4 ms·

A long time ago I was reading a text on burnout, and one factor that stood out was lack of closure. Think of an architect - they design a building, deliver blu

by bbojan 5y ago

A long time ago I was reading a text on burnout, and one factor that stood out was lack of closure. Think of an architect - they design a building, deliver blueprints and the building gets built. They're done. They can drive by the building and say "Look, I've designed that building". There's closure. A developer's job is rarely done. You do a fantastic job and fix 2 almost intractable bugs in a sprint. What happens the next sprint? You get more bugs to fix. There's rarely closure.

Verdex 5y ago
Interesting idea. Here's my anecdote [or in other words, we should be dubious that there is any meaning here at all beyond coincidence]. Most of the work that I've done was for medical technology where the customer tends to deploy more often in Europe. I have seen very few finished products where I had a hand in implementing something. However, one of my happiest experiences was years ago when we finished a rewrite of some hardware for a customer that had to be done because they didn't want to interrupt their sales pipeline (also their customers wanted to be able to continue buying with out their purchasing pipeline being interrupted either). Anyway, so things had to move fast and once we were done soon after (months later iirc) there was a website up that had the new product that we had worked on. It felt really good (even years later now thinking back) to be able to actually see and be able to show people I knew the product that we worked over a year on.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
It's the same in a lot of industries and jobs. You're a doctor and cure a patient; what do you get tomorrow, more patients. You're a automotive worker and assemble 100 cars today; what do you get tomorrow, more cars to build. You're a mechanical engineer and fix a customer's issue with the machinery; what do you get next week, more customer issues. Jobs where you can regularly fully close a project and never hear about it again are the exception.
loudlambda 5y ago
In high school I worked some janitor jobs; every week your cleaning up a very similar mess as last week, but the work can be fulfilling if you're striving to do an excellent job and achieve mastery. That's one area that is soul crushing in software; the complete disdain for excellence and mastery. Nobody on the business side seems to care about creating master pieces. They want to throw half cooked spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks before throwing more spaghetti against more walls, and they strive to be the next facebook and have tens of thousands of employees throwing spaghetti. Android has 10 year old bugs with thousands of watchers and instead Google is off trying to use Android in cars or televisions or probably tennis shoes. Maybe it's finally fixed, but for years AWS cloud-formation and CDK was unable to be used with a significant and critical set of AWS services and features. Instead, AWS is off creating toy RC cars and creating elastic-cloud-simple-machine-model-shift service, which are both missing cloud-formation bindings. If your the guy who actually cares about your customers, and is trying to fix these things, you're career has been repeatedly hit-and-run by everyone else making career moves and running off to make purpose-built block-chain gamified cloud-native social machine-learned pez dispensers. And even if you can't find a job that will let you create excellence, using and learning excellent tools can be rewarding. Instead it seems like a downward spiral. There was a brief moment of sanity when the industry dropped all tangled complexity that was XML, but in general it seems like the industry is going from well crafted products like PostgreSQL, to half-baked databases like Cassandra CQL which apparently doesn't allow NOT NULL constraints. Once Java, C++, and Javascript all start to have fairly nice feature sets, it suddenly becomes hard to not find one's self stuck in jobs requiring the obtuse language go. And then there's helm, which seems to be trying to win at a competition to see if it's possible to make a configuration that's more brittle and convoluted then the old M4 based Sendmail configs of yore. Why should I even bother becoming anything more then slightly proficient in any of these if they're going to be replaced with something even uglier and less ergonomic next year? What's the point of pouring my sweat and tears into a product for a company if the company is just going to strand it and rush off to build something else that it's going to abandon and rush off to yet something else?

by bbojan 5y ago

Verdex 5y ago

Interesting idea. Here's my anecdote [or in other words, we should be dubious that there is any meaning here at all beyond coincidence]. Most of the work that I've done was for medical technology where the customer tends to deploy more often in Europe. I have seen very few finished products where I had a hand in implementing something. However, one of my happiest experiences was years ago when we finished a rewrite of some hardware for a customer that had to be done because they didn't want to interrupt their sales pipeline (also their customers wanted to be able to continue buying with out their purchasing pipeline being interrupted either). Anyway, so things had to move fast and once we were done soon after (months later iirc) there was a website up that had the new product that we had worked on. It felt really good (even years later now thinking back) to be able to actually see and be able to show people I knew the product that we worked over a year on.

benhurmarcel 5y ago

It's the same in a lot of industries and jobs. You're a doctor and cure a patient; what do you get tomorrow, more patients. You're a automotive worker and assemble 100 cars today; what do you get tomorrow, more cars to build. You're a mechanical engineer and fix a customer's issue with the machinery; what do you get next week, more customer issues. Jobs where you can regularly fully close a project and never hear about it again are the exception.

loudlambda 5y ago

In high school I worked some janitor jobs; every week your cleaning up a very similar mess as last week, but the work can be fulfilling if you're striving to do an excellent job and achieve mastery. That's one area that is soul crushing in software; the complete disdain for excellence and mastery. Nobody on the business side seems to care about creating master pieces. They want to throw half cooked spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks before throwing more spaghetti against more walls, and they strive to be the next facebook and have tens of thousands of employees throwing spaghetti. Android has 10 year old bugs with thousands of watchers and instead Google is off trying to use Android in cars or televisions or probably tennis shoes. Maybe it's finally fixed, but for years AWS cloud-formation and CDK was unable to be used with a significant and critical set of AWS services and features. Instead, AWS is off creating toy RC cars and creating elastic-cloud-simple-machine-model-shift service, which are both missing cloud-formation bindings. If your the guy who actually cares about your customers, and is trying to fix these things, you're career has been repeatedly hit-and-run by everyone else making career moves and running off to make purpose-built block-chain gamified cloud-native social machine-learned pez dispensers. And even if you can't find a job that will let you create excellence, using and learning excellent tools can be rewarding. Instead it seems like a downward spiral. There was a brief moment of sanity when the industry dropped all tangled complexity that was XML, but in general it seems like the industry is going from well crafted products like PostgreSQL, to half-baked databases like Cassandra CQL which apparently doesn't allow NOT NULL constraints. Once Java, C++, and Javascript all start to have fairly nice feature sets, it suddenly becomes hard to not find one's self stuck in jobs requiring the obtuse language go. And then there's helm, which seems to be trying to win at a competition to see if it's possible to make a configuration that's more brittle and convoluted then the old M4 based Sendmail configs of yore. Why should I even bother becoming anything more then slightly proficient in any of these if they're going to be replaced with something even uglier and less ergonomic next year? What's the point of pouring my sweat and tears into a product for a company if the company is just going to strand it and rush off to build something else that it's going to abandon and rush off to yet something else?