5 ms·

The time, patience and level of enthusiasm required to learn the craft to the level you can develop a piece of software that is well-designed, performant, easy

The time, patience and level of enthusiasm required to learn the craft to the level you can develop a piece of software that is well-designed, performant, easy to reason about and an overall joy to work with is about 10 to 100x what the average engineer is willing to put in. It's a hard career and industry for this reason. We all know the systems we work on are full of subpar choices, design flaws. We all know the delta between what it is an what it could be. But almost nobody can reconcile that gap on their own. And multiply that by entire teams. It's orders of magnitude less likely an entire team is that skilled and enthusiastic. I have three philosophical perspectives that help me better frame the software industry. Number one: People aren't stupid. Rather, things are hard. Number two: Writing software is like doing a trillion piece jigsaw puzzle. Number 3: Software Engineers are like Surgeons, except the twelve years of training is received on the job.

clarry 7y ago
Number 4: there's never enough time. People who could do better are pushed to ship a feature tomorrow because hey it's simple and it can't take more than a day or so, right? And then we have the next feature.. I haven't seen anyone pull off a large code base without ever going back and reiterating on the design and refactoring things as needed in an attempt to try and maintain the qualities we (developers) would want in software. Unfortunately there are too many places in the commercial world where the time for that work is never given.
- de_watcher 7y ago
  "Never enough time" is an artificial construct. Set up a pace that gives you a manageable output, nobody will be able to measure you precisely anyways. Then suddenly you learn to do the right thing ("right" means the one that is not stressing you out) faster. And you're a happy person.
  - collyw 7y ago
    How many managers have you heard giving importance to refactoring or maintenance? (Some pay lip service, but very few actually make sure that its gets done in my experience).
    - clarry 7y ago
      > How many managers Or customers, for that matter. Sucks when there's weeks' worth of reworking guts, refactoring, and testing to be done and you need to bill someone for the time.
    - de_watcher 7y ago
      I don't think that they are the experts in this kind of trade-offs.
- LandR 7y ago
  In my experience the people who have said "I didn't have enough time" if they were given infinite time, wouldn't have done any better a job.
  - clarry 7y ago
    Funny, because aside from some cheap tools and coffee, time is pretty much the only thing a developer needs to do anything. What I've experienced is that in open source projects, patches get rejected and rejected until everyone agrees they're good enough, and sometimes that takes months or years of iteration. Not good enough? Spend more time on it. That's how things improve. Wanna write a test suite? Need time. Wanna run a battery of static analysis tools and inspect their output? Need time. Wanna run a fuzzer? Need time. Wanna document things? Need time. Wanna rework the buggy guts of your application? Need time. Want to figure out the heisenbug that rears its head every once in a while? Need time. Realize the API the guy before you wrote is crap and needs to be rewritten, and all components that depend on it need to be updated to match the new API? Need time. Want to formally verify that the core mechanisms of your critical application are correct? Need time. Need to figure out and rewrite the part of the program that slows everything down to a miserable crawl? Need time. On the projects I'm on right now, I could think of months of stuff to do to get them to a state where I'm somewhat happy with them. Every goddamn thing just takes time and not much else. And IME the commercial world presents the same problem over and over again, far too often: you don't have time, you can't bill your customer for all the work that should be done (if good software were a concern), and you can't block the thing they want just because you first want to fix three other things that'd take a while to do. Crap just accumulates, because people build in a hurry, on a bad foundation. Even open source projects where deadlines and "we sold this as an item that takes three days of work" aren't a thing, time is always a problem because there's only so many people putting hours in.
zer00eyz 7y ago
"Even systems with well-defined architectures are prone to structural erosion. The relentless onslaught of changing requirements that any successful system attracts can gradually undermine its structure. Systems that were once tidy become overgrown as PIECEMEAL GROWTH gradually allows elements of the system to sprawl in an uncontrolled fashion." http://www.laputan.org/mud/ http://www.laputan.org/mud/ There is that old adage "perfect is the enemy of the good", well I would argue that "working is the enemy of the good" as well. When your "average" engineer spends 2 to 3 years at a company how often do they have to pick up the messes they make? Rarely? Never? It doesn't pay to be a good citizen in that case - it pays to be (as another poster pointed out) fast. > The time, patience and level of enthusiasm required to learn the craft to the level you can develop a piece of software that is well-designed, performant, easy to reason about and an overall joy to work with is about 10 to 100x what the average engineer is willing to put in. If software is hard, and average people are not ~willing~ to put in the work to make it less so, doesn't that make them lazy? Willfully and willingly lazy at that. > Number 3: Software Engineers are like Surgeons, except the twelve years of training is received on the job. Look around you,how many engineers do you know who's code you would be willing to bet your life on? The problem is that every engineer thinks they are a surgeon (and a good one at that) when many of them wouldn't even make good nurses.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  It doesn't make them lazy. You're not lazy for not wanting to hike the Oregon Trail. No, it simply makes good systems brutally improbable. Re: Surgeons - precisely the point. A perfect result demands a high level of skill which the average developer has nowhere near. As a result there are lots of casualties.
  - zer00eyz 7y ago
    > It doesn't make them lazy. You're not lazy for not wanting to hike the Oregon Trail. If I walk the 1/4 of a mile flat loop at the park down the street from my house every day and call my self a hiker I would be a liar. Really were talking about Dunning–Kruger, "If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent". I go back to "stupid" as the clear winner, and add in that they are too lazy to get out of that rut (put in the work) and that the title "engineer" becomes a willful or delusional lie. > Re: Surgeons - precisely the point. A perfect result demands a high level of skill which the average developer has nowhere near. As a result there are lots of casualties. To your earlier point, we give everyone with a pre med degree a scalpel and a patient with a traumatic brain injury and say "go" were going to have a lot of bodies. The case is clear that we are far too tolerant of bad code and bad engineers, and we don't have roles like "podiatry" or "nurse" to demote people down to where they can contribute and we can limit their harm.
pmoriarty 7y ago
"The time, patience and level of enthusiasm required to learn the craft to the level you can develop a piece of software that is well-designed, performant, easy to reason about and an overall joy to work with is about 10 to 100x what the average engineer is willing to put in." It's not just that, but the typical company is too busy chasing new features and fighting fires with understaffed engineering teams on constant death marches to unrealistic deadlines. Nobody has time to do things right, though many of us want to. Instead the systems accrete endless layers of bandaids and half-assed solutions which everybody hates but no one has the luxury to fix or solve properly the first time.
- ellius 7y ago
  You need strong engineering management to communicate the business advantages of well-made software. The benefits of good software are exceedingly hard to measure and understand as a businessperson, because design is a lot like risk management: you can't measure the cost of the disasters that don't happen. The only substitute is to communicate thoroughly on the business's own terms and to show examples of payoffs whenever they're tangible enough to make the point.
LandR 7y ago
Number 3: MOst SOftware Engineers are bad at their job, they aren't anything close to Surgeons. This I think is the reason most software nowadays is garbage, there is a lot of low skilled people creating it. I blame bootcamps and dumbed down CS courses for this. It's not necessarily the developers fault, they can't improve on the things they don't know they are bad at.
- nradov 7y ago
  Computer Science curriculum was never intended to produce competent software developers. You're complaining about the wrong problem.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you consider yourself the exception or the rule?

clarry 7y ago

Number 4: there's never enough time. People who could do better are pushed to ship a feature tomorrow because hey it's simple and it can't take more than a day or so, right? And then we have the next feature.. I haven't seen anyone pull off a large code base without ever going back and reiterating on the design and refactoring things as needed in an attempt to try and maintain the qualities we (developers) would want in software. Unfortunately there are too many places in the commercial world where the time for that work is never given.

de_watcher 7y ago
"Never enough time" is an artificial construct. Set up a pace that gives you a manageable output, nobody will be able to measure you precisely anyways. Then suddenly you learn to do the right thing ("right" means the one that is not stressing you out) faster. And you're a happy person.
- collyw 7y ago
  How many managers have you heard giving importance to refactoring or maintenance? (Some pay lip service, but very few actually make sure that its gets done in my experience).
  - clarry 7y ago
    > How many managers Or customers, for that matter. Sucks when there's weeks' worth of reworking guts, refactoring, and testing to be done and you need to bill someone for the time.
  - de_watcher 7y ago
    I don't think that they are the experts in this kind of trade-offs.
LandR 7y ago
In my experience the people who have said "I didn't have enough time" if they were given infinite time, wouldn't have done any better a job.
- clarry 7y ago
  Funny, because aside from some cheap tools and coffee, time is pretty much the only thing a developer needs to do anything. What I've experienced is that in open source projects, patches get rejected and rejected until everyone agrees they're good enough, and sometimes that takes months or years of iteration. Not good enough? Spend more time on it. That's how things improve. Wanna write a test suite? Need time. Wanna run a battery of static analysis tools and inspect their output? Need time. Wanna run a fuzzer? Need time. Wanna document things? Need time. Wanna rework the buggy guts of your application? Need time. Want to figure out the heisenbug that rears its head every once in a while? Need time. Realize the API the guy before you wrote is crap and needs to be rewritten, and all components that depend on it need to be updated to match the new API? Need time. Want to formally verify that the core mechanisms of your critical application are correct? Need time. Need to figure out and rewrite the part of the program that slows everything down to a miserable crawl? Need time. On the projects I'm on right now, I could think of months of stuff to do to get them to a state where I'm somewhat happy with them. Every goddamn thing just takes time and not much else. And IME the commercial world presents the same problem over and over again, far too often: you don't have time, you can't bill your customer for all the work that should be done (if good software were a concern), and you can't block the thing they want just because you first want to fix three other things that'd take a while to do. Crap just accumulates, because people build in a hurry, on a bad foundation. Even open source projects where deadlines and "we sold this as an item that takes three days of work" aren't a thing, time is always a problem because there's only so many people putting hours in.

zer00eyz 7y ago

"Even systems with well-defined architectures are prone to structural erosion. The relentless onslaught of changing requirements that any successful system attracts can gradually undermine its structure. Systems that were once tidy become overgrown as PIECEMEAL GROWTH gradually allows elements of the system to sprawl in an uncontrolled fashion." http://www.laputan.org/mud/ http://www.laputan.org/mud/ There is that old adage "perfect is the enemy of the good", well I would argue that "working is the enemy of the good" as well. When your "average" engineer spends 2 to 3 years at a company how often do they have to pick up the messes they make? Rarely? Never? It doesn't pay to be a good citizen in that case - it pays to be (as another poster pointed out) fast. > The time, patience and level of enthusiasm required to learn the craft to the level you can develop a piece of software that is well-designed, performant, easy to reason about and an overall joy to work with is about 10 to 100x what the average engineer is willing to put in. If software is hard, and average people are not ~willing~ to put in the work to make it less so, doesn't that make them lazy? Willfully and willingly lazy at that. > Number 3: Software Engineers are like Surgeons, except the twelve years of training is received on the job. Look around you,how many engineers do you know who's code you would be willing to bet your life on? The problem is that every engineer thinks they are a surgeon (and a good one at that) when many of them wouldn't even make good nurses.

james_s_tayler 7y ago
It doesn't make them lazy. You're not lazy for not wanting to hike the Oregon Trail. No, it simply makes good systems brutally improbable. Re: Surgeons - precisely the point. A perfect result demands a high level of skill which the average developer has nowhere near. As a result there are lots of casualties.
- zer00eyz 7y ago
  > It doesn't make them lazy. You're not lazy for not wanting to hike the Oregon Trail. If I walk the 1/4 of a mile flat loop at the park down the street from my house every day and call my self a hiker I would be a liar. Really were talking about Dunning–Kruger, "If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent". I go back to "stupid" as the clear winner, and add in that they are too lazy to get out of that rut (put in the work) and that the title "engineer" becomes a willful or delusional lie. > Re: Surgeons - precisely the point. A perfect result demands a high level of skill which the average developer has nowhere near. As a result there are lots of casualties. To your earlier point, we give everyone with a pre med degree a scalpel and a patient with a traumatic brain injury and say "go" were going to have a lot of bodies. The case is clear that we are far too tolerant of bad code and bad engineers, and we don't have roles like "podiatry" or "nurse" to demote people down to where they can contribute and we can limit their harm.

pmoriarty 7y ago

"The time, patience and level of enthusiasm required to learn the craft to the level you can develop a piece of software that is well-designed, performant, easy to reason about and an overall joy to work with is about 10 to 100x what the average engineer is willing to put in." It's not just that, but the typical company is too busy chasing new features and fighting fires with understaffed engineering teams on constant death marches to unrealistic deadlines. Nobody has time to do things right, though many of us want to. Instead the systems accrete endless layers of bandaids and half-assed solutions which everybody hates but no one has the luxury to fix or solve properly the first time.

ellius 7y ago
You need strong engineering management to communicate the business advantages of well-made software. The benefits of good software are exceedingly hard to measure and understand as a businessperson, because design is a lot like risk management: you can't measure the cost of the disasters that don't happen. The only substitute is to communicate thoroughly on the business's own terms and to show examples of payoffs whenever they're tangible enough to make the point.

LandR 7y ago

Number 3: MOst SOftware Engineers are bad at their job, they aren't anything close to Surgeons. This I think is the reason most software nowadays is garbage, there is a lot of low skilled people creating it. I blame bootcamps and dumbed down CS courses for this. It's not necessarily the developers fault, they can't improve on the things they don't know they are bad at.

nradov 7y ago
Computer Science curriculum was never intended to produce competent software developers. You're complaining about the wrong problem.
SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
Out of curiosity, do you consider yourself the exception or the rule?