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I disagree with some of the things the article describes. Not that they aren't real or that the world works differently, but with those things themselves. For e

I disagree with some of the things the article describes. Not that they aren't real or that the world works differently, but with those things themselves. For example: (1) It should always be ones goal to improve ones technical skills, not only in the beginning of ones career. Too often have I seen bad code or lack of knowledge about computer programming concepts, that people ought to know, considering the time they spent in their career. Those things will result in "solutions" but those solutions might not be the most maintainable and understandable. Fine if you switch jobs every 2 years and never have to deal with the aftermath, but not fine for people, who value quality. All your communication skills won't make up for a brittle base due to insufficient technical skills. (2) To let others dictate, how you develop professionally, being the ultimate yes-sayer. Improve the way you yourself value and see as important and stick to your guns. Not everyone needs to go along career paths that some company with mediocre management has laid out for them. Not everyone needs to become a talker. (3) Perhaps the title is a bit too extreme. Code can be the solution. Good code even more so. Personally that's what I want to do. Write code to solve problems. Of course, only write it, when it is necessary. Who wants to write code only to have it be discarded, because it was not needed in the first place. (OK maybe sometimes one does, for the learning experience.)

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Yeah. The article has the right idea in general. But, It's pretty thin, there are entire books written on this subject that dig into the 'nuance'. I've also had consultants get a bit to 'hand-wavy' like described, and then I don't trust they can code either.
- acedTrex 3y ago
  I feel like the hand wave should be the default until actually asked then you can dive into specifics.
chadash 3y ago
> Code can be the solution. Good code even more so. I think I agree with the author here. Code is a tool. This is like saying "a wrench can be the solution and a good wrench is even more valuable". I'm sure that car mechanics have very strong opinions about various wrenches. But I'm paying to get my car fixed. Sure, it's nice to hear that your shop has the latest equipment, but at the end of the day, the thing that matters most is that you can fix my car. Even as a developer, I hardly care about the code quality or what language you use if you provide a good and reliable service. I've never thought to myself, geez, I love AWS, but I really wish they'd move away from Java.
- kraftman 3y ago
  You would if their services crashed every day though right? Like when you pay to get your car fixed, there's an implicit expectation that it will be fixed well enough that it doesnt break the same way again for a certain amount of time, and it doesnt make anything else break. If you found out that the garage was using wooden wrenches that broke 10% of the time and they passed that cost onto you, or occasionally broke and damaged the car, but didn't in your case, you wouldnt be like 'oh well, they fixed the problem, Ill keep going back to them'.
  - chadash 3y ago
    i'm trying to think of the coding equivalent of wooden wrenches? Let's say that's an app written entirely with VBA. If I perceive that it solves my problems, then for most use cases, i'd be fine with it. I guess if it's running my bank account or it's a platform for deploying my code, maybe i'd care somewhat, but in 99% of cases, i wouldn't. But the reality is that most code is written in a language that's good enough. It's a metal wrench that might be showing some rust. Do I think that PHP is a good language to start a project with today? Of course not. Do I care if you wrote your site 15 years ago and it still runs on PHP? Not really.
    - kraftman 3y ago
      maybe a better anology would be using the wrong tool to get something done. like you could use a high quality hammer to hammer a high quality screw into two pieces of wood, and it would probably hold them together, but you shouldn't. you could build an entire SPA in pure JavaScript...

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Yeah. The article has the right idea in general. But, It's pretty thin, there are entire books written on this subject that dig into the 'nuance'. I've also had consultants get a bit to 'hand-wavy' like described, and then I don't trust they can code either.

acedTrex 3y ago
I feel like the hand wave should be the default until actually asked then you can dive into specifics.

chadash 3y ago

> Code can be the solution. Good code even more so. I think I agree with the author here. Code is a tool. This is like saying "a wrench can be the solution and a good wrench is even more valuable". I'm sure that car mechanics have very strong opinions about various wrenches. But I'm paying to get my car fixed. Sure, it's nice to hear that your shop has the latest equipment, but at the end of the day, the thing that matters most is that you can fix my car. Even as a developer, I hardly care about the code quality or what language you use if you provide a good and reliable service. I've never thought to myself, geez, I love AWS, but I really wish they'd move away from Java.

kraftman 3y ago
You would if their services crashed every day though right? Like when you pay to get your car fixed, there's an implicit expectation that it will be fixed well enough that it doesnt break the same way again for a certain amount of time, and it doesnt make anything else break. If you found out that the garage was using wooden wrenches that broke 10% of the time and they passed that cost onto you, or occasionally broke and damaged the car, but didn't in your case, you wouldnt be like 'oh well, they fixed the problem, Ill keep going back to them'.
- chadash 3y ago
  i'm trying to think of the coding equivalent of wooden wrenches? Let's say that's an app written entirely with VBA. If I perceive that it solves my problems, then for most use cases, i'd be fine with it. I guess if it's running my bank account or it's a platform for deploying my code, maybe i'd care somewhat, but in 99% of cases, i wouldn't. But the reality is that most code is written in a language that's good enough. It's a metal wrench that might be showing some rust. Do I think that PHP is a good language to start a project with today? Of course not. Do I care if you wrote your site 15 years ago and it still runs on PHP? Not really.
  - kraftman 3y ago
    maybe a better anology would be using the wrong tool to get something done. like you could use a high quality hammer to hammer a high quality screw into two pieces of wood, and it would probably hold them together, but you shouldn't. you could build an entire SPA in pure JavaScript...