Maybe You're Not Sick of Programming
shubhamjain.co
shubhamjain.co
>Bureaucratical bullshit to get simple things done
>Lack of product vision where everyone from sales to marketing to support is driving it.
>Lack of ownership in product; the inability to effect a positive change.
>Pointless meetings and discussions.
>Process, procedures, having the upper-hand, and getting things done taking a back-seat.
I've been professionally doing this since 1997. I've been through the Windows revolution, the internet revolution, the cloud revolution, the iPhone revolution.
Just brainstorming as to why
- I'm sick of being spied on all the time.
- The interwebs is dead.
- I'm sick of new frameworks that don't really offer anything new except to obsolete old frameworks that work fine.
- You can't just write something neat and make any money off of it unless you allow yourself to get hijacked by some VC or other investor.
- The market for software is flooded by absolute crap software with massive marketing budgets.
- There are a lot of people who got into it for the money are hell to work with.
The grind continues.
I don't think about this a lot, but perhaps I should.
https://www.geekwire.com/2023/suspect-in-alleged-stabbing-of...
I am sympathetic to the pains discussed here, but that sounds like a psychotic and deeply disturbed individual whose traits were not attributable to programming or tech in general.
Might as well have been an industrial engineer or lorry driver.
"Entfremdung" in work is a real thing, but mentioning this kind of case and thinking up associations is not doing this idea any justice.
Yes, I think a big factor was his early life and then further drug "adventures" (was put on adderall at 5 y.o. -- by his admission -- become dependent on it and then fell into meth and the rest).
If you read some of his journals I think this, and a different sort of familial alienation (which led to another sort of social alienation) led to this chain of events. An alienation nonetheless, but yes not exactly job-caused (though it cannot be ruled out as a factor).
- "Requirements" that don't mean anything and change on a whim
- Project management and issue tracking that is nothing more than a pretend game played for pretend by everyone involved yet is more important than actual results
- "We should do X" for two years, but we are still for some reason doing Y
- I'm tired of sprinting
- Incompetent managers that take a team of reasonably competent and intelligent software engineers and turn them into a void of non-productivity, where you send requirements and requests to simply vanish and never result in anything.
- A devops department that is chock full of talented individuals who are helpful and friendly and yet still take 2 weeks to turn around "Hey can you click the button in AWS to provision a new instance?"
- Knowing that this company that purposely hires middle tier talent (which I'm actually okay with, C students still build most of the world) and can't get out of it's own way still manages to run the entire industry, own the vast majority of the market, and basically takes it's profit as a tax on every consumer, and will never have to change.
Completely agree. Its just a logical segment of time to cut up and review at the end of each segment. Even just better phrasing could help here like a "phase".
I'm only a few years into my career, but I'm already depressingly conservative/hyperreactionary with respect to modern technology and feel as you do about most software work. I feel dysphoric toward any web tech, for example, for reasons I can articulate and others I can't. So I'm wondering whether being sick of programming at large is just a matter of years passing or environment.
I've been doing Linux for quite a while. I've really gotten into it the last 5 years. I do all our server builds and maintenance as one of my hats. I do really enjoy working with Linux. I haven't done C,C++ in decades. I did Obj-C when the iPhone first came out and really enjoyed it, particularly with the old school memory management. I like being close to the metal.
I've been doing C# for the last 15 years or so and enjoyed it for the first 10 years, but don't like the new iteration of the syntax. It seems like going backwards to me. Let's see how much shit we can put on a single line. That used to be a meme.
An old high school buddy of mine is really into ML and I'm trying to absorb his passion, but it's not quite taking. I hope I can get back into it at a personal level. I do miss enjoying it.
I've been on Macs since 2008 or so because it's close to *nix. I got spoiled by the hardware. Anyone recommend a laptop that is 16:10 and close to the Apple hardware that runs Linux? My laptop of choice was Thinkpad back in the day, but they all went to 16:9 which is annoying AF to me. 16:10 seems to be making a comeback though.
None of it makes sense... yet somehow it is supposed to, and with accountability.
Would I be correct in assuming that you're tired of people not doing proper data engineering, and in general having a irresponsible disregard for it?
At least, "soul crushing to constantly be fixing problems that shouldn't have happened in the first place" resonates a lot. But I mostly see it as a result of the aforementioned.
When you have to touch code that several other people work on, guardrails are the only guarantee you have that someone else didn't take shortcuts and left unnecessary levels of complexity behind for you to untangle.