Altoids by the Fistful
scottsmitelli.com
scottsmitelli.com
This one really rings true. Every individual change you don’t push back on makes things slowly, incrementally worse until you end up with a pile of garbage. But do you really want to block someone’s change because they wrote some awkward, hacky code? After all, they’ve solved some problem for the business and it might only take an hour to clean up later.
Later never comes. Hacks get built on top of other hacks and that one hour improvement would now be a week long refactor. No one can justify that.
After few rounds of this you start to become the type of person who blocks changes for code clarity and things others view as nitpicks. Now you’re the asshole stopping people from getting work done. You ask yourself if it’s really so bad to let it slide this one time.
Repeat.
Paid to, supposedly. Utterly frustrating to be hired for Reliability and told endlessly to lower quality. 'Controlled opposition' it is, then.
That depends on whether hacky code is nicely contained or spreads it's bad influence all over the place.
I would totally ask to add a reference to the tech debt ticket right there to the code so it's clear it's not a good practice to follow and to make sure that the ticket is actually created and not scheduled to be created by adding an async job into a memory hole.
Half the time, just asking for that is enough for stuff to be straightened out right there, as it's easier than creating a ticket.
>Later never comes. Hacks get built on top of other hacks and that one hour improvement would now be a week long refactor. No one can justify that.
But that's sometimes okay, it's a lifecycle of software. If business doesn't schedule maintenance, then maintenance schedules itself. The job of a good engineer is to make business types in the know about and let them decide.
It's complicated. I've worked on a product that had accumulated 15 years of tech debt. This all happened for very good reasons. The previous leadership often needed to ship features to get contracts signed and to make payroll.
However, paying that debt off had become very expensive and getting meaningful returns from these improvements took a long time. The most direct value came out of making tests more comprehensive and faster. However, beyond that benefits were only tangible over months to years and only if you worked on the right code area. In a large corporation leadership tenure in a role is often shorter than that. So the personal incentives for much of leadership was to just ignore the tech debt.
It's an extreme example but it's where you can get yourself.
Edit: I am honestly not sure I have a strong recommendation from this, other than "watch the tech debt and pay it off when you get breathing room". But then original company leadership AFAIK never paid most of the cost (if any?) of the accumulated debt and had AFAIK two(!) nice exits from it.
Or sometimes the code continues to encrust itself, like a pearl - or more likely, like a kidney stone - not fatally, but causing pain all the goddamned time.
99 times out of 100, they create the tech debt ticket, they add the comment, and multiple years later no follow up was ever scheduled in and the ticket eventually just gets resolved out as "wont fix" or is otherwise never looked at again.
That's just business. When a tram line has to be constructed and there is a leaking something something that will sabotage it if not taken care of, it's taken care of and included in the funding.
I ate a lot of cat turds as a kid. Ate a whole bunch through university, and then I signed up to work for a cat turd factory in London.
Sucked. Decided to stop eating cat turds and go start a candy factory instead.
For the first few years, we made candy. Good candy. Then, slowly, gradually, over the course of a decade, we realised that our clients wanted cat turds, so little by little we started putting more turd and less candy in the product, and as part of that we of course had to start eating cat turds again. I would distribute them to my staff, our investors would check in to ensure everyone was still eating their turds, and I would eat as many of them as I could to save the staff from indigestion.
Fast forward a decade and we had a full scale cat turd factory going. I’d get up every day, ram thousands of the things down my throat, spent my nights vomiting them up, for it turns out you really can only eat so many, and then repeat.
Eventually, my body started failing. It turns out you can’t live on cat turds alone.
So I quit, and only snack on a cat turd occasionally these days, when the state mandates it.
The factory is still going strong. After my departure they got rid of the staff who didn’t realise how many turds they’d have to eat after I left, hired coprophages, and switched over to producing a successful line of cat diarrhoea.
Isn't this precisely the time to do it? You reject with a note that says the idea is good, but code needs to be improved. "Doesn't fit the style" type of response. Make the contributor make the update so that it doesn't need an hour later. Take the hour now.
It's easy to push back on a hacky change if there's an elegant solution close at hand. But often the business needs and the architecture of the codebase are at odds with each other.
A recent example: an engineer wrote a custom caching layer for a service call, then called the service wrapper every time the data was needed, relying on caching to avoid hitting our dependency too often. I suggested fetching the data once and passing it around, but the engineer pushed back, citing the feature’s launch deadline and the effort required to update multiple interfaces. Their solution ultimately has more failure modes and is harder to test (requiring mocking of the service wrapper in several places), but it isn’t terrible and we probably won’t encounter cache overflow issues.
Another persistent example is function parameter length. Inevitably, there’s always “just one more argument” needed until we hit our configured linter limit. About 70% of the time, engineers add a suppression and push the change through as-is. Refactoring to reduce parameters can require significant work (and simply stuffing them into a parameter object doesn’t solve the underlying problem).
I could respond to these patterns by expanding our coding standards guide. It could document that caching shouldn’t be relied upon within a single request’s scope, or reinforce that functions should have fewer than 7 parameters (already enforced by our linter). But in my experience, these guidelines are rarely consulted before contributing. As the parameter example shows, people often push for exceptions rather than follow standards rigidly.
I do think standards guides can work well for open source projects, where contributions should never block someone from delivering value. Contributors always have the option to fork and use their changes as-is, which undermines arguments for “just getting something in.” Internal service codebases don’t have that luxury. When you’re changing a service to launch your feature before a major sales event, delays have real costs, and there’s no “I’ll fork this and maintain it myself” alternative.
As a tech person, this is the essence. All we want to do is make an amazing fast/efficient/performant/cheap/insightful/optimized/smart/something-else thing.
But then we have to deal with organizations like governments, businesses, customers, and people like managers, co-workers, and clients. And ultimately, human irrationality of preferences.
It's why RMS and Edsger are so appealing to so many. The above makes one want to say screw this, I'm gonna do it my way and damn the consequences.
Haha, this is a great way to describe the feeling of writing code you can't test locally, instead needing to wait while it makes its way through numerous pipelines before pooping out for an error that might not even be related to your code itself, but sometimes as simple as an intermittent infrastructure issue.
Ouch, right to the heart. I do wish I could say that being an asshole was restricted to Younger Self, as I carried some of that way later in my career than I should have.
If you take it diligently and treat it as fun, you can make amazing pieces in only ten times the time it would take a factory - but you do it your way with your attention to detail.
And you can make the back out of good wood and paint it, too. Nobody will ever know; it’s your secret between you and God.
I prefer metalworking, but the equipment is larger & more expensive. And you still need a workbench for a bunch of the finishing steps (hand filing, polishing, engraving, etc.) so some basic woodworking is very handy for making said workbench.
My type of humor, cathartic read
>Look at me now, having to Google how to read a text file line-by-line in Python despite having done it a hundred times at this point
At least the phone screen could be displaying something interesting but most graffitis are pseudo-artistic "I was here" tags. I wish more of that paint was used to actually make a place nicer rather than worse. And don't get me wrong, I'm totally ok with guerilla, technically illegal actions taken by citizens to improve their surroundings but most graffiti are far from that.
Sounds like the Open AI logo
Thank you for sharing.
Something I think about sometimes: the abstractions in math can be awfully elegant. Learning about them is probably 60% of the fun of studying math. But they took hundreds of years (or thousands in some cases) to conceive and refine. All that time was spent writing weird—often awkward and often wrong—proofs and trying every other idea that doesn’t work as well, and throwing them out (and still getting stuck with some of them, like pi instead of tau).
Software is less than a hundred years old. Eventually software will be quite elegant and make a lot of sense. Until then, we’re trying every idea we can think of (yaml templates) to see what’s good. Once AI can invent a programming language and reproduce decades of software development in it to test its design ideas, we can skip to the end.
this is glib but i couldnt keep myself from intentionally misinterpreting the end: "and on top of these existential crises he has covid now!"
"[C]ursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return."
EDIT: Whether you believe this particular explanation or not, the fact that it's here is evidence that people have long felt that how unnecessarily hard work is is something that needs an explanation.
Meaningless work is the problem.
The work that only needs to be done because something is already fucked up.
I "blame" it mostly on the two owners who also worked there. They were exemplary people and managers. Of course you need a nice group of people too, but I think a misfit wouldn't have stuck around for long.
My litter box is filled with turds from my cat scrum (sometimes we call him agile).
As to the topic… the slop washing and compounding effort it creates is awful. At work we use Gemini as part of Google Workspace. I wish Google would have an enterprise option “share all prompts” for full prompt transparency between everyone in the organization. I believe this will go a long way toward solving the root problem, which is one of disrespect and laziness. If I can see your prompt history, maybe you’ll think twice before asking me to review the slop it produced.
the rest of me says wow, this was a well written story
Good one, it took me a moment... :-)
I kind of have to wonder what was so bad about s expressions after all.
What advice does one give when confronted with this?
The path didn't shift beneath your feet. You finally learned how to see in the dark, and realized you'd been walking in circles around a grave you dug for someone who was never real to begin with. What you're really mourning is the death of who you thought you had to be, and what feels like emptiness is actually the first honest space you've ever had to discover what you might want to become.
Calling it "idealized image" downplays the mechanistic and implies the inauthentic - these judgments differ, see below. Nonetheless the resulting state of mind is the same: you're stuck somewhere being someone you don't truly know how to be - and it's been so taxing for so long that you've started to forget why exactly you're there in the first place.
It's a relatable sentiment. Funny how this surfaced today, after a few other materials inducing delusion of reference on HN frontpage. (I don't remember anyone ever saying how personalized HN's recommender is, but if there's places on the Net where it pays for the recommender to be subtle, here's one.)
As this sort of habituation is commonplace, it seems like not long after the stage where different authors introduced varying ontologies of the same alienatory phenomenon, the 20th century psychology community might've suffered something of a schism on the matter of whether it's right for the state of dedicating 100%+ of one's life energies to the "idealized image" to be considered "normal".
As a result, the currents in psychological/philosophical/humanistic inquiry most able to produce "technical" insights, i.e. ones which can be genuinely and reliably useful to an introspective person without necessitating the services of a care facilitator, remain underdeveloped and walled off. (You're in for a ride if you look into those, it's no coincidence you find em piecemeal in the oeuvre of a certain sort of literary carny barker.)
Anyway, some of them say that as you find ways to let go of conditioned reactive patterns, that results in something like more headspace freed up for your actual volition. Let's see how that one goes then. What I can add is that unconditioning oneself is done by experiencing unhabitual stimuli. If you're even a moderately routine-based sort of person you can drill yourself into a sort of "RNG watchdog" habit. At a random minute of every hour begin to breate manually, and proceed from there.
Is that the same one they're looking for, in the dark room?
Shout out to fellow frontend devs. Rough times.
There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both.
More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people.
Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.
If you’re complaining about secularism and committed to Judeo-Christian religion, how do you reconcile Elon and Karp being the embodiment of everything that Jesus condemns?
I didn’t say I was committed to the religions - I said they’re a battle tested adaptive cultural technology we should be careful about throwing away because there will be unintended consequences. They are very effective at helping people live meaningful lives and have community.
You can choose to be obstinate and read what I wrote through a political lens with no charity - that’s kind of the political religious substitute I’m talking about.
For what it’s worth- I’ve been on a similar journey recently and it’s brought me to similar conclusions. I got there through learning more about Eastern Philosophy and trying to map it to modern Western life.
We should aim to take a balanced, complete and holistic view of what that price has looked like, and looks like today.
In general terms it optimises for the middle of various bell-curves, at considerable disbenefit for those towards the edges of the distribution. Essentially if you naturally conform to its proposed life-model, you'll broadly have a fairly good time, and if you don't, you won't.
It's OK to recognise the pros and the cons as part of the assessment, in a quest for a more fulfilling and long-term-sustainable model for society and human existence. I'm not sure many have the open-mindedness and maturity to participate, though.
That's a good way to find yourself with a job you hate by the way.
With PG’s retarded “Free Palestine” arch, it’s probably best to just leave.
This transition was deliberate, and conscious. I can't imagine how I could have endured all of the social risks and personal discomfort "without even realizing it."
But, more to the point: have you never heard of The Feminine Mystique? Have you never heard of The Vindication of the Rights of Women? It's an undeniable fact that female spouses have endured centuries of unpaid labor and domestic violence—including legalized rape.
This is a serious issue, and it's not "much dumber" to oppose. Frankly, you have to be pretty stupid to think that we're better off through gendered subjugation.
> female spouses have endured centuries of unpaid labor
Until fairly recently, due to the realities of childbirth and breastfeeding, women had to shoulder that burden. Unpaid is wrong - women received the fruits of their spouse's labor in return for their own work at home. Underpaid labor is more accurate, since women often couldn't inherit or own their spouse's property.
With extreme conditions no legal employer could impose, often including rape and certainly bodily mutilation—to say nothing of tight purse strings.
My point is that marriage and kids provide a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment and a certain kind of narrowing clarity and that ideas of what leads to a fulfilling life are well established in old cultural communities for a reason. He’d no longer be looking for the meaning in obscure trivia - which was never the correct place to find it anyway.
The other bit is a lot of jobs are bullshit (probably most) with enormous amounts of waste building stuff that doesn’t matter. You can fix that by working at Tesla, spacex, etc.
Beyond that, this a too-long essay about a deeply poisonous and discouraging worldview. I regret having read it. At least it wasn't written by AI!
That used to be called "honest" back in the days
And, as with so many blatantly bad and wrong things in modern development, someone will show up just to scream at you confusedly if you as much as think of solving it somehow better (e.g. how you describe) because they have mastered the officially endorsed badwrong way (and even that with great difficulty) thus you'd be stealing their cat turds
>I regret having read it.
It makes me happy that you do!
Like rolling a dice on wasting 30 minutes, but maybe maybe it’ll be interesting or mildly amusing, best case.
There’s just no way that use of time could be worth the squeeze when your takehome is $500/hr. 8% of your waking day spent reading an article. Come on?
You could also skim, that's a practice that has really done a lot for me when it comes to not-so-information-dense literature that might still have worthwhile nuggets in it, like a good chunk of nonfiction.
I read the full article and found it well worth the time. A somewhat sobering essay, prompting some self-reflection, while also being beautifully written. I appreciated the art displayed.
How can you put a price tag on something like that?
If it was not obvious to anyone, then they needed to read it all perhaps. Not having any big feelings for people who do or don't anymore, I have been avoiding all kinds of cat turds most of my life, not bad decision but it's very lonely.
That's absurd. The point of my life isn't to maximise my $/hr return to some faceless corporation.
I started reading it, I liked the writing style, it resonated with me. I kept reading till I had finished it.
There, that's the entire justification, I need no more justification than that.
Work lost 5-10 minutes of productivity so I could indulge in reading something ? Sure. That's fine. I'm sure they will survive.
If not, then maybe they should just go out and hire a team of soulless robots.
That's a great mentality to have if you want to die with a high score.
It's easy. I just remind myself that, in about 5 billion years, the Sun will have sufficiently run out of fuel to begin its transition to a Red Giant. At that point, all remnants of biologic life that ever lived on the crust of the earth will be incinerated and it won't have mattered whether anyone carefully conserved the precious time remaining in their lives or not. I have so thoroughly incorporated this understanding into my psyche that I can merely blink now and all of that context is immediately present to me.
the old adage for discarding a book is read 100 pages - your age
if its good i keep reading. this was fantastic
The interesting-sounding articles here I open, skim, and close. Or leave as an open tab to come back to because I "really should read it".
And yet, this one captured me. The writing was engaging, and it left me hanging as I went along. I _enjoyed_ it.
That's why. Maybe I should read more things I _enjoy_ and fewer things I "should" read.