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> "All of this, to dabble in code" I'm not a professional programmer, and when my laptop takes 10 minutes to start moving the mouse cursor smoothly after wakin

> "All of this, to dabble in code" I'm not a professional programmer, and when my laptop takes 10 minutes to start moving the mouse cursor smoothly after waking from a weekend suspend (today!), I'm pointing fingers at you all, the professional "dabblers" who don't understand computers, don't understand firewalls, don't understand databases, don't understand algorithms, don't understand garbage collectors, don't understand or care about any kind of security or legal compliance regulations, don't optimise anything, don't want any constraints, any meetings, any plans, any accountability, just want to 'optimise developer productivity' where you play with the most fun framework of the day and millions of users suffer the consequences of it. "Developers" have only "developers" to blame for how software takes down a 1,000,000 IOPS SSD to the point of complete machine unresponsiveness. It's not 'Jira' or 'stories' or 'weaponised Agile' or 'Indian outsourcers' or 'management' doing that. Maybe instead of seeing it as red tape garrotting you or an abusive guardian at the front door with a shotgun, see it as end users with scowls their hired heavies at the door, end users wanting their computers back from your code, wanting their data back from your clutches, wanting their time back from your advertising, wanting their lives back from your industry's overreach. People who've had enough of the priority always being your comfort and convenience. People who've had to bring in the security heavies with their legal and compliance regulation to try and herd you because left to yourselves you leave SQL injection and plain text secrets and cross site scripting and logging libraries that can talk to the internet and execute arbitrary code and when told to get your act together, throw your toys out of the pram and want dynamic languages and moving fast and breaking things because anything else is too boring. Hobbyists can be dabblers, end users can be dabblers, people who get their job done in VBA and Excel or a Perl script copied from the web, or IFTTT, you aren't "here to help", you're here to laugh at them for using VBA and Windows and offer them a worthless meta-interpreter in LISP or a workflow from the 1970s. People are crying out for help and all they get from professional developers is scorn of business apps and CRUD software and yet another text editor and whining that it doesn't work on Linux. End users are not interested in whether Java has type erasure in its generics, or whether the BEAM VM is outdated or whether TypeScript is an improvement on JavaScript, they're interested in how to share a spreadsheet with a supplier in another company and why search never returns what they typed in, and why their phone can't respond to the 'answer call' button before the caller hangs up. As 'Uncle' Bob Martin said in a talk in some recent year, if the software development industry can't sort this out itself, if it can't fix the Boeing 747 Max and the cars on the road being exploitable over their cellular connections through the infotainment system to disable the brakes and cut the engine, if it can't fix the senator's private emails being leaked, or the shareholders being hit by a company taken out for a week by ransomware, it can expect governments to implement laws regulating software development, and those laws will be overreaching, uninformed, out of touch, hard work, no-fun, and mandatory.

twh270 4y ago
Very reactionary take here. Blaming developers for everything that's wrong is just as bad-wrong as blaming everything on management, the C-suite, capitalism, or anything else. I've worked with some very ignorant, lazy, incompetent, individuals. Some had 'programmer' or 'developer' in their title, others were managers or product owners or QA, etc. etc. I do agree with your last point. I expect the real-world consequences of Bad Software to become more serious and common, and that will result in more regulation of the industry.
- scottLobster 4y ago
  I think he's focusing on the word "dabble", and how unprofessional it sounds. I'd be inclined to agree. I'm a developer and would never say I "dabble" in code. It just sounds light, playful and uncommitted. If your goal at work is to "dabble" in code because you're "passionate" about it, you have an unprofessional mindset. You're putting your passion above the mission. Maybe reading too much into a couple of words, particularly since this is the internet, but in general I'd recommend avoiding words like "passion" and "dabble" in professional contexts.
  - digitalsushi 4y ago
    As the commenter above who used those words, I stand by them: my influence over code these days is, indeed, light, playful, and uncommitted. I'm the art teacher who draws a single line on the canvas of the student whom is stuck, and then walk away. That's my role, to exist on my team and help them navigate this red tape by dabbling with their code. If this costs me the Next Big Thing, so be it. This modern mindset, that we're always interviewing for the next job, even between HN comments, is exhausting and just funnels us further into exhaustion.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  There is nobody else who could have written good code, except developers. There is nobody else who kept rewriting X-Screensaver clones insecurely for 17 years[1] except developers. Nobody else who has knowledge or experience to standardise on tools for the greater good. There is nobody else who wrote Jira but developers. There is nobody else who only wants to do Electron, or who refuses things like UAC because security is fine on their OpenBSD ThinkPad. Reddit blames capitalism, HN blames managmenent, 4chan blames 'Pajeet' Indian stereotype, Slashdot blames Microsoft, very few developers take a look in the mirror and say things like "we need less powerful languages"[2] or "ignore the firehose of new technologies"[3] or "If I want to ship my software, as opposed to just write it, I need to use tech that's a couple of clicks back from "bleeding edge," and spend a lot of time, "polishing the fenders. B O R I N G [but I do it]"[4]. Civil engineers have legal duties and responsibilities to make sure the things they build are fit for purpose and sign off on them before they get deployed, and can be personally fined or imprisoned or lose licenses if they weren't fit for purpose. Want to make a text editor at home? Knock yourself out, pick any language you want, dabble all you like. Want to make something that handles millions of people's data, sign your name to it and put your professional reputation on the line before every release. And it may well make salaries go up for the people willing and able to do that. The world runs on a lot more code than buildings these days and professional developers with bleeding edge MacBooks Pro and six figure salaries complaining that all the software we all suffer under is shitty, is like civil engineers complaining that buildings fall down and it's all management's fault for demanding blueprints before construction and inspections during construction to try and stop the company buildings falling down so often, ugh all that red tape, can't we still use wattle and daub it works fine on my garden shed. [Edit: just seen[5] comment from "Jon" "if you think 'function will crash if given invalid parameters' is a "defect" you should switch to Java". Nice sneer, right?] [1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition/ [2] https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/ https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/ [3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=chrismarshallnyc%20polish&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [5] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8477965/is-kr-c-still-applicable#comment10486687 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8477965/is-kr-c-still-ap... comment from "Jon"

twh270 4y ago

Very reactionary take here. Blaming developers for everything that's wrong is just as bad-wrong as blaming everything on management, the C-suite, capitalism, or anything else. I've worked with some very ignorant, lazy, incompetent, individuals. Some had 'programmer' or 'developer' in their title, others were managers or product owners or QA, etc. etc. I do agree with your last point. I expect the real-world consequences of Bad Software to become more serious and common, and that will result in more regulation of the industry.

scottLobster 4y ago
I think he's focusing on the word "dabble", and how unprofessional it sounds. I'd be inclined to agree. I'm a developer and would never say I "dabble" in code. It just sounds light, playful and uncommitted. If your goal at work is to "dabble" in code because you're "passionate" about it, you have an unprofessional mindset. You're putting your passion above the mission. Maybe reading too much into a couple of words, particularly since this is the internet, but in general I'd recommend avoiding words like "passion" and "dabble" in professional contexts.
- digitalsushi 4y ago
  As the commenter above who used those words, I stand by them: my influence over code these days is, indeed, light, playful, and uncommitted. I'm the art teacher who draws a single line on the canvas of the student whom is stuck, and then walk away. That's my role, to exist on my team and help them navigate this red tape by dabbling with their code. If this costs me the Next Big Thing, so be it. This modern mindset, that we're always interviewing for the next job, even between HN comments, is exhausting and just funnels us further into exhaustion.
jodrellblank 4y ago
There is nobody else who could have written good code, except developers. There is nobody else who kept rewriting X-Screensaver clones insecurely for 17 years[1] except developers. Nobody else who has knowledge or experience to standardise on tools for the greater good. There is nobody else who wrote Jira but developers. There is nobody else who only wants to do Electron, or who refuses things like UAC because security is fine on their OpenBSD ThinkPad. Reddit blames capitalism, HN blames managmenent, 4chan blames 'Pajeet' Indian stereotype, Slashdot blames Microsoft, very few developers take a look in the mirror and say things like "we need less powerful languages"[2] or "ignore the firehose of new technologies"[3] or "If I want to ship my software, as opposed to just write it, I need to use tech that's a couple of clicks back from "bleeding edge," and spend a lot of time, "polishing the fenders. B O R I N G [but I do it]"[4]. Civil engineers have legal duties and responsibilities to make sure the things they build are fit for purpose and sign off on them before they get deployed, and can be personally fined or imprisoned or lose licenses if they weren't fit for purpose. Want to make a text editor at home? Knock yourself out, pick any language you want, dabble all you like. Want to make something that handles millions of people's data, sign your name to it and put your professional reputation on the line before every release. And it may well make salaries go up for the people willing and able to do that. The world runs on a lot more code than buildings these days and professional developers with bleeding edge MacBooks Pro and six figure salaries complaining that all the software we all suffer under is shitty, is like civil engineers complaining that buildings fall down and it's all management's fault for demanding blueprints before construction and inspections during construction to try and stop the company buildings falling down so often, ugh all that red tape, can't we still use wattle and daub it works fine on my garden shed. [Edit: just seen[5] comment from "Jon" "if you think 'function will crash if given invalid parameters' is a "defect" you should switch to Java". Nice sneer, right?] [1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition/ [2] https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/ https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/ [3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=chrismarshallnyc%20polish&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [5] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8477965/is-kr-c-still-applicable#comment10486687 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8477965/is-kr-c-still-ap... comment from "Jon"