Why I learned to "make things" | Hacker News Reader

Why I learned to "make things"

37signals.com

120 pointsmh_32 comments

Yes. And this is in a company where many other people are programmers.

If you are in a corporate environment surrounded by people who don't know how to write code, or even barely know how to use Excel, it cannot be overstated how valuable a basic knowledge of even something like VBA, and a little SQL, can make you.

I started learning to program because I was tired of being faced with the same business problems and productivity drags over and over again. Like being asked to log into a legacy system, look up some performance numbers, copy/paste them into a spreadsheet and e-mail it to management. I've even seen people summing numbers together with a calculator and then typing the sum into an spreadsheet because they didn't know about formulas in Excel. That knowledge could free up at least an hour of that person's time per day, which really adds up over many years on the job.

Not everyone needs to actually be a hacker, but everyone who's even remotely curious about programming should learn some basic skills in order to automate tasks and make oneself more productive, if nothing else.

When I visit "business type" offices, I am constantly shocked at the amount of wasted time that goes on that I see. The examples you cited are merely the tip of the iceberg. Part of the reason I'm a programmer, I think, is because I absolutely ABHOR wasted/duplicated effort. This "natural programmer laziness" has always pushed me to figure out the way to "automate out all the boring parts".

I think it's a huge market opportunity for a programmer to merely show some poor bastards how to NOT get by via emailing spreadsheets back and forth.

Yes. There are so many companies with wasted productivity in repetitive business process waiting for someone to automate them or "DRY them out." One of the worst examples I saw was a woman whose entire job, as far as I could tell, consisted of downloading a list of system-generated pickup numbers every day and e-mailing it to people. This person was probably being paid between $40-50k per year to do a job that could be completely automated by a few lines of scripting code.

Not that I think automation should be used to lay people off. But if the job she was doing were automated, they could have her on the phone talking to customers and helping out the overworked customer service staff with the call queue instead, with no net expense to the company.

Why shouldn't automation be used to lay people off? Eliminating busywork jobs is a big deal -- how are we going to get to a post-scarcity society otherwise?

Unless/until there were a revolution, increased automation leads to increased inequality rather than a 'post-scarcity society', though.

Should we restart the buggy whip assembly lines to "re-create" all those jobs? What about all the jobs lost to car assembly robots, which probably pushed down the cost to make said cars?

Increased automation doesn't have to mean increased inequality -- ideally, it would lead to a gradual reduction in average work hours. Working hours for people in first-world western nations are evidence of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_i...

I think the lesson of the 21st century is that people don't want reduced work hours. They'll just work as hard as they can for even more utilons/status points/dollars.

I mean, it's not like Paul Graham ever had to work another day after he sold Viaweb. Nevertheless, you see him still working. (And he's not an outlier.)

That's not necessarily true. There was a study making the rounds ~2 years ago done by two Princeton researchers, indicating that once you hit ~$75,000+ a year in income, your emotional well-being doesn't significantly improve past that amount.

It follows that if you could make $75,000+ working 20 hours a week, you'd be quite happy. I know I certainly would =) (Yes, I'm sure there have been studies done on the correlation of life satisfaction and keeping busy; that's what hobbies are for! I'm sure there are plenty of happy, busy retired people.)

http://wws.princeton.edu/news/Income_Happiness/ (press release) http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011492107 (actual study)

This is great. I wish more business analysts had this mentality of "it's faster to learn it myself than wait for a developer." That's a quality to look for when hiring.

I come from a Business Analysis background, now a full-time programmer. I love your mentality, but it can be frightening for employers. Many do not share your opinion. Over the years, I have also become somewhat reluctant to write code when it isn't specifically in my job description.

For me, it's always been a balance of sustainability, maintainability, and competitive advantage: What happens when I leave the company? Who's going to fix my bugs and restart the server? And then there's the flip side: If we don't innovate, isn't that the same as giving an advantage to our competitor?

I'm a fan of writing scripts and macros to add to your own personal productivity at work for basically any desk job.

When I was in a sales support job I went as far as writing an web application hosted on my machine so I could share it with my colleagues in the building. It let us do ad-hoc reporting on certain figures that weren't captured in the company's official data mart, but it wasn't very scalable or maintainable, especially once I left that company.

But building little tools that make you and your colleagues more productive can add to your value and desirability as an employee. For the employer, the tradeoff of tolerating an "underground" code base existing on your employees' machines, is the productivity gains that come from it, which can really add up. Just by writing a script that automates a report, I can gift my employer thousands of dollars per year in productivity. Employers love employees who figure out how to automate their own tasks.

> What happens when I leave the company?

And this is exactly why programming makes you more valuable and puts you in a much better position to negotiate promotions. You give them better "machinery" for better productivity, but they need you to operate it! Now if you leave they are taking a significantly larger step back than if you hadn't built things for them in the first place.

I'd rather not have that kind of relationship with an employer. It's a perfectly rational position, I just think it will eventually hold you back from your full potential.

I didn't learn to program because I wanted to keep my job. I learned programming because, frankly, it was fun and challenging.

I find it sad when someone talks about "learning to making things" as if he had discovered the moon. Humans have been "making things" since the dawn of times out of necessity. Going through life without the need to "make things" is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Making little things, temporary things, things for your own use, is still pretty common. Making serious things, or making things seriously, is a skill that has to be learned.

It seems to me that the post is more about the former than the latter. It's not like he built an airplane from scratch by himself; he contributed to building tools for internal use at a small company.

"It's not like he built an airplane from scratch by himself"

How true. Amazing what passes off for high fives on HN. Anybody ever watch any documentaries on the real world showing what people with serious jobs build and maintain everyday? (I saw one last night about the complexity of the military supply chain ships near Somalia).

Many of these posts that I see here on HN seem like the equivalent of a kid in elementary school bringing home an art project to show their parents and grandparents who exclaim how wonderful an achievement and how promising they are.

These posts do serve a purpose though. They bring traffic and exposure to the poster's company website (in this example 37signals but there are many others) by highlighting some simple revelation or discovery.

HN exists as a blog monetization tool

I think this is a really cynical perspective. Nowhere is the author claiming he's making something superior, or matches up to the best of "makers" in our society.

Look around at most of the people you interact with every day. Many of them are stuck in a cycle of not making things, and this guy worked hard enough to break that cycle for himself. He found his calling in writing code. That is inspirational, and something to be proud of.

This scares me about modern culture (at least that of middle class America). In grade school, I really enjoyed making things. Simple things, like creatures out of paper clips. To me that was more enjoyable than watching pre-made shows, or playing pre-made games.

When I discovered computers, it became even more fun to make things - websites, animations, scripts to make chemistry homework automatic, etc. My classmates would spend the same amount of time discussing who was the best at throwing pig-skin balls in an arena, or how funny that last South Park episode was.

Now that was before every kid had an portable entertainment system on hand for 24 hours a day, with interfaces tailored for consumption, and operating systems discouraging fiddling. I can only imagine the maker culture is dwindling, especially in younger generations. Is there a way to fix this?

Perhaps no one should ever blog about anything they do and learn from? Unless, of course, it's a rocket ship or a fusion reactor. /HN

""Before I could actually make things, I felt like an outsider – who was I to provide advice to these people who actually made things?""

This is so true specially when you are working with an amazing team.

Six or seven weeks after I started...

What exactly were you doing for 6-7 weeks? If you know MatLab & R as well as you claim, I'm hard-pressed to believe that all you accomplished was one git commit, one git clone, and some copying and pasting.

EDIT: My point being... he was already a "maker" -- just not using web technologies.

Nowhere did he say that was all he accomplished, and whether it was or not seems beside the point.

He says he's an analyst. Presumably he was looking at data.

A little meta, but this design makes it hard to comment on posts! I spent about a minute trying to find the comments section, which is a click away, as opposed to a simple scroll.

Maybe that's the idea.

That's exactly the idea.

But then it only really works once, right? I mean, it's not harder, it's just different.

Once is probably enough to stop a good chunk of spam and general thoughtless comments, with how powerful first impressions are and all. (@dhh: does it work?)

I would agree that the comment section is not naturally below the content like most websites. However, at least for me, I'm getting annoyed with loading a full website where the comments take up 80% of the entire page. I'm assuming the point of them "hiding" the comment section is a design choice to reduce loading comments that may not be what the reader wants to read.

Maybe a happy medium would be to have a more obvious "click button" that would allow for comments.

It's important to get in a word from the sponsors, 37 signals. Comments would distract from that because your eye would be drawn to them instead of the ads that appear.

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