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Want to know what the true sign of wisdom is for programmers? Realizing that no matter what you're bitching about: marketing, sales, tools, the furniture police

Want to know what the true sign of wisdom is for programmers? Realizing that no matter what you're bitching about: marketing, sales, tools, the furniture police, what have you? It's us. At the end of the day we are our own worst enemies. Folks talk a lot about managing complexity, but it feels a bit too tech-weenie and direct enough for the problem we have. The phrase I've been using is managing cognitive load, because it covers more than making decisions around microservices or null pointers. Our failure -- and hatred -- around managing cognitive load is what keeps taking great organizations and destroying them. What happens if you have 1-5 really smart devs and give them freedom and a problem? You get a solved problem What happens if you keep adding really smart, capable people? You get a mess. Continue this process, you'll have burdensome process, a couple of new frameworks, an architecture team, and more. You'll get a huge amount of really super smart people -- all making a mess and pointing the finger at somebody else for being responsible. After some consideration, I have come to a sad conclusion: most of us in tech do not want to do our jobs. Our jobs are to solve problems for people. After that, it's brutally keeping the cognitive load down for everybody that touches what we do. To put others first in this way and realize we're prone to making things far, far too complicated is humbling. It involves creating simple things that a first-year programmer might make. In short, it's boring. And who wants to be bored? We have met the enemy and it is us.

magduf 8y ago
I think you touched on the problem here, but didn't quite hit the nail on the head. Many problems could be solved by a smart but small team in a pretty simple way, but that doesn't keep lots of people employed. Look at a lot of open-source tools: they're created by one person, or a small team, and when they're done, they're mostly done and that's it; occasionally they'll do a little maintenance work on it, or some small bugfixes or security updates, but overall there's very little work done after the initial release. By contrast, most commercial stuff is hugely complex, and is constantly being rewritten to use new frameworks and other technologies, but this keeps dev teams motivated and employed, and keeps a nearly constant revenue stream coming from customers. Basically, just solving a problem once isn't going to keep large teams of people employed long-term, so people don't work that way.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  Maybe your formulation is better. This is something I've been hitting on for some time. Here's another way of looking at it: how do you know not to do your job? It's a simple question. All true professions like lawyers or doctors, have clear guidelines for when their services are not appropriate. You go ask a doctor to use his medical skills to hurt somebody and they'll turn you down (hopefully!) But not tech. You can throw 100 technology developers at anything. Doesn't matter if the problem is already solved, whether it needs solving or not, whether it's ethical to solve, or whatnot. Doesn't even matter (and this is more to my point) whether you can do it in one line of code or a million. In fact, a million lines would be better! Keeps everybody looking busy. We desperately need better ethics in our profession. Code budgets can help some here, but there's a lot more room for growth.

magduf 8y ago

I think you touched on the problem here, but didn't quite hit the nail on the head. Many problems could be solved by a smart but small team in a pretty simple way, but that doesn't keep lots of people employed. Look at a lot of open-source tools: they're created by one person, or a small team, and when they're done, they're mostly done and that's it; occasionally they'll do a little maintenance work on it, or some small bugfixes or security updates, but overall there's very little work done after the initial release. By contrast, most commercial stuff is hugely complex, and is constantly being rewritten to use new frameworks and other technologies, but this keeps dev teams motivated and employed, and keeps a nearly constant revenue stream coming from customers. Basically, just solving a problem once isn't going to keep large teams of people employed long-term, so people don't work that way.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
Maybe your formulation is better. This is something I've been hitting on for some time. Here's another way of looking at it: how do you know not to do your job? It's a simple question. All true professions like lawyers or doctors, have clear guidelines for when their services are not appropriate. You go ask a doctor to use his medical skills to hurt somebody and they'll turn you down (hopefully!) But not tech. You can throw 100 technology developers at anything. Doesn't matter if the problem is already solved, whether it needs solving or not, whether it's ethical to solve, or whatnot. Doesn't even matter (and this is more to my point) whether you can do it in one line of code or a million. In fact, a million lines would be better! Keeps everybody looking busy. We desperately need better ethics in our profession. Code budgets can help some here, but there's a lot more room for growth.