspect
| we were up to something.
| purple-leafy wrote:
| Amen. On the same bandwidth here. No social media. I don't
| read the news. We don't have a TV. I yearn for old tech. New
| tech has no character or charm. AI is the worst thing to
| happen to the industry. Literally just makes our working
| conditions worse
| twojobsoneboss wrote:
| There are plenty of big tech or big tech adjacent public traded
| company jobs paying far better that are still majority coding
| and with a lot less speed pressure than an early stage startup,
| among other things allowi Ng for an earlier retirement.
|
| Will take one of those instead, any day.
| fatbird wrote:
| I work for a digital services consultancy handling large gov't
| contracts. It has all the problems of every large organization,
| public or private, but it's not overly demanding. The work is
| more challenging from a people perspective than a technical
| one.
|
| But, as in my last big project, I'm building something well
| that makes a concrete difference in people's lives, internally
| and externally. In my previous project, the software we
| delivered saved hours a day for clerks who were typically very
| overworked, and we received grateful emails telling us that
| they'd been able to sit down for lunch for the first time in
| years. In the current project we're bringing GIS capabilities
| and full accessibility to a gov't online service--we have a
| mandate to ensure it works properly with screen readers, and
| we're actually doing new work on making map features accessible
| to the visually impaired.
|
| So much of the motivation for geeks is technical satisfaction
| that we can miss many other forms of fulfillment in our
| technical jobs. Having worked on the web since the late 1900s,
| through multiple hype waves and "oh, we're doing this again"
| moments, I find the non-tech, more people-oriented rewards much
| more satisfying.
|
| Also, I'm building out the wood shop I want. :)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting
| hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to
| work for well-known big companies
|
| Guilty (although retired now). When I could apply creativity to
| my job, I did so, but I think I prefer to have had the outside-
| work activities to have been my creative outlets.
|
| The application to express creativity in software is fairly
| narrow in comparison to other activities and, as was pointed
| out in this thread, physically creating with your hands (rather
| than virtual creating with your keyboard) is ... real.
| zerkten wrote:
| >> The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul.
|
| This really struck me because I'm realizing it is soul
| destroying but have gotten competent, and even good at it. I
| was involved in my family's small business and some of my own
| startup attempts and consulting, so I remember those feelings.
| hinkley wrote:
| At small companies, across a long career, I've solved the same
| problems many times. But that's not the part that stings the
| most.
|
| What grinds my gears is _failing to solve problems I've already
| solved_. At some point you have to convince others that a plan
| is good. Your arguments might not work on a new team. You might
| not know what the secret sauce was that got you consensus last
| time. Or after years of getting your way you may forget some of
| the arguments for an idea.
|
| Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an
| intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once
| a decision process is successfully ingrained, the
| intellectualized path is dead weight.
|
| There's a lot of vaguely intellectually lazy, cheap instead of
| frugal thinking, and ethically challenged people in or around
| our industry, and the collective weight of it causes pushback
| on progress.
| skydhash wrote:
| > Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an
| intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster.
| Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the
| intellectualized path is dead weight.
|
| That's where you write a blog post, a company note, or a book
| if you got the time. The best proof of mastery is teaching
| because that's when you got confronted to the problems from
| another perspective (the other may not learn it as well as
| you do). And you won't have to repeat yourself that much if
| your arguments and process are written somewhere.
| whb101 wrote:
| This comment hits the crux of what OP was really getting at.
| It's not that software itself is an inherently bad trade; it's
| what's been happening to it and why.
|
| > very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can
| have honest conversations about the customer and the product
|
| Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are
| feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful
| vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims
| of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the
| amount that's just natural in software and getting
| disproportionately bad.
|
| It's because the market is driving people to the software world
| like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social
| media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software
| are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good -
| just a little too good for its own good.
|
| As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and
| wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it.
| What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil
| rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of
| unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.
|
| This makes people, including many software engineers
| themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you
| can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with
| biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their
| hands.
|
| The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of
| production, and providing each other with reliably good
| schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be
| common sense in 100 years if we're still around.
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| I'm going to seize on one phrase: people,
| including many software engineers themselves, view software
| engineers as natural resources
|
| I've said this a million times on this forum.. the little
| trick whereby people who were once employees became merely
| _human resources_ has done more to damage work-life in this
| world than anything else I can think of.
|
| Its natural to exploit resources to their fullest. Labeling
| humans as resources is inherently dehumanizing and
| desperately needs to end.
| jq-r wrote:
| I've lost my cool one time when a very young "manager"
| asked: "Do we have a backend resource on this call?"
|
| It really got my blood boiling and I've said something very
| similar to: "No we don't have a resource on the call, we
| have engineers, colleagues, employees, humans and friends
| on this call. Resources are air, water, memory, cpu and
| time, please don't call people like that". This followed by
| silence, and a lot of red faces.
|
| Couple of weeks later, had a talk with my manager who is a
| true and true programmer I really respect. And then he says
| something with that "resource" referring to our team
| members...
|
| I have experience across various industries, and many
| professions think very highly of themselves. But over here
| I have seen the working population be so easily
| manipulated, self-effacing, and self-abnegating. Most of
| the time bad managers just say "jump!" and engineers just
| ask "how high?".
| bitwize wrote:
| I had the unfortunate privilege of meeting two of the
| first "techbros". They were marketers more than tech
| people, but they were tech-adjacent and that was enough
| to make them cutting edge.
|
| The thing they kept saying was "We'll run it through the
| machine." Meaning "We'll hand that off to our software
| team and have them complete it." Of course today, the one
| who stayed in tech might be salivating about running
| software requirements through an actual machine to
| produce code.
| irrational wrote:
| I like the big companies because I can be paid a hefty six
| figure salary while working 4 hour days and spending the rest
| of the hours doing woodworking, gardening, home remodeling,
| baking, exercising, reading, etc.
| hyggetrold wrote:
| It's an odd thing - at all the big companies I've worked for,
| you can usually get all your work for the day done in 4
| hours. Between meetings and status waste, that's all anybody
| expects from you.
| ghaff wrote:
| What you personally do is only part of your job.
| Communicating with others is probably at least the other
| 50%. Even if your an individual consultant your clients
| will expect you to communicate with them.
| rendaw wrote:
| Do meetings typically involve communication? I'm not
| familiar with practices in various companies.
| lawlessone wrote:
| psst, stop saying it.
|
| Companies would rather overwork 1 person than pay 2 and have
| both slightly under utilized
| htrp wrote:
| Do you count the meetings as work?
| randomdata wrote:
| Surely. It'd be hard to get to 4 hours otherwise.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I wish I could be so lucky. In recent years, every job I've
| worked for has reached a point where I had to endure 4 hours
| of meetings per day before we could even begin to get work
| done (if we were lucky)
|
| The departments where people were casually putting in 4 hours
| per day mostly got axed during COVID and again during the
| 2024 recessions. There was a period of time where a lot of
| teams accumulated a lot of people so they could spread the
| work thin. Eventually management started catching on and put
| an end to that.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| You hit on a really key point here:
|
| > I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the
| customer" and solve their problems
|
| I finally identified that at my last job, and have begun
| actively working to make that happen. For example, I
| transitioned internally to a "platform" team so that I know my
| customer--my fellow product developers at the company.
|
| This has resulted in me being MUCH happier with my day-to-day
| work.
| freedomben wrote:
| Same. The enterprise can be enjoyable from some aspects, but in
| the end the soul-suck isn't worth it to me. I think a great
| skunk works team with a big budget is probably the dream, but
| short of those rare and difficult-to-get opportunities, the
| startup/small-tech co is the place to go for people like us.
| Some are better than others at faciliting honesty, but it's far
| more common IME than big corp.
| jajko wrote:
| > if you want to solve problems and build stuff
|
| Not everybody is like that, even in software. I mean sure,
| creative aspect is very cool, but its fraction of any senior
| job, including most bigger startups from what I've heard. Even
| my current corporate job which started 12 years ago was pure
| dev in the beginning, now its maybe 20-30%. Responsibilities,
| personal growth, but also business grew in complexity and IT
| landscape and various regulations governing it exploded and
| keep exploding. I know stuff very few other do, so I get
| involved continuously into tons of efforts.
|
| As they say, if you work manually hard work rest with mental
| challenges, and vice versa. Wood working must be cool since you
| create visible results with your hands and there is certainly
| some physical effort. I don't seek further creativity TBH, I
| look for extreme/adrenaline sports, be it climbing, ski
| alpinism, paragliding and few other similar (but also super
| chill diving to cover all elements and balance intensity). And
| ie in climbing, finding out how to climb some new route that is
| hard and scary for you is extremely rewarding, a literal
| creative ballet on vertical rock face.
|
| Till kids came, this was making me properly happy and fulfilled
| to 120% since I was doing something every evening, every
| weekend, every vacation combined with 3rd world backpacking.
| Plus it made me super healthy and more focused on healthy
| eating too, became quite attractive to women since all this
| changes visuals but also confidence and overall persona for the
| better in aspects many women notice.
|
| With small kids, and few non-horrible injuries I am now
| somewhere in the middle now, but kids are top priority, rest
| are not that important now (folks who keep going the same
| way/pace after having kid(s) I don't respect, it shows later on
| those kids in all kinds of bad ways). I know I have skillset to
| show them later some pretty awesome places and activities, but
| will let them go their own way. Just managing maximum possible
| off screen time since thats cancer for young soul and sugary
| stuff since thats cancer for body, now its easy and they follow
| our examples so they happily much some bio carrots and ignore
| cakes.
| jjav wrote:
| > Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems
| and build stuff.
|
| There are many levels to "build stuff", so it's important to
| introspect what kind is important to you.
|
| I love to build _quality_ code. Production code that is quite
| efficient, fast, secure and maintainable while being full-
| featured.
|
| Having done five startups now, this is very difficult to do in
| startups.
|
| (There was one startup where we had a great team of like-minded
| quality-driven people and it was awesome, but it was the
| exception.)
|
| "Building stuff" in startups usually means throwing together a
| mess of half-baked code and holding it together with chewing
| gum and duct tape and immediately moving on to the next thing
| that sales promised a customer yesterday but hasn't been
| started. From a business perspective, that's not wrong. It's a
| startup, you need to grow fast and add features at lightning
| speed to capture some market. But if you crave to build
| quality, this isn't it.
|
| It's only in larger companies with some stability and steady
| revenue that there is some possibility of finding the
| environment to build things I can be proud of. Of course, most
| large companies also just build junk. Finding a good one is
| hard, and is an exercise left to the reader.
|
| (If you know any please share!)
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost
| center so the less of it the better.
|
| Less is more? Oh you are painting such a rosy picture of
| enterprise IT.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| > Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems
| and build stuff
|
| My experience is the opposite: you can usually chill at big
| companies, while startups need money fast and attracts the
| worst managers. I know it's not the same experience for
| everyone, but I'll never work for a startup ever again.
| xvilka wrote:
| A lot of software jobs are "bullshit jobs" - creating
| unnecessary or unused software (or particular features).
| netbioserror wrote:
| I'm very lucky. I work on a very small software team, with a
| very flat structure, where my boss, with a very high level of
| trust, tasked me with replacing several very old parts of the
| product stack using my best judgment and choice of
| languages/tools. He also appreciated that during the interview,
| I mentioned that my work must be oriented towards customer
| value; that is the ultimate goal of any of our work. I am often
| privy to client feedback. However, I am also protected by a
| hard communications firewall from direct contact with those
| customers, as well as the much larger field tech and sales side
| of the company. My job thoroughly satisfies my creative and
| technical needs, such that I do not pursue much programming or
| high-skill crafting outside of work.
|
| Nobody believes me when I tell them this. Software is so
| thoroughly corrupted by the low-trust managerial paradigm,
| where massive hierarchies are built to justify high-paying
| managerial positions that end up reducing the efficiency and
| productivity of great programmers, that it's simply taken for
| granted: We should never trust engineers to make independent
| decisions, to schedule their own pursuit of tasks, to pick the
| right tool for the job, to do this all with customer value in
| mind.
|
| Who knows? Maybe I'm the exception and engineers don't deserve
| to be trusted. In which case we have a very, very big societal
| problem. All I know is that our software team performs very
| esoteric group interviews, and our style seems very good at
| sniffing out pretenders and exploiters.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > _Software is so thoroughly corrupted by the low-trust
| managerial paradigm_
|
| They were certainly very good at coopting the agile
| ,,movement" in this manner.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| It didn't help having Jeff Sutherland blathering on about
| "twice the work in half the time."
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > However, I am also protected by a hard communications
| firewall from direct contact with those customers, as well as
| the much larger field tech and sales side of the company.
|
| One of the worst faceplants I've seen in my current role was
| when my team was developing a solution to integrate some
| third-party data. Our PO reported to a Product Manager who
| was tapped as the "I talk to the end users" person and he
| completely fucked it up. The team was siloed off to do this
| for multiple quarters, and at the rollout we literally got
| laughed at and told "we can't use this." But God forbid my
| team actually, you know, TALK and DEMO to the end users once
| an iteration like you're supposed to in Scrum, as opposed to
| plugging in some drone from corporate who it turns out
| doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
| netbioserror wrote:
| We have a liaison in a similar manner, but she manages a
| Jira ticketing system by which we require our sales people
| and field techs to fully communicate issues and feature
| demands. The company used to give out programmer phone
| numbers and emails. Projects used to get completely side-
| tracked by programmers chasing trivial features or even
| entire alternative tools and getting sidetracked long-term
| from the primary projects. It cost the company their
| leadership position and a significant amount of programmer
| turnover. It's still an ongoing issue that our field techs
| and sales folks simply do not understand the field well
| enough to know what they're asking for.
|
| The ticketing firewall has been a net boon and we've been
| able to overhaul a number of ailing backend systems, while
| adding features that were in demand for going on two
| decades. Turns out, most of the features being requested
| were easy to implement given the right choice of languages
| and architecture. We went from constant fires to downright
| quiet in our office. Most of the ongoing project work is
| aspirational and would vault us back to industry
| leadership, instead of the constant remedial work that was
| bogging us down.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech
| company where one can have honest conversations about the
| customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?
|
| My experience is the opposite. Startups i've worked at were
| mostly 'boys clubs' where if you weren't part of a 'core group'
| then you were merely a mercenary. So you are in the same
| situation as in 'big tech' without the safety or prestige. You
| still have schmooze and 'manage up' to get into that core group
| of decision makers. Startups aren't immune from human nature.
|
| startups as meritocratic wonderlands of creativity is not an
| idea based in reality.
| maptime wrote:
| I made my son a floor bed, it's really true that when you work
| with code all day having something tangible that you can touch
| helps.
|
| It took twice as long as I thought. It cost double what it would
| have cost to buy one of Etsy but it's still one of my favourite
| things I've done in ages. My son still gets excited when he see's
| it sometimes
| t43562 wrote:
| I have to laugh because I find almost all programmers are like
| this. They are almost always people who like making things. A lot
| of them are musicians too.
|
| I find DIY to be similar - you get a physical result, you use
| your hands to make something, the satisfaction is almost always
| about pleasing your own sense of what you want. Ok there's the
| wife too but ....
|
| I also like feeling that I can cope with certain jobs even if not
| well. Also you do get better. Baking and cooking can be like this
| too. When you learn the "tricks" that make your bread turn out
| better or your skirting boards line up properly or whatever then
| it's a super feeling. :-)
| xandrius wrote:
| Yeah, agree!
|
| I also find cooking (not necessarily baking) to be quite
| similar to programming: you follow steps and if some bug
| happens in production (too salty, too thick, not flavourful
| enough) then you go in and try to debug it and fix it (I guess
| the simile breaks down here).
|
| But if someone is good at breaking down IT tasks, I believe
| they will be able to prepare a large meal with multiple
| courses, as I find it requiring a similar mindset to releasing
| a feature.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I love baking! I purposefully don't try to optimize my
| recipes so that there's always a bit of art, magic,
| randomness, individual element to it. It's so much fun
| compared to corporate job!
| sublimefire wrote:
| Confirmation bias. I have seen multiple different programmers
| developers etc that such a generalization just puts a smile on
| my face. Age, family status, location, family influences
| probably have more to do with the selection of a hobby rather
| than the text modification job alone. The last decades rendered
| us more or less exceptional and people like to play with this
| satisfactory idea. But programmers are no different to
| electricians or plumbers or architectural technicians, etc.
| mhaberl wrote:
| > Even my last team leader sent me a message out of the blue
| saying "I think I'll run a bar. I want to be a bartender and
| listen to other people's stories, not figure out why protobuf
| doesn't deserialize data that worked JUST FINE for the past three
| years".
|
| I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the
| most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings'
| are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories you can
| hear.
|
| This is just comparing apples to oranges. Woodworking or any
| other hobby that you enjoy will be more pleasing than any real
| job you will do. Programming is fun, that is why you started
| doing it. Working as software developer can be less so.
| uxp100 wrote:
| Yeah, I know a few white collar workers bartending or in a
| kitchen, one weekday night or so, but they had a lot of
| experience with the service industry before they got a white
| collar job, and worked in lower paying business side and non
| tech engineering jobs where the extra money was a little more
| appreciated, if not their main reason for being there. (The
| bartender wanted "forced" socialization and the cook was a food
| enthusiast who wanted to keep his skills sharp). I'm not saying
| a "techie" wouldn't or couldn't do it, but if they've never
| done it before they don't know if they're the type of person
| who would be burnt out by it or rejuvenated.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it.
|
| For some. I certainly started that way. But many of my friends
| at Uni started from a different point. I heard many describing
| how they choose computer engineering because it is perceived as
| a good career or because they heard it pays a lot. I'm not sure
| if those people have the same "Programming is fun, that is why
| you started doing it." to fall back to.
| allen_berg wrote:
| A lot, most of the people actually who got into software for
| the past decade or so seem to have been motivated by money.
| They'd just as easily became doctors or lawyers. And it
| shows, a lot of software now is just some grey corporate
| kafkaesque mess.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The people responsible for all the packages on npm, pip,
| cargo, Conan really really love writing lots of lines of
| code to solve every imaginable tiny problem. So they are
| out there.
| matt_s wrote:
| FWIW this happened during the dot com boom and a lot of
| them scurried off during the dot com bust. The amount of US
| salary one can pull with no formal education needed is the
| driver for this cycle.
|
| My preference in hiring is people that are drawn to
| computing naturally, they will be there for the long haul.
| busterarm wrote:
| I'm not sure it's just the money. You can still do those
| other things and make good money.
|
| I think a lot of people are drawn into the industry these
| days from various online communities because you can
| enforce your particular viewpoint of social order in a
| small niche and basically be mini-tyrants. This is very
| western-world specific, but looking at the "communities"
| around Ruby, Node, Rust, Nix, etc, it looks fairly clear.
|
| I put communities in quotes because I'm referring to those
| communities within the community that tend to label
| themselves as the whole community, write petitions to
| remove undesirables, etc.
|
| The ability to create a space entirely of likeminded
| individuals that purges undesirables is highly attractive
| to certain kinds of people. Saw this happening on forums
| and bbs first decades ago and now it's the governance body
| of everything.
|
| It's happened in tabletop gaming too -- one local game
| group I was a part of got co-opted by a guy just through
| starting a discord and hosting events. Suddenly a very
| apolitical community started being dominated by tankie
| politics and banning of members for wrongthink. We were
| just trying to game with some minis up till then. I got fed
| up and quit once the guy running the discord started
| ranting about how everyone in America should be forcibly
| relocated to cities and reeducated in more progressive
| values. I'm just trying to point plastic lasers at people
| and roll dice, my guy.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I got into programming before the past decade and initially
| it was the lure of a good career i.e. money. But when
| attended my first class, I instantly knew that this was it.
| Sometimes the path isn't pretty but it can lead to
| beautiful places.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| Sure, but that's their problem. If you choose to fill your
| life with an activity you know you won't enjoy then, well,
| that's your choice.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| > I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories;
| the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile
| meetings' are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories
| you can hear.
|
| I'm assuming that by this you mean that most stories you hear
| around the bar are just the same stories with different
| characters and protagonists?
| doubled112 wrote:
| "The faces change but the characters remain the same" was
| some oddly insightful advice I received at my first "real
| job".
| allen_berg wrote:
| Anything gets old. I feel like a lot of the problems my friends
| and I have with software work comes down to having to wrangle
| the same sort of nonsense week in, week out.
|
| Alienation of the workers and all that. Profitable but
| psychologically damaging. We thrive when we get to be whole
| persons.
| arcbyte wrote:
| It's not profitable and we should stop saying that. The issue
| is that there's just not enough quality out there so
| companies accept less quality and have to start managing for
| it.
|
| If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out
| they would.
| ornornor wrote:
| > If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit
| out they would.
|
| I don't know this is true. My personal experience across a
| dozen jobs is that the only metric that really matters is
| "how low can you go?" Cost is the thing to minimize and
| quality is the absolute first thing to be considered
| optional and to be cut to fulfill the cost objective.
| Closely followed by "how fast can you go?" Not a pleasant
| way to work.
| DanielHB wrote:
| Anything you do 40 hours a week gets tiring eventually.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I haven't hit that stage yet.
|
| I mean, yes - work isn't fun. But I have coding side projects
| I work on, and it _is_ fun for me, still!
| all2 wrote:
| I am very much this way. Greenfield dev on a project that's
| interesting is very engaging. Munging through thousands of
| lines of code trying to find the conditional or field that
| isn't being set properly, or that is being incorrectly
| accessed is draining.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Or finding that `savePaypalTransactionToDatabase` doesn't
| return the row ID, but instead returns true/false to
| indicate success, and not being able to easily refactor
| it because god knows where that function is being used,
| and what sorts of knock-on effects it can have, even with
| a decent IDE, and deciding "fuck it, I'll just write a
| wrapper around it that then queries for the
|
| You know what, nevermind, it's Saturday, why am I
| thinking about work.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I keep reflecting on this, it's always when you get
| negative mismatch. Being forced to work with the wrong
| people (too negative, too angry, not motivated) or not
| having time to work on a good idea or good solution.
|
| When you don't have to suffer these, you can work long,
| cause it's basically a kind of self fulfilling game.
| DanielHB wrote:
| The key difference is that you are not working on the same
| side project doing the same thing for 40 hours a week for
| years. You probably change around you side project every
| few months and likely don't work on them full time.
| digging wrote:
| Which is why my primary career goal is working less at this
| point. Not because I hate software engineering, but because I
| love it...
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Woodworking or any other hobby that you enjoy will be more
| pleasing than any real job you will do.
|
| I think that you mean that a hobby (that you can pick up and
| put down as you please) is always more enjoyable than a job (at
| which you must work, usually on someone else's schedule, to
| make money), but, just to be quite clear, there's no reason
| that woodworking can't be a real job.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Programing is fun but it lacks a tangible component, I started
| my studies as a CS major but after a spending an entire spring
| break writing and debugging(and basically only those
| things...eating and sleeping happened if I remembered to) were
| the second year project. I realized that I would end up working
| the same way, so I found a major that I can't take with me and
| isn't just contained in my head.
| zith wrote:
| I worked in the robotics lab at my university for a few
| months. That was a really nice way of making software more
| tangible. Seeing things move through physical space made it
| more real.
| Leherenn wrote:
| I miss working in robotics, in part due to this. Also
| implenting a complex path algorithm is so much more
| rewarding than moving data around. The field testing trips
| were the cherry on top.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| The nicest part of working at the bar is when you leave the bar
| you're done working. Also, you don't need to get your drink
| pouring approved by another bartender that nitpick small
| details of what you did to boost their own ego.
| digging wrote:
| Have you worked in a bar? Both of those things can be untrue,
| lol.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's the timeless notion of "work". All the chaotic constraints
| thrown at one person: teammates, customers, tooling,
| psychology, politics.. they will turn anything into a slow
| boiling hell.
|
| That said some domains are cleaner than others, just like small
| rivers have clearer water, I remember working in food stores or
| even mechanics and you don't get the same kind of fatigue as in
| software engineering. The stimulations are more diverse, a bit
| deeper (helps getting into flow in a way) and the culture helps
| (less discussion about shallow things like indentation). Fast
| food for instance, being a real-time thing requires tight
| planning and tight execution, no space for slack. It makes you
| sweat but you get seriously fast and good at your operations.
| Unlike coding where you can spin in circles for ages never get
| anywhere, and go home drained feeling useless.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| The grass is always greener and all that.
|
| I'll be 40 in a few months, so recently I've been a bit more
| pensive than usual, reflecting on where I'm at in my life. One
| of my biggest regrets so far is how much time I spent wishing I
| was somewhere other than where I was.
| bmj wrote:
| >I went through those stages too: when the Agile meetings at my
| last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA
| task time in T-shirt sizes
|
| Oh, boy, I can relate. Every three months, I think our program
| increment planning meetings can't get more ridiculous and, yet,
| they do. Most recently, we were told that we should just treat
| story points as days of effort.
| bengale wrote:
| At least there is some honesty there. Everywhere that does
| estimates, even if they make the devs think its complexity or
| some other nonsense, is translating that to days somewhere down
| the line.
| swader999 wrote:
| I spit my coffee all over the table when they ask for days.
| And they look at me like I'm crazy.
| rvense wrote:
| We should call them fairy tale points.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I don't think t-shirt sizes is absurd. It's one of the few good
| ways that really conveys "we have only a very vague idea how
| long this will take".
|
| Story points are dumb because they _always_ are just a bad
| proxy for time.
|
| Really though, the right solution is time _plus confidence_.
| Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.
|
| Unfortunately a large number of people simply can't comprehend
| this, and also no tools support it, so I've never seen it
| actually done. I imagine management wouldn't like it either
| because then they can't pretend they have a perfect plan with
| no uncertainty.
| conductr wrote:
| I feel like if that task took 8 days you'd end up having to
| explain everything that happened and why it couldn't be done
| in 1.
| IshKebab wrote:
| What would you rather - it took 8 days and you said it
| would take 1-8 days, or it took 8 days and you said it
| would take _exactly 4 days_?
|
| In any case, there should be absolutely no problem
| explaining why it took 8 days if it really did.
| ruszki wrote:
| I never understood this sentiment. It seems to me that
| the communication is broken, when a developer has
| problems with delays. It's not their decision, and it's
| not their risk. If developers report uncertainties
| properly, even during development, when a previously
| unknown unknown appears, or a known unknown takes longer
| than it was estimated, it's not their fault. If this
| doesn't happen, it's obviously difficult to explain.
| Otherwise, I never had problems with even delays 4x the
| original estimation, because every party knew even from
| the start, that we had no idea how the end result would
| look like.
| conductr wrote:
| > if it really did
|
| The fact you even had to say that part points to the
| management problem at hand. Not only are you trying to
| keep idle time low, you're trying to estimate essentially
| unknown timelines, and you have to think about whether
| people are even telling the truth or padding hours where
| they feel they can.
|
| I just think the range is too wide. Sure anything can be
| a 1 day task (potentially just an easy solution to add
| in, or some variables/settings to change, etc). And any 1
| day task could be turned into an 8 day task (anything
| from refactoring unnecessarily, all the way to just
| walking the dog too frequently). I'm left wondering, how
| long should this task have taken?
| IshKebab wrote:
| I don't really follow you to be honest.
|
| > Not only are you trying to keep idle time low
|
| Yes... I'm paid to work.
|
| > you're trying to estimate essentially unknown timeline
|
| Yes. The exact amount of time the task will take is
| unknown. That doesn't mean I have _no_ idea how long it
| will take. The point of the estimate is to tell other
| people my idea of how long it will take. Even if I only
| have a rough idea it is probably a better idea than a lot
| of people.
|
| Incidentally I've found that a lot of people don't
| understand that, and I have a hack! If you find yourself
| in a situation where you're waiting for something...
| let's say roadworks, and you say "any idea how long it
| will take?" and they refuse to give an estimate, even
| though they clearly have a better idea than you... What
| you can do is suggest an outlandish number, and then
| they'll say "oh no no not that long. More like x".
|
| Worked every time I've tried it.
|
| I can't parse your second paragraph at all.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > Really though, the right solution is time plus confidence.
| Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.
|
| It's a half-assed reimplementation of PERT charts, which were
| invented in the 1950s and used successfully for many decades,
| until everyone decided that everything old is terrible.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Last year I abandoned my JavaScript career of 15 years. I made a
| promise to myself that I will NEVER go back for less than
| $500,000. Yes, the number is large enough to reach absurdity, but
| that's the point.
|
| I am currently happy at my current job that pays well enough
| writing proxies. The team and leadership are great with
| tremendous internal training. It just feels military, which is
| fitting since it's at a military organization.
|
| If this line of work doesn't work I will still not go back to
| software. I would rather be unemployed and lose my house.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| Either you should speak with someone or you're not being
| genuine. Sorry that your experience led you to believe you'd
| rather be homeless.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| It would be hard for some people. I am well conditioned to
| live on less by my part time job.
| nobody0 wrote:
| Like painting or architecture, woodworking have a finished state,
| after that, you just ship it and not worry about it again.
| whereas in software, everything is so malleable that a rewrite is
| often going to happen again and again.
| pawjast wrote:
| I like coding and don't feel like burn out yet.
|
| But it's great to have other passions outside of it. To get away
| from your main occupation. To reset and to get a perspective.
|
| And woodworks seems like a good choice. You're still making
| things, physical ones and you can hone your skill.
|
| I've made a handful of things in my life (e.g. two simple custom
| beds for my home) without any prior knowledge of wood working at
| all. They weren't great, but good enough. And I couldn't have
| been prouder.
|
| So thanks for sharing your story. I might get back to tinkering
| in my garage more often!
| indymike wrote:
| This line from the article may be one of the saddest descriptions
| of modern "success" I've ever read:
|
| "When you've been conditioned to believe rightly or wrongly that
| your value as a human being is derived from the economic value
| you provide to those around you and all barriers to producing
| work have been removed by an unprecedented upheaval to social
| norms, it felt like there was only one path forward and that was
| working as hard as possible every day."
| koonsolo wrote:
| I don't think the difference is between software vs any other
| endeavor.
|
| I think it's working for a huge corporation vs a tiny one.
|
| If you feel drained by all the bullshit of your current
| development job, I'm guessing you work for a huge company. Start
| work at a <10 employee company, and see if you can find more job
| satisfaction there.
| mym1990 wrote:
| There are tradeoffs too though...large corporations can offer
| large problems to solve too, even though they will often be
| behind a bunch of red tape. Some people are well equipped to
| deal with that. Some people are okay with encountering the red
| tape, and waiting the 3 months for it to resolve...in the
| meantime you focus on other things, still get paid, and then go
| home and focus on hobbies/family/whatever. For the people that
| want to "move fast and break things"...yeah don't join a
| fortune 100/500 company.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| Nothing wrong with finding a new hobby but this is a stereotype
| of tech workers. If it isn't woodworking, it's beekeeping or some
| other perfectly fine side quest.
|
| I have a small issue with the way the people who get into these
| hobbies are so bitter. Every job has stuff like this, we aren't
| special.
| jebarker wrote:
| > Every job has stuff like this
|
| And many jobs have much worse stuff like danger, filth, hard
| manual labor, no social standing etc
| ceving wrote:
| I would say the bookshelves are a bit too thin. But I like your
| approach. I am doing the same, although a bit less consequent.
| sesm wrote:
| There is a talk 'Programming With Hand Tools' by Tim Ewald, where
| the author explains why he uses hand tools (as opposed to
| electric tools) in his woodworking hobby and how this might be
| reflected back to programming.
| raddan wrote:
| I haven't seen the talk but I think about this comparison all
| the time. Knowing how to use hand tools makes you keenly aware
| of your material. I was recently surprised to learned exactly
| what "against the grain" meant while trying to plane hard
| maple. This awareness translates into a more nuanced
| understanding of power tools and has made me a much better
| power tool woodworker. Understanding programming tools all the
| way down to bare metal has the same effect. I teach a computer
| security course where we look at a number of classic control
| flow attacks (eg, stack smashing). Students are simply unable
| to explain the behavior I show them until they get all the way
| down to raw memory dumps of programs.
|
| The only downside to seeing this connection is that you're
| constantly tempted to use idioms from woodworking to explain
| programming problems, which just confuses most people.
| suhlig wrote:
| Being involved with software professionally and woodworking as
| a hobby, I can recommend that talk. The parallels he draws are
| so good that I was almost angry with myself for not seeing them
| before watching that talk.
| detourdog wrote:
| The absurdity I see most is based in culture. Technology
| development is awesome the business plans and machinations are
| the absurdities. Any job that does not have a manager with a
| business plan or an org chart is a breath of fresh air.
| readingnews wrote:
| Replace woodworking with "any hobby you want to pursue".
|
| I find that a lot of people go to work thinking they enjoy it,
| and wake up later and realize it is just "work". This leads them
| to go off and figure out what they really enjoy, and they start
| doing that (they call it a hobby). Some of them ruin their hobby,
| by turning it into a full time job, where once again, it just
| becomes "work".
| esarbe wrote:
| I recommend gardening.
|
| It's really satisfying to see stuff grow, to learn how to tend to
| plants, how they compete and cooperate.
|
| It helps me to preserve some sanity.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I tried out hydroponics over the pandemic and it was fantastic!
| I stuck a pepper plant into a cup of water, made sure the
| nutrients were right, and watched that thing go off, I was an
| extremely proud plant dad.
| mberning wrote:
| Quite a bit of romanticizing goes on with this fantasy, but I
| think it does illuminate why software jobs tend to pay so well.
| It's usually not very fun, hard to learn, hard to keep up with,
| and if it weren't for the pay many people would not bother with
| it.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Interestingly, Glenn Reid also escaped from making software
| (Touchtype.app, PasteUp.app, wrote "The Green Book", _PostScript
| Language Program Design_) to making dovetail joined furniture by
| hand.
|
| That said, I've always described the "Maker" movement as "Geeks
| who missed shop class", and have argued that the world would be a
| better place if the Sloyd system of woodworking as a basic
| constituent of education was prevalent:
|
| https://rainfordrestorations.com/tag/sloyd/
|
| >Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever
| have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your
| hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Isn't it more Geeks who enjoyed shop class, but went into
| software because it paid more?
|
| (I'm the Geek who hated shop class, and thank my locking stars
| I can make a living writing software, decades later.)
| hinkley wrote:
| Being reductive af and a little sardonic: I couldn't think of
| a job that involved LEGO before I encountered my first
| programming class.
| WillAdams wrote:
| No, given the naivete with which "Makers" approach things,
| they don't seem to have had real shop-class experience, or at
| least not a sensible class which actually taught anything
| meaningful.
| JR1427 wrote:
| What?! You mean 3d printing is not always the right answer?
|
| Shocking!
| Implicated wrote:
| I took the Cisco networking electives, being the geek I was.
| I slept through 90% of it, it was such a terrible experience.
| Ironically, there was a very popular shop class where
| effectively the entire student population knew who the shop
| teacher was and I chose to take the networking because I
| didn't have any interest in shop.
|
| Now I have a garage full of woodworking equipment (and wood),
| spend my leisure time watching youtube and building things..
| sometimes I wonder if I would have ever made it to software
| professionally had I taken that shop class. Might have ended
| up making cabinets :D
| rcarmo wrote:
| s/woodworking/3d printing/ and yeah, I feel ya.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| "The first monk asked: "Master... what has the bridge-builder
| learned from us?"
|
| Said Kaimu: "Nothing yet. But when I touch a lit candle to the
| oil I sprinkled from my lantern during our crossing, he will
| learn the reason to plan for the absurd, the virtue of rebuilding
| in stone, and the wisdom of not insulting your customers." - 0
|
| 0 - http://thecodelesscode.com/case/154
| conductr wrote:
| I recently stumbled on a saying that resonated with me and is on
| this topic, "work with your mind, rest with your hands"
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| My godfather turned to woodworking after commanding an AA missile
| regiment. He moved ~ 50 km (30 miles) from Alin and spent about
| 20 years sculpting in wood, he became quite good. I was a kid
| when he started, not paying attention to that, but when I was in
| my thirties I talked to him about it; he said it was relaxing and
| very enjoyable.
|
| I grew up further North in a region where every house had some
| tools for working wood. It was natural, some people were really
| good at it, some mediocre, but using a manual wood planner or a
| wood chisel was almost routine for any man or kid. I am no longer
| living there and I am not working with wood, but I find it
| escaping to do some work in the garden, put some pipes for
| irrigation or fixing something on the vise. It is a different
| world than the craziness of the software industry, especially in
| the corporate world.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| It s not software that s absurb, it s society at large that is.
| Starting with the insane pointless bureaucracy then trickling all
| the way down into every single aspect of our lives.
|
| I love coding. And I love woodworking too: there are so many
| videos out there to help you get started. Learning to use dowels
| was quite the revelation for me.
|
| Still very scared of the table saw (Don t have one yet).
| erellsworth wrote:
| I think a little bit of fear is a good thing when it comes to
| power tools, especially those that have spinning blades. That
| said, if you have the budget a SawStop might help you overcome
| your fear enough to start using a table saw.
| egypturnash wrote:
| It's just nice to make physical shit with your hands, I've been a
| professional artist for a quarter of a century but it's been
| pretty much entirely digital. I've been fucking around with some
| canvases lately and I am making so many mistakes as I try to
| dredge up what I learnt about the physical process of painting
| thirty or forty years ago, but it's _fun_ to get my hands dirty
| for a change.
|
| And it's not just "it's more fun when you're not doing a thing
| for money", I certainly plan to try and sell these things when
| they're done, and I've relentlessly optimized the way I work for
| being fun to do. It's just really nice to be able to look at a
| physical thing and know that you made it.
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| My dad used to do a lot of woodworking when i was a kid, he
| worked his entire career at IBM. I started doing some pen turning
| when I split with my ex and got a lathe and a little tv in my
| shed. It was a lot of fun and a great way to relax.
| simonsarris wrote:
| I don't understand why it has to be exclusive or comparative or
| even complimentary.
|
| I do a lot of programming, some wood working (a little fine stuff
| but also timber framing), stone work, and (ornamental) gardening.
| I find all of these things very similar. Building, guiding things
| that I don't quite control towards an end I want. Open-ended and
| creative. I find all of them very relaxing.
|
| > software dev as we know it is about to disappear soon
|
| circa 2006 my father begged me to not pick Computer Science as a
| major. He was certain by the time I graduated there would be no
| jobs left.
|
| > And I got so tired of everything being online, immaterial,
| ephemeral and lonely, like indie development tends to be.
|
| Ah well, it's good he's not gardening!
| trey-jones wrote:
| I reached this point after the small company that I work for had
| a terrible 2023 and I realized I hadn't been having fun or
| looking forward to going to work for probably years. Now I'm
| actively looking to get out of the industry. I haven't had an
| interesting problem to solve since I can remember, and all the
| other absurdities mentioned in this thread apply. I turned 40 in
| December, maybe that has something to do with it. Early midlife
| crisis or something.
| threetonesun wrote:
| Similar age. Got let go from a job last year after a few years
| of being burned out by what I was working on. Looking around
| for a new role there was a lot of positions where all I could
| think was "why does anyone even care about this", let alone how
| could they expect me to care enough to be some sort of super
| supporter, available all hours to work on it.
|
| I dunno that it's a midlife "crisis" per se. I think the older
| you get the more aware you are of the time that's left, and you
| ask "why are we doing this" instead of assuming there's time to
| do anything.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| What a beautiful post
| manesioz wrote:
| I feel this so much. Woodworking, gardening, anything outdoors
| and with your hands
| whartung wrote:
| I used to (actually I still do) quip about if, back in the day, I
| spent the money I did on computer equipment instead on
| woodworking tools, not only would I have a shop that could
| probably compare with Norm Abraham's, but id still have a
| majority of them and they'd still work.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| Woodworking is insanely expensive from my experience. I saved
| way more money when computers and electronics were my hobby.
| Some software is like what $50-70 max? A full 3d printing kit
| is $1000. Buying mere wood to start a project is in the
| hundreds, minimum, and the tool equivalent to a high end Ryzen
| processor _starts_ in the thousands.
| nsguy wrote:
| I built my first electric guitar with wood from a
| construction site junk pile and hand tools. I've built my
| work bench from wood that came from heavy-weight pallets
| (some random hardish wood from China) that were given away by
| someone on Craigslist. I have piles of wood sitting in my
| driveway that are from trunks of a tree cut down that were
| cut into slabs using a chainsaw.
|
| Tools-wise I bought a used bandsaw for cheap. Added a riser
| block and made it a pretty awesome tool. I bought a jointer
| from someone down the street, again for cheap, replaced the
| knives and it's pretty good. You can get started for
| reasonably cheap.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I don't understand why more adults don't have awesome hobbies...
| most of my childhood friends don't seem to do anything fun now as
| adults.
|
| I really love physical things I can do with my body as a
| counterbalance to working on the computer- weight lifting,
| woodworking, and sailing add a lot of value to my life, and have
| gotten me outdoors and in shape. I'm currently building a wood
| sailboat in my garage together with my son, using ancient
| woodworking tools I inherited from my grandfather.
| switch007 wrote:
| If I could afford a bigger house with a big garden, shed,
| garage etc I'd definitely have way more hobbies like
| woodworking etc (UK here)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, sure can name a lot of friends that consume: mainly
| gaming and streaming.
|
| Has the curve on the creator/consumer axis shifted in recent
| times or has it always been skewed toward consuming? Or is
| there instead a social axis that has been waning recently? I'm
| thinking of the once popular Bridge card game or bowling
| leagues as examples...
| gravescale wrote:
| I think it's always been about the same. Shakespeare wrote
| plays watched by hundreds who mostly didn't write plays,
| Mozart's music halls were full of people who mostly didn't
| compose, Austen's novels were read by people who mostly
| didn't write novels.
|
| Maybe it's become easier to consume incredible amounts of
| content for free recently, but it's also never been easier to
| make things if you want, either in terms of access to cheap
| materials and tools or instructional content. Perhaps the one
| thing that has waned a little is closer-knit forums that have
| been replaced with endless Reddit.
| parpfish wrote:
| One of my theories is that the internet and socialmedia
| exposes everybody to examples of elite talents and raises the
| bar too much for performance based hobbies. Playing the piano
| poorly can be a fun and worthwhile hobby even if you'll never
| be as good as the people you see online.
|
| And then there a collecting based hobbies* which have been
| ruined by being able buy rare things from anywhere in a
| click. Now getting a stamp collection isn't a pursuit, it's
| just an afternoon on eBay with your credit card.
|
| *one exception here is birdwatching, which I've anecdotally
| seen a huge increase in. Almost all my friends are aware of
| Merlin and many Hanna the habit to stop to ask "what's that"
| if they see an unfamiliar bird
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I found my enjoyment of a hobby goes way up if I just do
| it, and don't talk about it online, document/photograph it,
| or follow people online doing it better than me (unless I
| am learning a specific technique from them, e.g. watching a
| how-to video).
|
| Social media totally shifts and ruins our experience of
| things: it becomes a performance to impress others rather
| than actually fun itself.
|
| Once I realized that- I realized the people everyone envies
| online aren't even having fun, or actually enjoying the
| hobby. That person doing extreme camping on Instagram with
| the most glamorous photos: it's 100% fake. They're lugging
| camera equipment to remote places, and likely bringing a
| professional paid photographer. They probably tore it all
| down and slept in a hotel after setting up camp for the
| photo.
| underlipton wrote:
| Gaming is cheap, has low space and physical set-up
| requirements, and holds loads of potential for creativity,
| self-expression, and positive socializing. The FGC in
| particular embodies this.
| ahartman00 wrote:
| I remember in math class in high school, we had a project
| where we analyzed hours of tv watching per day. Quite a few
| people watched like 6 hours of tv a day. I'd say its been
| heavily skewed towards consuming for a while. I would also
| say that gaming and watching streams can have a social aspect
| too, though that depends. If anything there is more of a
| social aspect? At least for me I talk to people on twitch
| regularly.
| colecut wrote:
| If you inherited woodworking tools from your grandfather, I'm
| assuming that either your grandfather or father taught you some
| woodworking skills?
|
| I grew up on the computer since I was a preteen. My dad moved
| 2000 miles away when I was 11. Every job I've ever had since I
| was 14 was web/software related and I am nearly 39. I feel like
| I have no practical skills outside of computers and the idea of
| building things with my hands or using power tools just fills
| me with anxiety. I wish I knew how to break out of the mindset.
| gravescale wrote:
| Start small. Maybe just a little model kit. You can get
| incredibly cheap model kits these days. Get used to the idea
| that you can start with "bits" and end with "things", and you
| have agency over that process.
| parpfish wrote:
| Start simple.
|
| Watch a YouTube video.
|
| Plan on failing a few times in ways you don't expect.
|
| Remember that this is a hobby so the stake are low.
| culopatin wrote:
| Don't let that be a brake on your enjoyment though. I always
| liked cars and I do have an affinity for tinkering. But I
| didn't know anything about fabrication. I got me a welder and
| many YouTube videos and hours later I was making stainless
| exhausts. It was a very enjoyable experience. Just stumbling
| through is most of the fun.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Awesome. I usually have luck with things like this, but
| seem to have no gift for welding. I could never get a clean
| bead from my cheap welder, and ended up even taking a
| community college welding class... the instructor could lay
| a clean bead with my welder, but I couldn't and eventually
| decided to just pay professionals to weld for me when my
| hobbies require it. I still can't tell what I was doing
| wrong. I even made an exhaust system for my car, but the
| welds were so bad it leaked a lot.
|
| Nowadays, I'll set everything up, cut/buy the metal, etc.
| and usually for under $100 have someone come over and do
| the actual welding for me.
| culopatin wrote:
| That's how I felt at first. I got started with a tig. I
| guess the advantage I had was that I had seen someone
| really good weld with a tig many times so I kinda knew
| what it should look like both result and motion wise, but
| they never taught me any settings, technique or anything
| at all otherwise.
|
| Keeping the tungsten from touching the bead is harder
| than it looks.
|
| The thing with welding is that it doesn't give you any
| time to figure things out in the moment. Sort of like
| tennis in that way. You hit it wrong and you gotta go get
| the ball. Start wrong with welding and gotta get the
| angle grinder and restart.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Yes, that is certainly a key part of it. My dad built the
| house I grew up in by himself in his spare time while also
| working full time, and taught me basic woodworking as a kid.
|
| But he taught me crude woodworking like framing in houses-
| almost none of the tools or skills translate into fine
| woodworking required for building things like furniture or
| boats. Until the last year I didn't know how to cut with the
| grain, what a planer was for, etc.
|
| What my dad really taught me was the confidence that I can
| learn what I need as I go, to do almost anything. I'm not
| afraid to start big projects where I have zero idea how to do
| any of the steps required at first, and am expecting to learn
| them one at a time as I go. My dad would regularly jump into
| things like buying a car with a blown engine and expecting to
| rebuild it without any clue where to start- and then follow
| books and advice, and do it successfully the first time. So I
| learned to also do that.
|
| YouTube has been a huge boon- anyone can learn almost
| anything for free, without needing someone to teach them
| first. Also tech like 3D printers allows people to get into
| making things without the physical skills previously needed.
| skyfaller wrote:
| Yeah, both my parents have/had practical skills, like
| woodworking and gardening, and completely failed to pass them
| on.
|
| Part of it is that they pushed me towards skills they thought
| would help me more, like computers... my dad liked to brag he
| had one of the first computers on the block, and that he put
| me in front of the computer as soon as I could sit up. They
| pushed me towards getting good grades instead of knowing how
| to work with physical objects.
|
| Part of it is interest, like I wanted to do my own thing
| instead of my parents' things, once I had the choice. That's
| partly because my parents just weren't very kind or patient
| teachers, they were hypercritical, exacting perfectionists.
| Partly because my friends weren't working with physical
| objects much, so it didn't seem like a good way to connect
| with my peers.
|
| But yeah, my parents were extremely present and they still
| did not pass on their knowledge.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Don't dwell on it too much. I thought the same thing when I
| was younger - had no interest in my parent's hobbies - but
| eventually they came back around as I got older and I
| realized I actually knew more about plants & plumbing than
| I thought.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| I've always recommended hobbies that meet the following
| criteria
|
| 1. Don't require you to interact with screens 2. Require your
| full attention (e.g. if you were listening to a podcast while
| doing it, you wouldn't remember a single thing they were
| talking about) 3. Has a social aspect, but is also possible
| to do on your own 4. Preferably physical 5. Preferably has
| some level of "controllable danger/risk", e.g. mountain
| biking is good because you can walk down hard stuff or stay
| on easy trails, vs. road biking you don't control the risk of
| getting injured / killed by a driver.
|
| Some that fall into this category are climbing, skiing,
| mountain biking, surfing, windsurfing.
|
| There's the other category that this post about woodworking
| scratches: building things and developing new skills and
| mastery doing so. However, these don't often come with an
| easily-accessible, accepting community; it's usually just you
| alone in a garage. Given how important social connection is,
| and how isolating a lot of tech jobs can be, this is a void
| that a lot of us on this orange website need to actively
| pursue.
|
| If you're in any "tech city", there's definitely a climbing
| gym nearby. Climbers are almost always amicable, and for the
| socially anxious, it's a great pretense to interact with
| someone (because they have to be on the other end of the rope
| anyway). The amount of capital outlay to get started is low
| (e.g. shoes, belay device, and a harness will cost <$300
| total if you get nice stuff, albeit sticking with the non-
| expert shoes!), and you can pretty much start having fun
| right away (vs skiing takes at least a season to get
| confident enough to truly start having fun and not
| "surviving").
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Great criteria! I strongly recommend sailing also as a
| hobby meeting these criteria- although wind surfing is a
| type of sailing. Zero equipment or money is required
| because most people that race sailboats are always looking
| for crew, and are happy to take on a novice that is excited
| to learn.
|
| I think people often turn away from sailing because it's
| seen as an expensive elitist thing for wealthy people, but
| the truth is the polar opposite of that- most people in the
| sailing community are working class and often have either
| small dinghies or older boats you can get for a few hundred
| dollars and easily maintain yourself. I paid $800 for my
| first working sailboat, and the first yacht club I joined
| had a literal garden shed full of rusty hand tools for a
| "clubhouse."
| robocat wrote:
| > happy to take on a novice that is excited to learn.
|
| Agree. With zero background in wind-sports I joined a
| crew. The yacht owner mostly just wanted someone that
| would turn up reliably - we had one guy who was terrible
| on the boat but he was reliably there. Good mixture of
| backgrounds of the crew.
|
| I really enjoyed being part of a team sport.
|
| The main cost was committing to one day a week. I got
| cheap gear (jacket, gloves) and currently I use a summer
| wetsuit to stay warm and dry (cold water in our Banks
| Peninsula harbours).
|
| > climbing, skiing, mountain biking, surfing, windsurfing
|
| Suggested by previous comment. But they are not team
| sports. I am a developer and those sports are good and
| social but they are focused on your own personal skills.
| ghaff wrote:
| There is probably a local hiking/walking group in many
| areas. Though I realize that may not be appealing to many
| here.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I fly light aircraft and that's exactly what I think.
|
| One thing I may add is commitment and responsibility, as
| in, if you are careless, people may die, including
| yourself. In most software work, with all these tests and
| reviews and backups, you don't have that, for very good
| reasons, but it kind of feels like what you are doing is
| inconsequential.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| How did you get into this hobby and what does it take?
| Sounds amazing
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I started out with no physical skills and only ever have
| worked in software. However, I took a pottery class and loved
| it. Classes also start you out on a schedule which is a great
| way to make sure you actually invest in your new hobby.
| Similarly you can take classes in most tech shops as well.
| andoando wrote:
| You can always learn new things on your own. It's really not
| hard, you just have to try.
|
| I mean hell there's plenty you can do that doesn't require
| learning at all.
| ne8il wrote:
| You can download a book called "The Anarchist's Tool Chest"
| by Christopher Schwarz free as a PDF here:
| https://lostartpress.com/products/the-anarchists-tool-chest
|
| You can also download his follow-up, "The Anarchist's Design
| Book", free here: https://lostartpress.com/products/the-
| anarchists-design-book
|
| Between those two, they will teach you what tools you need
| and how to build simple furniture by hand. Start small.
| levinb wrote:
| Just chiming in to say your link led me to the document.
| The introduction is fantastic. I'm in the middle of an
| enormous woodworking undertaking and I am gonna have to hit
| pause and read this book. Completely nerd-sniped; other
| lurkers beware this rabbit hole.
| 91bananas wrote:
| As others have mentioned, try. Youtube has a literal endless
| wealth of knowledge of how to do any task. I learned how to
| machine metal after 5 months of background youtube videos on
| manual machining. Youtube Apprenticeship.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| This seems like the real answer here... you have to
| actually try, and not make excuses why it's impossible to
| even try. Lots of somewhat abrasive replies say you need a
| ton of money, time, and space that most people don't have
| to do hobbies- but those are easy excuses, and are simply
| not true.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Having the right tools can make the experiences far, far
| better. But it's often not a requirement. I can imagine
| the prospect of cutting dozens of rabbets by hand using a
| rabbet plane might keep some people away. If they had the
| space and money for a router table or table saw setup to
| cut dados they might stick with it and create more
| things. It's the same with programming. There are tons of
| developers who learned when there weren't good tools or
| documentation and became deep experts. As the tools got
| easier and easier to learn, the bar for who could
| participate dropped as well. So we have a lot of
| productive developers today who couldn't have really
| participated in "old school" software development at all.
| Ultimately I agree with you though. A willingness to try
| is 80% of the challenge it seems.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I had no interest in cars mechanically growing up. I still
| don't really. But when the repair shop told me they
| couldn't replace my alternator for two weeks, I went to the
| parts store, put on the YouTube video for the replacement
| of that specific part on my specific van year range, rolled
| up my sleeves and got to work. It easily took me twice as
| long as someone with any amount of experience doing the
| same job, and I ran into challenges like having to pry the
| radiator far enough out of the way without damaging it to
| give enough room to wiggle the alternator out. Having to
| zip tie a long stick onto a wrench to extend the reach to
| get one particularly obnoxious bolt out.
|
| I've also replaced the starter and replaced the default
| head unit with something modern that includes GPS. Most of
| it was intimidating to get started, but none of it was what
| I would call difficult. There's too many very specific
| guides around showing you exactly what you need to do. And
| developers are used to following guides and running into
| inconsistent documentation and troubleshooting from there.
| Most of them would be right at home stumbling their way
| through auto repair.
|
| Last year I epoxied my garage floor and got very good
| results thanks to my YouTube studies. My YouTube internship
| has also lead to me re-modelling my entire kitchen. I
| designed everything in sketchup and am in the middle of
| building the custom cabinets. I'll end up mixing and
| pouring concrete countertops myself as well. I've repaired
| my dishwasher twice and my dryer three times by looking up
| symptoms online and ordering the most likely parts and just
| digging in. Every time there have been videos with the
| specific model and the specific problem that I can follow
| along with.
|
| Again, none of this is what I would consider to be
| difficult relative to some of the technical problems I've
| had to face at work. It's all very well documented
| processes and combined with the ability to troubleshoot and
| the budget to not have to fight your tools all the time and
| most things seem to be very achievable by non-experts. I
| still don't consider myself to be "handy". But I know I can
| fix pretty much anything in my house or on my vehicle with
| enough tutorials and time.
| jean-bonneau wrote:
| I taken up on running and ultra trail running 5 years ago. I
| also started learning woodworking 2 years agi, using hand
| tools mostly as I can only practice in my living room.
|
| I didn't have any experience in any of these before and I was
| not particularly athletic. You only need to find something
| you want to try, and if you like it try to commit to it for a
| couple of years.
|
| In my example, I started running when I signed up for a 10k
| race as a team event when I joined my company, and realized
| the racing experience was actually enjoyable (regardless of
| my performance). And for woodworking, I signed up for a 6
| weeks course to make a simple box at my local recreation
| center, and ended up making a couple of furniture or
| decorative pieces that are not fancy at all but still a lot
| more interesting than IKEA stuff.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Just try it. With this age of Youtube, the barrier to entry
| is extremely low. You don't need a full shop of tools, just
| patience and the willingness to learn.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| What time is left after work, kids, sleep, and personal
| obligations for the median adult?
|
| Awesome hobbies are awesome! But they require time, and in some
| cases, financial resources.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| And many hobbies require space. I'd love to do some
| woodworking but I don't have any space for that. I live in
| small flat. Of course nothing money couldn't solve, but
| buying huge house with workshop is another level of expenses
| and requires lifestyle changes as well.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| There are makerspaces and the like- I'm a member of a low
| cost DIY-centric yacht club where people maintain and build
| their own boats, and we have a full woodworking shop that
| is shared/free. We have programs to make membership free
| for young people and those that can't afford it. You can
| also make friends with people that have the equipment for
| just about any hobby, and do it with them for free.
|
| I used to buy/sell/repair cars as an undergrad in college
| both for fun and spare money, and did it on the side of
| public roads, and outside in a low budget apartment parking
| lot.
|
| For many equipment-intensive hobbies, you can also take
| classes, e.g. at a local community college or community
| center, which are taught in places with all of the
| equipment provided.
| SaltPork wrote:
| Think smaller, try whittling a spoon. All you need is a
| sharp knife, you could buy a kit that come with a knife and
| a spoon gouge(it makes life easier). Pick up a stick and
| carve something. Or buy blanks, the BORG(big orange retail
| giant) will have carving material.
|
| The obscene idea is that whatever hobby you pick up you
| must master, be great at it. Fail a lot at your hobby and
| learn from the mistakes. Perfection in your hobbies comes
| from the time you spent failing. This is the time you
| should long after a hectic day, week or month, a time to
| fail.
|
| Once in a while you will create something you love, it
| probably won't even be good. It doesn't matter. Your not
| making a dollar on your hobby(do not try to), your carving
| your mind and body into a better person.
|
| After work, after kids, after exercise, I've spent many
| nights just carving wood into what ever I feel like.
| Spoons, forks, etc. Many of them suck, many have been used
| to keep me warm on a cool night, none have expected
| anything from me, its always there when I have time and the
| will.
|
| I've also suggest some cut gloves as well, you need your
| digits for the next time you decide to pick up your hobby.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| How much do you really sleep and work in a week? If you work
| 40 hours a week and sleep 56, that leaves 72 more hours. Most
| knowledge workers actually do more like 10-15 hours/wk of
| real focused "deep work" and a lot of people sleep less than
| that also...
|
| I find plenty of time to do my hobbies despite being a single
| dad, and having a high stress academic PI job. I have every
| weekend and evening free, and I use them. I also involve my
| kid in my hobbies- we do them together, so it's also
| parenting time.
|
| I think most people aren't short on time, but short on energy
| because of poor physical and mental health- things that can
| be solved/addressed. For me, the hobbies themselves are a key
| part of staying healthy enough to have a lot of energy. But
| also not the only thing- I had serious medical problems that
| caused fatigue, which I needed to treat to have the energy I
| now have.
|
| I also usually find a way to do hobbies cheaply, or even make
| money at them. For example, with cars and boats I get cheap
| ones that need work, fix them myself, and usually sell for
| enough more to keep the hobby self sustaining.
|
| Ultimately, the most important thing is to just do it, even
| if it seems too expensive/inaccessible/etc. Take a leap/risk
| and find a way to overcome the barriers, don't come up with
| excuses to stop before you even start.
| throwaway918274 wrote:
| engaging with hobbies with your kids, which can also teach
| them useful skills, is one way
|
| when I was a kid, when my dad was repairing the house or car
| I was always "holding the flashlight" or he would actually
| teach me to use power tools and do the repairs myself while
| guiding me along.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| The average person is on their phone for over 4 hours a day.
| You can have a very meaningful hobby with less than a quarter
| of that.
| firstplacelast wrote:
| I agree with this to at extent, but will give a brief
| anecdote. My dad was/is a hobbyist woodworker and that's part
| of what he did on weekends. Typically late spring-early fall.
| However, 90%+ of his projects revolved around home
| improvement. Large decks and patios, chairs/benches for the
| kitchen table, playground sets, awning for the RV, redoing
| floors in the house, etc.
|
| The larger projects would often span two summers. He also did
| not contribute to his projects on Sundays because he is
| religious.
| underlipton wrote:
| _> I don't understand why more adults don't have awesome
| hobbies..._
|
| If the prerequisites for having awesome hobbies are, "Having a
| garage," "Inheriting tools from one's grandparents," and
| "Having the time do something with both," there would be your
| answer.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| There are tons of hacker labs, maker spaces, community
| colleges, etc. that have woodworking courses and materials in
| shared places available for cheap or free. The old tools I
| have are outdated and undesirable. They could be found for
| under $100 on Craigslist (or more likely free), and fit
| against the back wall of a 1 car garage- I can still park a
| car in there and use them in front of the car. My entire
| "shop" area is smaller than a regular dinner table or
| workdesk, and I have to shuffle things around and reconfigure
| the entire space each time I switch tools. For example, I
| have a table saw that is also the only workbench, and I have
| a drill press bolted on top of it, so it takes 10-15 minutes
| to actually clear the saw to make a single cut. I am also a
| single parent with a high stress/demanding job and my free
| time is limited- I've been building a very small 6' dinghy
| with my son for almost a year, and we're only 1/3rd of the
| way done but we're having fun.
|
| I actually felt a little stupid accepting these tools and
| setting up a space for them, when I later realized that I
| already had free access to several local community woodshops
| through a few different mechanisms... I am thinking about
| getting rid of some or all of the tools and using those
| instead.
|
| I think it's pretty easy to make excuses for why something is
| impossible, but if people really wanted to, almost anyone
| could do it. The average teenager in the USA buys themselves
| single outfits of clothing that cost more than the basics to
| get into woodworking. Most Americans have streaming and
| Amazon Prime subscriptions that cost a lot more than I spend
| on woodworking- and I don't have any subscriptions like that.
| JR1427 wrote:
| In my opinion these are absolutely not prerequisites.
|
| I built many things at my desk or the kitchen table in our
| flat with very simple tools. Even a single Swiss Army knife
| can be used to achieve a lot. And you don't need a lot of
| time to make small things.
|
| It can be easy to be jealous of the DIY YouTubers with
| massive workshops (I'm jealous!), but I find it more
| satisfying to take inspiration from the kinds of simple
| things people make/made in simpler societies/civilisations.
| sevagh wrote:
| > I don't understand why more adults don't have awesome
| hobbies... most of my childhood friends don't seem to do
| anything fun now as adults.
|
| I get more enjoyment whole-assing one thing than half-assing
| many, in my case. Not to say hobbies aren't cool - I know
| somebody that built an entire guitar starting from wood - but
| I'd rather spend that time going even further in my main thing.
| "Majoring in the minors" or whatever.
|
| I hope it doesn't come across as some sigma grindset stuff,
| it's not that I suppress my urge to have fun hobbies - I just
| feel happier and more secure incrementally building on my main
| career than creating a new persona for an activity I'm
| indifferent to.
| JR1427 wrote:
| I just can't help but pick up projects, and these really keep
| me going. I suppose I crave satisfaction much more than
| relaxation.
|
| I find it very hard to relax by just chilling on a beach, or
| reading a book in the afternoon. I just want to work on a
| project.
|
| What I find really fun is that often when I'm working on a
| project, my 5 year old daughter will get in to a project
| mindset herself, and will be working on her own thing (sticky
| tape, cardboard, etc), while I'm fixing a bicycle or building
| something. It's a really fun companionable time, where we're
| both working on our own thing, but in each other's company.
| fullshark wrote:
| Exhaustion
| rambojohnson wrote:
| ~ from the absurdities of corporate. not software.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I have seen a lot of my coworkers go into woodworking since 2020,
| and I can certainly see the appeal. Software is often so abstract
| and never truly tangible(in the sense that I can sit in it or
| hold it in my hands, and I mean the actual software, not the
| hardware its built on top of). It is extremely satisfying to
| build something out of a piece of wood and hold it/use it. To get
| started you really only need a hand plane, some chisels, clamps,
| and something to measure with...and add to your arsenal from
| there. On the flip side...my manager has been working on the same
| chest of drawers for what seems about 3 years now...so its a
| journey!
| peteyPete wrote:
| I've found myself doing this in the past 5 years as well. After
| decades in development, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a
| house. I've since then slowly been converting the garage into a
| woodworking shop. Most of the projects I've completed are for the
| workshop itself. I've spent way more time on what I've built than
| any sane person should but I'm using my shop furniture as a
| learning experience and nitpick everything.
|
| There's definitely a different type of satisfaction/reward you
| get from finishing something you put a lot of time in when you
| can feel and see the thing. I guess it aligns with why I enjoyed
| front end dev more so than backend enterprise stuff. Its visual..
| With woodworking, its not only visual but a physical object. You
| see every inch of it, every corner, every joint, everywhere where
| you fixed something, where you took the time to perfectly sand a
| surface to ensure it looks just perfect in the end.
|
| I also usually put on an audio book or music in my buds. Its a
| great way to disconnect and immerse yourself into something that
| isn't tied to anything else at that moment. No deadlines, no
| PRDs, no tests, no dependencies, just you and what you're working
| on... Its relaxing..
|
| Sorry.. I lied... there's tons of dependencies.. Those happen to
| be all the right tools for the job that you don't yet have and
| every time you do something, you have to decide whether you'll
| invest the money to buy said tool, or build said thing to help
| you get from A to B, or if you'll go the other way around and
| wing it by hand, taking much longer and hopefully not too much of
| a worst result..
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I'm not sure what's actually absurd: software or a software
| career.
|
| I enjoy the former. I enjoy collaborating on my craft and doing
| something fun and cool. I like the people I work with and enjoy
| helping grow and build other people's careers.
|
| Then there's the reality of navigating a workplace - the "career"
| has the silliness of managing narcissists aspiring to be the next
| Steve Jobs. It's generally lucrative, but that money attracts its
| own absurdity and egotists, putting more into advancing their
| status in an arbitrary org structure than building. The older I
| get the less energy I have for these sorts of politics.
| pojzon wrote:
| I like how everyone talks here only about how much spare time
| they have on prpeuctive things.
|
| Some ppl simply dont have money to start:
|
| - woodworking
|
| - sailing
|
| - skying
|
| - buying motors
|
| - building boats
|
| - renovating cars
|
| Be happy you are in 1% of the richest ppl on the Earth.
|
| Most of my friends are happy when they can get by in given month.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Nothing destroys your love of a hobby, even one that you are
| passionately (or even obsessively) dedicated to, like making it
| your job. I LOVE riding bikes but all the BS of working in
| software is preferable to trying to support my love of bikes
| within the broader industry of bikes.
|
| The word "amateur" has negative connotations, but should really
| be interpreted as "not your primary pay cheque", not that you
| suck.
| isametry wrote:
| Isn't "hobbyist" the exact word you're looking for?
| randomdata wrote:
| A hobbyist is an amateur who enjoys the activity. It adds
| some precision to to what he is looking for, but is still
| dependent on what you take amateur to mean. Someone "who
| sucks", but at least enjoys it, is not what he is trying to
| convey.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Well, amateur is the word. It's literal meaning is only that
| you're not a professional, i.e., one whose profession is
| that:
|
| > _A person attached to a particular pursuit, study, science,
| or art (such as music or painting), especially one who
| cultivates any study, interest, taste, or attachment without
| engaging in it professionally._
|
| (Wiktionary.) It just also can be used to derogatorily refer
| to a "low" skill level ( _Someone who is unqualified or
| insufficiently skillful._ , same), but the non-ad hominem
| definition doesn't have that connotation.
|
| E.g., in the ballroom dance community, the "amateur" category
| is filled with people _incredibly_ talented, I 'd estimate
| with like 8-10+ years of experience. They're amazing to
| watch.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _The word "amateur" has negative connotations, but should
| really be interpreted as "not your primary pay cheque", not
| that you suck._
|
| The negative connotations is a more recent development:
|
| > _The meaning "one who cultivates and participates (in
| something) but does not pursue it professionally or with an eye
| to gain" (as opposed to professional) is from 1786; often with
| disparaging suggestions of "dabbler, dilettante," but not in
| athletics, where the disparagement shaded the professional, at
| least formerly. As an adjective, by 1838._
|
| * https://www.etymonline.com/word/amateur
|
| It comes from the from the Latin _amatorem_ , "lover": someone
| who does something not for any practical reason, but simply for
| the enjoyment / love of the activity. How well one does it does
| not necessarily come into consideration, as long as there is
| enjoyment.
| lolinder wrote:
| > How well one does it does not necessarily come into
| consideration, as long as there is enjoyment.
|
| Indeed, the Olympics is technically supposed to be an event
| for amateurs, while also being generally perceived as the
| peak of competition for each relevant sport.
| hervature wrote:
| The Olympics were originally meant to be an event for
| amateurs but that shift happened a long time ago. The IOC
| in 1986 let the individual sports federations make a ruling
| on whether pros were allowed. I think the only sports left
| for amateurs are wrestling and boxing.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _The IOC in 1986 let the individual sports federations
| make a ruling on whether pros were allowed._
|
| And then you have NBA players on the Olympic team:
|
| * https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/lebron-curry-durant-
| embiid-...
|
| See also NHL/MLB players.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| "connoiseur" :)
|
| sometimes much-much more involved - paycheck-less - than just
| "next pro"
| manchmalscott wrote:
| I've recently started learning to sew, and instead of working on
| programming in my spare time I've made a few button up shirts.
| It's nice to create something that the other people in my life
| can understand.
| hn72774 wrote:
| Having interests outside of work is important for me. When I get
| too focused on any one thing, work or whatever, I start to lose
| the forest from the trees. It also helps me keep my identity
| separate from my job. There is no company loyalty to employees
| anymore.
|
| A hobby gives me enough distance from work problems to come back
| to them with a fresh perspective and more energy.
| hackernewds wrote:
| That is a great perspective. I've learned the importance of
| diversification of my identity.
|
| Often when people are asked who they are, they respond with
| their job titles.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| Woodworking (or any interesting manual labor) as a hobby is fun.
| Doing it as a job though is brutal, repetitive, boring, and
| dangerous. The client relationship is even worse --- at least
| most devs have insulation through the agile system from the
| direct force of clients. Selling in the trades is rough, rough
| work, and probably more than half the job.
| dekhn wrote:
| My woodworking often uses absurd software; for example, the tool
| I use Fusion 360 is one of the most extraordinary programs I've
| ever used. It embeds so much engineering and technology in
| service of making my life easier. The end result is a static
| "program" that I send to my CNC which creates art that could be
| made by an extremely skilled woodworker- but I just sit here
| waiting for the machine to do the work. I actually enjoy this
| much more than spending the hours to carve the same work with my
| own hands, but I also do enjoy the visceral experience of using
| analog hand tools. I mostly start with STL meshes sold on etsy.
|
| THere is a programmatic aspect, too: Fusion360's modeller has a
| Python API that lets you programmatically build and evaluate
| designs. I rarely use this, but it does come in handy. For one
| project, where I wanted to make a 3D topo-style map of California
| (basically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZkQ8pA_TLY) it
| was a great opportunity to learn geo (using the great GIS
| package, "OS4Geo", especially QGIS), turn that geo info into a
| mesh, and then render it in wood.
|
| Stay-at-home-for-COVID made my life a lot easier, as I could
| start a carving in the morning and let it go all day while
| sitting nearby and programming.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| What CNC do you use? I've been into 3D printing for a bit and
| was debating getting into CNC as well.
| dekhn wrote:
| I have a Genmitsu 4040 Pro
| https://www.sainsmart.com/products/genmitsu-4040-pro-semi-
| as... with the upgraded XZ (if you experience chatter, you
| can send support an email with a photo and they will send a
| replacement part; I just installed it yesterday and it's
| greatly improved my results). I haven't really accessorized
| it, other than to replace the included spindle with a Dewalt
| 611 router.
|
| Before that I had an XCarve but it was just too big and not
| rigid enough. I owned several early Shapeokos, which were
| simply not rigid enough. The 4040 pro is the first router
| I've had that's actually worked the way I expected (and even
| then, it clearly has some issues) in the cost window I care
| about.
|
| CNC brings challenges (and joys) that 3d printing does not
| have. You have to spend a lot more time thinking about the
| tools and their paths, mounting the work in the CNC, dealing
| with dust, etc, etc, but it's really reawrding to hand
| somebody a carving and see them blown away by the results.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| That price is not bad at all for that kind of machine,
| especially if it's stable. My dad had an XCarve for a long
| while but he eventually just gave up on it. He was going to
| give it to me but I was reading about it and it just seemed
| like more bother than it was worth, especially given the
| physical space required.
| dekhn wrote:
| yes, the xcarve was nice but took up a big corner of my
| garage and honestly I wasn't cutting stuff near 1m x 1m
| and the ~400 x 400mm of the 4040 pro is more reasonable.
| It's stable (rigid) but not extremely so. You will not be
| able to make cuts as deep as you want, and aluminum will
| be challenging. But it's great for carving up a hunk of
| figured maple into art, as well as many other workflows.
|
| There are things like the MPCNC ,and building your own
| design with OpenBuilds, but I don't recommend them unless
| designing, building, and maintaining is what you want to
| spend your time doing.
| knighthack wrote:
| As a lawyer, I find the law (which is supposedly 'logical' and
| 'rational') to be highly absurd at times. It's unavoidable, given
| that the law heavily involves humans.
|
| I am in part drawn to software development and programming,
| because it's logical and comparatively rigid (at least
| programming itself is, if you take away the
| environment/ecosystem/cults that develop around the
| idiosyncracies of different languages). I find programming very
| far from absurd.
|
| I am therefore surprised to see software programmers claiming
| that software development is absurd - and that woodworking could
| somehow be less so.
|
| The grass is always greener on the other side. (And I still can't
| accept that programming itself is absurd.)
| taysix wrote:
| You are correct to a point. Programming is not absurd until you
| involve the humans! Your end users will end up driving you
| crazy.
| ornornor wrote:
| I guess programming itself isn't absurd in the same sense that
| law isn't absurd if you look at it through the lens of logic.
|
| But that's only a very tiny part of the art... what breaks the
| camel's back for many of us is all the BS around it coming from
| management, investors, clueless middle managers, political
| business people, overcommitted salespeople, and the constantly
| changing tooling so that something you wrote 6-12 months ago
| won't run today anymore without a variable amount of change and
| effort. Not to mention the layers upon layers upon layers of
| abstraction that make the whole thing inscrutable.
|
| I think that's what a lot of us are fed up with and mean with
| "programming has become absurd"
| gwern wrote:
| https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-so...
| tmarsden wrote:
| I think this all boils down to what Ted Kaczynski talked about in
| "Industrial Society and Its Future." Specifically "The Industrial
| Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the
| human race" because "in modern industrial society only minimal
| effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs." I would say
| 99.999% of all modern work is "surrogate activity" (an activity
| that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for
| themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward.)
|
| It's no surprise you can end up feeling empty and unfulfilled in
| a career like software development, or any other modern career,
| you are putting energy and emotional involvement that you would
| otherwise have put into the search for physical necessities. I
| think this is particularly acute for those in software
| development because it is so abstract and disconnected from the
| physical world. Biologically speaking fulfillment should come
| from satisfying your physical needs (i.e. surviving) not from the
| pursuit of some made up goal.
| jayd16 wrote:
| What about attracting a mate and social status. Those are
| fairly ancient goals that are relevant in the modern world. How
| does that impact the conjecture that we're wired for survival
| only?
| tmarsden wrote:
| Attracting a mate and reproduction easily falls under
| "satisfying your physical needs" and I would argue is a
| deeply wired survival instinct.
|
| In his words "the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is
| not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their
| existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if
| they passed their lives without ever having a relationship
| with a member of the opposite sex."
| freedomben wrote:
| It really is a shame that he ended up getting violent, because
| "Industrial Society and Its Future" is one of the most
| interesting, insightful, and fascinating things I've read. I
| recommend it to everyone.
|
| IMHO it's a classic example where "the author is excellent at
| identifying problems, not good at identifying solutions."
| Unfortunately almost nobody reads the first (identification)
| part because the solution part is so unpalatable and
| unacceptable. For anyone who doesn't know, Ted Kaczynski was
| the Unabomber and his solution to the problem of technology was
| basically to destroy the entire system by wiping it out in a
| way that leaves no ability for humans to resume technological
| progress, and violence was his way of beginning the societal
| destruction part. From a purely theoretical/philosophical view
| it makes logical sense, but for most people who have a sense of
| compassion and empathy the costs are extremely unpalatable.
| tmarsden wrote:
| Completely agree, his ideas could stand on their own there
| was no need to push them with violence.
| VelesDude wrote:
| He used violence to get attention on the ideas. What this
| did was stifled his goals by decades all for his own
| selfish gains. Did more damage than good by his own
| definition of success.
| chubot wrote:
| Did the Unabomer have any ideas you couldn't read elsewhere?
|
| I imagine there are tons of philosophers who have said
| similar things.
|
| Here's a comment recommending Jacque Ellul and Lewis Mumford
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4015488
|
| Another one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658601
|
| (I haven't read them)
|
| But we probably don't remember or cite them because their
| manifestos weren't published on the front page of newspapers.
|
| That was due to the serial violence of the author, and it was
| subsequently talked about for decades.
|
| That is, the notoriety of his crimes could be the reason that
| you read and recommend his work, rather than somebody else's
| work -- as opposed to it being a coincidence
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| His manifesto is crying about SJWs 40 years before the
| concept existed. There's nothing insightful in there at all.
| VelesDude wrote:
| Yeah that part is weird. He did clarify later on that it
| wasnt meant to just be them but more of an example of over
| socialisation.
|
| 27 years in the slammer to clear up some ideas means there
| is A LOT of additional reading material from him in form of
| letters, essays and books.
|
| It seems the longer he thought about it the more he could
| not find a path to stop technology progress but figured we
| just need to ride through it until collapse, if that
| happens.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It really is a shame that he ended up getting violent,
| because "Industrial Society and Its Future" is one of the
| most interesting, insightful, and fascinating things I've
| read. I recommend it to everyone.
|
| It's pseudo-profound, but not really insightful at all. It's
| the kind of writing that seems brilliant to people going
| through difficult times in life or edgy teenagers who are
| angry at the world, but to be blunt it falls flat for people
| who are well-adjusted and thriving.
|
| That's the crux of that type of writing: Ranting about the
| world in pseudo-profound prose is always going to feel
| brilliant to people who are struggling with _something_ and
| want to identify with others who are also struggling, but
| that doesn 't make it insightful or good writing.
|
| > For anyone who doesn't know, Ted Kaczynski was the
| Unabomber and his solution to the problem of technology was
| basically to destroy the entire system by wiping it out in a
| way that leaves no ability for humans to resume technological
| progress, and violence was his way of beginning the societal
| destruction part. From a purely theoretical/philosophical
| view it makes logical sense,
|
| Treating his writings and actions as two separate, unrelated
| things is really downplaying the manifesto. The fact that he
| took the ideas he wrote down and came to the logical
| conclusion that violence and destruction were the way forward
| should tell you something about his writings. Specifically,
| that they were hyperbolically incorrect.
|
| To be honest, the way that you're identifying with his
| writings and thinking that even his actions make "logical
| sense" suggests that you may need to take a step back and
| reevaluate. It seems his prose got its hooks into you, but
| it's not actually brilliant content.
| alecst wrote:
| Honestly, ouch -- I'm not even the person you replied to
| and I feel attacked somehow, haha!
|
| You basically just said, "That guy's not all that smart,
| and if you think he is, take a hard look in the mirror!"
| Maybe you can say more about why you think his writing
| falls short and who you'd recommend to read as a
| counterpoint?
| yowlingcat wrote:
| What a thoroughly lazy critique. To suggest that reading an
| author with cutting insights whose end conclusions you
| thoroughly disagree with is akin to agreeing with them is
| very black and white thinking, and frankly a childish
| assertion for an adult to make.
|
| You don't actually engage with any of the ideas Ted
| Kaczynski brought up or offer a thorough critique, so
| ironically you yourself are engaging in writing a "pseudo-
| profound" comment, which boils down to a giant ad hominem.
| Ad hominems aren't wrong because of moral turpitude,
| they're wrong because they are devoid of information.
|
| If you really did want to critique his worldview, you'd
| understand pretty intimately Kaczynski's intellectual
| influences, and you'd be able to identify and articulate
| which parts you agree with and which parts you don't. It's
| telling but unfortunate that you opted not to do that and
| instead reached for the lazy ad hominem.
|
| My advice to you: if you truly do vehemently oppose the
| actions of this individual (as do I), it's even more
| incumbent upon you to inform yourself their worldview and
| influences so that you are equipped to intellectually
| oppose its potential resurgence. If you aren't willing to
| do that, you have no right to judge others who have.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >brilliant to people going through difficult times in life
| or edgy teenagers who are angry at the world, but to be
| blunt it falls flat for people who are well-adjusted and
| thriving.
|
| Quote: It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a
| profoundly sick society ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
| brazzy wrote:
| > I would say 99.999% of all modern work is "surrogate
| activity" (an activity that is directed toward an artificial
| goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have
| some goal to work toward.)
|
| That's one of the most absurd hyperboles (or the most detached-
| from-realiy statements) I have ever seen. That would mean only
| one out of 100,000 people is doing "real" work. Or if you
| spread it evenly, less than one third of a second per working
| day.
| tmarsden wrote:
| You're probably right, it was a made up number to make a
| point. The point being that if you are not growing your own
| food (or hunting it) you're probably engaged in "surrogate
| activity" for a living and not directly satisfying your
| physical needs. Would you say more than 1/100,000 people in
| today's world grow and or hunt for their food daily?
| edanm wrote:
| That's an absurd definition. It also fits the kind typical
| HN/high-tech mold of underappreciating most people and
| professions.
|
| What makes you think think that your definition of
| "surrogate activity" is an interesting distinction? That
| only "growing your own food" is going to make people
| fulfilled, biologically? Is there any evidence of this?
| That hunter gatherers, or that farmers in history, were
| somehow happier?
|
| As far as I can tell, most people throughout history worked
| really hard, but tried as much as they can to do anything
| _but_ what they had to do to survive. Every single human
| culture has music, art, science, etc.
| brazzy wrote:
| Now you're moving goalposts at breathtaking speeds.
| Previously, you defined surrogate activity as "artificial
| goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to
| have some goal", i.e. definitely not producing anything
| useful. Now suddenly it's supposed to be anything "not
| directly satisfying your physical needs".
| jononor wrote:
| 1 in 100k is a stretch. But 1 in 10 maybe? Physically we need
| water, food, shelter and medical care. Around 10% of US
| workforce is in agriculture, but a decent chunk of that is
| probably for providing non-essentials foodstuffs. So maybe
| only 10% work on actually providing all the essentials for
| human life.
| sebastianz wrote:
| Last time I was at the doctor's for a bone fracture I have
| been treated by people with tens of years of experience and
| education, in a gigantic building, and my bones were
| scanned by tools that cost millions and were science
| fiction 2 generations ago.
|
| Water food and shelter are not all there is to a
| comfortable life.
| jononor wrote:
| Agreed. That I why I had "and medical care" in the post
| :)
| joquarky wrote:
| "Comfortable" is a relative value.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> I think this is particularly acute for those in software
| development because it is so abstract and disconnected from the
| physical world._
|
| Or is it what the "legendary" comment in the original link
| calls attention to: That the pay is good? As a result, you
| technically only need to spend a minutes per day, if that,
| working on software. Everything else is fluff. This seems to
| match what Kaczynski is talking about.
|
| Take a job developing software that just barely covers the cost
| of your survival needs and I expect there is no chance you will
| feel empty about it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I would say 99.999% of all modern work is "surrogate
| activity" (an activity that is directed toward an artificial
| goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have
| some goal to work toward.)
|
| I think this level of hyperbole only feels correct when you've
| been trapped in the kinds of companies where everyone is at
| least ten steps removed from the customer. When you're sitting
| through meetings and pushing around abstract "work" to achieve
| artificial goals all day, it can seem like modern work is all
| made up and arbitrary.
|
| But step outside one of these absurd corporate jobs and you'll
| see plenty of people doing "real" work, and doing a lot of it.
| It's eye opening to go from a corporate behemoth to a small
| company where what you do actually matters to customers. Once
| you see the effect your work has on something up close, it
| makes a lot more sense.
|
| Every time I read an HN comment where someone is romanticizing
| Ted Kaczynski's writings, it feels like they're coming from a
| place of being just a bit too chronically online and a bit too
| disconnected from how the real world works outside of the
| internet and corporate life.
| denkmoon wrote:
| You can understand why though. Those of us in corporate land
| swim in an all consuming miasma of unreality. Nothing
| matters. Logic is irrelevant. Absurdity is the norm. Of
| course it skews your perspective. Yet another ill corporatism
| inflicts on us.
| wslh wrote:
| Beyond the Unabomber it is good to trace much earlier of him
| such as Kafka, Marx's theory of Alienation, Chaplin, etc.
| hinkley wrote:
| I was at my second job as a lead dev. I'd been consolidated into
| another team to improve our burn rate, and because my product was
| being asked to squeeze blood from stone and we were starting to
| arrive at the end of the quantity of blood I was likely to be
| able to extract. It is still some of my cleverest work.
|
| I'd been on the new project long enough to fix a couple major
| logistic issues with code-build-test cycles, and to get a page
| that took 30 seconds to load down to 3 seconds with five lines of
| code, and they were starting to trust me.
|
| One day I'm in a conversation with the architect where we are
| about to spiral airing the things that suck and he starts talking
| about how some of these seem to be intrinsic. He ends a sentence
| with "and the only way to solve these problems is to open a
| flower shop. If you sell someone flowers they don't come back in
| five days telling you they were the wrong flowers."
|
| From then on, every time the outlook got dark or just spicy, we
| would joke about opening a flower shop together. What's the best
| month to open a flower shop? Most of the sales are for
| Valentine's Day, but how long do you need to be open for brand
| recognition ahead of VD?
| drowntoge wrote:
| The burnt-out or laid-off software professionals of today will
| become the most unconventional generation of artisans in history.
| throwawayl3ll wrote:
| I was considering woodworking as well. However, spraying paint in
| public places has much lower learning curve:
| https://mastodon.online/@gibonov
| costa_fot wrote:
| People have lost the plot on what is hard work. I am sorry. This
| is absurd.
| jhjhjhjhjj wrote:
| The problem isn't whether or not you're a software engineer. The
| problem is finding balance. I started out as a mechanical
| engineer and eventually found my way to a software job that pays
| triple what I made as a ME and rarely requires me to work more
| than 35hrs/wk. That gives me plenty of money and time to build
| robots and make furniture as hobbies. Every once in a while I
| daydream that I'd rather be a chef, my other major hobby, but
| then I talk to chefs and they tell me either 1) fuck off with
| that shit 2) I will definitely be happier remaining in software.
| We as an industry are still insanely pampered and spoiled, even
| if our jobs are slightly less cushy than they were in 2021.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Start gardening, playing music, drawing, riding bike, going for a
| walk, run, get a dog, ....
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| I had this hobby until I cut the tip of my left finger.
|
| The lesson: Woodworking is physically dangerous, do not cheapen
| on tools and protection.
| hacker_88 wrote:
| Bro made all the difficult requests in wood rather than software
| parentheses wrote:
| Write less absurd software in your free time.
| tardismechanic wrote:
| Not possible on H1B - moving right along...
| vineetsinha wrote:
| I did this, and thought I was alone. Around this time last year,
| picked up woodworking and jumped in the deep end. Metabo saws and
| nailes, building mini A-frames for my pet rabbit, shelves,
| shoecase, you name it. It's gratifying and provides a sense of
| control and completion - which sometimes doesn't happen in the
| real world.
| jameszol wrote:
| Software is absurd, indeed. I don't write code but I feel similar
| about digital and the Internet as a whole because my career is
| here... so I went back to a hobby of pre-computer automotive
| restoration. I do it for me, so I haven't switched careers. I
| don't want the same burnout with my hobby. Instead, I find a bit
| of balance for myself by working on a machine in my garage
| instead of going from my day job to my mobile device for videos
| or social networks.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| To do well with software engineering, you have to enjoy it. It
| needs to be one of your personal interests, not just a
| professional one.
|
| If you're only in it because it pays well, you've got the wrong
| idea and will run into those "throw the laptop out the window"
| urges and are likely to burn out fast and take up woodworking, or
| some other thing.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| This is Tylenol, not an antibiotic. There are two solutions: *
| develop confidence, competence, courage, and
| communication/political skills so that you enjoy collaborating
| with others more (by virtue of being better at it) * find a way
| to steer your actual career towards something where you have
| greater/total creative control
|
| Actually, these solutions are just two different ways of working
| toward the same goal: absolute power
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| > There's also this oily smell of AI and machine learning
|
| Lovely phraseology - this definitely resonates with me, and is
| one of several reasons why any interest I might have had in
| working in tech has evaporated.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| It's not just for software folks, I've known folks of all walks
| of life who sought escape through woodworking. My dad the
| jeweler, lawyers, doctors, IRS folks, and of course engineers and
| software folks.
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