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> And there’s not a single young programmer that cares about that. Seriously. You’re young, you want to do a fun project, your managers are saying, in three mon
by Jorge1o1 5y ago
> And there’s not a single young programmer that cares about that. Seriously. You’re young, you want to do a fun project, your managers are saying, in three months I need this thing done. You do whatever you want to do. Well, they get it done. And then you have new a data silo.
Ironically in this one quote that is the basis for the entire article and headline claim, it’s not even the young programmer at fault. It’s the manager. They set a tight deadline, they want it done in three months, you do what you have to do, etc. It’s the manager’s responsibility in this case to specify they want it hooked up to some kind of data mesh.
I’ll directly refute the whole article by saying that in my experience as a young developer, I try to suggest doing projects in a more “strategic” “long-term” way even at the expense of requiring a bit more time to refactor and complete, and my grizzled 40-year old manager shuts me down.
Because he’s being judged by upper management on how many features he ships and how much the product has advanced, and not on the level of crust or techdebt in the stack. It would look bad for his release velocity.
But I guess that’s why I’ve never heard of AllegroGraph. Because they’re busy selling to 40-year-olds who are set in their ways and don’t want to rock the boat, instead of new talent that is still adaptable and searching for new ideas.
- yunohn 5y agoI was going to comment on the same part of the article, but you’ve summarized my thoughts perfectly. Especially being a manager (the CEO), you’d think he’d be more self-aware of the problem while spelling it out so clearly.
- whiddershins 5y agoThe less experienced a person is, the shorter their deadlines should be and the narrower their scope.
- rektide 5y agoto what ends? to milking every drop of productivity out of them? to snubbing their agency & crushing their soul? wrestling with big things, bringing stuff together, toil, is not for everyone, whatever level of experience. but our industry guards constantly against anything but the safe path, actively obstructs good & interesting efforts, relies on charisma & personality to get permissiom to step beyond the safe & apparent paths. most companies indeed don't really need or benefit from truly exceptional work, from harder battles being engaged in & fought, so I'm sympathetic. but it's no less of a waste of potential, and this industry lacks good testing grounds for us worker's real mettle.
- whiddershins 5y agoI’m not sure what you think I’m saying. In general it takes more experience and internal organization skills to do larger, broader, longer timeline, less well defined projects and finish them. In my experience, the best way to get there is to start smaller, and get feedback sooner. This is true with everything: writing, music, film, home improvement ... you don’t learn to surf on 10 ft waves. Edit: I’ve seen far more people be discouraged and burned out by incompletable (for them) projects that are unsuccessful than from doing small and well defined tasks that aren’t creative enough.