7 ms·

Engineers need to be kept happy. Some like tech, some money. It's a personal preference. Businessses need to deliver in-time and also profit, or they just need

by CSDude 6y ago

Engineers need to be kept happy. Some like tech, some money. It's a personal preference. Businessses need to deliver in-time and also profit, or they just need to be stable. Choosing exciting can be a tech-debt, or it can remove tech debt. Boring can be stable, but can be soul-crushing. Exciting & Boring is not mutually exclusive. They can co-exist. Engineer excitement and Business continuation must be kept in balance. Generalization is not helpful. As an engineer or business, or in general a sensible person, you must always do pros and cons without bias. Thanks for comimng to my TED Talk.

amw-zero 6y ago
What is this idea that “engineers need to be kept happy?” Are programmers children that we need to entertain in order for them to do their job?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- idorosen 6y ago
  They’re professionals whose decisions and input companies must afford the appropriate amount of consideration, and whose professional development companies must also respect to be competitive in the hiring market. These tech choices are usually contextual, and that context includes business factors such as continuity and retention, which present a trade off. That is a compressed version of the GP post.
- killingtime74 6y ago
  Yes. It’s called job satisfaction. Also you don’t have to if you’re willing to pay more
- bsenftner 6y ago
  In many cases, in some industries: yes. When working in media production, it does not matter if the media being produced is feature films, feature animated films, a TV series, an animated TV series, or a AAA to C level video game production - the software developers, digital artists, and line producers are ready to quit or reduce productivity to a trickle at the drop of a hat if they sense the production will not be a commercial success and not grant them social bragging rights. Yes, this sounds completely absurd, until you are in the media production industries and see it happening. It's an entitled attitude, but getting the line workers to see it that way is not gonna happen.
  - username90 6y ago
    > It's an entitled attitude, but getting the line workers to see it that way is not gonna happen. Not it is not. Knowing you can get a better job elsewhere and therefore going elsewhere is not entitlement. Thinking that workers who are unhappy and can get a better job elsewhere shouldn't leave is entitlement.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    >It's an entitled attitude, but getting the line workers to see it that way is not gonna happen. Why is entitled to act like you owe nothing to your employer when they would fire you on the drop of a hat if it made them more money?
    - amw-zero 6y ago
      A business is founded on reciprocity. If you really provide value, you won't get fired to save 5 dollars.
      - borski 6y ago
        That’s simply not always true, due to a lot of mitigating factors; bad bosses, jealous bosses, sexist bosses, layoffs, etc.
      - username90 6y ago
        If the company really provides value the employee wont leave just to work on a new framework. If your employee leaves you simply didn't provide enough value to them.
- ratww 6y ago
  Employees need to be kept happy, otherwise they leave and the company has to spend more money hiring and training a replacement. The alternative to this is offering more money, which isn’t even guaranteed to work.
  - throw14082020 6y ago
    I disagree that employees need to be kept happy. The confident/ well informed ones do if you want them to stay, because they will go spend the extra time to leave and find another job. But I've been in jobs where developers are clearly not happy, but they put up with it. So the point is, you will brain drain your company if you don't make developers happy. I was initially gonna say "Good" in place of "confident/ well informed", but I'm sure some developers who are good simply don't know there are better places out for them.
    - username90 6y ago
      Sounds like you'd easily get the dead sea effect if you manage teams like that.
      - throw14082020 6y ago
        Yes thats what I was trying to explain. I didn't know the name was dead sea effect. I don't recommend doing this, I just mean employees don't "need" to be kept happy, many companies exist like this, and some do quite well financially. I guess the dead sea effect doesn't always happen.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      Eventually the confident/well informed ones will start sniping the goods ones for the new companies they're at.
    - bluefirebrand 6y ago
      > I disagree that employees need to be kept happy Are you my old manager?
  - 6y ago
- chousuke 6y ago
  Happy people are more creative, and most engineering is definitely creative work. If most of your work is engaging or satisfying, it's easier to drudge through the bad bits. It's not like physical work where you can just keep doing it and it'll resolve itself eventually; it is entirely possible to keep hitting your head against an engineering problem forever without making any progress if your brain just refuses to make the correct connections, and it's really difficult to tell if you're making progress or not. In general, all people deserve to be kept happy, so removing barriers to happiness is nearly always a good thing.
- CSDude 6y ago
  Happiness does not equal to entertainment. It's called job satisfaction, not specific to engineers. Multiple factors can satisfy you. Pay is one of them. Some engineers can also take less pay in exchange for use of shiny tech because boring tech can be very demaning. But that's not always the case. In either case, one need to be happy with job to continue right? Or else one can find another job if they are not happy with pay, organization, food, location, ethics, abuse etc. It's not 1-dimensional.
- karlicoss 6y ago
  You don't have to be happy to do your job, but I wish everyone was
  - amw-zero 6y ago
    Yes, I wish for a lot of things.
    - username90 6y ago
      If you wish to be happy at your job why wouldn't you leave if you are unhappy?
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Contrary to what some seem to think, for most people, getting a new well-paying job isn't a matter of sending a couple of emails and starting somewhere else for the same or more money the following Monday. I've been unhappy, for certain values of unhappy, for periods at probably every one of the handful of jobs I've had over the years. I've either worked through it or I've switched jobs. But it's never been something I've done casually.
        username90 6y ago
        Yeah, you don't have to make people without options happy, you are right. But I wouldn't want to work at a company that accumulates engineers without options.
- rualca 6y ago
  > What is this idea that “engineers need to be kept happy?” Are you honestly asking why people who happen to have a profession need to be happy? And what's this idea that happiness is something that is only desirable in children? Do you honestly believe everyone should be cursed to die inside once they enter adulthood? A healthy society is a society where happiness is not an abnormality, but the norm.
  - amw-zero 6y ago
    I'm not against happiness. Read the wording of that statement: "Engineers need to be kept happy." This is a statement rooted in fear - that if you don't entertain programmers with things that they enjoy, they will leave. Does that not sound like how you'd approach a child who you fear will have a tantrum if you don't give them a lollipop? I'm saying, programmers also need to take pride and satisfaction in the contribution they make to a business. Focusing on the business outcomes that you contribute to is more satisfying than getting to use React at work, or whatever it is you think will keep you "happy." I'm talking specifically about the idea that programmers conflate tech stacks with happiness, not happiness in general. I would hope that was clear.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      A lot of people are missing a nuance. Should employees take satisfaction in what they creating, what the business is selling to customers, and how they're advancing in their careers/learning? Of course. Does that mean that the business should allow developers to indulge in whatever resume-driven development decisions they feel like lest they burst into tears? No. There are various comments in the thread about people who get bored after a few months because they have to do code maintenance.
      - username90 6y ago
        > There are various comments in the thread about people who get bored after a few months because they have to do code maintenance. There is nothing wrong with getting bored by maintenance work. If you have that kind of work then hire boring engineers who will do whatever as long as you give them money, but don't say that all engineers needs to be happy with that kind of work.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  More generally "all employees need to be kept happy", does that satisfy you? Turnover is expensive, employee retention is a generally important goal for successful companies.
  - refenestrator 6y ago
    The engineer pushing to rewrite in haskell or whatever is also a particularly high risk to leave when it's "done" and saddle you with it, though.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      "Keep engineers happy" is not the same thing as "let engineers do whatever the hell they want".
      - ghaff 6y ago
        It's not. But there are definitely people commenting who, for them, seem to feel that "happy" equals, at least in part, playing with cool new stuff. Which is obviously a valid preference. They just shouldn't be surprised if most companies won't be open to people flitting from thing to thing, getting bored every few months.
- simias 6y ago
  Considering caring for the happiness of your employees (or really people in general) to be infantilizing is a pretty toxic mindset IMO. I WANT MY JOB SOUL CRUSHING BECAUSE I'M A REAL MAN. Happiness and entertainment are not the same thing. Most of us spend a huge portion of our life working, we might as well try to make it at least a little bit fulfilling instead of just a way to fund the two days of the week when you can do something else. And more cynically happy people will almost certainly work better. Have you never taken much more time than necessary to complete a task just because it was so incredibly dull, tedious and uninteresting? Bugtrackers are filled with issues that would require two lines of code to fix but nobody can be bothered to write them.
  - amw-zero 6y ago
    I'm obviously not saying that you should purposefully treat employees like garbage. The parent comment's tone was as if a business needs to beg for workers, and to make sure that programmers are kept happy with fancy and trendy technology. This is what's toxic and infantilizing. We are all a part of a business for one purpose - to continue or increase the success of the business. For me, a job has to be reciprocal. I take my salary very seriously, and I reflect on what I've done in the past pay period. I want to make sure that I've provided that amount of value in that amount of time. Of course my feelings are important, I'm not going to contribute to an environment that doesn't reciprocate the value that I provide with some combination of compensation and gratitude. My point is, I hear a lot of programmers talk about the feelings of the business with disdain, and frankly complete entitlement. I've seen plenty of engineers not contribute their fair share value to the business side - they think they earn their living by showing up and completing a couple of tickets a week, when in reality the business needs are much more demanding. The ideal working relationship is reciprocal - both parties get some satisfying bit of value out of it.
    - username90 6y ago
      > The parent comment's tone was as if a business needs to beg for workers, and to make sure that programmers are kept happy with fancy and trendy technology. This is what's toxic and infantilizing. That was just your interpretation. The parent commenter said that some engineers are motivated by money and some by new tech. Either way you need to keep workers happy or they will leave, that is just common sense. So if you choose boring technology you will get people motivated by money and not the "infant" engineers who "need toys" as you say. But really they don't "need" the toys, they just prefer it and will therefore leave if someone else gives them that when you don't.
- bottled_poe 6y ago
  I think this phenomenon is a temporary luxury that arises due to the high demand for skills and relative immaturity of the discipline.
- atleta 6y ago
  Nope. Their are humans. And (seeking) happiness is one of the most powerful motivators (if not THE most powerful one) for such beings. Also, happy people just produce better results. Especially if the way for them to achieve happiness is the route to better results. If you just want your coal mined, happiness of your workers may not matter much. As soon as you want quality output from any intellectual worker it will start to matter. (Though I'm pretty sure that it's true for any job with any level of autonomy and creativity needed, even if it's manual labour.)
- satyrnein 6y ago
  It's a reality that retaining developers in the US sometimes involves indulging their pet projects despite negative expected value. In other parts of the world, many capable developers are happy to just have reliable, reasonably paid work. There may be a correction coming.
- mikewarot 6y ago
  I'd be quite happy to show up, build something, and then keep it producing value for customers for decades with as little time and effort for all the humans involved as possible. As long as there is a way to quantify that value, it could be incentivized, boring systems should be the most profitable.
- fmajid 6y ago
  There is that, but mostly the concern of many engineers is that they need to stay buzzword-compliant to have a marketable resume, otherwise they risk career stagnation. It's an indictment of hiring managers, and to an extent a self-fulfilling prophecy, but we all know the best technology does not always win in the marketplace.
- dathinab 6y ago
  It's more about avoiding avoiding negative emotions being associated with the work in a way which does hamper productivity. Software Development is that strange split between clear defined engineering aspects and creativity aspects which are often as important. I have seen major problems in projects due to developers being dissatisfied and annoyed with the tools they can use. The problem was twofold - first it was not that they couldn't use the newest exiting tools, but that the tools they had to use had horrible UX making them unnecessary hard to use. Like if you tell someone they have to now turn pages of an book with a fork instead of their hands. - The other problem was that one person involved had a fixed view about what is good and in their view must be done and nothing else is good and doing something else is always stupid and as such in their view their work is stupid and worthless and as such they don't want to do that at all as it's just a pointless wast of time which will be discarded in the future anyway... Which is quite a bad approach to your job, tbh. And caused some massive problems later on.
- ozim 6y ago
  Well yes, because next funky startup doing Z is going to take them away unless you pay them much more to stay with you. All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; Players stay in the game as long as it is fun.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  If I have to do a Magento project I charge double. If I knew COBOL I would charge even more. Simply put, if the job is not enjoyable I'd rather look for an enjoyable job or ask more money until it's worth it. The market still favours developers and finding a job is pretty easy, so developers have all the incentive to look for a fulfilling position, while it lasts.
- joana035 6y ago
  Yes, and everything is "painful" and frustrating.
egeozcan 6y ago
> Exciting & Boring is not mutually exclusive Yeah the confusion is caused by people meaning stable & tested when they say boring, as they find most of the stuff that excites people not suitable for production use. There's still a lot remaining though, when you filter out the unstable and untested stuff. I strongly agree with this.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  Boring is also implies popular as it lowers downside risk. It also lowers upside potential but that's the bet being made.
BlargMcLarg 6y ago
Exciting and boring are antonyms of one another, though.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  As a different poster mentioned, "Boring" in this case is being used to mean "stable and tested" or more simply "reliable" A formula 1 car is certainly reliable, and certainly exciting to drive.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Yes, they are antonyms. But the real world is multi-dimensional.
chousuke 6y ago
Personally, I am excited (or satisfied) by systems that work, up to and including the processes required to keep it "in motion". The technology used is secondary as long as its properties and risks are understood and accounted for and you can work with it without having to double-check every little thing with the business owners or clients. Sometimes things break, but in a "good" system, some breakage is expected, and the risk of breakage is not minimized by being fearful of change, but by having monitoring, redundancy and checks in place to keep the change controlled and the impact of faults within agreed boundaries.
- gaogao 6y ago
  Tech that's excitingly boring is great! >>> npm’s first Rust program hasn't caused any alerts in its year and a half in production. "My biggest compliment to Rust is that it's boring," offered Dickinson, "and this is an amazing compliment." The process of deploying the new Rust service was straightforward, and soon they were able to forget about the Rust service because it caused so few operational issues. At npm, the usual experience of deploying a JavaScript service to production was that the service would need extensive monitoring for errors and excessive resource usage necessitating debugging and restarts
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    That's actually what I'd call Elixir. "Excitingly boring". Built atop a runtime environment that is 35 years old, battle tested, and built for reliability in distributed and concurrent environments, but feeling like a modern, expressive language, with clever ideas that most other languages don't have.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      I'm using Elixir professionally for 4.5 years and Rust for 2.5. What you and the patent poster said applies to both.
      - lostcolony 6y ago
MikeDelta 6y ago
I agree that the very talented engineers need to be challenged and kept happy, but with a balance: sometimes stuff needs to get done and somebody will have to do it. The other thing one needs to be careful of is if they start challenging themselves by writing very complex and difficult to maintain code.
bayindirh 6y ago
You can do exciting things using boring technology and vice versa. I personally enjoy breaking new ground, and the tools I use are not important. Doing more exciting stuff with older tools is also somewhat more satisfying, at least for me.

by CSDude 6y ago

amw-zero 6y ago

What is this idea that “engineers need to be kept happy?” Are programmers children that we need to entertain in order for them to do their job?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
idorosen 6y ago
They’re professionals whose decisions and input companies must afford the appropriate amount of consideration, and whose professional development companies must also respect to be competitive in the hiring market. These tech choices are usually contextual, and that context includes business factors such as continuity and retention, which present a trade off. That is a compressed version of the GP post.
killingtime74 6y ago
Yes. It’s called job satisfaction. Also you don’t have to if you’re willing to pay more
bsenftner 6y ago
In many cases, in some industries: yes. When working in media production, it does not matter if the media being produced is feature films, feature animated films, a TV series, an animated TV series, or a AAA to C level video game production - the software developers, digital artists, and line producers are ready to quit or reduce productivity to a trickle at the drop of a hat if they sense the production will not be a commercial success and not grant them social bragging rights. Yes, this sounds completely absurd, until you are in the media production industries and see it happening. It's an entitled attitude, but getting the line workers to see it that way is not gonna happen.
- username90 6y ago
  > It's an entitled attitude, but getting the line workers to see it that way is not gonna happen. Not it is not. Knowing you can get a better job elsewhere and therefore going elsewhere is not entitlement. Thinking that workers who are unhappy and can get a better job elsewhere shouldn't leave is entitlement.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >It's an entitled attitude, but getting the line workers to see it that way is not gonna happen. Why is entitled to act like you owe nothing to your employer when they would fire you on the drop of a hat if it made them more money?
  - amw-zero 6y ago
    A business is founded on reciprocity. If you really provide value, you won't get fired to save 5 dollars.
    - borski 6y ago
      That’s simply not always true, due to a lot of mitigating factors; bad bosses, jealous bosses, sexist bosses, layoffs, etc.
    - username90 6y ago
      If the company really provides value the employee wont leave just to work on a new framework. If your employee leaves you simply didn't provide enough value to them.
ratww 6y ago
Employees need to be kept happy, otherwise they leave and the company has to spend more money hiring and training a replacement. The alternative to this is offering more money, which isn’t even guaranteed to work.
- throw14082020 6y ago
  I disagree that employees need to be kept happy. The confident/ well informed ones do if you want them to stay, because they will go spend the extra time to leave and find another job. But I've been in jobs where developers are clearly not happy, but they put up with it. So the point is, you will brain drain your company if you don't make developers happy. I was initially gonna say "Good" in place of "confident/ well informed", but I'm sure some developers who are good simply don't know there are better places out for them.
  - username90 6y ago
    Sounds like you'd easily get the dead sea effect if you manage teams like that.
    - throw14082020 6y ago
      Yes thats what I was trying to explain. I didn't know the name was dead sea effect. I don't recommend doing this, I just mean employees don't "need" to be kept happy, many companies exist like this, and some do quite well financially. I guess the dead sea effect doesn't always happen.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Eventually the confident/well informed ones will start sniping the goods ones for the new companies they're at.
  - bluefirebrand 6y ago
    > I disagree that employees need to be kept happy Are you my old manager?
- 6y ago
chousuke 6y ago
Happy people are more creative, and most engineering is definitely creative work. If most of your work is engaging or satisfying, it's easier to drudge through the bad bits. It's not like physical work where you can just keep doing it and it'll resolve itself eventually; it is entirely possible to keep hitting your head against an engineering problem forever without making any progress if your brain just refuses to make the correct connections, and it's really difficult to tell if you're making progress or not. In general, all people deserve to be kept happy, so removing barriers to happiness is nearly always a good thing.
CSDude 6y ago
Happiness does not equal to entertainment. It's called job satisfaction, not specific to engineers. Multiple factors can satisfy you. Pay is one of them. Some engineers can also take less pay in exchange for use of shiny tech because boring tech can be very demaning. But that's not always the case. In either case, one need to be happy with job to continue right? Or else one can find another job if they are not happy with pay, organization, food, location, ethics, abuse etc. It's not 1-dimensional.
karlicoss 6y ago
You don't have to be happy to do your job, but I wish everyone was
- amw-zero 6y ago
  Yes, I wish for a lot of things.
  - username90 6y ago
    If you wish to be happy at your job why wouldn't you leave if you are unhappy?
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Contrary to what some seem to think, for most people, getting a new well-paying job isn't a matter of sending a couple of emails and starting somewhere else for the same or more money the following Monday. I've been unhappy, for certain values of unhappy, for periods at probably every one of the handful of jobs I've had over the years. I've either worked through it or I've switched jobs. But it's never been something I've done casually.
      - username90 6y ago
        Yeah, you don't have to make people without options happy, you are right. But I wouldn't want to work at a company that accumulates engineers without options.
rualca 6y ago
> What is this idea that “engineers need to be kept happy?” Are you honestly asking why people who happen to have a profession need to be happy? And what's this idea that happiness is something that is only desirable in children? Do you honestly believe everyone should be cursed to die inside once they enter adulthood? A healthy society is a society where happiness is not an abnormality, but the norm.
- amw-zero 6y ago
  I'm not against happiness. Read the wording of that statement: "Engineers need to be kept happy." This is a statement rooted in fear - that if you don't entertain programmers with things that they enjoy, they will leave. Does that not sound like how you'd approach a child who you fear will have a tantrum if you don't give them a lollipop? I'm saying, programmers also need to take pride and satisfaction in the contribution they make to a business. Focusing on the business outcomes that you contribute to is more satisfying than getting to use React at work, or whatever it is you think will keep you "happy." I'm talking specifically about the idea that programmers conflate tech stacks with happiness, not happiness in general. I would hope that was clear.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    A lot of people are missing a nuance. Should employees take satisfaction in what they creating, what the business is selling to customers, and how they're advancing in their careers/learning? Of course. Does that mean that the business should allow developers to indulge in whatever resume-driven development decisions they feel like lest they burst into tears? No. There are various comments in the thread about people who get bored after a few months because they have to do code maintenance.
    - username90 6y ago
      > There are various comments in the thread about people who get bored after a few months because they have to do code maintenance. There is nothing wrong with getting bored by maintenance work. If you have that kind of work then hire boring engineers who will do whatever as long as you give them money, but don't say that all engineers needs to be happy with that kind of work.
bluefirebrand 6y ago
More generally "all employees need to be kept happy", does that satisfy you? Turnover is expensive, employee retention is a generally important goal for successful companies.
- refenestrator 6y ago
  The engineer pushing to rewrite in haskell or whatever is also a particularly high risk to leave when it's "done" and saddle you with it, though.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    "Keep engineers happy" is not the same thing as "let engineers do whatever the hell they want".
    - ghaff 6y ago
      It's not. But there are definitely people commenting who, for them, seem to feel that "happy" equals, at least in part, playing with cool new stuff. Which is obviously a valid preference. They just shouldn't be surprised if most companies won't be open to people flitting from thing to thing, getting bored every few months.
simias 6y ago
Considering caring for the happiness of your employees (or really people in general) to be infantilizing is a pretty toxic mindset IMO. I WANT MY JOB SOUL CRUSHING BECAUSE I'M A REAL MAN. Happiness and entertainment are not the same thing. Most of us spend a huge portion of our life working, we might as well try to make it at least a little bit fulfilling instead of just a way to fund the two days of the week when you can do something else. And more cynically happy people will almost certainly work better. Have you never taken much more time than necessary to complete a task just because it was so incredibly dull, tedious and uninteresting? Bugtrackers are filled with issues that would require two lines of code to fix but nobody can be bothered to write them.
- amw-zero 6y ago
  I'm obviously not saying that you should purposefully treat employees like garbage. The parent comment's tone was as if a business needs to beg for workers, and to make sure that programmers are kept happy with fancy and trendy technology. This is what's toxic and infantilizing. We are all a part of a business for one purpose - to continue or increase the success of the business. For me, a job has to be reciprocal. I take my salary very seriously, and I reflect on what I've done in the past pay period. I want to make sure that I've provided that amount of value in that amount of time. Of course my feelings are important, I'm not going to contribute to an environment that doesn't reciprocate the value that I provide with some combination of compensation and gratitude. My point is, I hear a lot of programmers talk about the feelings of the business with disdain, and frankly complete entitlement. I've seen plenty of engineers not contribute their fair share value to the business side - they think they earn their living by showing up and completing a couple of tickets a week, when in reality the business needs are much more demanding. The ideal working relationship is reciprocal - both parties get some satisfying bit of value out of it.
  - username90 6y ago
    > The parent comment's tone was as if a business needs to beg for workers, and to make sure that programmers are kept happy with fancy and trendy technology. This is what's toxic and infantilizing. That was just your interpretation. The parent commenter said that some engineers are motivated by money and some by new tech. Either way you need to keep workers happy or they will leave, that is just common sense. So if you choose boring technology you will get people motivated by money and not the "infant" engineers who "need toys" as you say. But really they don't "need" the toys, they just prefer it and will therefore leave if someone else gives them that when you don't.
bottled_poe 6y ago
I think this phenomenon is a temporary luxury that arises due to the high demand for skills and relative immaturity of the discipline.
atleta 6y ago
Nope. Their are humans. And (seeking) happiness is one of the most powerful motivators (if not THE most powerful one) for such beings. Also, happy people just produce better results. Especially if the way for them to achieve happiness is the route to better results. If you just want your coal mined, happiness of your workers may not matter much. As soon as you want quality output from any intellectual worker it will start to matter. (Though I'm pretty sure that it's true for any job with any level of autonomy and creativity needed, even if it's manual labour.)
satyrnein 6y ago
It's a reality that retaining developers in the US sometimes involves indulging their pet projects despite negative expected value. In other parts of the world, many capable developers are happy to just have reliable, reasonably paid work. There may be a correction coming.
mikewarot 6y ago
I'd be quite happy to show up, build something, and then keep it producing value for customers for decades with as little time and effort for all the humans involved as possible. As long as there is a way to quantify that value, it could be incentivized, boring systems should be the most profitable.
fmajid 6y ago
There is that, but mostly the concern of many engineers is that they need to stay buzzword-compliant to have a marketable resume, otherwise they risk career stagnation. It's an indictment of hiring managers, and to an extent a self-fulfilling prophecy, but we all know the best technology does not always win in the marketplace.
dathinab 6y ago
It's more about avoiding avoiding negative emotions being associated with the work in a way which does hamper productivity. Software Development is that strange split between clear defined engineering aspects and creativity aspects which are often as important. I have seen major problems in projects due to developers being dissatisfied and annoyed with the tools they can use. The problem was twofold - first it was not that they couldn't use the newest exiting tools, but that the tools they had to use had horrible UX making them unnecessary hard to use. Like if you tell someone they have to now turn pages of an book with a fork instead of their hands. - The other problem was that one person involved had a fixed view about what is good and in their view must be done and nothing else is good and doing something else is always stupid and as such in their view their work is stupid and worthless and as such they don't want to do that at all as it's just a pointless wast of time which will be discarded in the future anyway... Which is quite a bad approach to your job, tbh. And caused some massive problems later on.
ozim 6y ago
Well yes, because next funky startup doing Z is going to take them away unless you pay them much more to stay with you. All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; Players stay in the game as long as it is fun.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
If I have to do a Magento project I charge double. If I knew COBOL I would charge even more. Simply put, if the job is not enjoyable I'd rather look for an enjoyable job or ask more money until it's worth it. The market still favours developers and finding a job is pretty easy, so developers have all the incentive to look for a fulfilling position, while it lasts.
joana035 6y ago
Yes, and everything is "painful" and frustrating.

egeozcan 6y ago

> Exciting & Boring is not mutually exclusive Yeah the confusion is caused by people meaning stable & tested when they say boring, as they find most of the stuff that excites people not suitable for production use. There's still a lot remaining though, when you filter out the unstable and untested stuff. I strongly agree with this.

karmakaze 6y ago
Boring is also implies popular as it lowers downside risk. It also lowers upside potential but that's the bet being made.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago

Exciting and boring are antonyms of one another, though.

bluefirebrand 6y ago
As a different poster mentioned, "Boring" in this case is being used to mean "stable and tested" or more simply "reliable" A formula 1 car is certainly reliable, and certainly exciting to drive.
marcosdumay 6y ago
Yes, they are antonyms. But the real world is multi-dimensional.

chousuke 6y ago

Personally, I am excited (or satisfied) by systems that work, up to and including the processes required to keep it "in motion". The technology used is secondary as long as its properties and risks are understood and accounted for and you can work with it without having to double-check every little thing with the business owners or clients. Sometimes things break, but in a "good" system, some breakage is expected, and the risk of breakage is not minimized by being fearful of change, but by having monitoring, redundancy and checks in place to keep the change controlled and the impact of faults within agreed boundaries.

gaogao 6y ago
Tech that's excitingly boring is great! >>> npm’s first Rust program hasn't caused any alerts in its year and a half in production. "My biggest compliment to Rust is that it's boring," offered Dickinson, "and this is an amazing compliment." The process of deploying the new Rust service was straightforward, and soon they were able to forget about the Rust service because it caused so few operational issues. At npm, the usual experience of deploying a JavaScript service to production was that the service would need extensive monitoring for errors and excessive resource usage necessitating debugging and restarts
- lostcolony 6y ago
  That's actually what I'd call Elixir. "Excitingly boring". Built atop a runtime environment that is 35 years old, battle tested, and built for reliability in distributed and concurrent environments, but feeling like a modern, expressive language, with clever ideas that most other languages don't have.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    I'm using Elixir professionally for 4.5 years and Rust for 2.5. What you and the patent poster said applies to both.
    - lostcolony 6y ago

MikeDelta 6y ago

I agree that the very talented engineers need to be challenged and kept happy, but with a balance: sometimes stuff needs to get done and somebody will have to do it. The other thing one needs to be careful of is if they start challenging themselves by writing very complex and difficult to maintain code.

bayindirh 6y ago

You can do exciting things using boring technology and vice versa. I personally enjoy breaking new ground, and the tools I use are not important. Doing more exciting stuff with older tools is also somewhat more satisfying, at least for me.