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It's really sad if you don't strive to excel at your craft. Though I understand that most of the craftsmen don't care about their work, they care about bringing

by dozzie 10y ago

It's really sad if you don't strive to excel at your craft. Though I understand that most of the craftsmen don't care about their work, they care about bringing home a good living.

tyingq 10y ago
It may not be the posters desire to excel...just the reality of what's possible in their current job. I suppose their are job choices you can make the open up more possibilities, but that brings other factors into play, not all of which are easy choices (salary, where to live, career stability, etc).
- pdimitar 10y ago
  > just the reality of what's possible in their current job. Reality is maleable, albeit it's not an easy thing to do, that's a fact. The real question is if you are willing to change your reality -- or are you a coffee-addicted slouch who is always too tired to try and change anything and just wants to go home for a proper sleep after yet another soul-draining workday. Apologies for being a bit extreme. IMO it helps illustrate my point a little better. No offense is meant to you or anyone else reading this.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    No offense taken. I've been where that poster has been though. "If you are willing to change your reality" isn't always as easy as it sounds. I could have easily escaped, for example, if I moved away to a different city. But, I didn't want to uproot my children. I did eventually escape, but there really wasn't a safe way to do so quickly.
marcus_holmes 10y ago
There's a huge difference between excelling at your craft and caring about your work. As a software developer for a commercial organisation, the work is to make profitable software. Profitable does not mean the same thing as elegant. There is a huge amount of skill involved in creating profitable software, because it involves a huge number of judgement calls about what matters, and what will produce the most bang for the least buck. Creating beautiful, elegant, software is easy when there are no time constraints. Beautiful, elegant software is wonderful stuff when it's part of a non-commercial open-source project that we all use and depend on. That's not the stuff most of us write. We write code that's part of a product that a limited range of customers will run, paid for by a limited budget. We very much need to be good at our work, which may well involve writing shitty code quickly if that's the most profitable thing to do. Caring about our work is not the same thing as writing elegant code.
palunon 10y ago
Some domains don't need maintainable code. If you're near the end of the development cycle for a video game, and you need to ship before some date, it doesn't matter if what you write is a cluster fuck. Most of the code is gonna get thrown out anyway, what matters is that the game is in the stores on time...

by dozzie 10y ago

It's really sad if you don't strive to excel at your craft. Though I understand that most of the craftsmen don't care about their work, they care about bringing home a good living.

tyingq 10y ago

It may not be the posters desire to excel...just the reality of what's possible in their current job. I suppose their are job choices you can make the open up more possibilities, but that brings other factors into play, not all of which are easy choices (salary, where to live, career stability, etc).

pdimitar 10y ago
> just the reality of what's possible in their current job. Reality is maleable, albeit it's not an easy thing to do, that's a fact. The real question is if you are willing to change your reality -- or are you a coffee-addicted slouch who is always too tired to try and change anything and just wants to go home for a proper sleep after yet another soul-draining workday. Apologies for being a bit extreme. IMO it helps illustrate my point a little better. No offense is meant to you or anyone else reading this.
- tyingq 10y ago
  No offense taken. I've been where that poster has been though. "If you are willing to change your reality" isn't always as easy as it sounds. I could have easily escaped, for example, if I moved away to a different city. But, I didn't want to uproot my children. I did eventually escape, but there really wasn't a safe way to do so quickly.

marcus_holmes 10y ago

There's a huge difference between excelling at your craft and caring about your work. As a software developer for a commercial organisation, the work is to make profitable software. Profitable does not mean the same thing as elegant. There is a huge amount of skill involved in creating profitable software, because it involves a huge number of judgement calls about what matters, and what will produce the most bang for the least buck. Creating beautiful, elegant, software is easy when there are no time constraints. Beautiful, elegant software is wonderful stuff when it's part of a non-commercial open-source project that we all use and depend on. That's not the stuff most of us write. We write code that's part of a product that a limited range of customers will run, paid for by a limited budget. We very much need to be good at our work, which may well involve writing shitty code quickly if that's the most profitable thing to do. Caring about our work is not the same thing as writing elegant code.

palunon 10y ago

Some domains don't need maintainable code. If you're near the end of the development cycle for a video game, and you need to ship before some date, it doesn't matter if what you write is a cluster fuck. Most of the code is gonna get thrown out anyway, what matters is that the game is in the stores on time...