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Then quit? No one is forcing you to write software with a gun to your head. You either accept that you are willing to put up with the bullshit for the money or

• KronisLV 4y ago
  > I would say someone is a bullshit person if they feel the need to express that their job is bullshit yet keep showing up every day. This doesn't feel in good faith. Many people out there enjoy having employment and finding new employment isn't always easy, or guaranteed to provide better circumstances in any way. For example, consider that many still live from salary to salary, or might live in countries where good practices don't have a significant mindshare. Could people do better? Sure, but that just isn't the objective reality for everyone, therefore there's no need to be that mean towards them. > Turns out most people don't because they don't have the slightest idea how to run a business yet they are 100% sure the people who are running successful businesses are full of bullshit. Please remember that a system can generate business value and ensure that certain job positions even exist, and yet be badly made and problematic under the surface all at the same time. Profitable software and good software aren't the same thing from an engineering perspective, although they might be similar from a business perspective. Alternatively, consider that many companies out there are simply burning lots of investor money on unprofitable systems anyways in hopes of them becoming good from a business perspective, regardless of the underlying engineering quality. Sometimes this means systems that are well engineered (though also overengineered), other times that means systems that still work but are a ticking time bomb. Personally, I feel some empathy for the people in the article and don't want to dismiss their feelings.
  • anm89 4y ago
    I honestly disagree in good faith. I'm not saying I feel no empathy for people in shitty jobs. I do. I've worked plenty of shitty jobs. I've worked jobs that I percieved as bullshit. But someone else didn't perceive them as bullshit and wanted to pay me to do them and I agreed it was worth it for the money at the time. But the whole thing conceptually makes no sense. If you hate your job then just hate your job. Quit if you can. Don't if you can't. But the "bullshitness" of it is irrelevant and the only person with skin in the game on how "bullshit" the job is, the employer who trades a resource to pay for the job to be done, says it isn't bullshit. Your perception of if your job is bullshit is irrelevant unless you are interested in doing something about it but by nature it's not the kind of thing that the person complaining about it is usually in a position to do anything about. So if you want to make this your stand, then a) quit b) Lobby internally to get moved or whatever or unbullshit your job c) accept that you are willing to do bullshit jobs for money But just complaining that the jobs are bullshit is meaningless. No one is paying you to philosophize on the abstract value of your job. It counts for nothing. The world doesn't owe you to have the internal perception of value in your job. That's your job to achieve. Not the world's responsibility to provide. Basically so what if it's bullshit? Let's say your job is literally to show up to an office and write "my job is not bullshit" on a whiteboard on repeat indefinitely. So your job is clearly bullshit. So what? You've accomplished absolutely nothing by pointing this out. Someone is willing to pay you to do it and you are willing to show up for the money. There's really no further interesting discussion to have. But if you are going to make "my job is bullshit" the thing you are going to a loudly take a stand on, and then you wake up in the morning and show back up on your own free will, then I think that's indicative of a weak character of the person aimlessly complaining, not any other issue with the system.
    • KronisLV 4y ago
      > But the whole thing conceptually makes no sense. If you hate your job then just hate your job. Quit if you can. Don't if you can't. But the "bullshitness" of it is irrelevant and the only person with skin in the game on how "bullshit" the job is, the employer who trades a resource to pay for the job to be done, says it isn't bullshit. Your perception of if your job is bullshit is irrelevant unless you are interested in doing something about it but by nature it's not the kind of thing that the person complaining about it is usually in a position to do anything about. I will concede that this is a fair point! > But just complaining that the jobs are bullshit is meaningless. No one is paying you to philosophize on the abstract value of your job. It counts for nothing. The world doesn't owe you to have the internal perception of value in your job. That's your job to achieve. Not the world's responsibility to provide. I will disagree with this, however, at least in cases where the premise of the project isn't hopelessly wrong in the first place (e.g. pet project with no future, but rather just a flawed project that could be successful with some action). Identifying issues that make you miserable or make you feel like your job is meaningless can have multiple benefits: - figure out how things got there, what is the root cause, which ways of thinking and practices are harmful - figure out what other canaries are there for identifying such circumstances, whether it's attitude or culture - think up actionable steps to either improve things and make it less meaningless, or identify why those couldn't be feasibly done Eventually, when you are looking for a new place to work in, or for a new project in a different team in the org, you'll have a certain "BS detector" that will be able to tell you when you shouldn't get invested and should perhaps quit your new job in pursuit of something better. You'll also be able to look at someone starting to go down some path and will be able to say: "Listen, if you keep on with this, in X years you'll have serious problems with Y, I saw this over in the Z project in the past." hopefully preventing or at least slowing down the eventual slip into unfeasibility (e.g. unmaintainable code and bad practices). See JSON used in a DB column instead of a foreign key, because someone wanted polymorphic links but couldn't be bothered to use either multiple tables or the dreaded OTLT pattern, instead choosing perhaps one of the more problematic solutions instead? Take heed and call it out, if possible. See something like that happening in regards to how work is organized or what tools and practices you have to follow, e.g. having to fix every single SonarQube identified code issue when the quality profile is all wrong and many of those supposed issues are false positives? Take heed and call it out, if possible. See the whole team struggle because of the constant re-engineering that's also mentioned in the article? Take heed and call it out, if possible. If none of that is viable, look for the door at your convenience. It's good that people frankly talk about their perceived issues in the industry, for example: https://devrant.com/ https://devrant.com/ This is validating and matters for mental health, so they don't just suffer in silence, in more productive communities people might even have actionable solutions, e.g. for how to work with legacy code. That's also why student groups are popular when people are learning to code and decrease dropout rates - because people no longer feel completely alone, same idea. Ergo, I don't think that complaining is useless, there is some benefit to even articles like this: http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks And if your team has enough people who identify issues together, then you might just be able to do something about it together, even if there would otherwise be one or two other people who'd dictate their own rules and preferences that would make people miserable. Or don't, it's your choice. You can just bite the bullet and work in silence.