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Ask HN: What's likely to suck in any development job?
- potta_coffee 8y agoThere will always be ugly legacy code. There will always be competing interests between departments / stakeholders, etc (Development vs Marketing vs Sales vs Executive). There will always be some shitty person that makes your life difficult.
- k0t0n0 8y agoSome projects never ends. i can't work on long projects i sort of lose interest after some time.
- admay 8y agoIn the same sense, some projects never end because your PO/manager won't let you finish them. I've had a handful of projects that were supposed to make it at least to MVP phase that were just killed at the 60-70% mark.
- Rjevski 8y agoContracting is a good option for this. You move around every 6 months or so which means you don't really spend enough time to get burned out by any single project.
- philwelch 8y agoAlso, every tech stack sucks, and if your tech stack doesn't suck, either you haven't worked with it long enough to get disillusioned or you're not doing anything particularly hard. The grizzled old guys who say that something "doesn't suck" and mean it as high praise aren't just understated cynics; if anything, they're getting swept up in a wave of irrational exuberance. Edit: Also, there are never enough conference rooms.
- cimmanom 8y agoUpvoted just for the conference rooms.
- speedplane 8y agoHa, I don’t even think about tech stacks sucking, I just deal with their suckage as part of the job. If I had the time to make my own stack I would, and it would be amazing initially but probably suck a year or two into it. Kudos to the sucky stacks that managed to stick around.
- nubb 8y agoIf you work at my employer, having to write secure code seems to be the bane of these developers existence.
- seattle_spring 8y agoIn my experience: issue management, because every company has required JIRA for some strange reason.
- bitlax 8y agoWhat is your preferred alternative?
- seattle_spring 8y agoNot sure yet. Asana seems much better. Basically anything that doesn't encourage upper management to enforce unnecessary process. The fact that 2 of the 5 companies I've worked with have had full time jobs dedicated to "JIRA administrator" suggests that it's a majorly overcomplicated solution.
- cam3ham 8y agoyeah... as someone that has used both. Asana sucks.
- arduinomancer 8y agoI feel like Asana is too unstructured last time I used it for a job. For example if I remember it has no issue numbers like JIRA making it hard to reference tasks succinctly.
- philwelch 8y agoYou mean administrating JIRA processes or administering the software itself? Any web app you install on your network is going to need to have someone managing it.
- tomjen3 8y agoSo far I have been pretty happy with Trello, actually. You can configure it as you want. That said, at this point just use the bug tracker that is built-in to your git hosting solution.
- 8y ago
- superfamicom 8y agoYou will get excited by some new technology, but eventually burn yourself out on programming, from doing it all day, to the point of never getting to use that new exciting technology for anything personal. It is very hard to break this cycle, but not impossible.
- he0001 8y agoI would say the tech envy and the closely related “if we use this new technology X we will solve all our problems” instead of actually doing the hard work to be able.
- amai 8y agoPeople much less smart than you will manage your project and will try to tell you what to do.
- amai 8y agoEverybody, including yourself, will always underestimate the complexity of your tasks.
- arduinomancer 8y agoThe worst is when you're in a meeting with a non-technical manager and another developer is like "this task is trivial, I could do it in X hours". It's becomes like a weird intimidation thing where people don't want to argue back because non-technical managers might think you're just slow at development or don't know what you're doing.
- quickthrower2 8y agoTouche. Don't want to lose the reverse auction!
- cimmanom 8y agoTech debt. You’ll never have time to pay it all down and even when you do, it starts accruing again quickly. If you can’t live with a certain baseline level of imperfection, you may want to look for another career.
- sethammons 8y agoTech debt is like real debt. In business it should be leveraged for growth, but beware of interest payments.
- sethammons 8y agoLegacy code and legacy architecture :)
- tomjen3 8y agoMeetings, bosses, limited independence, severe time-drain. The tech is always behind, what should take 1 minutes will take two days.
- speedplane 8y agoBeing too good. There’s nothing worse than being an amazing developer, with bosses without clear visions of what to build. Every project you’re assigned takes you 3 days instead of the slotted 3 weeks and you start getting board out of your mind. Eventually, you start making silly and fun side projects to alleviate the boredom. Eventually your silly side projec turns into a real product, and maybe you have a customer or two. Maybe you quit your job to jump right into it. Maybe it succeeds or fails. The moral of the story: a boring job is the worst but can also be the best.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fulafel 8y ago>> 80% of programming jobs will have you work on something that is not meaningful to you personally or address big problems like climate change, corruption or other significant miseries that plague the world. (It's of course possible to get a job that doesn't have this problem!)
- speedplane 8y agoSometimes working on the smaller problems can be more rewarding than being a drop in the bucket for bigger problems.
- fulafel 8y agoYes, hence the "or" :)
- speedplane 8y agoYour “or” referred to significant maladies. By smaller projects, I’m referring to something smaller than that. Creating a government website as a contractor, allowing folks to communicate across great distances, programming accounting software for a hospital, building test hardware for a racecar... none of these will save the world, but there is plenty of meaning in each, depending on the person.
- detaro 8y agoWhich would clearly fit the part before the or: "meaningful to you personally"?
- speedplane 8y agoFair, my point was only that there are ways of being gratified without succumbing to the cliche of changing the world.