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As a dev in a business environment, I don't care about your project. At all. It's going to be run-of-the-mill business app, storage, front-end, logic. There wil

As a dev in a business environment, I don't care about your project. At all. It's going to be run-of-the-mill business app, storage, front-end, logic. There will be nothing exciting or interesting for me whatsoever. I don't care about your case management, insurance leads, or Teams Governance. Becuase I'm a human with human interests (writing code, and dreaming of a decent Transformers movie before I die), your projects are not interesting, and they will not invest me. However for every project I take on, there will always be something I have never done before, or a maybe some new technique I want to try, could be a new language. That's where the engagement comes from. I don't care about the project, I care about writing code (and exploring writing code) to the best of my ability (and to the best of the project constraints). If I've done my job well, that means I learned something new/had fun and the project will never burn my screen pixels ever again.

jnorthrop 5y ago
No matter your technical proficiency, you are a lousy hire. I do not want a developer that is solely interested in work that improves their skills. These projects contribute to the success of the business in one way or another. If you are not invested in understanding why that project is funded and what it will accomplish you will not do the job as well as someone who is engaged and only has half your skills.
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  You mean you want someone who is willing to blow smoke up your ass.
  - uDontKnowMe 5y ago
    No, I think they're looking for people who are intrinsically motivated by the drive to do a professional job applying their craft, rather than to use a project as an opportunity to experiment with technology that they want to learn for their own curiosity or career trajectory. In the same way, when you hire a contractor build you a garage, you look for someone who will use their experience to build a good garage with the best materials and techniques keeping in mind the priorities of the owner, like maintainance, cost, appearance, resalability, etc. You don't want someone showing up who just views your garage primarily as an opportunity to learn about this new construction material they've heard about that doesn't help you.
    - andi999 5y ago
      So do you ask your contractor what keeps him passionate about garages?
      - babyblueblanket 5y ago
        I'd like for my contractor to suggest garage designs that aren't decades old, insecure, unmaintainable, to know what're the modern garage tools...
        z3t4 5y ago
        There are buildings that have stood for hundreds of years, meanwhile you have to re-paint your own house every 10 year... new/modern is not always better.
      - rpeden 5y ago
        Not the OP, but I'd like it if my contractor shows at least a bit of professional engagement. I'm hiring them because they're the expert - and if they ask some questions about why I want the garage and what I plan to use it for, it'll help them deliver a final product that's a better fit for my needs. For example, if I say "I want a garage that's 200 square feet and has an epoxy-covered floor", I'd like it if my contractor asked me some questions and came back with responses like "Since you want to do x in your garage, I'd avoid the epoxy floor and go with painted concrete. Also, I've has several clients who were interested in doing x and they ended up wanting a storage loft in the garage. You can add one later if you'd like, but it's much less expensive if you add it during initial construction." So...maybe not passionate, exactly. But engaged and professional, absolutely.
    - LegitGandalf 5y ago
      How do you reconcile how bespoke and ever changing the requirements are for software products vs how stable the requirements are for garages? I'm asking because I see the construction analogy pop up a lot and I just can't reconcile the two things. To me the development of a new blueprint for a new kind of garage for a new kind of vehicle operated by a never before seen alien species is a bit closer to creating a software product. I mean, who would ask a contractor to do what people regularly ask software engineering teams to do?
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  How many devs out there are just faking it? People have learned to answer the "Why do you want to work here with?" questions "I have a passion about X, because Y." It is like med school interviews. Everyone knows the answer to "why do you want to be a doctor?" is "I like science and want to help people." along with an anecdote proving that when tons go to medicine as it is a well paid and stable career.
  - allo37 5y ago
    I think there's a bit of a spectrum between "I don't give a rat's ass about you or your project" and "This is my new life's passion". From my own experience I find that yeah, job interview answers are mostly self-marketing BS. But I do also care about the quality of the end product beyond just having fun with the tech.
    - xur17 5y ago
      I really think it comes down to having empathy for the end user, which requires some level of caring about the product.
    - hinkley 5y ago
      This is HN though. This is the same level of conversation at a trade show or over drinks. If you can’t lay out your dispassion bluntly (even if just for effect) here then where can you? I would not encourage anyone to talk to their boss the way GP is talking. But these are peers talking, and if you don’t think convos like this happen, then you haven’t seen them or you’ve dismissed them. If you haven’t seen them, I can only assume nobody trusts you enough to vent.
      - allo37 5y ago
        I like to think most software engineers have at least some interest in what they're investing most of their waking hours in. Sounds miserable otherwise!
        5y ago
- whateveracct 5y ago
  hah you'll never figure this out before you hire me and pay me
- whycombinater 5y ago
  Pay me commission. Most businesses that pay salary operate like this: Worker picks 5000 apples, coworkers picks 300. Business pays them each 1 apple. Both start picking 1 apple, business puts them on improvement plan. (China wants apple pickers to struggle.) Also, please write a 13-page paper detailing how your soul is mine, I'm your daddy, and any food you might try to grow on your own property is actually mine (Google).
- ABCLAW 5y ago
  >No matter your technical proficiency, you are a lousy hire. Hard disagree. There is a place for the developer as product evangelist, and there's a place for the developer as a skilled tradesperson. The idea that someone needs to be fully invested in your worldview to pipe together a backend is... strange.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    It’s not strange if you’ve worked out that people who are invested are easier to exploit. There’s a fine line between having to cajole a bunch of disaffected developers into getting work done, and explaining that I can’t give you a raise because it would ruin the company and you really should think about what’s best for the team. Or could you just work late on Friday, or cancel your honeymoon.
- void_mint 5y ago
  This is just a really silly way to think of craftsmanship. Whoever you pay to redo your bathroom doesn't care at all, literally at all, about your motivations behind wanting to redo your bathroom and how you think it'll change your whole morning and evening routines. They don't care. It's their craft. They will redo your bathroom to the best of their abilities and will take pleasure in new or interesting units of work you've included in your bathroom design that they haven't been able to try. What you're suggesting is just hustle culture nonsense. If you want someone to be invested in your company, give them _equity_. If you won't (and you won't), accept that you're paying for a transactional relationship, not "investment".
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    I would disagree. If they knew I was redoing my bathroom to sell the house and know my sink design choice is less saleable than another sink design choice, I would absolutely want this person to tell me as such and would pay extra money to hire a contractor who would say things like that. And then tell everyone I know to hire this contractor, they are worth the money.
    - void_mint 5y ago
      That's not a contractor though....
  - notJim 5y ago
    This isn't really true IME. The best contractors will understand the goals and motivations for your project, and make suggestions based on their vastly greater experience of ways to improve upon the project.
    - drchiu 5y ago
      This is correct. Also tends to be more expensive as well.
  - delusional 5y ago
    This comment makes it seem like you've never worked with a contractor. I come from a family of contractors (electricians and metalworkers mostly), and every experience I've ever had working with them tell me that they care about understanding. If you ask them to make you a bathroom without any waterproofing they'll ask you if you've gone mad and tell you that you NEED waterproofing, because they understand that you don't want your house to rot. If you say you want a metal frame and you have a drawing. The very first step they will take is to analyze your drawing to see if it makes any sense. I have never worked with a contractor that just did whatever you told them to, without understanding what you're doing. If they chose to disengage with a problem, it's a conscious choice. The big differentiator is the ease of understanding. Building a bathroom is relatable. You kinds of intuitively understand why you want a new bathroom, and people understand the sorts of issues a new bathroom can solve. People do NOT understand what new software can solve, and how it solves it. They think software is magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on problems to make them go away. That means we have to do more of the work of helping them map out the solution than a contractor would.
- idrios 5y ago
  They sound like a great hire to me. If you needed an electrician to wire your house, would you rather hire someone who likes to get inspired and find creative ways to do electrical wiring, or someone who just wants to do the best and most documented practices while saving their creativity for personal projects
  - tonyarkles 5y ago
    How about someone who cares about why you're trying to get a 200A circuit run to your garage and can provide feedback and point out things that they've seen before that could make your life easier. Or, like in my current situation, I really hope an electrician can come up with a creative solution to my current house wiring situation because it seems like it's going to be a huge hassle and the previous owner has painted us into a corner.
    - idrios 5y ago
      My own current situation is that I work with an electrician who found a hard-but-solved problem and wanted his own solution to it. He is now the only person who understands the wiring he did, and if he ever leaves the company we'll also need to find a creative person to work on it, or else throw it all out and start over. EDIT: just be clear I'm still actually talking about software
- occams_chainsaw 5y ago
  There's a place for both- you need the devs who care more about adding business value quickly, and you need the devs that lean more towards perfectionism in how it's built. Too little of the former, and nothing valuable gets done. Too little of the latter, and you end up drowning in technical debt, preventing the business from adapting as quickly as it needs to
  - morgancmartin 5y ago
    In practice, the latter scenario seems rampant, at least IME.
    - username90 5y ago
      Then the problem is that people who care about business don't want to learn to code. Blame them and tell them to learn to code rather than argue that people who like technical stuff must care about what you care about. In the end there are way more people out there who care about the business side so shouldn't be hard at all to make them the majority.
- acituan 5y ago
  > These projects contribute to the success of the business in one way or another. If you want your workers to care about the success of your business, then pay them with the success of business (e.g. shares). If you are only paying an hourly salary, you're not entitled to anything but their hour's output.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    Having been on the receiving end of shares, devs are in an extremely bad position to estimate their valuation. It’s like being a passenger on a train and being asked to judge which direction it goes. And I’m a product-oriented dev who loved the business side and loved doing plenty of UX interviews. Being now on the donating end of shares, employees know much better how to value the gross pay.
- twic 5y ago
  But they did hire him. So now they have to figure out how to work with him.
  - weimerica 5y ago
    Alternatively, and depending on the severity, they can recognize they've hired a bad (apple|fit) and separate, possibly update the hiring process, and move on. While adding in new technologies isn't always a bad thing, having nothing but a desire to do so is classical Resume-Driven-Development. If your firm is in a business position such that having all the latest, greatest tools is a good thing (hard to imagine industries in which this is an unqualified good) then keep on trucking. Otherwise you may find yourself needing to have adult conversations with $RDD_DEV about just what it is that makes the business money, in light of technical decisions that cost additional time, have larger TCO, and so on.
- ramphastidae 5y ago
  I disagree. I would love this hire. This person has clearly expressed what motivates them. I now know what type of work they prefer (and don’t), as well as the level of involvement they expect with outside stakeholders. It’s much easier to have a productive relationship with someone who can articulate this clearly. What I see too much are teammates who say they want to be more involved with customers or prioritization but don’t show up for feedback sessions or high level discussions and then later complain about not being involved enough, causing even more headache. The more you accommodate, the more problems they come up with, and never actually get around to doing the actual work.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  Very cool and healthy that people on this website instinctively imagine themselves as the boss of random commenters on a website whose motivations are incredibly relatable.
- kabdib 5y ago
  A while back we replaced the windows in our house with new, more efficient windows. The workers who showed up were the usual contract construction labor folks; generic company truck, not a whole lot of enthusiasm. Every replacement window came in a box. Every window wasn't the same, but neither were they very much different. A fair amount of pessimistic banter when they thought the customer wasn't in earshot. Then one of them suggested that we install a bay window instead of the boring thing we'd had planned, and when it costed out reasonably, they got right on it. The tools came out, the enthusiasm was turned on, and a couple of them spent half a day building an absolutely beautiful window that I and our pets value to this day. Good workers doing stupid, boring jobs are likely a resource that companies are not taking advantage of. People are more capable, and sometimes you should let the reigns loose (maybe most of the time).
- ankurdhama 5y ago
  The project is your vision, all the decisions about the future of the project are being made by you (or your business people), how can you expect a developer to feel invested or engaged in the project? Are you willing to give the developer the same decision power as the business people? The reason developers love to work on personal projects is not primarily because it is using some shiny new tech but because they own the vision, they own the decisions, they started the question and they want to build the answer.
maxbaines 5y ago
I would perhaps re-think how you achieve your personal development, to be frank your username sums it up. Try to align what you want to achieve with the best interests of the project, it can be achieved I do it weekly.
dnh44 5y ago
One of the first bits of paid work I did was for a printing company that made business cards among lots of other things. They would manually create a CorelDraw document with a page full of cards for each employee, taking the contact information from an excel spreadsheet. The data entry for making cards for 100 people would take several days. I was able to automate this for them with a pretty simple VB.net script. Several days of boring mind-numbing work per month were reduced to a couple button clicks and a few seconds of CPU time. It also eliminated all typographical errors on the part of the printing company. I never touched vb.net again after that. I had no interest in the technology at all and there was nothing particularly interesting about the work itself. However saving people from having to do a bunch of boring work is extremely satisfying. And it saved the owner money which feels great too. I find that being empathic towards my users not only makes the work more fulfilling but it also allows me to design better products. As a human with human interests you should at least give it a try.
- ketzo 5y ago
  I appreciate this perspective quite a lot. I think that for me, being a good engineer is first and foremost about solving problems for people, and if I lose sight of that simple goal, I lose a lot of my energy for my work.
  - sharken 5y ago
    Exactly, and the harder the problem, the greater the reward when it's finally solved. The problem solving process never ceases to amaze me, how a problem can go unsolved for months on end, and then suddenly all the dots can be connected and the solution appears. Starting out with the notion that "It must be possible to solve this", is always the first step i find.
- darkhorse13 5y ago
  Thank you, this is a nice counter to the usual nihilistic stuff you find on HN. I find that just doing something useful is fulfilling for me, especially if it makes peoples' lives easier, no matter how little I care about or understand the actual product itself.
blacktriangle 5y ago
I think it was DHH who had a great line about this: Don't care about product, care about process. For developers, the process of delivering value IS the excitement, it doesn't matter how awesome or boring the product itself is, it's the process of writing good code to solve customer problems that excites us.
slumdev 5y ago
> However for every project I take on, there will always be something I have never done before, or a maybe some new technique I want to try, could be a new language. So you do care. But you care about the technology, not the InCrEdIbLe ImPaCt this latest "X-but-as-an-app" is going to have on the course of human history. There's nothing wrong with you, and I'd love to work with you.
bitwize 5y ago
> writing code, and dreaming of a decent Transformers movie before I die Have you seen Bumblebee? I don't know what your idea of a "decent" Transformers movie is, but if you still like the original series there's a lot to like about Bumblebee, including character designs, voices, and dialogue that are close to the 1980s originals.
hinkley 5y ago
While this is a valid sanity saving technique, you have to be very judicious with it. Too often people get more excited by the tech they’re using than the problem domain, and their solutions start to fit that domain badly. Then we have impedance mismatches, and someone who is effectively holding the code hostage because that is where all of their emotional investment is. I’ve seen this many times, participated a couple. In the end there’s a moment you should move on to something more interesting. And like selling your house, you should never look back at what they did to your code.
Lich 5y ago
I really hated the Michael Bay Transformer films. Have you seen Transformers War for Cybertron on Netflix? It’s nothing amazing, but more entertaining than the Bay films.
javier123454321 5y ago
This is such an interesting concept coming from a different industry (architecture) into software development. I find it hard to be so disconnected to the outcome of what I am making. I definitely care about the projects that I am a part of, otherwise it just feels mechanical. I want to work to solve a problem that I care about, feel like I am doing something more meaningful than just implementing another warehouse logistics crud app. Don't get me wrong, I have gotten pretty decent at making crud apps, but I find it so much more compelling if the crud app is making education more efficient, vs another problem that I don't care about. I just find it so foreign that software engineering culture holds your mentality more often than not, where the tools that you are working with are advertised more than the problem you are solving. Not good nor bad, just an observation.
analog31 5y ago
A large enough project needs juniors and seniors. It's OK to be one but not the other. The juniors don't necessarily need to understand the project in a big-picture sense. But somebody does.
- boardwaalk 5y ago
  I don't see how not being emotionally invested in a project would mean you can't understand or even design the big picture of it. Feels a bit straw man-ish.
Camouflager 5y ago
This is ridiculous. Do you expect your contractor to explicitly tell you every detail of the project? It isn't even possible. Because the code itself is the only way to describe the project comprehensively. Because natural language is weak, and sometimes useless, especially in describing specifics. Natural language is good for negotiating incentives, which is why you have to think like your contractor in order to do the job. This type of mechanical reasoning is a common pitfall. People did too much symbolic reasoning they end up embracing too much symbolism instead of real life and real people.
estsauver 5y ago
I get where you're coming from, and I've been there, but this is a truly sad way to live. If you can't find something that you care about to work on, why do it? Isn't it worth everything to do something that you're proud of with your life?
- azemetre 5y ago
  You can be proud of the accoutrements it takes to do your job without caring about the end product, especially if it's an environment you have little influence in the direction of the product. It's not mutually exclusive. Do you think tax attorneys are proud of tax laws, or do you think they care about being the best tax attorney in their field? This mind set isn't exclusive to certain industries.
haspok 5y ago
You might be perfectly suited for a devops-style of job. As a developer working on business-related tasks your net contribution might even be negative with this attitude (because if you don't understand the business and you are not even interested in understanding it then the only tasks you can do yourself must be so small and so well specified that it (the specification) might take more time than doing the task itself).

jnorthrop 5y ago

No matter your technical proficiency, you are a lousy hire. I do not want a developer that is solely interested in work that improves their skills. These projects contribute to the success of the business in one way or another. If you are not invested in understanding why that project is funded and what it will accomplish you will not do the job as well as someone who is engaged and only has half your skills.

schwartzworld 5y ago
You mean you want someone who is willing to blow smoke up your ass.
- uDontKnowMe 5y ago
  No, I think they're looking for people who are intrinsically motivated by the drive to do a professional job applying their craft, rather than to use a project as an opportunity to experiment with technology that they want to learn for their own curiosity or career trajectory. In the same way, when you hire a contractor build you a garage, you look for someone who will use their experience to build a good garage with the best materials and techniques keeping in mind the priorities of the owner, like maintainance, cost, appearance, resalability, etc. You don't want someone showing up who just views your garage primarily as an opportunity to learn about this new construction material they've heard about that doesn't help you.
  - andi999 5y ago
    So do you ask your contractor what keeps him passionate about garages?
    - babyblueblanket 5y ago
      I'd like for my contractor to suggest garage designs that aren't decades old, insecure, unmaintainable, to know what're the modern garage tools...
      - z3t4 5y ago
        There are buildings that have stood for hundreds of years, meanwhile you have to re-paint your own house every 10 year... new/modern is not always better.
    - rpeden 5y ago
      Not the OP, but I'd like it if my contractor shows at least a bit of professional engagement. I'm hiring them because they're the expert - and if they ask some questions about why I want the garage and what I plan to use it for, it'll help them deliver a final product that's a better fit for my needs. For example, if I say "I want a garage that's 200 square feet and has an epoxy-covered floor", I'd like it if my contractor asked me some questions and came back with responses like "Since you want to do x in your garage, I'd avoid the epoxy floor and go with painted concrete. Also, I've has several clients who were interested in doing x and they ended up wanting a storage loft in the garage. You can add one later if you'd like, but it's much less expensive if you add it during initial construction." So...maybe not passionate, exactly. But engaged and professional, absolutely.
  - LegitGandalf 5y ago
    How do you reconcile how bespoke and ever changing the requirements are for software products vs how stable the requirements are for garages? I'm asking because I see the construction analogy pop up a lot and I just can't reconcile the two things. To me the development of a new blueprint for a new kind of garage for a new kind of vehicle operated by a never before seen alien species is a bit closer to creating a software product. I mean, who would ask a contractor to do what people regularly ask software engineering teams to do?
MattGaiser 5y ago
How many devs out there are just faking it? People have learned to answer the "Why do you want to work here with?" questions "I have a passion about X, because Y." It is like med school interviews. Everyone knows the answer to "why do you want to be a doctor?" is "I like science and want to help people." along with an anecdote proving that when tons go to medicine as it is a well paid and stable career.
- allo37 5y ago
  I think there's a bit of a spectrum between "I don't give a rat's ass about you or your project" and "This is my new life's passion". From my own experience I find that yeah, job interview answers are mostly self-marketing BS. But I do also care about the quality of the end product beyond just having fun with the tech.
  - xur17 5y ago
    I really think it comes down to having empathy for the end user, which requires some level of caring about the product.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    This is HN though. This is the same level of conversation at a trade show or over drinks. If you can’t lay out your dispassion bluntly (even if just for effect) here then where can you? I would not encourage anyone to talk to their boss the way GP is talking. But these are peers talking, and if you don’t think convos like this happen, then you haven’t seen them or you’ve dismissed them. If you haven’t seen them, I can only assume nobody trusts you enough to vent.
    - allo37 5y ago
      I like to think most software engineers have at least some interest in what they're investing most of their waking hours in. Sounds miserable otherwise!
      - 5y ago
whateveracct 5y ago
hah you'll never figure this out before you hire me and pay me
whycombinater 5y ago
Pay me commission. Most businesses that pay salary operate like this: Worker picks 5000 apples, coworkers picks 300. Business pays them each 1 apple. Both start picking 1 apple, business puts them on improvement plan. (China wants apple pickers to struggle.) Also, please write a 13-page paper detailing how your soul is mine, I'm your daddy, and any food you might try to grow on your own property is actually mine (Google).
ABCLAW 5y ago
>No matter your technical proficiency, you are a lousy hire. Hard disagree. There is a place for the developer as product evangelist, and there's a place for the developer as a skilled tradesperson. The idea that someone needs to be fully invested in your worldview to pipe together a backend is... strange.
- hinkley 5y ago
  It’s not strange if you’ve worked out that people who are invested are easier to exploit. There’s a fine line between having to cajole a bunch of disaffected developers into getting work done, and explaining that I can’t give you a raise because it would ruin the company and you really should think about what’s best for the team. Or could you just work late on Friday, or cancel your honeymoon.
void_mint 5y ago
This is just a really silly way to think of craftsmanship. Whoever you pay to redo your bathroom doesn't care at all, literally at all, about your motivations behind wanting to redo your bathroom and how you think it'll change your whole morning and evening routines. They don't care. It's their craft. They will redo your bathroom to the best of their abilities and will take pleasure in new or interesting units of work you've included in your bathroom design that they haven't been able to try. What you're suggesting is just hustle culture nonsense. If you want someone to be invested in your company, give them _equity_. If you won't (and you won't), accept that you're paying for a transactional relationship, not "investment".
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  I would disagree. If they knew I was redoing my bathroom to sell the house and know my sink design choice is less saleable than another sink design choice, I would absolutely want this person to tell me as such and would pay extra money to hire a contractor who would say things like that. And then tell everyone I know to hire this contractor, they are worth the money.
  - void_mint 5y ago
    That's not a contractor though....
- notJim 5y ago
  This isn't really true IME. The best contractors will understand the goals and motivations for your project, and make suggestions based on their vastly greater experience of ways to improve upon the project.
  - drchiu 5y ago
    This is correct. Also tends to be more expensive as well.
- delusional 5y ago
  This comment makes it seem like you've never worked with a contractor. I come from a family of contractors (electricians and metalworkers mostly), and every experience I've ever had working with them tell me that they care about understanding. If you ask them to make you a bathroom without any waterproofing they'll ask you if you've gone mad and tell you that you NEED waterproofing, because they understand that you don't want your house to rot. If you say you want a metal frame and you have a drawing. The very first step they will take is to analyze your drawing to see if it makes any sense. I have never worked with a contractor that just did whatever you told them to, without understanding what you're doing. If they chose to disengage with a problem, it's a conscious choice. The big differentiator is the ease of understanding. Building a bathroom is relatable. You kinds of intuitively understand why you want a new bathroom, and people understand the sorts of issues a new bathroom can solve. People do NOT understand what new software can solve, and how it solves it. They think software is magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on problems to make them go away. That means we have to do more of the work of helping them map out the solution than a contractor would.
idrios 5y ago
They sound like a great hire to me. If you needed an electrician to wire your house, would you rather hire someone who likes to get inspired and find creative ways to do electrical wiring, or someone who just wants to do the best and most documented practices while saving their creativity for personal projects
- tonyarkles 5y ago
  How about someone who cares about why you're trying to get a 200A circuit run to your garage and can provide feedback and point out things that they've seen before that could make your life easier. Or, like in my current situation, I really hope an electrician can come up with a creative solution to my current house wiring situation because it seems like it's going to be a huge hassle and the previous owner has painted us into a corner.
  - idrios 5y ago
    My own current situation is that I work with an electrician who found a hard-but-solved problem and wanted his own solution to it. He is now the only person who understands the wiring he did, and if he ever leaves the company we'll also need to find a creative person to work on it, or else throw it all out and start over. EDIT: just be clear I'm still actually talking about software
occams_chainsaw 5y ago
There's a place for both- you need the devs who care more about adding business value quickly, and you need the devs that lean more towards perfectionism in how it's built. Too little of the former, and nothing valuable gets done. Too little of the latter, and you end up drowning in technical debt, preventing the business from adapting as quickly as it needs to
- morgancmartin 5y ago
  In practice, the latter scenario seems rampant, at least IME.
  - username90 5y ago
    Then the problem is that people who care about business don't want to learn to code. Blame them and tell them to learn to code rather than argue that people who like technical stuff must care about what you care about. In the end there are way more people out there who care about the business side so shouldn't be hard at all to make them the majority.
acituan 5y ago
> These projects contribute to the success of the business in one way or another. If you want your workers to care about the success of your business, then pay them with the success of business (e.g. shares). If you are only paying an hourly salary, you're not entitled to anything but their hour's output.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Having been on the receiving end of shares, devs are in an extremely bad position to estimate their valuation. It’s like being a passenger on a train and being asked to judge which direction it goes. And I’m a product-oriented dev who loved the business side and loved doing plenty of UX interviews. Being now on the donating end of shares, employees know much better how to value the gross pay.
twic 5y ago
But they did hire him. So now they have to figure out how to work with him.
- weimerica 5y ago
  Alternatively, and depending on the severity, they can recognize they've hired a bad (apple|fit) and separate, possibly update the hiring process, and move on. While adding in new technologies isn't always a bad thing, having nothing but a desire to do so is classical Resume-Driven-Development. If your firm is in a business position such that having all the latest, greatest tools is a good thing (hard to imagine industries in which this is an unqualified good) then keep on trucking. Otherwise you may find yourself needing to have adult conversations with $RDD_DEV about just what it is that makes the business money, in light of technical decisions that cost additional time, have larger TCO, and so on.
ramphastidae 5y ago
I disagree. I would love this hire. This person has clearly expressed what motivates them. I now know what type of work they prefer (and don’t), as well as the level of involvement they expect with outside stakeholders. It’s much easier to have a productive relationship with someone who can articulate this clearly. What I see too much are teammates who say they want to be more involved with customers or prioritization but don’t show up for feedback sessions or high level discussions and then later complain about not being involved enough, causing even more headache. The more you accommodate, the more problems they come up with, and never actually get around to doing the actual work.
tehjoker 5y ago
Very cool and healthy that people on this website instinctively imagine themselves as the boss of random commenters on a website whose motivations are incredibly relatable.
kabdib 5y ago
A while back we replaced the windows in our house with new, more efficient windows. The workers who showed up were the usual contract construction labor folks; generic company truck, not a whole lot of enthusiasm. Every replacement window came in a box. Every window wasn't the same, but neither were they very much different. A fair amount of pessimistic banter when they thought the customer wasn't in earshot. Then one of them suggested that we install a bay window instead of the boring thing we'd had planned, and when it costed out reasonably, they got right on it. The tools came out, the enthusiasm was turned on, and a couple of them spent half a day building an absolutely beautiful window that I and our pets value to this day. Good workers doing stupid, boring jobs are likely a resource that companies are not taking advantage of. People are more capable, and sometimes you should let the reigns loose (maybe most of the time).
ankurdhama 5y ago
The project is your vision, all the decisions about the future of the project are being made by you (or your business people), how can you expect a developer to feel invested or engaged in the project? Are you willing to give the developer the same decision power as the business people? The reason developers love to work on personal projects is not primarily because it is using some shiny new tech but because they own the vision, they own the decisions, they started the question and they want to build the answer.

maxbaines 5y ago

I would perhaps re-think how you achieve your personal development, to be frank your username sums it up. Try to align what you want to achieve with the best interests of the project, it can be achieved I do it weekly.

dnh44 5y ago

One of the first bits of paid work I did was for a printing company that made business cards among lots of other things. They would manually create a CorelDraw document with a page full of cards for each employee, taking the contact information from an excel spreadsheet. The data entry for making cards for 100 people would take several days. I was able to automate this for them with a pretty simple VB.net script. Several days of boring mind-numbing work per month were reduced to a couple button clicks and a few seconds of CPU time. It also eliminated all typographical errors on the part of the printing company. I never touched vb.net again after that. I had no interest in the technology at all and there was nothing particularly interesting about the work itself. However saving people from having to do a bunch of boring work is extremely satisfying. And it saved the owner money which feels great too. I find that being empathic towards my users not only makes the work more fulfilling but it also allows me to design better products. As a human with human interests you should at least give it a try.

ketzo 5y ago
I appreciate this perspective quite a lot. I think that for me, being a good engineer is first and foremost about solving problems for people, and if I lose sight of that simple goal, I lose a lot of my energy for my work.
- sharken 5y ago
  Exactly, and the harder the problem, the greater the reward when it's finally solved. The problem solving process never ceases to amaze me, how a problem can go unsolved for months on end, and then suddenly all the dots can be connected and the solution appears. Starting out with the notion that "It must be possible to solve this", is always the first step i find.
darkhorse13 5y ago
Thank you, this is a nice counter to the usual nihilistic stuff you find on HN. I find that just doing something useful is fulfilling for me, especially if it makes peoples' lives easier, no matter how little I care about or understand the actual product itself.

blacktriangle 5y ago

I think it was DHH who had a great line about this: Don't care about product, care about process. For developers, the process of delivering value IS the excitement, it doesn't matter how awesome or boring the product itself is, it's the process of writing good code to solve customer problems that excites us.

slumdev 5y ago

> However for every project I take on, there will always be something I have never done before, or a maybe some new technique I want to try, could be a new language. So you do care. But you care about the technology, not the InCrEdIbLe ImPaCt this latest "X-but-as-an-app" is going to have on the course of human history. There's nothing wrong with you, and I'd love to work with you.

bitwize 5y ago

> writing code, and dreaming of a decent Transformers movie before I die Have you seen Bumblebee? I don't know what your idea of a "decent" Transformers movie is, but if you still like the original series there's a lot to like about Bumblebee, including character designs, voices, and dialogue that are close to the 1980s originals.

hinkley 5y ago

While this is a valid sanity saving technique, you have to be very judicious with it. Too often people get more excited by the tech they’re using than the problem domain, and their solutions start to fit that domain badly. Then we have impedance mismatches, and someone who is effectively holding the code hostage because that is where all of their emotional investment is. I’ve seen this many times, participated a couple. In the end there’s a moment you should move on to something more interesting. And like selling your house, you should never look back at what they did to your code.

Lich 5y ago

I really hated the Michael Bay Transformer films. Have you seen Transformers War for Cybertron on Netflix? It’s nothing amazing, but more entertaining than the Bay films.

javier123454321 5y ago

This is such an interesting concept coming from a different industry (architecture) into software development. I find it hard to be so disconnected to the outcome of what I am making. I definitely care about the projects that I am a part of, otherwise it just feels mechanical. I want to work to solve a problem that I care about, feel like I am doing something more meaningful than just implementing another warehouse logistics crud app. Don't get me wrong, I have gotten pretty decent at making crud apps, but I find it so much more compelling if the crud app is making education more efficient, vs another problem that I don't care about. I just find it so foreign that software engineering culture holds your mentality more often than not, where the tools that you are working with are advertised more than the problem you are solving. Not good nor bad, just an observation.

analog31 5y ago

A large enough project needs juniors and seniors. It's OK to be one but not the other. The juniors don't necessarily need to understand the project in a big-picture sense. But somebody does.

boardwaalk 5y ago
I don't see how not being emotionally invested in a project would mean you can't understand or even design the big picture of it. Feels a bit straw man-ish.

Camouflager 5y ago

This is ridiculous. Do you expect your contractor to explicitly tell you every detail of the project? It isn't even possible. Because the code itself is the only way to describe the project comprehensively. Because natural language is weak, and sometimes useless, especially in describing specifics. Natural language is good for negotiating incentives, which is why you have to think like your contractor in order to do the job. This type of mechanical reasoning is a common pitfall. People did too much symbolic reasoning they end up embracing too much symbolism instead of real life and real people.

estsauver 5y ago

I get where you're coming from, and I've been there, but this is a truly sad way to live. If you can't find something that you care about to work on, why do it? Isn't it worth everything to do something that you're proud of with your life?

azemetre 5y ago
You can be proud of the accoutrements it takes to do your job without caring about the end product, especially if it's an environment you have little influence in the direction of the product. It's not mutually exclusive. Do you think tax attorneys are proud of tax laws, or do you think they care about being the best tax attorney in their field? This mind set isn't exclusive to certain industries.

haspok 5y ago

You might be perfectly suited for a devops-style of job. As a developer working on business-related tasks your net contribution might even be negative with this attitude (because if you don't understand the business and you are not even interested in understanding it then the only tasks you can do yourself must be so small and so well specified that it (the specification) might take more time than doing the task itself).