Stop hunting programmers. Many of us actually don't care about the deadlines, the users etc. We just love to program. We don't care about stand-ups, story points or whatever the business uses to convert complexity to billable hours.
Don't use "we" when you mean "I".
If I interviewed a programmer who had this view point, they wouldn't get the job.
Good (not necessary) processes manage risk. Risk needs to be managed whenever money changes hands in exchange for goods and services. These processes ensure you get paid.
It's a profession. Just as a builder or architect shouldn't hate plans and drawings, programmers need to care as much about the surrounding engineering processes as the "hammer and nails" act of coding.
It's the difference between a professional engineer and an arrogant, hobby hacker.
I am really happy there exist more business people that look after processes and whatnot, because it does seem like we (society) need it, to some degree.
Assuming you’re not trolling: you might be surprised to know that your colleagues are actually not, in fact, idiots, and will sniff this out.
For how many years do you suppose you will find it rewarding to fake your way from one thing to another? 5, 10, 20, your whole career?
What makes this strategy work is the quantity of technical incompetence that's present in nearly all workplaces. I am actually a liked employee (both by superiors and by colleagues), I just have a low tolerance for bullshit. Usually the problem is "the other way around", that is with people that follow processes, use proper corpspeak but don't actually produce much, and are trying to cover the low output with manners.
I've been writing code on and off since I was 8 years old. Of course not professionally :)
From an ethical standpoint, this is no more toxic or false than the facades presented by many employers to their employees.
If we experience a white collar recession, the toxic players will have to reevaluate their behavior.
In one of these you're paid to care.
At work all we hear about is "put the customer (user) first" which is great. But in reality you get 'dinged' if you really do that. In the 80s and very early 90s, I would work directly with the user to give them what they want. The users would see real progress so was kept happy, no matter how long it took. You just had to prove to them why you are having issues. Not a big deal.
Then the methodologies came in, far more than I can remember. Now, god forbid I forget to keep Jira updated. Also, I have not talked to a real user in many years. The outcome, the real users are frustrated because they get their statuses from their managers who attend meetings that show meaningless 'high-level' presentations.
The web site should add a line for "high-level", meaning "I am too dumb to look at details, here is a pretty picture". When I hear "high-level", I know the meeting will contain no real information.
You can see this with Opensource too, in the Early Days of Linux, if a user had a problem, Linus or someone close to him, would respond directly and it would get fix rather quickly. Now companies run the show, so we get things we really do not want. But to be fair, I think Linus still tries to cut through the bureaucracy when he can, with little success.
Businesses are there to make money and pay the bills (including the salary of the programmers) but the needs of the users can get lost sometimes in the shuffle. Managers are so busy trying to meet some goal set in a 'high-level' meeting that they lose focus on what would make customers happy.
My current project is very enjoyable. I built a system that I personally wanted (data management) and worked on features that I thought were important. I work closely with customers and beta sites to figure out which feature should get my attention next. It's not finished until I am personally happy with how it works.
That isn't the case for everyone, and not a reason for "black and white" thinking where you take the extreme position of rejecting the tools used badly against you ... rather than placing the individuals accountable.
It isn't the tool's fault, be that meetings, agile, estimation, jira or anything else.
Last I heard, the squad decides what points mean so how can that be rolled up :)
I think it depends what project you want to interact with. In the projects I am involved in (Python, Numpy, SciPy, Cython, PyPy) you will get a response from a core dev quite quickly.
I also work to eject those who can’t work with customers. We’re not here to serve the beauty of JUnit tests. I simply don’t understand the “programmers aren’t paid enough” torpe; It’s only true for purists who don’t dedicate their work to building a business.
The business's goal is generally to extract as much value as possible from its ability to balance servicing customers and users, and managing operations. I've never worked anywhere where there isn't a fair bit of conflict of interests between those three groups
i bet a lot managers know that devs don’t care about business goals
Code review, having a clear software development lifecycle (not rigid, just clear), testing, good and frequent communication between developers and from developers to the higher levels, and spending more time on design are not bad things. They can save a lot of time and frustration in the long run.
Like, what, are you building software in an ivory tower for yourself? It's such a self-centered attitude.
What do you care about other than 'tinkering'? Surely you have to care about at least delivering the bare minimum of results, or you wouldn't be valuable on a team.
In a large company, there are so many layers of abstraction between you and the users that it's difficult to see how something could benefit them.
Also on top of this, I don't think that showing users more ads is supposed to "benefit" them. There are so many orgs like this, where you hear this claptrap about "benefiting the user" when it's really just showing them more ads or something like that
At this point, what else is there to care about other than just writing good code and making sure it's correct?
Because that's the core driver for me. I often feel other programmers fall into this trap of technology usage for the sake of technology usage and less about solving real problems.
I think having a distaste for process is justified when working in environments where there's no buy in from the team...but don't assume that applies to "many of us"
It probably matters a little less for programmers in the ad-tech industry, in which case it's fine to be more risk-taking in your programming. Programming != Programming, different approaches make sense for different products and industries.
I mean, I agree that some tests are, indeed, pointless, but I wouldn't trust someone who "just wants to program" to decide which tests are useful and which are pointless.
Hey look, he even sells "learn it the hard way" books for $29.99!