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>I envy musicians, fiction writers, at least their work gives people joy, and maybe gives them joy as well. Ask yourself this - what qualities do you see in th

by apohn 9y ago

>I envy musicians, fiction writers, at least their work gives people joy, and maybe gives them joy as well. Ask yourself this - what qualities do you see in this work that you admire? Are they things like autonomy, creativity? Which of those are you missing from your work? Do you work with/for people you like and respect? Imagine this scenario. You work as a writer for a huge company called International Book Manufacturing. An exec has just decided the company wants to launch 9 book series on romantic vampire-pandas and they have got funding. This is what happens next. 1). A group of execs and strategy researchers sit down and decide the major themes of these books 2). A group of senior managers narrow down which book get which themes 3). A group of book managers are assigned to each book. They write the major plot requirements for each book 4). A group of principal book architects write out the major plot points 5). A group of book architects define what goes into each chapter and do the outline for each chapter 6). A group of principal book engineers further refine the outlines and define the paragraphs 7). The writers finally get all of this and are assigned paragraphs. You only get to interact with your team, which is people who are writing the same chapter. You have a style guide for what you can and can't do. 8). Halfway through the project, book scientists uncover vampire-pandas are on the way out and ware-koala bears are the new hot things. Major parts of the books are rescoped. 9). When your team is 80% done with your chapter, an editor realizes an important portion of your chapter was not done properly but the person who worked on that has left the company. They scramble to get a new person, don't train them, and have them fix that portion in a completely half-cooked way, which causes major problems when book 4 is started. 8). The company realizes that a competitor is going to publish a 10 book series and the first one is coming out 3 months before yours gets to market. The scope is changed to get your book out the door sooner. Would you enjoy being a writer in this situation? Do any of the qualities you imagine a happy writer/musician has in their work exist in this scenario? Sadly, I imagine there are people who churn out stuff like this (e.g. Mills and Boon Romance Novels, Top 40 Songs) because they have to.

matfil 9y ago
Any idea why the expectation of autonomy for professional programmers seems to be so much lower than for professional novelists?
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  Because novelists who don't already have a proven track record of producing marketable work are producing the work on their own dime and only get paid after they have already produced a financially successful novel. Programmers have the same option, but most choose a guaranteed paycheck over autonomy.
  - apohn 9y ago
    I also wonder if the autonomy novelists have changes when they get famous. Suddenly the success of the book has a direct impact on sales of future books, movies, toys, games, cartoons, the Disney Rides, etc. When there is more risk there are going to be more people trying to mitigate that risk. I think that's true of software as well. When V1.0 of your software has a large install base, lots of things are going to be put into place to make sure 2.0 doesn't cause your customers to run. That decreases autonomy, especially when some of the "management" is really just political nonsense and ladder climbing.
- psyc 9y ago
  Programming makes managers nervous. Their solution is onerous process that mostly keeps the programmers from programming. Imagine if a plumber had a foreman following him around, and every time he tried to touch the pipes, the foreman cried "No, no, don't touch the pipes. You'll break something." A couple of times, I had managers who were stupendously good programmers. They weren't nervous about programming. They didn't care if we went in there, ripped everything up, and set it right again. Managers who don't code well must feel weird. Their responsible for this fragile thing, but they don't know how it works, or what you're doing to it.
davey_the_dog 9y ago
>Ask yourself this - what qualities do you see in this work that you admire? The qualities in he work output is what I admire. I won't deny that if you were a musician at a company that creates elevator music, or a corporate writer compiling a quarterly report, that it could just be as bad as programming for hire. In my very quickly written submission, I wasn't very clear what kind of musician or writer I meant, and I agree this may be an idealized projection. But if you've ever read a novel that at the end you feel a bit lonely, like you've lost a friend, or been moved by a beautiful piece of music, then you'll perhaps see what I'm getting at. Perhaps the artists that created these moving pieces of art had a difficult experience when creating the work. It's common to hear some writers say they hate the act of writing, for example. But at the very least the end product has the ability to create joy in others. As a maintenance programmer working on some horrible ball of mud codebase that all programmers fear to touch, I don't even have that chance. All too often the code is both painful to work on and painful to consume as a user.
- apohn 9y ago
  >But if you've ever read a novel that at the end you feel a bit lonely, like you've lost a friend, or been moved by a beautiful piece of music, then you'll perhaps see what I'm getting at. If you don't mind, here's an anecdote. I used to work in the consulting arm of a typical enterprise software company. The company sold consulting software+consulting hours, and definitely preferred to sell long term consulting projects that typically embedded us in big changes at large non-tech companies. Lots of people, lots of management/stakeholders, etc. For some customers they also sold smaller blocks (e.g. 160 hours) of undefined consulting hours. The customer typically used these when they needed a bit of help. A typical project would be something like "3 Analysts have something that is being done in Excel and is a total mess as a business process. Can you streamline this?" Can you guess which projects I found more rewarding? When I worked on the small projects it was typically me and someone else working directly with the Analysts and I knew exactly what they needed. At the end of the short project they were extremely happy that some small thing we built made their day to much easier. I felt like I had built a relationship with the people I worked with and could directly see how valuable (or not) what I built was. I felt like I mattered to those people. Note that this was not the type of work that made my resume shine or made people envious when I talked about it. Compare that to the big projects where I basically was 1 of 20 bolt tighteners working on a new bridge. Great stuff for resumes and for some press release in a newspaper. But anybody else could have tightened that bolt and I knew it. So the success of the project barely made me feel anything about what I had done. Note that I did work on pointless small projects as well. When a company has consulting hours they have to burn by Dec 31st they can imagine all sorts of pointless ways to burn them. So my point isn't about small vs big, but how connected you are to the impact of what you are doing. Big projects can have big impact, but it's harder to feel that if you are just a cog in it.

by apohn 9y ago

matfil 9y ago

Any idea why the expectation of autonomy for professional programmers seems to be so much lower than for professional novelists?

TheCoelacanth 9y ago
Because novelists who don't already have a proven track record of producing marketable work are producing the work on their own dime and only get paid after they have already produced a financially successful novel. Programmers have the same option, but most choose a guaranteed paycheck over autonomy.
- apohn 9y ago
  I also wonder if the autonomy novelists have changes when they get famous. Suddenly the success of the book has a direct impact on sales of future books, movies, toys, games, cartoons, the Disney Rides, etc. When there is more risk there are going to be more people trying to mitigate that risk. I think that's true of software as well. When V1.0 of your software has a large install base, lots of things are going to be put into place to make sure 2.0 doesn't cause your customers to run. That decreases autonomy, especially when some of the "management" is really just political nonsense and ladder climbing.
psyc 9y ago
Programming makes managers nervous. Their solution is onerous process that mostly keeps the programmers from programming. Imagine if a plumber had a foreman following him around, and every time he tried to touch the pipes, the foreman cried "No, no, don't touch the pipes. You'll break something." A couple of times, I had managers who were stupendously good programmers. They weren't nervous about programming. They didn't care if we went in there, ripped everything up, and set it right again. Managers who don't code well must feel weird. Their responsible for this fragile thing, but they don't know how it works, or what you're doing to it.

davey_the_dog 9y ago

>Ask yourself this - what qualities do you see in this work that you admire? The qualities in he work output is what I admire. I won't deny that if you were a musician at a company that creates elevator music, or a corporate writer compiling a quarterly report, that it could just be as bad as programming for hire. In my very quickly written submission, I wasn't very clear what kind of musician or writer I meant, and I agree this may be an idealized projection. But if you've ever read a novel that at the end you feel a bit lonely, like you've lost a friend, or been moved by a beautiful piece of music, then you'll perhaps see what I'm getting at. Perhaps the artists that created these moving pieces of art had a difficult experience when creating the work. It's common to hear some writers say they hate the act of writing, for example. But at the very least the end product has the ability to create joy in others. As a maintenance programmer working on some horrible ball of mud codebase that all programmers fear to touch, I don't even have that chance. All too often the code is both painful to work on and painful to consume as a user.

apohn 9y ago
>But if you've ever read a novel that at the end you feel a bit lonely, like you've lost a friend, or been moved by a beautiful piece of music, then you'll perhaps see what I'm getting at. If you don't mind, here's an anecdote. I used to work in the consulting arm of a typical enterprise software company. The company sold consulting software+consulting hours, and definitely preferred to sell long term consulting projects that typically embedded us in big changes at large non-tech companies. Lots of people, lots of management/stakeholders, etc. For some customers they also sold smaller blocks (e.g. 160 hours) of undefined consulting hours. The customer typically used these when they needed a bit of help. A typical project would be something like "3 Analysts have something that is being done in Excel and is a total mess as a business process. Can you streamline this?" Can you guess which projects I found more rewarding? When I worked on the small projects it was typically me and someone else working directly with the Analysts and I knew exactly what they needed. At the end of the short project they were extremely happy that some small thing we built made their day to much easier. I felt like I had built a relationship with the people I worked with and could directly see how valuable (or not) what I built was. I felt like I mattered to those people. Note that this was not the type of work that made my resume shine or made people envious when I talked about it. Compare that to the big projects where I basically was 1 of 20 bolt tighteners working on a new bridge. Great stuff for resumes and for some press release in a newspaper. But anybody else could have tightened that bolt and I knew it. So the success of the project barely made me feel anything about what I had done. Note that I did work on pointless small projects as well. When a company has consulting hours they have to burn by Dec 31st they can imagine all sorts of pointless ways to burn them. So my point isn't about small vs big, but how connected you are to the impact of what you are doing. Big projects can have big impact, but it's harder to feel that if you are just a cog in it.