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> There are also many who still explore, but qualitatively the overall culture feels very different. I thought the same, then one day I stumbled onto a discord

> There are also many who still explore, but qualitatively the overall culture feels very different. I thought the same, then one day I stumbled onto a discord populated by teens and college students who were doing the same sort of shenanigans my friends and I were up to back in the day. The S/N ratio is worse, but there are still people out there having fun!

xpe 4y ago
Fair enough. Still, after many decades in software, the current ethos feels so different as to be unrecognizable from where I started. I learned to program on an Apple ][+. To start, I was not business driven; I primarily explored software and hardware, without a particular business end in mind. Later, after studying engineering, I moved more into caring about problems and products. Over time, I found more and more companies wanted the benefits of having skilled software developers, but they seems to primarily want the businessified version -- solve the problem at hand while punting obvious existential problems down the road. Sure, many Silicon Valley startups say they want "passionate" programmers, but they didn't usually embrace the tradeoffs that go along with it ... time and resources to explore, supporting risk taking, and fostering a culture where some experimentation is its own end (not merely a means). Worse, these same companies that claimed to be business focused didn't even engineer well. So often I saw a double failure: a lack of both the long-term exploration and tactical execution. Somehow both got lost. There are exceptions of organizations that have healthy, adaptive cultures that internalize continual assessment and improvement, ranging across team interactions, software quality, user experience, and organizational processes. Perhaps I was too naive and didn't fully appreciate the difficulty here; my progression in engineering has generally coincided with me lowering my expectations. I mean this as a trend line only; I have seen some impressive exceptions, but they tend to be unusual and fairly narrow in scope. For example, the best product vision I've ever seen was coupled with a seemingly distracted CEO. This is just one thread of my experience, I'm sure others have seen many other things. I for one would really enjoy reading reflections on working in the software industry. For myself and perhaps other "passionate" programmers, learning to dial down "caring" and attempting to fit in with imperfect cultures is very hard. It would be one thing if the people in control seemed to understand the situation and showed empirically good results.
UltimateEdge 4y ago
How did you stumble across such a group? I have been looking for a community like you describe since 2018, when I left the group I was part of at the time.

xpe 4y ago

Fair enough. Still, after many decades in software, the current ethos feels so different as to be unrecognizable from where I started. I learned to program on an Apple ][+. To start, I was not business driven; I primarily explored software and hardware, without a particular business end in mind. Later, after studying engineering, I moved more into caring about problems and products. Over time, I found more and more companies wanted the benefits of having skilled software developers, but they seems to primarily want the businessified version -- solve the problem at hand while punting obvious existential problems down the road. Sure, many Silicon Valley startups say they want "passionate" programmers, but they didn't usually embrace the tradeoffs that go along with it ... time and resources to explore, supporting risk taking, and fostering a culture where some experimentation is its own end (not merely a means). Worse, these same companies that claimed to be business focused didn't even engineer well. So often I saw a double failure: a lack of both the long-term exploration and tactical execution. Somehow both got lost. There are exceptions of organizations that have healthy, adaptive cultures that internalize continual assessment and improvement, ranging across team interactions, software quality, user experience, and organizational processes. Perhaps I was too naive and didn't fully appreciate the difficulty here; my progression in engineering has generally coincided with me lowering my expectations. I mean this as a trend line only; I have seen some impressive exceptions, but they tend to be unusual and fairly narrow in scope. For example, the best product vision I've ever seen was coupled with a seemingly distracted CEO. This is just one thread of my experience, I'm sure others have seen many other things. I for one would really enjoy reading reflections on working in the software industry. For myself and perhaps other "passionate" programmers, learning to dial down "caring" and attempting to fit in with imperfect cultures is very hard. It would be one thing if the people in control seemed to understand the situation and showed empirically good results.

UltimateEdge 4y ago

How did you stumble across such a group? I have been looking for a community like you describe since 2018, when I left the group I was part of at the time.