11 ms·

Coding is boring, unless

252 points by jordanfish 11y ago

ggambetta 11y ago
> Because 50% of my code (hyperbole intended!) was a direct copy/paste of Stack Overflow. And another 40% was a copy/paste from other scripts. Either my colleagues’ scripts or my own. It became repetitive. And there was little creativity or learning involved. How is this even possible? I've never had a job where copying and pasting code would have helped. It blows my mind every time I read this kind of claim, to the point that I sort of refuse to believe it's true. Are there people who get paid to do things that simple that they can be copied and pasted from Stack Overflow?
- jgh 11y ago
  He pointed out that it's a hyperbole.
  - purpled_haze 11y ago
    It is and yet it's not. If you think about it, most of the code we benefit from each day was written by someone else from the operating system, to the language compiler/interpreter, to the frameworks, libraries, etc. Many developers get their queues about how to use a language, framework, library, or application because they learned how to use it on StackOverflow. Do you really know how much code was written to get to the point where you are sitting there, using all of the benefits of past coding, much of it thrown away to make way for other code for better or worse? All of that code is likely far beyond 50% of what your company has written.
- superplussed 11y ago
  For the first year or so of learning Ruby and Rails, I did end up copying and pasting alot from SO. In fact, I think I had a streak of visiting SO every day for at least a year, and that wasn't idle browsing, that was "Oh shit I'm stuck, better hit up SO". So now when I hear claims like this, I just assume it's coming from someone that is new enough to a specific technology that relying on SO is necessary for them.
  - gotchange 11y ago
    I rarely visited SO for answers and I went through the novice phase like everyone else but I didn't pick the path of least resistance every time I'm faced with a technical problem, because I have a held belief that you can't accumulate knowledge and expertise if you don't polish your debugging/troubleshooting skills and make yourself go through the painful process of solving technical problems on your own without the help of someone else and I could say that help very much in honing my skills.
    - jgh 11y ago
      This thread is killing me. I have worked on a whole bunch of shit that has little to no documentation (SO included) in my career. I have had to figure out a lot of stuff on my own. SO is amazing when it has information that I'm looking for. You know why? I don't want to have to figure out literally everything. I want to save my figuring energy for tasks worth applying it to. So just get the fuckin' job done and do it right and quit pretending you're trying to achieve nirvana.
    - _up 11y ago
      If you write a paper you also first cite what is state of the art. Before you go into details what Innovation you came up with. So researching SO first, before reinventing the Wheel. Resembles more the scientific way of problem solving. You can also learn a lot by reading and understanding all the different solutions that are often given to a Problem. Your time is better used if you solve new problems or find a better solutions than reinventing the wheel and you also learn as much if not more.
      - Scarblac 11y ago
        It's hard to argue much about this because nobody so far said what kind of problem we're trying to solve. But I feel the first step should be going to the documentation of whatever language or library you're using, rather than Stack Overflow. SO will tell you the answer to a single question, the docs usually give some more information (you don't get "use this option", but "here are the options and this is what they do") so the chance is higher that next time, you'll just know the answer. Of course when inexplicable things happen or when docs are bad, SO can be pure gold.
- gotchange 11y ago
  It always amazes me that there are people out there willing to hire and pay full these type of workers who scour SO for answers without working hard on the problem and expanding their knowledge and expertise in the process. No wonder that our field and profession is suffering from bad image and quality problem when so-called pros copy and paste all the time on the job.
  - abdulhaq 11y ago
    When the deadline is tight and you don't have to debug the bluetooth stack to see why it doesn't work on Samsung XYZ on Android ABC, then SO is a godsend.
  - sohcahtoa 11y ago
    I think there are two ways to view what the job most programmers do is. IMO it isn't to write code, it's to solve business problems. Code just happens to be the tool that you use to do that, most of the time. Anyone who tries to solve a problem by staring hard at a blank piece of paper instead of just googling the answer is not making effective use of their time.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Indeed. Some would call it lazy - I prefer "leveraging the combined knowledge and experience of all humanity".
    - lubonay 11y ago
      You are missing the forest for the trees. Reaching for Google and SO as your first impulse when confronted with a problem will deteriorate your ability to find your own solutions in the long run. Use it or lose it, as they say. And besides, any non-trivial problem can't be solved by copying code from SO alone.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Most companies don't solve non-trivial problems. For instance, 90% of web development is regurgitating the same CRUD for different customers. Most of the work consists of wiring standard components together in a standard way, and slapping some CSS on top of it. If you're trying to think too much and reinvent too much, you'll waste a lot of time. Source: did too much webdev in my life already, and wasted way too much time doing things by myself.
- DennisP 11y ago
  Probably because they're just manipulating some crappy, inconsistent API, or a buggy library. Nothing to figure out, just have to find the incantation that works.
- FLUX-YOU 11y ago
  >Are there people who get paid to do things that simple that they can be copied and pasted from Stack Overflow? Yes, because the reality is that someone has to do it, and a half-assed effort from a developer browsing SO is still better than getting a random Joe off of the street for $10/hr to try it. Not all companies have interesting problems to solve 100% of the time. It's not impossible that your company is trying to solve a problem that the majority of SO questions will answer, because your problem is just that boring. If that blows your mind, you should know there are people that get paid well to do stuff that is a lot more simple than even cobbling scripts together from the internet.
- VLM 11y ago
  Something no other commenters mentioned (so far) is every programming book starts out with "hello world" and this spread online not just to generic language teaching but into APIs and libraries. Bootstrapping up from hello world is nearly guaranteed to work, write the entire thing first then try it is a recipe for pain.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I would not be surprised to learn that a codebase is 20-50% made of stuff literally copied from SO (with occasional variable name change). Why? Because most work is not that unique. Rare are the jobs where you're building something new in software; usually it's solving slight variations of the same business problem. In particular, people copy-paste a lot of JS from SO, and again, it's no surprise. Most of the web development isn't done by superstar sexy rocketship startups on the bleeding edge of Node.js ecosystem - it's done by small companies employing barely competent programmers, and it doesn't require any innovation. It's just taking the same components everybody uses, configuring them in the same way everyone configures, and wiring them together in the same way everyone does.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    This was true way back when people were trying frame-based programming, 4GL's, etc. The same general components could often get the job done. So, the tools made that easy to express along with code generators to turn them into 3GL code (eg C, COBOL) specialized for the task. Both vendors and businesses developed an assortment of reusable components that became a selling point in time saving. Repeated again in past 10 years with OOP, SOA, micro-services, and so on. Applies to configurations and admin scripts, too, not just code.
- lordnacho 11y ago
  If what you're building is pretty standard, it might work, especially if there's no performance element. Web type stuff can often be "take this widget and glue it to this page" in which case it's almost directly from SO. Pretty much everything I do requires parts that came from SO, but it's more like I get a bunch of puzzle pieces and then think about a smart way to assemble the big picture. Then there's the profiling and arrangement that only makes sense on my particular codebase. No way to SO that.
- laxatives 11y ago
  Sounds like many coders from out outside the US and went to a for-profit MS program.
- bluedino 11y ago
  >> Are there people who get paid to do things that simple that they can be copied and pasted from Stack Overflow? Have you been on SO?
  - babuskov 11y ago
    SO had a great year 1, and maybe year 2. You know, when real questions were asked. Now you have beginners asking so simple questions it's both funny and tragic at the same time. Here's the first question in the list when I opened the site today: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33989450/mysql-joins-on-two-table-with-the-same-value http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33989450/mysql-joins-on-t... Yeah. That guy is one of those who just ask others how to to their job and then copy/paste it. Who answers such questions? I have no idea. Probably the guys who are just a step above on the knowledge curve. They probably hang around to ask their own questions, and also find such questions challenging enough to bother providing an answer.
    - rorykoehler 11y ago
      It's a platform for learning. The asker is a beginner. There is nothing wrong with that and someone asking with the intention of learning should never be looked down upon. If you find it so easy why are you even looking at that question? Your google-fu is sub-optimal?
      - babuskov 11y ago
        I'm not looking down on anything or anyone. I'm just analyzing the state of SO today versus the first few years when it started. As for the question, you obviously didn't read what I wrote carefully. I get served a full page of such questions every time I open the site. Finding an interesting question has became a tedious job and that's why I don't even bother to visit the site anymore. Once again, I'm not even sorry about that. It freed a lot of my time - I rarely visit the site, but I'm still ranked in top 2% users, so you can guess how active I was before.
        11y ago
huuu 11y ago
For me boredom hits when I'm working on some kind of 'not changing the world in a positive way' project. I believe every project has it's boring parts. But when the goal is positive it helps to get thrue.
to3m 11y ago
I hope that's somebody's living quarters in the photo, and not their office! I've worked at a couple of offices that felt tightly packed, but they were nothing by comparison to that ;) As a long-term proposition, I'd say that table is suitable for no more than 3. (Not sure what official guidelines are, but I'd say you'd need around 150cm x 75cm, or 5' x 2'6", per person. That gives you enough room for keyboard-laptop-monitor depthwise, and two monitors-plus-space widthwise. But the more the merrier, of course... humans are social, but not THAT social.)
- vinay427 11y ago
  >I hope that's somebody's living quarters in the photo, and not their office! I've worked at a couple of offices that felt tightly packed, but they were nothing by comparison to that ;) That looks like a typical university hackathon to me. Certainly not excusable if it is an office. Thankfully my only workspace (at an internship) had nicely sized desks for everyone, and the company was looking to expand by renting more office space rather than decreasing desk space.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I've been to the offices that look like that - I always assumed it's a typical startup setup. Frankly, I probably wouldn't last more than a week in such conditions - I don't respond well to sharing personal space with other people for prolonged periods of time.
    - walshemj 11y ago
      And doing serious development on lap tops realy! you need some decent 2 or 3 monitor set ups with a nice i7 workstations with some nicer mechanical keyboards and mice. Yes I know you can get docks etc for laptops but its far more expensive for the same performance.
      - mbrock 11y ago
        Need? Depends. I don't. I'm happy with a laptop and a bit of privacy. Different strokes.
S_A_P 11y ago
I don't know. I've been writing c# for years and I still go to SO for things. Sometimes it's even stuff I should know, like creating a text file. However I don't do some of these tasks often enough to remember by heart and it's not an exciting problem to figure out so I go for SO. I don't see a problem with that at all. I also don't get the sentiment that you're not a real coder if you use SO and copy paste code. I don't always have the luxury to figure out which sorting algorithm is fastest for the dataset I'm working with. Sometimes I have to meet a deadline. A great developer is one who writes easy to parse code that is as bug free as possible in the alotted time frame. There are times when it's important to do some r&d and learn more, but there are also times when you need to ship. It really depends on what the task is. You can't paint the whole thing with broad strokes.
- nilliams 11y ago
  Way I read it the overuse of SO (along with C&P programming) thing was just one example/potential symptom -- he wasn't making a broad generalisation that all SO usage is bad.
  - thebouv 11y ago
    I tell employers and employees and co-workers: I'm a good programmer, I'm a phenomenal Googler. I don't have to memorize the best sorting algorithms or how to create a text file in every language I touch. I know how to problem solve, choose the correct tools and search for guidance (note: that doesn't mean straight c&p always but could if it is appropriate) on things that get sticky.
VLM 11y ago
I'd agree with most of the article except the "The day-to-day always gets boring" segment. If you don't like yourself, traveling merely results in not liking yourself somewhere else. If you are boring, going somewhere exciting merely results in an exciting place now including qty one boring person. If you don't like your job, being forced to participate in a hackathon will result in increasing the hatred of the job not loving it. The diversity part especially was racist, all brits are the same, all greeks are the same, there is more to diversity. Note how that section also neatly excludes all potential employees with social lives or family lives outside of coworkers due to the relatively intense level of required coworker socialization, yet categorized that very exclusion as diversity. This is especially striking on a holiday weekend, I had a lot of fun this weekend without a single coworker being involved, not even a phone call, so far anyway. It would suck from a stress standpoint never being able to get away from work, or having to give up holiday family time just to put food on the table. An unmentioned advantage is there is some (ugh) synergy in the two separately described issues of elimination of giant monoliths and rotation of personnel. However, eliminating "can grok the entire system architecture" as a precondition of writing code doesn't mean nobody needs to grok the entire system architecture. One way I've handled "Too Long; Didn’t Learn" professionally is to just fix stuff on a higher level. In the article there is an example of a boring inside tool acting as a "fake-Spark". Well why not just re-implement in Spark? The reason why not might tie into the other paragraph that paraphrases to "micromanagement is not fun", but just job hop until you find a professionally managed company then its all good.
anonyfox 11y ago
I switched jobs a year ago: from a low paid startup job to a company that does project-to-project grunt work for local banks. I (@Hisako1337) learned a lot during the past years, absorbed the whole mindset of Lean Startup, Customer Development and truly agile software development. I taught myself the complete fullstack, from User interviews to SPA frontend dev with advanced SEO, backend development with imperative, OO and functional mindsets (Love Elixir currently!), using different communication protocols (have a degree in distributed systems), and optimize solutions by using appropriate database solutions, from relational to document stores to graph databases. I even learned how to build desktop apps with web tech before it was as cool as today and currently I absorb every piece of machine learning material I can find/buy. Every bit of learning happens in my spare time, because: ... Now guess what I do for a living for my current "FinTech" employer? Bugfixing a decade-old Spaghetti-architecture CRUD PHP app, doing pretty useless projectwork for customers (middle bank management). I'm not allowed to improve things, because stuff might break and of course there are zero tests written. Boredom? I hate every Single hour at work. Most colleauges behave like braindead zombies. But the salary is quite good and I can't move to better job locations. Others here might not believe that situations like described in this articles occur- but really- things can be fairly worse. I'd love having problems that are worth a question at SO, not the trivial gruntwork I'm supposed to do all day, with zero impact for anyone for idiots that have no clue but enough money. Sorry for the rant- this article triggered a wave of emotions...
- khaannn 11y ago
  This is my life. The ancient codebase that doesn't use Objects because "They didn't see the point" with no unit tests. The pay is more than I could possibly hope to achieve at another employer in this area and, accounting for the cost of living, more than I could hope to get anywhere. I'm attempting to improve the place from within, but the long-term employees are resisting change.
krick 11y ago
Off topic: I don't know a single feature that would be as annoying as fucking toolbar/header/whatever showing up when you scroll upwards. Why everybody does this?
- arm 11y ago
  I agree, although, it’s not as bad in this case. I find it far more annoying on sites where the header is always there, as it breaks page down / spacebar functionality (when you page down, the header will cover some unread text).
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Makes sense in Facebook mobile app, where you often actually want to use the toolbar (it lets you create a new post). Elsewhere, I don't know. Probably people copying UX solutions from other people without thinking about whether they're needed.
charlieflowers 11y ago
The business exists to make a profit, and it needs to perform financially as well as possible this quarter. That does not always align with what is most interesting for a developer to pursue. So in the short term and medium term, these goals are usually at odds. In the long term, you can find harmony between them sometimes if you try really hard. It's impossible by definition for them to be in harmony all the time. Too bad, but that's reality. Each individual developer has to occasionally re-align them by making a job change.
hibikir 11y ago
I've been programming professionally for 15 years. But I cannot say that I was ever bored programming. My favorite story about this comes from my first job, in 2000. We were working in C++, and we were turning a program designed to run in one machine into a client-server system, because nobody made machines big enough to run what we needed. The plan to do that involved replacing the old function calls with code that serialized the data, sent it over a wire, deserialized it on the other side, and call the actual function. In essence, a small bit of smart code, surrounded by a lot of boilerplate, slightly different for each function. Months of boredom looming for a team of 5. But I said: Why do all that serialization and deserialization manually? What If I can just read the headers for the function calls, and generate the code that would run it all? Way too hard, our dev lead said: It'll take us longer to write a code generator that read C++ header files than the months of boredom. I disagreed, and asked for two weeks of my time to show it could be done, with less bugs than if we did it by hand. And then when functions changed, all that we needed to do was add a step to a make file, to regenerate the whole thing. Ultimately he decided it was OK to let me try. After all, nobody expected any real output from the guy right out of school, and failure might teach him to respect his elders. But it was all done in two weeks, by one person right out of school, because building a lexical analyzer,a parser, and a simple generator is easy. Instead of a team bored for months, we had fun work for two weeks, and then on to better things, without that dev lead. So if you are doing something long, and slow, and boring, always wonder: Is there a way to just eliminate that entire set of boring tasks? You'll be surprised by how often, the answer is yes.
- gjvc 11y ago
  what happened to that dev lead?
- sopooneo 11y ago
  When you can afford it in terms of budget and timeline, I am a big fan of that sort of "race to the finish" between an elegant approach and a brute force one.
binwiederhier 11y ago
> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process. In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. The primary purpose is to make money and to pay our salary. Now, that doesn't mean that coding can't be exciting or that you're not supposed to have fun. Not at all. But I feel that the author largely fails to see the business perspective. Rewriting things from scratch, adding another language to the overall architecture, using some fancy new technology, etc. are not wise business decisions in /most/ cases. Especially the comment about "using a different language or technology" will lead to a maintenance nightmare in the future ...
- iopq 11y ago
  It's a wise decision if you care about engineers being engaged and liking their job.
  - binwiederhier 11y ago
    I've seen these types of projects where a few developers just went overboard with all the new frameworks and languages. Two years or so later most of them have moved on and other devs are stuck with technologies that are now considered outdated. Especially in the JS world, that's a real scenario. I am all for keeping your engineers happy. Heck I am one of them. "Exciting" can mean "better architecture" or "extensible", but I think that adding a new language is always a bad idea.
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
      > other devs are stuck with technologies that are now considered outdated Isn't that a case of not letting developers rewrite anything? How did it got so outdated? Anyway, the Javascript world sucks. Frameworks shouldn't get outdated in just a few years, and any tech where they do is doing something very wrong.
jasim 11y ago
> In our team, we try and prevent anyone from working on the same code, product or dataset for more than three months. This period is a bit arbitrary and perhaps too short for larger companies. But we generally believe in fast rotations. To contrast, here is Rich Hickey on Mastery: (https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb) A wide variety of experiences might lead to well-roundedness, but not to greatness, nor even goodness. By constantly switching from one thing to another you are always reaching above your comfort zone, yes, but doing so by resetting your skill and knowledge level to zero.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  TL;DR: "I work at a startup that provides aids for learning new things aimed at developers. Here's a 1000 words advertisement." It may very well loving learning as a person, but the whole pice is incredibly onedirectional and single minded. What about build automation? Testing? Deployment of all those unrelated technologies? What about every line of code becoming "legacy" in six month?
logn 11y ago
This is great advice. Much more important than free pizza and foosball. Regarding re-writing micro-services, I would be interested to hear how this turns out for people in practice and how 'micro' these services are.
asveikau 11y ago
Reads like a whiner to me. Gets bored and switches jobs every two years? Doesn't want to maintain anything not written by him when he can rewrite it? These are immature attitudes. I bet his rewrites introduce a ton of new bugs because he hasn't taken the time to understand what the old thing did.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  Why? I'm bored with my job. What is missed is that you get bored with a company because they're treating you like a fixed resource. You get assigned tasks in your area of usefulness, which everybody takes for granted because that's all they've ever seen you do. You ask for time to do useful things like work on the build system or refactor some stuff to use a new language feature, but because your boss is uncomfortable letting you branch out, they ignore you. You might get assigned some busywork documentation while all the real decisions are made after hours and with no input. Essentially, you get bored with a job for the same reasons you get bored with an SO. They slip into a state of taking you for granted.
lordnacho 11y ago
How does salary come into this? You'd think people would be able to stand the boredom a bit better if they got paid more. For instance, I know people in banking who are getting 1200GBP a day doing nothing special in some Java CRUD. But it's not that easy to find something interesting like what you read about in startup land that pays nearly as much.
- osullivj 11y ago
  Blimey! Who's paying 1200 for Java CRUD? I get plenty of agent calls for London banking gigs, and 700 is the top end I tend to hear.
  - lordnacho 11y ago
    Well the agent eats a fair chunk. I suppose you need to be somewhat senior as well. Figures are quoted to me by a PM who oversees some devs in a well known Swiss bank in Canary Wharf.
    - osullivj 11y ago
      Thanks. I have seen four figure contractor rates at a well known British bank on CW for senior team lead devs. And I've got first hand experience of four figure rate cards as a consultant with a "boutique" consultancy myself. I know that day rates for Python contractors at banks and hedge funds are healthy recently as I get a lot of agent calls. I guess it's an effect of two things: firstly, a lot of the banking work is driven by regulation, and so is really boring. Secondly, lots of startups drawing the best devs with decent salary + equity.
edw519 11y ago
OP claims: Too Long; Didn’t Learn Maintaining legacy code is boring. Copy/pasting is boring. Internal tools are usually boring. Being a code-monkey is boring. The day-to-day always gets boring. These things are usually true when you're not building something cool and meaningful. These things are rarely true when you ARE building something cool and meaningful. So... Coding is boring, unless… You're building something cool and meaningful. That's pretty much been the way I've always seen it. Take OP's 6 headlines and add all the other stuff like: workspace equipment boss commute money and I still believe that if you're building something cool and meaningful, you put up with everything else and if you're not, you'll find a million things you don't like. What you build is the issue. Everything else rest are details.
- dmethvin 11y ago
  > Coding is boring, unless… you're building something cool and meaningful. The problem comes when the people doing the coding don't consider the business goal of the software to be cool and meaningful. To everyone but the programmers, it doesn't matter what tech you use to build the solution if it's not solving an important problem. So they start writing a web app with Backbone and then move to Angular and finally React without ever have created a viable product, but they feel good because they are using something that other devs feel is the coolest and most meaningful today.
nitrobeast 11y ago
Fixing bugs in poorly designed/written code is the number one cause of unhappiness for me. Maintaining my own code is fine, at least it is a learning process to see what worked/didn't work in the original design. Instead of letting everyone rewrite the legacy code with a new language/framework, I think the solution should be that each developer needs to maintain the code they write as much as possible. Maintenance work should be properly rewarded and project ownership should be promoted.
hox 11y ago
> A key ingredient here is diversity And all of the employees are white men. Yep. And what evidence is there that this advice is sound? The company hasn't been around for the same length of time that the author says is usually when he gets bored. This is just his rambling train of thoughts on the matter, and what is important to him.
- dham 11y ago
  > The company hasn't been around for the same length of time that the author says is usually when he gets bored This is the problem with some people. They worry so much about the latest technology that they forget to just get stuff done. The company might not even last long enough for engineer turnover. Just do things instead.
- throwaway999888 11y ago
  Apparently white men from four different nationalities, at that.
known 11y ago
> As a developer, I never managed to stick to the same job for more than two years. Ditto here.
- ilurkedhere 11y ago
  Yeah same here. It might be better to design your business assuming you won't keep an individual more than a couple of years.
- lcmatt 11y ago
  2 years > 3 years > 1 year > 1.5 years > 1 year Just started a new job last week too, some cases its been that I haven't enjoyed the agency others its nothing more than the new company offering something better.
dham 11y ago
I really want to build a team someday like this. https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/github-scaling-on-ruby-with-a-nomadic-tech-team-4db562b96dcd#.i4zbftv4o https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/github-scaling-on-ruby-with-a-n... or Shopify. I think it's possible on a Ruby or Python stack. Yes Ruby was a flavor of the month but now its not. I feel like if I hire a Ruby guy/girl now, they might have done it for a while or at least they don't seem to chase technologies. If I built a product on Node, or Go I just feel like that person would be gone in a year when the next thing comes out. I'm sure it happens on the Ruby/Python side but I think probably less.
dannypgh 11y ago
I don't understand how good programmers can have boring work. Any work you have that's not interesting is work that should have be done by a computer for you. If your computer can't trivially obtain and solve the work, the interesting work clearly isn't done. Just using tools or applying well-known solutions to known problems is boring, sure. But that's operational work. I believe our job is to eliminate operational work by building better (at the omega point, fully automated) tools.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dannypgh 11y ago
  Let me walk back that a bit - there's an exception. A good programmer can have boring work if their managers forbid them from building the tools necessary to reasonably do their job. I had a job once that did exactly that; they were happier with the status quo because with the setup they had they needed N hours of programmer time for every customer-feature launch pair. When I showed them how we could reduce it to approximately N hours of work to add the feature to every customer's instance, I was told no, because as it those N hours spent on each client's site were billable hours to the client. In other words, that I was reducing the total work needed by a factor of the number of customers to provide the same value was seen as detrimental to the business. Their business model was broken to the point where it favored operational work over engineering work. Hours spent working were more important than results delivered. I was only at that job for a couple of weeks; pretty much exactly when they told me that they didn't want me to reduce my total workload because of their billing structure was when I decided that I'd be leaving. And I have zero regrets. So, allow me to rephrase: I don't understand how good programmers, given the autonomy they ought to have, can have boring work.
wpietri 11y ago
This is missing my biggest trick: one of my biggest ways of fighting boredom with code is focusing on meaning. E.g., if I'm building a system to serve particular people, I meet them, I visit their offices, I watch them work. I also like watching user tests and taking support calls. Even when some particular block of code isn't technically fancy, I'm not bored by it as long as it's of use to people. Of course, once you start doing this, you're not really a "coder" any more, you're somebody who uses code to solve problems for people. This doesn't fit neatly into some managers' pigeonholes, but I think it results in much better products, so I'm ok with that.
- chemicaloliver 11y ago
  Yes, so much this... I like new fancy stuff as much as the next guy but I'd describe my motivations as 'solving other peoples problems with technology'. That can be done just as easily in a legacy codebase as in a greenfield project.
- chemicaloliver 11y ago
  Yes, so much this... I like new fancy stuff as much as the next guy but I'd describe my motivations as 'solving other peoples problems with technology'. That can be done just as easily in a legacy codebase as in a greenfield project.
orthoganol 11y ago
This is yet another trend following startup employer who doesn't get it. Really good, seasoned talent wants personal freedom (or more money and equity), and having an 'awesome culture' doesn't have to do with that. Culture baits are primarily for 20-somethings out of college who don't know better or have nothing better to do. An example of giving developers real freedom: Let them work remotely for n months out of the year. Yet few will trust developers with real freedom, because it seems too dangerous to most SV startup employers... and there is certainly risk there... But baiting developers with video games, pub trips, and secret cinema is just an extension of constraining said developer's freedom. If they don't care about that freedom, they are either young, in a tough financial position, or aren't top talent.
ercu 11y ago
>A key ingredient here is diversity: hiring people with different backgrounds and origins (e.g. our team of 6 is currently British, French, Russian and Greek). Seeing the same people every day is definitely more interesting if each of these people can brings something different to the culture. That is why remote work exists, so you can change your working environment by traveling to different places and then learn different cultures. That keeps you away from getting bored.
hendzen 11y ago
As soon as he mentioned working with a boring, large scale data integration framework with an annoying DSL I knew what company he was talking about.
rifung 11y ago
I think it's great that the author tries to address high turnover rates by trying to make the company a fun place to work. However, I feel like he's taking the wrong approach. It's certainly true that developers want to have fun, but I don't think technical decisions should be influenced heavily by what's fun but instead by what makes sense. For example, it'd be a lot of fun to rewrite an entire code base in Haskell or some other language I'd like to learn. I'd very much enjoy working somewhere that I could do something like that. On the other hand I wouldn't recommend doing that ever, because it makes very little business sense. In my opinion, a much more reasonable approach to letting developers have fun is to give them more freedom in things outside of work. This could be giving them more free time (every other Friday off or something), or even letting them do personal projects to advance their skills on company time. For example, you could host tech talks where employees teach each other things they learned, and also give them time to learn new things, while on company time. This seems to work better to me because this way your developers have a reason to stay: they will have a hard time finding another company that gives them these perks. On the other hand, you can keep your company's technical decisions influenced by what makes sense as a business. Maybe I'm just very cynical, but work is work, and I understand that while working I need to do what's best for the company, not for myself. In the same way, your employees will stay if staying at your company is what's best for them. Nevertheless, it makes me happy to see a company that tries to make its employees happy. I'm just worried that this method isn't really sustainable for the business itself, and if that's the case then I don't think other companies would follow suit.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I think there's something to be said for the Google model where you combine a good work environment with a time-splitting technique that allows a break from main projects. Many top projects in the company started as someone's 20% time or whatever they called it. Far as the perks, we don't have to go far as Google but a subset could certainly help.
douche 11y ago
That photo of six people stacked up working at one conference table, almost jostling elbows, looks like hell on earth for a working environment.
PSeitz 11y ago
The codebase must be pretty horrible when switching members all 3 months.
overgard 11y ago
I agree with most of the management advice here -- addressing employees engagement and boredom is probably one of the most important things you can do as a manager, and often the fix is simple (new project, new responsibilities, whatever). That being said.. You know that old saying "if you're bored than you're boring"? I think most programmers that like programming are able to keep themselves entertained most of the time, if they feel like they're building something useful. Even things that seem mundane often have their moments. In my experience as a programmer, my engagement almost has nothing to do with tech stack or stale technologies, it has to do with how useful I think the project is, and how much decision making autonomy I've been given in my little zone. I get the impression with there being a new in-vogue web framework every three months and database and whatever, that people are just seeking novelty. Programming has become much more democratized in the last decade, which means a lot of people that wouldn't have otherwise been programmers are involved. That's mostly a good thing, but it makes me wonder if a lot of this novelty seeking is because not-particularly-challenging work is being assigned to people that are not-that-interested.
nommm-nommm 11y ago
I love working on the same codebase for years!
daxfohl 11y ago
This doesn't work in the long-run. I'm an independent consultant and when I was just starting out I had the same thoughts. And it was great to be in full control and always use the latest shiny new things. However I eventually got shiny new fatigue. In the long-run, the real thing I found motivating was completing valuable work for clients in the most efficient way possible. And perhaps that's the true reason OP has found coding boring in the past. Not because of anything he thinks are the reasons, but because he's worked at too many places with inefficient management and poorly-defined projects. If so, new-shiny is only a bandaid on the root problem, and the real solution is to ensure projects are well defined, understood to be useful, and well-managed before a programmer ever even sees it. New-shiny may make it even worse in the long run. AND...microservices??? I can't imagine a scenario where the benefits outweigh the cons for as small a team as he's got. Of course they're all the rage and people get into microservices for all the wrong new-shiny reasons, but escaping boredom has to be the worst one I've ever heard.

252 points by jordanfish 11y ago

> Because 50% of my code (hyperbole intended!) was a direct copy/paste of Stack Overflow. And another 40% was a copy/paste from other scripts. Either my colleagues’ scripts or my own. It became repetitive. And there was little creativity or learning involved. How is this even possible? I've never had a job where copying and pasting code would have helped. It blows my mind every time I read this kind of claim, to the point that I sort of refuse to believe it's true. Are there people who get paid to do things that simple that they can be copied and pasted from Stack Overflow?

jgh 11y ago
He pointed out that it's a hyperbole.
- purpled_haze 11y ago
  It is and yet it's not. If you think about it, most of the code we benefit from each day was written by someone else from the operating system, to the language compiler/interpreter, to the frameworks, libraries, etc. Many developers get their queues about how to use a language, framework, library, or application because they learned how to use it on StackOverflow. Do you really know how much code was written to get to the point where you are sitting there, using all of the benefits of past coding, much of it thrown away to make way for other code for better or worse? All of that code is likely far beyond 50% of what your company has written.
superplussed 11y ago
For the first year or so of learning Ruby and Rails, I did end up copying and pasting alot from SO. In fact, I think I had a streak of visiting SO every day for at least a year, and that wasn't idle browsing, that was "Oh shit I'm stuck, better hit up SO". So now when I hear claims like this, I just assume it's coming from someone that is new enough to a specific technology that relying on SO is necessary for them.
- gotchange 11y ago
  I rarely visited SO for answers and I went through the novice phase like everyone else but I didn't pick the path of least resistance every time I'm faced with a technical problem, because I have a held belief that you can't accumulate knowledge and expertise if you don't polish your debugging/troubleshooting skills and make yourself go through the painful process of solving technical problems on your own without the help of someone else and I could say that help very much in honing my skills.
  - jgh 11y ago
    This thread is killing me. I have worked on a whole bunch of shit that has little to no documentation (SO included) in my career. I have had to figure out a lot of stuff on my own. SO is amazing when it has information that I'm looking for. You know why? I don't want to have to figure out literally everything. I want to save my figuring energy for tasks worth applying it to. So just get the fuckin' job done and do it right and quit pretending you're trying to achieve nirvana.
  - _up 11y ago
    If you write a paper you also first cite what is state of the art. Before you go into details what Innovation you came up with. So researching SO first, before reinventing the Wheel. Resembles more the scientific way of problem solving. You can also learn a lot by reading and understanding all the different solutions that are often given to a Problem. Your time is better used if you solve new problems or find a better solutions than reinventing the wheel and you also learn as much if not more.
    - Scarblac 11y ago
      It's hard to argue much about this because nobody so far said what kind of problem we're trying to solve. But I feel the first step should be going to the documentation of whatever language or library you're using, rather than Stack Overflow. SO will tell you the answer to a single question, the docs usually give some more information (you don't get "use this option", but "here are the options and this is what they do") so the chance is higher that next time, you'll just know the answer. Of course when inexplicable things happen or when docs are bad, SO can be pure gold.
gotchange 11y ago
It always amazes me that there are people out there willing to hire and pay full these type of workers who scour SO for answers without working hard on the problem and expanding their knowledge and expertise in the process. No wonder that our field and profession is suffering from bad image and quality problem when so-called pros copy and paste all the time on the job.
- abdulhaq 11y ago
  When the deadline is tight and you don't have to debug the bluetooth stack to see why it doesn't work on Samsung XYZ on Android ABC, then SO is a godsend.
- sohcahtoa 11y ago
  I think there are two ways to view what the job most programmers do is. IMO it isn't to write code, it's to solve business problems. Code just happens to be the tool that you use to do that, most of the time. Anyone who tries to solve a problem by staring hard at a blank piece of paper instead of just googling the answer is not making effective use of their time.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Indeed. Some would call it lazy - I prefer "leveraging the combined knowledge and experience of all humanity".
  - lubonay 11y ago
    You are missing the forest for the trees. Reaching for Google and SO as your first impulse when confronted with a problem will deteriorate your ability to find your own solutions in the long run. Use it or lose it, as they say. And besides, any non-trivial problem can't be solved by copying code from SO alone.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Most companies don't solve non-trivial problems. For instance, 90% of web development is regurgitating the same CRUD for different customers. Most of the work consists of wiring standard components together in a standard way, and slapping some CSS on top of it. If you're trying to think too much and reinvent too much, you'll waste a lot of time. Source: did too much webdev in my life already, and wasted way too much time doing things by myself.
DennisP 11y ago
Probably because they're just manipulating some crappy, inconsistent API, or a buggy library. Nothing to figure out, just have to find the incantation that works.
FLUX-YOU 11y ago
>Are there people who get paid to do things that simple that they can be copied and pasted from Stack Overflow? Yes, because the reality is that someone has to do it, and a half-assed effort from a developer browsing SO is still better than getting a random Joe off of the street for $10/hr to try it. Not all companies have interesting problems to solve 100% of the time. It's not impossible that your company is trying to solve a problem that the majority of SO questions will answer, because your problem is just that boring. If that blows your mind, you should know there are people that get paid well to do stuff that is a lot more simple than even cobbling scripts together from the internet.
VLM 11y ago
Something no other commenters mentioned (so far) is every programming book starts out with "hello world" and this spread online not just to generic language teaching but into APIs and libraries. Bootstrapping up from hello world is nearly guaranteed to work, write the entire thing first then try it is a recipe for pain.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I would not be surprised to learn that a codebase is 20-50% made of stuff literally copied from SO (with occasional variable name change). Why? Because most work is not that unique. Rare are the jobs where you're building something new in software; usually it's solving slight variations of the same business problem. In particular, people copy-paste a lot of JS from SO, and again, it's no surprise. Most of the web development isn't done by superstar sexy rocketship startups on the bleeding edge of Node.js ecosystem - it's done by small companies employing barely competent programmers, and it doesn't require any innovation. It's just taking the same components everybody uses, configuring them in the same way everyone configures, and wiring them together in the same way everyone does.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  This was true way back when people were trying frame-based programming, 4GL's, etc. The same general components could often get the job done. So, the tools made that easy to express along with code generators to turn them into 3GL code (eg C, COBOL) specialized for the task. Both vendors and businesses developed an assortment of reusable components that became a selling point in time saving. Repeated again in past 10 years with OOP, SOA, micro-services, and so on. Applies to configurations and admin scripts, too, not just code.
lordnacho 11y ago
If what you're building is pretty standard, it might work, especially if there's no performance element. Web type stuff can often be "take this widget and glue it to this page" in which case it's almost directly from SO. Pretty much everything I do requires parts that came from SO, but it's more like I get a bunch of puzzle pieces and then think about a smart way to assemble the big picture. Then there's the profiling and arrangement that only makes sense on my particular codebase. No way to SO that.
laxatives 11y ago
Sounds like many coders from out outside the US and went to a for-profit MS program.
bluedino 11y ago
>> Are there people who get paid to do things that simple that they can be copied and pasted from Stack Overflow? Have you been on SO?
- babuskov 11y ago
  SO had a great year 1, and maybe year 2. You know, when real questions were asked. Now you have beginners asking so simple questions it's both funny and tragic at the same time. Here's the first question in the list when I opened the site today: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33989450/mysql-joins-on-two-table-with-the-same-value http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33989450/mysql-joins-on-t... Yeah. That guy is one of those who just ask others how to to their job and then copy/paste it. Who answers such questions? I have no idea. Probably the guys who are just a step above on the knowledge curve. They probably hang around to ask their own questions, and also find such questions challenging enough to bother providing an answer.
  - rorykoehler 11y ago
    It's a platform for learning. The asker is a beginner. There is nothing wrong with that and someone asking with the intention of learning should never be looked down upon. If you find it so easy why are you even looking at that question? Your google-fu is sub-optimal?
    - babuskov 11y ago
      I'm not looking down on anything or anyone. I'm just analyzing the state of SO today versus the first few years when it started. As for the question, you obviously didn't read what I wrote carefully. I get served a full page of such questions every time I open the site. Finding an interesting question has became a tedious job and that's why I don't even bother to visit the site anymore. Once again, I'm not even sorry about that. It freed a lot of my time - I rarely visit the site, but I'm still ranked in top 2% users, so you can guess how active I was before.
      - 11y ago

huuu 11y ago

For me boredom hits when I'm working on some kind of 'not changing the world in a positive way' project. I believe every project has it's boring parts. But when the goal is positive it helps to get thrue.

to3m 11y ago

I hope that's somebody's living quarters in the photo, and not their office! I've worked at a couple of offices that felt tightly packed, but they were nothing by comparison to that ;) As a long-term proposition, I'd say that table is suitable for no more than 3. (Not sure what official guidelines are, but I'd say you'd need around 150cm x 75cm, or 5' x 2'6", per person. That gives you enough room for keyboard-laptop-monitor depthwise, and two monitors-plus-space widthwise. But the more the merrier, of course... humans are social, but not THAT social.)

vinay427 11y ago
>I hope that's somebody's living quarters in the photo, and not their office! I've worked at a couple of offices that felt tightly packed, but they were nothing by comparison to that ;) That looks like a typical university hackathon to me. Certainly not excusable if it is an office. Thankfully my only workspace (at an internship) had nicely sized desks for everyone, and the company was looking to expand by renting more office space rather than decreasing desk space.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I've been to the offices that look like that - I always assumed it's a typical startup setup. Frankly, I probably wouldn't last more than a week in such conditions - I don't respond well to sharing personal space with other people for prolonged periods of time.
  - walshemj 11y ago
    And doing serious development on lap tops realy! you need some decent 2 or 3 monitor set ups with a nice i7 workstations with some nicer mechanical keyboards and mice. Yes I know you can get docks etc for laptops but its far more expensive for the same performance.
    - mbrock 11y ago
      Need? Depends. I don't. I'm happy with a laptop and a bit of privacy. Different strokes.

S_A_P 11y ago

I don't know. I've been writing c# for years and I still go to SO for things. Sometimes it's even stuff I should know, like creating a text file. However I don't do some of these tasks often enough to remember by heart and it's not an exciting problem to figure out so I go for SO. I don't see a problem with that at all. I also don't get the sentiment that you're not a real coder if you use SO and copy paste code. I don't always have the luxury to figure out which sorting algorithm is fastest for the dataset I'm working with. Sometimes I have to meet a deadline. A great developer is one who writes easy to parse code that is as bug free as possible in the alotted time frame. There are times when it's important to do some r&d and learn more, but there are also times when you need to ship. It really depends on what the task is. You can't paint the whole thing with broad strokes.

nilliams 11y ago
Way I read it the overuse of SO (along with C&P programming) thing was just one example/potential symptom -- he wasn't making a broad generalisation that all SO usage is bad.
- thebouv 11y ago
  I tell employers and employees and co-workers: I'm a good programmer, I'm a phenomenal Googler. I don't have to memorize the best sorting algorithms or how to create a text file in every language I touch. I know how to problem solve, choose the correct tools and search for guidance (note: that doesn't mean straight c&p always but could if it is appropriate) on things that get sticky.

VLM 11y ago

I'd agree with most of the article except the "The day-to-day always gets boring" segment. If you don't like yourself, traveling merely results in not liking yourself somewhere else. If you are boring, going somewhere exciting merely results in an exciting place now including qty one boring person. If you don't like your job, being forced to participate in a hackathon will result in increasing the hatred of the job not loving it. The diversity part especially was racist, all brits are the same, all greeks are the same, there is more to diversity. Note how that section also neatly excludes all potential employees with social lives or family lives outside of coworkers due to the relatively intense level of required coworker socialization, yet categorized that very exclusion as diversity. This is especially striking on a holiday weekend, I had a lot of fun this weekend without a single coworker being involved, not even a phone call, so far anyway. It would suck from a stress standpoint never being able to get away from work, or having to give up holiday family time just to put food on the table. An unmentioned advantage is there is some (ugh) synergy in the two separately described issues of elimination of giant monoliths and rotation of personnel. However, eliminating "can grok the entire system architecture" as a precondition of writing code doesn't mean nobody needs to grok the entire system architecture. One way I've handled "Too Long; Didn’t Learn" professionally is to just fix stuff on a higher level. In the article there is an example of a boring inside tool acting as a "fake-Spark". Well why not just re-implement in Spark? The reason why not might tie into the other paragraph that paraphrases to "micromanagement is not fun", but just job hop until you find a professionally managed company then its all good.

anonyfox 11y ago

I switched jobs a year ago: from a low paid startup job to a company that does project-to-project grunt work for local banks. I (@Hisako1337) learned a lot during the past years, absorbed the whole mindset of Lean Startup, Customer Development and truly agile software development. I taught myself the complete fullstack, from User interviews to SPA frontend dev with advanced SEO, backend development with imperative, OO and functional mindsets (Love Elixir currently!), using different communication protocols (have a degree in distributed systems), and optimize solutions by using appropriate database solutions, from relational to document stores to graph databases. I even learned how to build desktop apps with web tech before it was as cool as today and currently I absorb every piece of machine learning material I can find/buy. Every bit of learning happens in my spare time, because: ... Now guess what I do for a living for my current "FinTech" employer? Bugfixing a decade-old Spaghetti-architecture CRUD PHP app, doing pretty useless projectwork for customers (middle bank management). I'm not allowed to improve things, because stuff might break and of course there are zero tests written. Boredom? I hate every Single hour at work. Most colleauges behave like braindead zombies. But the salary is quite good and I can't move to better job locations. Others here might not believe that situations like described in this articles occur- but really- things can be fairly worse. I'd love having problems that are worth a question at SO, not the trivial gruntwork I'm supposed to do all day, with zero impact for anyone for idiots that have no clue but enough money. Sorry for the rant- this article triggered a wave of emotions...

khaannn 11y ago
This is my life. The ancient codebase that doesn't use Objects because "They didn't see the point" with no unit tests. The pay is more than I could possibly hope to achieve at another employer in this area and, accounting for the cost of living, more than I could hope to get anywhere. I'm attempting to improve the place from within, but the long-term employees are resisting change.

krick 11y ago

Off topic: I don't know a single feature that would be as annoying as fucking toolbar/header/whatever showing up when you scroll upwards. Why everybody does this?

arm 11y ago
I agree, although, it’s not as bad in this case. I find it far more annoying on sites where the header is always there, as it breaks page down / spacebar functionality (when you page down, the header will cover some unread text).
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Makes sense in Facebook mobile app, where you often actually want to use the toolbar (it lets you create a new post). Elsewhere, I don't know. Probably people copying UX solutions from other people without thinking about whether they're needed.

charlieflowers 11y ago

The business exists to make a profit, and it needs to perform financially as well as possible this quarter. That does not always align with what is most interesting for a developer to pursue. So in the short term and medium term, these goals are usually at odds. In the long term, you can find harmony between them sometimes if you try really hard. It's impossible by definition for them to be in harmony all the time. Too bad, but that's reality. Each individual developer has to occasionally re-align them by making a job change.

hibikir 11y ago

I've been programming professionally for 15 years. But I cannot say that I was ever bored programming. My favorite story about this comes from my first job, in 2000. We were working in C++, and we were turning a program designed to run in one machine into a client-server system, because nobody made machines big enough to run what we needed. The plan to do that involved replacing the old function calls with code that serialized the data, sent it over a wire, deserialized it on the other side, and call the actual function. In essence, a small bit of smart code, surrounded by a lot of boilerplate, slightly different for each function. Months of boredom looming for a team of 5. But I said: Why do all that serialization and deserialization manually? What If I can just read the headers for the function calls, and generate the code that would run it all? Way too hard, our dev lead said: It'll take us longer to write a code generator that read C++ header files than the months of boredom. I disagreed, and asked for two weeks of my time to show it could be done, with less bugs than if we did it by hand. And then when functions changed, all that we needed to do was add a step to a make file, to regenerate the whole thing. Ultimately he decided it was OK to let me try. After all, nobody expected any real output from the guy right out of school, and failure might teach him to respect his elders. But it was all done in two weeks, by one person right out of school, because building a lexical analyzer,a parser, and a simple generator is easy. Instead of a team bored for months, we had fun work for two weeks, and then on to better things, without that dev lead. So if you are doing something long, and slow, and boring, always wonder: Is there a way to just eliminate that entire set of boring tasks? You'll be surprised by how often, the answer is yes.

gjvc 11y ago
what happened to that dev lead?
sopooneo 11y ago
When you can afford it in terms of budget and timeline, I am a big fan of that sort of "race to the finish" between an elegant approach and a brute force one.

binwiederhier 11y ago

> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process. In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. The primary purpose is to make money and to pay our salary. Now, that doesn't mean that coding can't be exciting or that you're not supposed to have fun. Not at all. But I feel that the author largely fails to see the business perspective. Rewriting things from scratch, adding another language to the overall architecture, using some fancy new technology, etc. are not wise business decisions in /most/ cases. Especially the comment about "using a different language or technology" will lead to a maintenance nightmare in the future ...

iopq 11y ago
It's a wise decision if you care about engineers being engaged and liking their job.
- binwiederhier 11y ago
  I've seen these types of projects where a few developers just went overboard with all the new frameworks and languages. Two years or so later most of them have moved on and other devs are stuck with technologies that are now considered outdated. Especially in the JS world, that's a real scenario. I am all for keeping your engineers happy. Heck I am one of them. "Exciting" can mean "better architecture" or "extensible", but I think that adding a new language is always a bad idea.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    > other devs are stuck with technologies that are now considered outdated Isn't that a case of not letting developers rewrite anything? How did it got so outdated? Anyway, the Javascript world sucks. Frameworks shouldn't get outdated in just a few years, and any tech where they do is doing something very wrong.

jasim 11y ago

> In our team, we try and prevent anyone from working on the same code, product or dataset for more than three months. This period is a bit arbitrary and perhaps too short for larger companies. But we generally believe in fast rotations. To contrast, here is Rich Hickey on Mastery: (https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb) A wide variety of experiences might lead to well-roundedness, but not to greatness, nor even goodness. By constantly switching from one thing to another you are always reaching above your comfort zone, yes, but doing so by resetting your skill and knowledge level to zero.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
TL;DR: "I work at a startup that provides aids for learning new things aimed at developers. Here's a 1000 words advertisement." It may very well loving learning as a person, but the whole pice is incredibly onedirectional and single minded. What about build automation? Testing? Deployment of all those unrelated technologies? What about every line of code becoming "legacy" in six month?

logn 11y ago

This is great advice. Much more important than free pizza and foosball. Regarding re-writing micro-services, I would be interested to hear how this turns out for people in practice and how 'micro' these services are.

asveikau 11y ago

Reads like a whiner to me. Gets bored and switches jobs every two years? Doesn't want to maintain anything not written by him when he can rewrite it? These are immature attitudes. I bet his rewrites introduce a ton of new bugs because he hasn't taken the time to understand what the old thing did.

jschwartzi 11y ago
Why? I'm bored with my job. What is missed is that you get bored with a company because they're treating you like a fixed resource. You get assigned tasks in your area of usefulness, which everybody takes for granted because that's all they've ever seen you do. You ask for time to do useful things like work on the build system or refactor some stuff to use a new language feature, but because your boss is uncomfortable letting you branch out, they ignore you. You might get assigned some busywork documentation while all the real decisions are made after hours and with no input. Essentially, you get bored with a job for the same reasons you get bored with an SO. They slip into a state of taking you for granted.

lordnacho 11y ago

How does salary come into this? You'd think people would be able to stand the boredom a bit better if they got paid more. For instance, I know people in banking who are getting 1200GBP a day doing nothing special in some Java CRUD. But it's not that easy to find something interesting like what you read about in startup land that pays nearly as much.

osullivj 11y ago
Blimey! Who's paying 1200 for Java CRUD? I get plenty of agent calls for London banking gigs, and 700 is the top end I tend to hear.
- lordnacho 11y ago
  Well the agent eats a fair chunk. I suppose you need to be somewhat senior as well. Figures are quoted to me by a PM who oversees some devs in a well known Swiss bank in Canary Wharf.
  - osullivj 11y ago
    Thanks. I have seen four figure contractor rates at a well known British bank on CW for senior team lead devs. And I've got first hand experience of four figure rate cards as a consultant with a "boutique" consultancy myself. I know that day rates for Python contractors at banks and hedge funds are healthy recently as I get a lot of agent calls. I guess it's an effect of two things: firstly, a lot of the banking work is driven by regulation, and so is really boring. Secondly, lots of startups drawing the best devs with decent salary + equity.

edw519 11y ago

OP claims: Too Long; Didn’t Learn Maintaining legacy code is boring. Copy/pasting is boring. Internal tools are usually boring. Being a code-monkey is boring. The day-to-day always gets boring. These things are usually true when you're not building something cool and meaningful. These things are rarely true when you ARE building something cool and meaningful. So... Coding is boring, unless… You're building something cool and meaningful. That's pretty much been the way I've always seen it. Take OP's 6 headlines and add all the other stuff like: workspace equipment boss commute money and I still believe that if you're building something cool and meaningful, you put up with everything else and if you're not, you'll find a million things you don't like. What you build is the issue. Everything else rest are details.

dmethvin 11y ago
> Coding is boring, unless… you're building something cool and meaningful. The problem comes when the people doing the coding don't consider the business goal of the software to be cool and meaningful. To everyone but the programmers, it doesn't matter what tech you use to build the solution if it's not solving an important problem. So they start writing a web app with Backbone and then move to Angular and finally React without ever have created a viable product, but they feel good because they are using something that other devs feel is the coolest and most meaningful today.

nitrobeast 11y ago

Fixing bugs in poorly designed/written code is the number one cause of unhappiness for me. Maintaining my own code is fine, at least it is a learning process to see what worked/didn't work in the original design. Instead of letting everyone rewrite the legacy code with a new language/framework, I think the solution should be that each developer needs to maintain the code they write as much as possible. Maintenance work should be properly rewarded and project ownership should be promoted.

hox 11y ago

> A key ingredient here is diversity And all of the employees are white men. Yep. And what evidence is there that this advice is sound? The company hasn't been around for the same length of time that the author says is usually when he gets bored. This is just his rambling train of thoughts on the matter, and what is important to him.

dham 11y ago
> The company hasn't been around for the same length of time that the author says is usually when he gets bored This is the problem with some people. They worry so much about the latest technology that they forget to just get stuff done. The company might not even last long enough for engineer turnover. Just do things instead.
throwaway999888 11y ago
Apparently white men from four different nationalities, at that.

known 11y ago

> As a developer, I never managed to stick to the same job for more than two years. Ditto here.

ilurkedhere 11y ago
Yeah same here. It might be better to design your business assuming you won't keep an individual more than a couple of years.
lcmatt 11y ago
2 years > 3 years > 1 year > 1.5 years > 1 year Just started a new job last week too, some cases its been that I haven't enjoyed the agency others its nothing more than the new company offering something better.

dham 11y ago

I really want to build a team someday like this. https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/github-scaling-on-ruby-with-a-nomadic-tech-team-4db562b96dcd#.i4zbftv4o https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/github-scaling-on-ruby-with-a-n... or Shopify. I think it's possible on a Ruby or Python stack. Yes Ruby was a flavor of the month but now its not. I feel like if I hire a Ruby guy/girl now, they might have done it for a while or at least they don't seem to chase technologies. If I built a product on Node, or Go I just feel like that person would be gone in a year when the next thing comes out. I'm sure it happens on the Ruby/Python side but I think probably less.

dannypgh 11y ago

I don't understand how good programmers can have boring work. Any work you have that's not interesting is work that should have be done by a computer for you. If your computer can't trivially obtain and solve the work, the interesting work clearly isn't done. Just using tools or applying well-known solutions to known problems is boring, sure. But that's operational work. I believe our job is to eliminate operational work by building better (at the omega point, fully automated) tools.

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dannypgh 11y ago
Let me walk back that a bit - there's an exception. A good programmer can have boring work if their managers forbid them from building the tools necessary to reasonably do their job. I had a job once that did exactly that; they were happier with the status quo because with the setup they had they needed N hours of programmer time for every customer-feature launch pair. When I showed them how we could reduce it to approximately N hours of work to add the feature to every customer's instance, I was told no, because as it those N hours spent on each client's site were billable hours to the client. In other words, that I was reducing the total work needed by a factor of the number of customers to provide the same value was seen as detrimental to the business. Their business model was broken to the point where it favored operational work over engineering work. Hours spent working were more important than results delivered. I was only at that job for a couple of weeks; pretty much exactly when they told me that they didn't want me to reduce my total workload because of their billing structure was when I decided that I'd be leaving. And I have zero regrets. So, allow me to rephrase: I don't understand how good programmers, given the autonomy they ought to have, can have boring work.

wpietri 11y ago

This is missing my biggest trick: one of my biggest ways of fighting boredom with code is focusing on meaning. E.g., if I'm building a system to serve particular people, I meet them, I visit their offices, I watch them work. I also like watching user tests and taking support calls. Even when some particular block of code isn't technically fancy, I'm not bored by it as long as it's of use to people. Of course, once you start doing this, you're not really a "coder" any more, you're somebody who uses code to solve problems for people. This doesn't fit neatly into some managers' pigeonholes, but I think it results in much better products, so I'm ok with that.

chemicaloliver 11y ago
Yes, so much this... I like new fancy stuff as much as the next guy but I'd describe my motivations as 'solving other peoples problems with technology'. That can be done just as easily in a legacy codebase as in a greenfield project.
chemicaloliver 11y ago
Yes, so much this... I like new fancy stuff as much as the next guy but I'd describe my motivations as 'solving other peoples problems with technology'. That can be done just as easily in a legacy codebase as in a greenfield project.

orthoganol 11y ago

This is yet another trend following startup employer who doesn't get it. Really good, seasoned talent wants personal freedom (or more money and equity), and having an 'awesome culture' doesn't have to do with that. Culture baits are primarily for 20-somethings out of college who don't know better or have nothing better to do. An example of giving developers real freedom: Let them work remotely for n months out of the year. Yet few will trust developers with real freedom, because it seems too dangerous to most SV startup employers... and there is certainly risk there... But baiting developers with video games, pub trips, and secret cinema is just an extension of constraining said developer's freedom. If they don't care about that freedom, they are either young, in a tough financial position, or aren't top talent.

ercu 11y ago

>A key ingredient here is diversity: hiring people with different backgrounds and origins (e.g. our team of 6 is currently British, French, Russian and Greek). Seeing the same people every day is definitely more interesting if each of these people can brings something different to the culture. That is why remote work exists, so you can change your working environment by traveling to different places and then learn different cultures. That keeps you away from getting bored.

hendzen 11y ago

As soon as he mentioned working with a boring, large scale data integration framework with an annoying DSL I knew what company he was talking about.

rifung 11y ago

I think it's great that the author tries to address high turnover rates by trying to make the company a fun place to work. However, I feel like he's taking the wrong approach. It's certainly true that developers want to have fun, but I don't think technical decisions should be influenced heavily by what's fun but instead by what makes sense. For example, it'd be a lot of fun to rewrite an entire code base in Haskell or some other language I'd like to learn. I'd very much enjoy working somewhere that I could do something like that. On the other hand I wouldn't recommend doing that ever, because it makes very little business sense. In my opinion, a much more reasonable approach to letting developers have fun is to give them more freedom in things outside of work. This could be giving them more free time (every other Friday off or something), or even letting them do personal projects to advance their skills on company time. For example, you could host tech talks where employees teach each other things they learned, and also give them time to learn new things, while on company time. This seems to work better to me because this way your developers have a reason to stay: they will have a hard time finding another company that gives them these perks. On the other hand, you can keep your company's technical decisions influenced by what makes sense as a business. Maybe I'm just very cynical, but work is work, and I understand that while working I need to do what's best for the company, not for myself. In the same way, your employees will stay if staying at your company is what's best for them. Nevertheless, it makes me happy to see a company that tries to make its employees happy. I'm just worried that this method isn't really sustainable for the business itself, and if that's the case then I don't think other companies would follow suit.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
I think there's something to be said for the Google model where you combine a good work environment with a time-splitting technique that allows a break from main projects. Many top projects in the company started as someone's 20% time or whatever they called it. Far as the perks, we don't have to go far as Google but a subset could certainly help.

douche 11y ago

That photo of six people stacked up working at one conference table, almost jostling elbows, looks like hell on earth for a working environment.

PSeitz 11y ago

The codebase must be pretty horrible when switching members all 3 months.

overgard 11y ago

I agree with most of the management advice here -- addressing employees engagement and boredom is probably one of the most important things you can do as a manager, and often the fix is simple (new project, new responsibilities, whatever). That being said.. You know that old saying "if you're bored than you're boring"? I think most programmers that like programming are able to keep themselves entertained most of the time, if they feel like they're building something useful. Even things that seem mundane often have their moments. In my experience as a programmer, my engagement almost has nothing to do with tech stack or stale technologies, it has to do with how useful I think the project is, and how much decision making autonomy I've been given in my little zone. I get the impression with there being a new in-vogue web framework every three months and database and whatever, that people are just seeking novelty. Programming has become much more democratized in the last decade, which means a lot of people that wouldn't have otherwise been programmers are involved. That's mostly a good thing, but it makes me wonder if a lot of this novelty seeking is because not-particularly-challenging work is being assigned to people that are not-that-interested.

nommm-nommm 11y ago

I love working on the same codebase for years!

daxfohl 11y ago

This doesn't work in the long-run. I'm an independent consultant and when I was just starting out I had the same thoughts. And it was great to be in full control and always use the latest shiny new things. However I eventually got shiny new fatigue. In the long-run, the real thing I found motivating was completing valuable work for clients in the most efficient way possible. And perhaps that's the true reason OP has found coding boring in the past. Not because of anything he thinks are the reasons, but because he's worked at too many places with inefficient management and poorly-defined projects. If so, new-shiny is only a bandaid on the root problem, and the real solution is to ensure projects are well defined, understood to be useful, and well-managed before a programmer ever even sees it. New-shiny may make it even worse in the long run. AND...microservices??? I can't imagine a scenario where the benefits outweigh the cons for as small a team as he's got. Of course they're all the rage and people get into microservices for all the wrong new-shiny reasons, but escaping boredom has to be the worst one I've ever heard.