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>My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. Dilbert and its ilk have been lampooning this since the 80s.

Based on the title, I was expecting the article to be a lamentation on Jira and Scrum.

By the time I got my first job in 1996, I had been a hobbyist for 10 years and graduated from college. The last thing I was thinking about doing as a single 22 year old who had just moved to the big city and had free cash flow was sit down at a computer after work.

I have never in 30 years written a single line of code that I didn’t get paid for except a little work I did for charity.

There's respectable musicians who are like this too.

And plenty who are not, it takes all kinds.

It's a matter of taste and still all tastes may not be satisfied anyway :)

That’s completely different. One of my good friends is a bartender. But his passion is his music. He’s practicing with friends, performing in front of people, etc. It is a social event - not sitting at a computer all day.

For years I was a part time fitness instructor and runner. I loved hanging out with friends, being in front of people, meeting them at races and us training together. It’s completely different than being at a computer at home - after working all day on one.

You're missing the point. Your good friend has to work on his music outside of his paid profession. It's a hobby that is not financially viable for him as a career.

You expect someone who writes software for 8+ hours a day professionally to go home and do more of it for fun?

Those who are interested in doing that are free to do so, but most people have more than 1 interest or would like to be compensated for the additional hours they are effectively working in their profession.

Rereading I can't edit now, but I meant there are plenty of respectable musicians who are not like this as well as plenty of great talents that only perform professionally.

Not that one or the other is a less-respectable approach.

Sorry if my text can be misinterpreted so easily.

That’s heartbreaking. :-(

It’s heartbreaking for a 22 year old to want to enjoy life outside of computers?

On Hacker News, it is.

> The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.

IMO this is the part that the author is missing. Back in the 2000's, software development was a much smaller field and your main focus was the "curiosity pond" where all the developers went to tinker.

Now software dev has expanded into an ocean. That pond is still there but the author missed the pond for the ocean.

this doesn't make sense to me. early on in my career I was permitted, even asked, to make operating systems, languages, and distributed protocols. in todays world I'm lucky if I'm allowed to write a dashboard.

where is this ocean? that I have all these big pre-cooked components I can use to make saas spaghetti?

Somewhat related, the partial-illusion of "where did all the old developers go, they seem way too rare, something is happening to them." While attrition and ageism do exist, there's a bigger factor.

The total workforce has expanded dramatically over time, so even if everybody in the started-40-years-ago cohort remained alive and employed, those (now much older) people would still be a tiny minority among the bigger and bigger cohorts that kept joining since then.

> it's just gotten better.

Couldn't agree more. Like many, I've had my honeymoon phase with AI and have now learned what it is good for and what it is not. What it has truly been good for is satisfying the nauseating number of topics I want to learn about. I can spend $20 a month and drill down into any topic I like for as long as I like in an incredibly efficient way. What a time to be alive.

What "hackers" don't understand is that at certain scale, social cohesion is extremely important. A huge army of socially cohesive morons will achieve greater things than a small group of dedicated geniuses. This means that for any entity that grows beyond certain scale, socially cohesive morons are actually preferable over dedicated geniuses. The fact that your coworkers are unmotivated lazy stupid fucks is not a bug, it's a feature. They're not there to be smart, they're there to be socially cohesive.

I've been in that situation where I was coding by day and didn't have a computer at home. Or at least, I didn't have one that was the same platform as the one I was using at work. Growing up there was at one point a Commodore 64, some kind of Tandy, and a UNIX workstation, but at work I was developing on Windows NT, Solarix, and HP/UX.

In another case, I had recently moved to a new city and we were targeting an internal proprietary platform (again with Windows NT) and also targeting Solaris.

There was a time when you would go to work and you would be working with header files and libraries that were proprietary and for which your company was paying an exorbitant per-head license fee.

I resonate with your message entirely. Have you been able to find a company/position where you are able to satisfy this drive?

Do we work at the same company? It's tough out there.

I relate 100%; there are still a lot of people like us :)