A love letter to my future employer (2020) | Hacker News Reader

A love letter to my future employer (2020)

catzkorn.dev

58 pointsluu21 comments

I'm sure you've changed lots in the last 5 years, but laughed (kindly) at the bit about feeling silly for leading your pairing partner down a garden path for a morning: I've been a professional (or, at least, paid) developer since 1996 and I still take a wrong turn at least once a month, if not more often, and will happily bring a pairing partner along for the ride!

Sad that the blog posts stopped after getting employed. I was hoping for some interesting insights after five years of doing it professionally.

Doing it professionally destroyed all the magic for me. Everything is slop, customer appointments are exhausting af, nobody is able to precisely communicate their needs and im supposed to be the people pleaser saying "sure can do" to every lunatic idea some person with enough money has. If you want to take responsibility and actually build a valuable product your only option is open source software as companies, no matter the size, do not care about the nuances a feature might have as long as its shippable. Big tech has embarked into enshittification for over two decades now. Imagine being paid for making a product worse. Fuck this industry, money is the only driver for me. Once that's gone, which surely will happen with companies trying to replace devs with AI, I'll hopefully find a way to keep my income stable in a different profession that is actually enjoyable.

I sense just a touch of catastrophising going on here…

Not really. No matter what enterprise dev I talked to their product is completely unsaveable. Too big for a rewrite and basically a Frankenstein monolith/microservice done wrong architecture. It's really painful to see how bad some stuff is millions of people depend on. If builders built houses like devs built software, we would have no houses.

Check out the homebuilding subreddit. The amount of "bad" stuff that ends up under the surface of nice drywal is, in fact, _just fine_, is quite high! Here's a recent example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebuilding/comments/1mjxqin/is_th...

Building with drywall is a concept ill never understand. Houses are made of brick walls where im from.

I'm sure you know, but to clarify, drywall is not structural. Load is borne by lumber in most cases, though some homes in America are built with structural masonry; South Florida builds a lot of homes with concrete masonry units, for example. The drywall is just there as a pleasant skin to hide the structural underpinnings. There's nothing stopping someone from using drywall in the interior even in structural masonry buildings, and this happens pretty often, in fact.

There's nothing wrong with wooden houses! They're a cost-effective method of building, and with proper care, such houses will last over a hundred years. Masonry buildings, of course, also need care to avoid falling apart, though probably less so than wooden buildings.

I don't know where it is that you're from, but I'd wager that large parts of the US sees harsher climate conditions. Between hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and wildfires, American houses have to deal with a lot. Properly-constructed wooden houses handle what they need to.

Sure, you could say that all else equal, a masonry structure is more durable than a wooden one. But as they say, anyone can build a bridge that stands, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands. Cost is always an object in the real world.

I didn’t say software everywhere isn’t quite crap, I’ve seen it first hand. I just thought the catastrophising was a bit over the top.

If anything, we're not responding to this enough.

If we were civil engineers it would be shocking for the public to learn that we are sometimes ordered build the bridges terribly on purpose, for something like the purpose that it influences people toward using toll roads -- when in the world of software engineering not only has this kind of anti-user (anti-human) behaviour become commonplace but actually it's increasingly the only novel work we do between gluing other people's code together.

Agreed. You don't even need to just include engineers. Even professionals like electricians or nurses etc stand to be struck off or even sent to prison for incompetence like mislabelling a fusebox or something. Meanwhile software engineers are being told to just fucking put a bolt in the fusebox, we haven't got time to do it properly.

Because people’s lives aren’t typically at stake because a website is janky.

We’re not building bridges though are we. I’m more aware than anyone that the software is terrible about the place. I’ve also seen that fail to matter that much 99% of the time.

Nah, we're just handling national security, healthcare, banking and social welfare. We're of course allowed to make oopsies, and since we're not a real engineering profession we're never held accountable :)

It really depends on the culture of the organization, personal and team goals. Very few places have everything in place to support engineers by making work low friction, productive and with the right support from the rest of the team combined with interesting tasks and goals. Once in a while a job like that comes along, but usually it ends up changing over time as priorities for the organization and individuals shift.

But yeah, I'm pretty down on tech these days (and even telecom). Bullshit happens everywhere and drains virtually all the fun out of everything. There are loads of incumbents, pole owners and municipalities that don't even do the bare minimum required by responding to permits in a timely manner. It's depressing that it is refreshing to me when people do the bare minimum -- replying to emails on the next business day (making it possible to get to the real work of installing cables for a customer). Most days for me now are hounding people to do what they should have done weeks / months / years ago, or writing legal documents to try to address harm they're causing. <sigh>

She still posts to her Mastodon and LinkedIn, but I guess blogging is completely dead. For what it's worth, she quit her job at Edera 2 weeks ago.

Hi!

I've been trying to write 'the next post' for the last 5 years - it's often something I think about that I've just left these posts in the ether with no conclusion. It wasn't a conscious decision not to continue, but I started interviewing then got hired at an early stage start up (Tailscale), and everything turned into a blur. When I went back to the draft I had going, it felt overwhelming to try condense the pace at which my skills and career was evolving and I'd close it pretty quickly. Surprisingly to me, it's been more than just how I write code thats evolved - I've discovered a lot about how I operate within a tech company and that I'm also extremely user focused.

I'm not sure how my blog was found and posted here (but thank you for reading!), but last night I did open that draft and started working on it again. A complete coincidence, but it was the first time it felt like I'm in the right space to continue working on it and distilling the past 4.5 years of employment, the initial job search, etc. As someone mentioned, I left my previous role recently, but I'm starting the next adventure on Monday. Now seems like a good time to finish that post!

Charlotte

Looking forward to it!

Charlotte (the author) now shares technical content through Tailscale's blog and her GitHub contributions instead.

I am currently at the stage from where I admire the software world from outside, trying to be competent one day at a time. The author is a badass for landing tailscale!

Can confirm that catzkorn is a badass.

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