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I am working towards quitting programming. Everyone in programming is insane. Managers, stakeholders, other programmers. I'd rather do construction and program

I am working towards quitting programming. Everyone in programming is insane. Managers, stakeholders, other programmers. I'd rather do construction and program on my off time.

runjake 2y ago
So then you’re quitting a software engineer job, you’re not quitting programming. The problem isn’t the programming part.
rqtwteye 2y ago
When you talk about insanity in programming, it’s probably not the best escape to go into construction :-).
- BadHumans 2y ago
  You're right but it's a different brand of crazy.
wizzwizz4 2y ago
Margaret Hamilton coined the term "software engineering" circa 1965, because she recognised that she and her fellow Apollo programmers were doing engineering, and had to be doing engineering, because otherwise people would die. Engineering involves requirements analysis, specification, and the mathematical analysis of families of components to demonstrate – according to the known laws of reality – that the proposed solution meets the requirements and won't kill people. E.W.Dijkstra advocated, repeatedly, from the 1970s onwards (EWD340 – and probably earlier than that also), that software should be formally-analysed and -verified as a matter of course. He called this humility. We call him arrogant, and insane.
- BadHumans 2y ago
  I have no idea what you are talking about or how it is relevant.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    > I now suggest that we confine ourselves to the design and implementation of intellectually manageable programs. If someone fears that this restriction is so severe that we cannot live with it, I can reassure him: the class of intellectually manageable programs is still sufficiently rich to contain many very realistic programs for any problem capable of algorithmic solution. We must not forget that it is not our business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour. Nobody does this. We don't even try. As you said, everyone in programming is insane: so much so, that proposing "hey, why don't we try writing computer programs we actually understand" elicits laughter and scorn. In every other engineering discipline, proposing a solution that you do not understand will get you fired. In software engineering, it's a Tuesday.
raxxorraxor 2y ago
I am a software dev in a company that doesn't sell software. We have everything, management, production, logistics. Developing software here is a blast and quite varied. Yes, this does result in very specialized applications where some of them have a huge amount of technical debt (often also caused by yourself), but you have a lot of freedoms. That freedom has advantages and disadvantages, but almost everything you do will become immediately productive. My experience by pure software companies was the same. Insane is pretty accurate.
- bossyTeacher 2y ago
  In what kind of way are pure software companies insane and non-software companies not insane as a dev? Just curious

I am working towards quitting programming. Everyone in programming is insane. Managers, stakeholders, other programmers. I'd rather do construction and program on my off time.

runjake 2y ago

So then you’re quitting a software engineer job, you’re not quitting programming. The problem isn’t the programming part.

rqtwteye 2y ago

When you talk about insanity in programming, it’s probably not the best escape to go into construction :-).

BadHumans 2y ago
You're right but it's a different brand of crazy.

wizzwizz4 2y ago

Margaret Hamilton coined the term "software engineering" circa 1965, because she recognised that she and her fellow Apollo programmers were doing engineering, and had to be doing engineering, because otherwise people would die. Engineering involves requirements analysis, specification, and the mathematical analysis of families of components to demonstrate – according to the known laws of reality – that the proposed solution meets the requirements and won't kill people. E.W.Dijkstra advocated, repeatedly, from the 1970s onwards (EWD340 – and probably earlier than that also), that software should be formally-analysed and -verified as a matter of course. He called this humility. We call him arrogant, and insane.

BadHumans 2y ago
I have no idea what you are talking about or how it is relevant.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  > I now suggest that we confine ourselves to the design and implementation of intellectually manageable programs. If someone fears that this restriction is so severe that we cannot live with it, I can reassure him: the class of intellectually manageable programs is still sufficiently rich to contain many very realistic programs for any problem capable of algorithmic solution. We must not forget that it is not our business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour. Nobody does this. We don't even try. As you said, everyone in programming is insane: so much so, that proposing "hey, why don't we try writing computer programs we actually understand" elicits laughter and scorn. In every other engineering discipline, proposing a solution that you do not understand will get you fired. In software engineering, it's a Tuesday.

raxxorraxor 2y ago

I am a software dev in a company that doesn't sell software. We have everything, management, production, logistics. Developing software here is a blast and quite varied. Yes, this does result in very specialized applications where some of them have a huge amount of technical debt (often also caused by yourself), but you have a lot of freedoms. That freedom has advantages and disadvantages, but almost everything you do will become immediately productive. My experience by pure software companies was the same. Insane is pretty accurate.

bossyTeacher 2y ago
In what kind of way are pure software companies insane and non-software companies not insane as a dev? Just curious