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I don't get this at all. I've been at this over 20 years and the only times I get "angry" (or more realistically, frustrated), is when the powers that be are ad

by snarf21 10y ago

I don't get this at all. I've been at this over 20 years and the only times I get "angry" (or more realistically, frustrated), is when the powers that be are adamant that the team spend months building a feature that no one wants or has no justification or is the feature we removed two years ago or there is no vision for what we are collectively trying to do. Digging a hole and filling it back in each day is very frustrating and can lead to anger. Programmers do get a dopamine high for solving things, creating things. But for me, this isn't about how genius we are but about making someone's life easier or better or providing real value to the company or customers. Right now, I'm spending most of my time adding features to a web portal/console with the sole intention to reduce tech support and enable scaling. There is nothing hard or genius about it. It is about understanding the real issues and making tools to solve problems. And when I succeed at that, I do get a rush. Yeah, me. Years ago, I worked at a company that had a computer vision based software product. The internal object structure was a nightmare. (Whoever wrote it initially had obvious just read their first OO programming book and decided to abstract all the things!). Each customer project had a configuration file that described all the tests and objects and connections. There were some that took over 45 minutes to load! With a little (2 days) profiling, I could see the biggest time waster. So, I add a map<object,name> to simplify the object connection process. Nothing magic or genius but it reduced the load time to 7 minutes! Not all valuable computer science work needs to be creating a new technique for neural networks. 90% of all things we need computers for is a simple UI and CRUD to a data store. It doesn't have to be genius if done in a way that adds value, then it is worthy of pride, not anger.

ditonal 10y ago
>I don't get this at all. I've been at this over 20 years and the only times I get "angry" (or more realistically, frustrated), is when the powers that be are adamant that the team spend months building a feature that no one wants or has no justification or is the feature we removed two years ago or there is no vision for what we are collectively trying to do. Constantly amazed at how often this has happened to me. The worst is the fake "agile" terminology when you're doing the opposite. MVPs that are neither minimal nor viable nor a product. Two week sprints that stick to the Gantt chart we made 6 months ago no matter what the customers/target audience tell us. Spending more time talking about the work we've done and plan to do than actually doing any. The empire-building as well drives me nuts. We need more people! Don't know what projects they will specifically do, communication and collaboration overhead is already slowing the pace down to a crawl, but we need more people. That way I can say I "led" a large team of engineers on LinkedIn. Wish these people obsessed with "leading" people could all be replaced by people obsessed with leading products. Always amazed me that I could make $8 an hour serving pizza in high school,, but clearly delivering economic value to people, then find so many people in the world who can raise so much money money or headcount and pay me ten times as much so I can deliver absolutely no value to anyone. I know we were talking about how most stuff doesn't make us angry though :) I think I was always above-average intelligence (top 20%) but I don't think I'm close to a genius. Sure, people pay me money to do things and of course many of them could do it themselves if they learned how, that much is obvious to me. I pay a lawyer money but I'm pretty sure I could have become a lawyer, it's not an insult to their intelligence, we all specialized, that's how economics works. I think a lot of programmers get angry because they're young and poorly socialized, my past included. Getting motivated to improve that which can be improved is good. Looking out for yourself and not being a doormat to the sociopaths that VC and management tends to attract is good. Doing the above without getting angry about what is usually trivial in the big picture is best.

by snarf21 10y ago

ditonal 10y ago

>I don't get this at all. I've been at this over 20 years and the only times I get "angry" (or more realistically, frustrated), is when the powers that be are adamant that the team spend months building a feature that no one wants or has no justification or is the feature we removed two years ago or there is no vision for what we are collectively trying to do. Constantly amazed at how often this has happened to me. The worst is the fake "agile" terminology when you're doing the opposite. MVPs that are neither minimal nor viable nor a product. Two week sprints that stick to the Gantt chart we made 6 months ago no matter what the customers/target audience tell us. Spending more time talking about the work we've done and plan to do than actually doing any. The empire-building as well drives me nuts. We need more people! Don't know what projects they will specifically do, communication and collaboration overhead is already slowing the pace down to a crawl, but we need more people. That way I can say I "led" a large team of engineers on LinkedIn. Wish these people obsessed with "leading" people could all be replaced by people obsessed with leading products. Always amazed me that I could make $8 an hour serving pizza in high school,, but clearly delivering economic value to people, then find so many people in the world who can raise so much money money or headcount and pay me ten times as much so I can deliver absolutely no value to anyone. I know we were talking about how most stuff doesn't make us angry though :) I think I was always above-average intelligence (top 20%) but I don't think I'm close to a genius. Sure, people pay me money to do things and of course many of them could do it themselves if they learned how, that much is obvious to me. I pay a lawyer money but I'm pretty sure I could have become a lawyer, it's not an insult to their intelligence, we all specialized, that's how economics works. I think a lot of programmers get angry because they're young and poorly socialized, my past included. Getting motivated to improve that which can be improved is good. Looking out for yourself and not being a doormat to the sociopaths that VC and management tends to attract is good. Doing the above without getting angry about what is usually trivial in the big picture is best.