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It’s not the “programming industry” that OP hates, it’s the “corporate world”. I’ve worked with (and have been) developers who have mismatched expectations on w

It’s not the “programming industry” that OP hates, it’s the “corporate world”. I’ve worked with (and have been) developers who have mismatched expectations on what “the real world” wants out of them. The corporate world doesn’t give a shit about finesse, abstractions, witty or beautiful code. They care about finding developers who will pump out features to the business requirements. Some human beings in that cog (managers, directors, peers, etc) may allude to enabling developers to actually practice the “art” of programming but the bottom line is if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability. Find comfort in programming outside of the corporate world and practicing the art but don’t expect the “industry” gives a damn about the how or why of programming, mearly the characters we punch onto the screen into cash. Once you come to terms with this, life gets a lot easier, less frustrating and you can actually find fun in the work (albeit, not necessarily “art”).

graemep 2y ago
> if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability. I would add, moving the needle in the short term. A business taking a long term view would care more about quality (reliability, security maintainability).
- chii 2y ago
  Ostensibly that's true, but in the long term we're all dead anyway. So the company's shareholders might only want the term to be just long enough to cash out.
  - graemep 2y ago
    Most of us will be dead in decades. What I mean by long term here is more than two or three years. > So the company's shareholders might only want the term to be just long enough to cash out. Which means they need to sell to people who think the business has enough of a future for them to cash out. That stretches the terms a bit, but not long enough from the point of view of employees, customers, or what is good of the economy as a while. Depends on the composition of shareholders too. One thing I recall from my time in investment management was the problem of clients who were reluctant to sell because it would create a capital gains tax liability. At the other extreme are fund managers whose most pressing concern is where they will appear in this year's performance league tables.
- bumby 2y ago
  Wouldn’t you think this would mean government-made code would be of higher quality (in theory, and ignoring when govt code is made by private contractors)? It seems to be the opposite
  - geraldwhen 2y ago
    Not all developers are equal. Government work pays a third or less what private industry pays. You’re never going to get extreme competence from a government software employee.
    - bumby 2y ago
      Never? You don’t think NSA or Israeli 8200 has preeminent software developers? I think your assumption hinges on people being motivated solely by money. That may be largely generalizable, but I suspect there are relatively large exceptions to that rule.
      - berniedurfee 2y ago
        I think they have the benefit of mystique. I don’t think you’d find their code quality any better than the average. I also think you’d find the same rush to market mania that plagues the rest of the software industry.
    - jampekka 2y ago
      Not all competent people are driven by pay. I'd say the most competent usually are not. There are a lot easier and safer ways to get paid well than competence.
  - graemep 2y ago
    Governments are often sort termist too. For politicians next year's election is often what matters. They also have layers of management, in some countries they are frequently moved around so the long term (from any given manager's point of view) is someone else's problem. From what I know academics in computing fields tend to write high quality software. Not all not Donald Knuth level, but they seem to mostly care about quality.
_trampeltier 2y ago
A part of the problem is, no user ever look at codebases. Unlike you da a PCB, make an electrical machine, build a bridge, people see the result. In software people see the UI. Also because copying is free, in PCB for ex. every jumper wire cost you, in software they are for free. So why fixing things truely.
- jackcviers3 2y ago
  Copying isn't free though. Every front-end application built on Electron or running in a container that duplicates half of the OS stack burns more memory on my computer, forcing earlier upgrades of either the entire machine or RAM with each year that passes. It's free to produce, but the cost of running more copied software always increases.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    But that at least allows the consumer to decide the tradeoff. If this Electron app or container costs me more than it’s worth to me, I don’t run it.
    - pyrale 2y ago
      > But that at least allows the consumer to decide the tradeoff. ...If they connect the dots.
      - jackcviers3 2y ago
        When consumer software still came on physical media, nearly everything advertised the amount of ram and minimum system and cpu requirements necessary to run the software. That just isn't the case nowadays, so you don't know there will be trouble until it occurs at runtime. I can limit the memory available to ALL the tools I use every day (I only do it for docker and jvm stuff), set priority levels, etc., but it feels very weird for a brand new laptop to hit swap after a few days of uptime.
  - _trampeltier 2y ago
jajko 2y ago
And this is general approach, nothing malevolent against IT geeks like some less experienced try to project themselves. They want plumbers also just to keep things running and implement requirements, not have academic discussions about fine art of optimized water flow. Companies are there to make money for the owners and thats it, not on some altruistic missions. I think OP could be better served in academia as long as he keeps greed for money at bay, which some manage better than others over time.
- z3phyr 2y ago
  Nope. Academia has a very sad bottom line as well. What OP needs is enough financial stability and political will that they can do whatever they want. This can be slowly achieved by grinding at a corporation, taking political control and grinding or by violence / threat of violence.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    Academia can be pretty great if you can live with economic uncertainty, non-unreasonable pay and aren't interested in careerism or that your work has any real impact outside handful of other academics. There's of course a lot of bullshit, but you can sort of choose the tradeoff between bullshit and career development/stability. If you're OK with a high chance of never getting a permanent job, in many places you can do practically whatever you want. And if you e.g. know how to code, you can usually go to the industry churn as a backup when your grant streak runs out. But yes, in the bigger picture, the latter are the sustainable course of action. There's only so many, or rather frew, grants.
- krautsourced 2y ago
  The last bit is very true - companies are making money for the owners _and_ to pay the programmer's often relatively high salary. It's a general rule in life that the more 'fun' or 'fulfilling' your job is, the more likely it is to pay peanuts.
_a_a_a_ 2y ago
Yeah, maybe they don't care about abstraction and beautiful code, but they suddenly start caring when technical debt caused by absence of these things starts to hit, but they are too often unable to see that the two are related. In my personal project I spend a huge amount of time tidying things up, abstracting, cleaning, commenting and that has really started to pay off as the project grew. If I'd let it deteriorate into a random bowl of software stew, I have come to a dead end by now, eternally firefighting instead of progressing. > if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability yup
- rileymat2 2y ago
  Yes, many people present a choice between “code quality” and speed, but this choice is false because tickets are not independent. Choices made with the current one affect the speed of the next. Sure you may make a tradeoff between speed and quality in a particular task, but that does not hold over a week or month of work.
- mrkeen 2y ago
  > If I'd let it deteriorate into a random bowl of software stew, I have come to a dead end by now, eternally firefighting instead of progressing. It's real. It's what I'm doing at work now. Every few months we start a new big project. Sometimes they're business-driven (end users can now have many X instead of one X), sometimes they're compliance-driven (we now need to block users who associate with users in blocked countries), sometimes they're tech-debt-driven (migrate from self-managed VMs into a dedicated provider). We keep finding missing parts we overlooked. Sometimes it's from us having rushed it, other times it's from consultants getting fired while they're working on it, and others struggling to continue the vision in the right direction. Sometimes it's bad tooling - our new managed Kafka host has a mirror-maker tool that doesn't quite mirror properly, or intellij/gradle will flag that a class is missing, but not why (i.e. which dependency is missing!).
ricardo81 2y ago
>corporate world That was my take, and an unwillingness to compromise on their principles. Sometimes the compromise may be less money but a more fulfilling role.
- andy99 2y ago
  > Sometimes the compromise may be less money but a more fulfilling role Once one reaches a point in their career where they have options this is almost universally true. It's in fact the reason why some jobs pay more, because they need to for people to do them instead of something more fulfilling. I've had jobs where I thought with a few changes this would be awesome, but eventually realized it's those few differences that mean someone is going to pay me well to do it. Depending on many things, this may be worth it to you or not.
  - ricardo81 2y ago
    Fair point. Maybe it applies to more experienced people who can afford to pick and choose. The article didn't mention their financial circumstance, I got the vibe it was someone younger. It read a little disjointed and it's hard to tell whether they sought jobs they believed in or whether they were satisfying an imperative financial need.
OJFord 2y ago
Or simpler than that, surprise, work is less fun than hobby. Even if you work for yourself doing what you love, even say it's making furniture or whatever, there's always going to be things like customers want the 'wrong' things, or won't pay extra for the nicer exotic material, etc. doing purely what you love as a hobby with no work aspect is always going to be better.
- _nalply 2y ago
  Because in a hobby you are your own master and in a job someone else is your superior and orders you to do things. If you are lucky many of these things are what you would like to do anyway.
  - chongli 2y ago
    Yeah. It's extremely rare to be able to do exactly and only what you want to do and be able to make money from it. Even the big YouTube celebrities face pressure to make the videos their audience wants to watch. When they go off the rails the views take a nosedive.
abnercoimbre 2y ago
Hope it's okay to self-plug here (seems highly relevant): what you say is a big reason why I organize the Handmade conferences for a living and why they're free of sponsors [0]. An implicit goal is to grow popular enough to the point that enough programmers collectively agree they should have a say in the "corporate world," such as demanding that we slow down "pumping out" new features and make greater investments in software quality. [0] https://handmadecities.com/about https://handmadecities.com/about
- stavros 2y ago
  This looks interesting, but why is 75% of your landing page your bios? When clicking the link, I definitely didn't have in mind "I wonder who founded this and what their background is". I now know a lot about who organizes this and what their reasons are, but I don't know anything about what it is.
  - mariusor 2y ago
    That's the about page. The landing page has more info: > We are the largest indie conferences for low-level programmers. This is your portal to meet with folks into graphics, game engines, kernels, compilers, and more!
    - stavros 2y ago
      Ah, derp, I didn't look at the link, thank you.
      - abnercoimbre 2y ago
        The one time I link to the About page instead of the landing... sorry! (I only did it because it mentions the bit about being sponsor-free.)
        stavros 2y ago
        Nah, it's my fault, I spaced out and didn't read the URL.
yodsanklai 2y ago
> Find comfort in programming outside of the corporate world and practicing the art It's hard to practice the art on the side when you already work hard in corporation. However, I think it's possible to have a bit of fun programming in the corporate world. Besides, the incentives between managements and programmers do overlap. It's not like all managers are stupid. If the codebase is too messy, or lead to too many productions incidents, it makes sense to clean it up and refactor, or use different tools or languages.
fuzzy2 2y ago
I think “industry” strongly implies “corporate world”. However > The corporate world doesn’t give a shit about finesse, abstractions, witty or beautiful code. Guess I’m the corporate world then! Listen here, dear colleagues: Before attempting any finesse, abstraction, wit or beauty, maybe first try to make it work to spec. Because otherwise it is entirely worthless. If you are reasonably good at making it work, you can then make it right and maybe even fast.
- halfmatthalfcat 2y ago
  I just wanted to make it more explicit since this issue isn't specific to software developers, every career grapples with the "right way" versus the "economically prudent way" in our (US) capitalistic society. That in and of itself isn't bad, take capitalism however you want, but the point is managing expectations to the reality that exists in front of us, not the one you wish it could be.
- bdw5204 2y ago
  In my experience, most of the corporate world seems to care more about their aesthetic notions of the Platonic ideal of what code should look like than whether or not it works or whether or not it is efficient. Certainly that's my experience from interviews. Maybe the people who care about business value should be the engineering managers not the people who equate their personal aesthetic preferences with the only right way to write code?
  - fuzzy2 2y ago
    I’ve had the opportunity to work with lots of mechanical engineering corps to date, and I can confidently tell you: Even if they had some platonic ideal, they would never be able to follow through. The mediocrity of their software development practices is… profound. On all levels of the hierarchy. Sure they care about the ideal of sustainable software development, but they just can’t do it. On the other hand, my employer advertises clean code as a service, and this attracts the kind of developers you describe.
  - peddling-brink 2y ago
ckdarby 2y ago
Your "beautiful" code won't be around if the company isn't around. If you want to do that then build a open source project and a company around it.
andrewfromx 2y ago
depends on your manager! I just recently told an engineer "well this is more art vs science, so paint the picture anyway you want" and left it to them to write the code the right way.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
From what they wrote, "small startups" are part of that "corporate world." From my experience, the cultural differences between large corporations, and smaller startups, is night and day. Often, neither one is functional; but they are dysfunctional, in different ways. For myself, I was never happy until I was able to helm my own ship. A lot of folks think that this means "hobby programmer," but I don't actually fit that template.
- fireflash38 2y ago
  I vote we bring back artisan. Someone who takes pride in their work, to a form of artistry, and just like in a lot of good art: not overly complicated
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    Not all artisanal is simple. Here's a carved rosewood dragon, from Bali: https://imgur.com/a/nwyGSqT https://imgur.com/a/nwyGSqT
  - berniedurfee 2y ago
    The starving software artist. I like it! :)
badpun 2y ago
I don't think it's "corporate world", but just capitalism. Non-corporate companies often have thinner margins than corporations and thus skimp on "extras" such as quality, craftsmanship etc. even more.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  What is a non-corporate company?
  - malermeister 2y ago
    State-owned companies or worker-owned coops come to mind.
  - badpun 2y ago
    Company that's not a corporation. As per dictionary: - company: a commercial business. - corporation: a large company or group of companies authorized to act as a single entity and recognized as such in law.
PUSH_AX 2y ago
Corporate? I think ultimately we’re talking about any business here. And a business doesn’t exist to facilitate engineers to go back and forth on a PR for a week, or to fantasise about abstractions all day. The entire problem is the vast majority of engineers have an inability to recognise the business function of their output. They live in their own worlds with tunnel vision on minutia. I can’t pin point when this happened but engineering is a complete circus in most companies. The horrifying thing is there is buy in at senior management, like the engineers have convinced everyone that it should take weeks to deliver some trivial feature, because God forbid they don’t deliver it by using every dogmatic and koolaid driven process they’ve picked up from others over the years. You work for a business that’s trying to make money, not a software engineering sandbox charity. Of course there needs to be some balance, but boy is it skewed one way for most right now.
- pyrale 2y ago
  > The entire problem is the vast majority of engineers have an inability to recognise the business function of their output. Who would have thought this would happens when actual business talks to a business analyst, who talks with a product owner, who talks with the engineer (when a PO proxy didn't manage to squeeze in between them).
  - PUSH_AX 2y ago
    I’m sorry but I think it’s cultural, I’ve worked in enough early stage startups where the first engineers are working directly with CXOs, and they’re still firmly living in lala engineering land.
pydry 2y ago
It's not just the corporate world, it's capitalism in general. I could point out a million people who have made rhyming criticisms of this type before programming even existed. Until those criticisms are met with widespread solid agreement instead of outright hostility or even a resigned "well, it's better than all the alternatives" then nothing will change. Ive lost count of the number of times Ive seen programmers complain bitterly about e.g. alienation, forever oblivious to the fact that they are rehashing Marx. This post is no exception. When push comes to shove though, 0 of these people would actually dare to call themselves a Marxist.
- p0nce 2y ago
  Reading Harry Braverman suitably explains a lot of what is going in programming.
- jampekka 2y ago
  You're not supposed to connect the dots. That could lead to effective reform.
marginalia_nu 2y ago
I feel this sort of mentality is exactly how you turn into Boeing. Wings staying attached to the plane in air isn't pumping up the KPIs, fire everyone who wastes time on such irrelevant concerns!
pyrale 2y ago
> the bottom line is if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability. That's fine. The issue comes when you fail to explain how stuff like keeping recent versions of your software or taking some time to fix (at least some of) the bugs moves the needle to people that would never fly a plane that doesn't receive maintenance. The issue, in economic terms, is that a significant share of our industry's sponsors are the kind of clients that make a market for lemons.
groestl 2y ago
Programming without moving the the needle on _something_ is, ultimately, ugly. Granted, not all needles are worth money. But for the subset of needles that do, you can bang out all the beautiful code you want, and you will get respect for it, in a functional org, even corporate. Abstractions for abstraction sake are frowned upon for good reason.
forinti 2y ago
Best job I ever had with regards to coding was for a small family business. I had to meet the requirements, of course, but otherwise I had total liberty. OTOH, nowadays I also have to deal with young (and not so young) coders that insist on very baroque designs that don't really help to achieve business goals and actually hinder progress.
ericyd 2y ago
I was coming to say something very similar. The hard truth is that the society-changing projects this person wants to work on are exceptionally rare, and most work boils down to selling products to consumers. Not that I'm saying this is ideal, but if it were easy to create deep and inspiring work that paid well, everyone would be doing it.
swatcoder 2y ago
> It’s not the “programming industry” that OP hates, it’s the “corporate world”. To add to this, the "industry" is very big and fundamentally quite diverse in character. But right now we're on the tail end of a big surge in growth, and those surges tend to introruce a lot of uniformity in their wake. Processes and practices of the orgs are taken as some part of the secret to their success and are adopted by competitors and newcomers, and after a while everybody-ish doing work adjacent to the booming sectors within the industry are approaching it similarly and procedurally. The focus is on outmaneuvering competing businesses for a slice of the growiing pie, and matters of concern of the craft itself or long-term engineering vision are generally deprioritized. This is not a permanent condition or a universal one. All along, there were still people and orgs and departments doing things differently, but they did become harder to spot amidst all the boom chasers. And as the boom tapers or bursts, with competition having less at stake, even the homogenized orgs and departments start having the headroom to take a second look at their processes, procedures, and priorities and again start to diversify. It's reasonable to get discouraged if you've only ever seen the kind of orgs you can't stomach anymore, but a little patience can find you with opportunities you're more comfortable with. Some dedicated pavement pounding and deep digging for the orgs that never hopped on the bandwagon can make it happen to. Different kinds of orgs are out there now, and more will come to look different again in some coming years.
leke 2y ago
This. I've been very happily working in a small company and we recently got a new CTO. In a couple of days we will find out which 6 of us are being terminated. Corporate fat trimmings and all that.
atmosx 2y ago
That is true. But the way you present the reality of the industry makes it sound like anyone could do anything. That is, obviously, not the case. For example, research lab code usually sucks big time, while other industries might higher standards. Some teams try to make up for lack of personnel by implementing extreme level of automation, in that case you need high quality code, with well thought abstractions and there are only so many engineers who will deliver that. So it’s not just “coffee -> code” machine. But the idea that a suit cares about the implementation details, programming languages and such is obviously not true and this community sometimes make it seem as if these things matter. They do to us, engineers, no one else cares much like my wife couldn’t care less about LBJ being better than MJ at basketball (he is not, obviously).
loldk 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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racional 2y ago
The corporate world doesn’t give a shit about finesse, abstractions, witty or beautiful code. Right, but that wasn't what the OP was talking about. In fact the issues they were concerned about were pretty much orthogonal to that. You're trying to make their complaint sound lame and pollyannaish, but really it wasn't.
from-nibly 2y ago
Id argue that there is art in figuring out how to continuously churn out features. Its really hard to write your code in such a way it can handle being jerked around, all while not wasting time on what might happen.
gofreddygo 2y ago
> Find comfort in programming outside of the corporate world This is indeed the bitter truth I've learned this last decade in the industry. You're paid to deliver. Whether its efficient, it solved the problem, made any money, ticked some boxes isn't yours to bother or control. Plan tour stuff, do your stuff, be nice to others and sign out at 5. Don't underdo by writing bad code, or not caring of the downstream consequences of your decisions etc. People do get fired for this. More important, don't overdo. Don't try to predict how the product evolves and catch those scenarios, don't fight for your obviously better design, don't try to deliver faster, don't try to fix that bug you found while working on something else you are tasked to deliver. Chasing a promotion is one of the worst kind of stress I brought on to myself. Know the kind of project you're in (high intensity, high growth, mature, next on the chopping block) and act accordingly. Further, take credit and be seen. Do a demo once every quarter, review people's code, show up for design meetings and ask a question, reply to emails/IM's (that show up before 5pm) quickly, deliver on what you said you will. Be seen as a useful resource but push back (with your actions) on the slightest sign of pressure to deliver. Finally, always be prepared to land your next job interview in 2 weeks. Its your workplace. Not your family, nor a body shop.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"... if you aren't moving the needle economically for the company, you're a liability." Being a liability could result in moving the needle, just not the direction the company would prefer.
isakkeyten 2y ago
I wish I had this corporate experience. We focus on finesse, abstractions, witty or beautiful code. I keep being forced to optimise things that we haven't measured, add new lines to places to make the code pretty, rename variables, functions and avoid using Javascript arrays and use the "more performant" sets, etc etc. All of this at the price of the god damn feature never being able to land and my PR staying in limbo for weeks. But this is just another end of the spectrum I guess.
kirso 2y ago
Great observation. I started learning programming years ago and never had an inclination to become a software engineer professionally. Whilst everyone is doomscrolling about AI taking over, I am learning basics and fundamentals of programming and having so much fun. Its the only activity that gives me flow state these days and actually allows to build something from nothing. I wish I could pickup the skills faster, but I also realize that I'd be probably miserable...

graemep 2y ago

> if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability. I would add, moving the needle in the short term. A business taking a long term view would care more about quality (reliability, security maintainability).

chii 2y ago
Ostensibly that's true, but in the long term we're all dead anyway. So the company's shareholders might only want the term to be just long enough to cash out.
- graemep 2y ago
  Most of us will be dead in decades. What I mean by long term here is more than two or three years. > So the company's shareholders might only want the term to be just long enough to cash out. Which means they need to sell to people who think the business has enough of a future for them to cash out. That stretches the terms a bit, but not long enough from the point of view of employees, customers, or what is good of the economy as a while. Depends on the composition of shareholders too. One thing I recall from my time in investment management was the problem of clients who were reluctant to sell because it would create a capital gains tax liability. At the other extreme are fund managers whose most pressing concern is where they will appear in this year's performance league tables.
bumby 2y ago
Wouldn’t you think this would mean government-made code would be of higher quality (in theory, and ignoring when govt code is made by private contractors)? It seems to be the opposite
- geraldwhen 2y ago
  Not all developers are equal. Government work pays a third or less what private industry pays. You’re never going to get extreme competence from a government software employee.
  - bumby 2y ago
    Never? You don’t think NSA or Israeli 8200 has preeminent software developers? I think your assumption hinges on people being motivated solely by money. That may be largely generalizable, but I suspect there are relatively large exceptions to that rule.
    - berniedurfee 2y ago
      I think they have the benefit of mystique. I don’t think you’d find their code quality any better than the average. I also think you’d find the same rush to market mania that plagues the rest of the software industry.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    Not all competent people are driven by pay. I'd say the most competent usually are not. There are a lot easier and safer ways to get paid well than competence.
- graemep 2y ago
  Governments are often sort termist too. For politicians next year's election is often what matters. They also have layers of management, in some countries they are frequently moved around so the long term (from any given manager's point of view) is someone else's problem. From what I know academics in computing fields tend to write high quality software. Not all not Donald Knuth level, but they seem to mostly care about quality.

_trampeltier 2y ago

A part of the problem is, no user ever look at codebases. Unlike you da a PCB, make an electrical machine, build a bridge, people see the result. In software people see the UI. Also because copying is free, in PCB for ex. every jumper wire cost you, in software they are for free. So why fixing things truely.

jackcviers3 2y ago
Copying isn't free though. Every front-end application built on Electron or running in a container that duplicates half of the OS stack burns more memory on my computer, forcing earlier upgrades of either the entire machine or RAM with each year that passes. It's free to produce, but the cost of running more copied software always increases.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  But that at least allows the consumer to decide the tradeoff. If this Electron app or container costs me more than it’s worth to me, I don’t run it.
  - pyrale 2y ago
    > But that at least allows the consumer to decide the tradeoff. ...If they connect the dots.
    - jackcviers3 2y ago
      When consumer software still came on physical media, nearly everything advertised the amount of ram and minimum system and cpu requirements necessary to run the software. That just isn't the case nowadays, so you don't know there will be trouble until it occurs at runtime. I can limit the memory available to ALL the tools I use every day (I only do it for docker and jvm stuff), set priority levels, etc., but it feels very weird for a brand new laptop to hit swap after a few days of uptime.
- _trampeltier 2y ago

jajko 2y ago

And this is general approach, nothing malevolent against IT geeks like some less experienced try to project themselves. They want plumbers also just to keep things running and implement requirements, not have academic discussions about fine art of optimized water flow. Companies are there to make money for the owners and thats it, not on some altruistic missions. I think OP could be better served in academia as long as he keeps greed for money at bay, which some manage better than others over time.

z3phyr 2y ago
Nope. Academia has a very sad bottom line as well. What OP needs is enough financial stability and political will that they can do whatever they want. This can be slowly achieved by grinding at a corporation, taking political control and grinding or by violence / threat of violence.
- jampekka 2y ago
  Academia can be pretty great if you can live with economic uncertainty, non-unreasonable pay and aren't interested in careerism or that your work has any real impact outside handful of other academics. There's of course a lot of bullshit, but you can sort of choose the tradeoff between bullshit and career development/stability. If you're OK with a high chance of never getting a permanent job, in many places you can do practically whatever you want. And if you e.g. know how to code, you can usually go to the industry churn as a backup when your grant streak runs out. But yes, in the bigger picture, the latter are the sustainable course of action. There's only so many, or rather frew, grants.
krautsourced 2y ago
The last bit is very true - companies are making money for the owners _and_ to pay the programmer's often relatively high salary. It's a general rule in life that the more 'fun' or 'fulfilling' your job is, the more likely it is to pay peanuts.

_a_a_a_ 2y ago

Yeah, maybe they don't care about abstraction and beautiful code, but they suddenly start caring when technical debt caused by absence of these things starts to hit, but they are too often unable to see that the two are related. In my personal project I spend a huge amount of time tidying things up, abstracting, cleaning, commenting and that has really started to pay off as the project grew. If I'd let it deteriorate into a random bowl of software stew, I have come to a dead end by now, eternally firefighting instead of progressing. > if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability yup

rileymat2 2y ago
Yes, many people present a choice between “code quality” and speed, but this choice is false because tickets are not independent. Choices made with the current one affect the speed of the next. Sure you may make a tradeoff between speed and quality in a particular task, but that does not hold over a week or month of work.
mrkeen 2y ago
> If I'd let it deteriorate into a random bowl of software stew, I have come to a dead end by now, eternally firefighting instead of progressing. It's real. It's what I'm doing at work now. Every few months we start a new big project. Sometimes they're business-driven (end users can now have many X instead of one X), sometimes they're compliance-driven (we now need to block users who associate with users in blocked countries), sometimes they're tech-debt-driven (migrate from self-managed VMs into a dedicated provider). We keep finding missing parts we overlooked. Sometimes it's from us having rushed it, other times it's from consultants getting fired while they're working on it, and others struggling to continue the vision in the right direction. Sometimes it's bad tooling - our new managed Kafka host has a mirror-maker tool that doesn't quite mirror properly, or intellij/gradle will flag that a class is missing, but not why (i.e. which dependency is missing!).

ricardo81 2y ago

>corporate world That was my take, and an unwillingness to compromise on their principles. Sometimes the compromise may be less money but a more fulfilling role.

andy99 2y ago
> Sometimes the compromise may be less money but a more fulfilling role Once one reaches a point in their career where they have options this is almost universally true. It's in fact the reason why some jobs pay more, because they need to for people to do them instead of something more fulfilling. I've had jobs where I thought with a few changes this would be awesome, but eventually realized it's those few differences that mean someone is going to pay me well to do it. Depending on many things, this may be worth it to you or not.
- ricardo81 2y ago
  Fair point. Maybe it applies to more experienced people who can afford to pick and choose. The article didn't mention their financial circumstance, I got the vibe it was someone younger. It read a little disjointed and it's hard to tell whether they sought jobs they believed in or whether they were satisfying an imperative financial need.

OJFord 2y ago

Or simpler than that, surprise, work is less fun than hobby. Even if you work for yourself doing what you love, even say it's making furniture or whatever, there's always going to be things like customers want the 'wrong' things, or won't pay extra for the nicer exotic material, etc. doing purely what you love as a hobby with no work aspect is always going to be better.

_nalply 2y ago
Because in a hobby you are your own master and in a job someone else is your superior and orders you to do things. If you are lucky many of these things are what you would like to do anyway.
- chongli 2y ago
  Yeah. It's extremely rare to be able to do exactly and only what you want to do and be able to make money from it. Even the big YouTube celebrities face pressure to make the videos their audience wants to watch. When they go off the rails the views take a nosedive.

abnercoimbre 2y ago

Hope it's okay to self-plug here (seems highly relevant): what you say is a big reason why I organize the Handmade conferences for a living and why they're free of sponsors [0]. An implicit goal is to grow popular enough to the point that enough programmers collectively agree they should have a say in the "corporate world," such as demanding that we slow down "pumping out" new features and make greater investments in software quality. [0] https://handmadecities.com/about https://handmadecities.com/about

stavros 2y ago
This looks interesting, but why is 75% of your landing page your bios? When clicking the link, I definitely didn't have in mind "I wonder who founded this and what their background is". I now know a lot about who organizes this and what their reasons are, but I don't know anything about what it is.
- mariusor 2y ago
  That's the about page. The landing page has more info: > We are the largest indie conferences for low-level programmers. This is your portal to meet with folks into graphics, game engines, kernels, compilers, and more!
  - stavros 2y ago
    Ah, derp, I didn't look at the link, thank you.
    - abnercoimbre 2y ago
      The one time I link to the About page instead of the landing... sorry! (I only did it because it mentions the bit about being sponsor-free.)
      - stavros 2y ago
        Nah, it's my fault, I spaced out and didn't read the URL.

yodsanklai 2y ago

> Find comfort in programming outside of the corporate world and practicing the art It's hard to practice the art on the side when you already work hard in corporation. However, I think it's possible to have a bit of fun programming in the corporate world. Besides, the incentives between managements and programmers do overlap. It's not like all managers are stupid. If the codebase is too messy, or lead to too many productions incidents, it makes sense to clean it up and refactor, or use different tools or languages.

fuzzy2 2y ago

I think “industry” strongly implies “corporate world”. However > The corporate world doesn’t give a shit about finesse, abstractions, witty or beautiful code. Guess I’m the corporate world then! Listen here, dear colleagues: Before attempting any finesse, abstraction, wit or beauty, maybe first try to make it work to spec. Because otherwise it is entirely worthless. If you are reasonably good at making it work, you can then make it right and maybe even fast.

halfmatthalfcat 2y ago
I just wanted to make it more explicit since this issue isn't specific to software developers, every career grapples with the "right way" versus the "economically prudent way" in our (US) capitalistic society. That in and of itself isn't bad, take capitalism however you want, but the point is managing expectations to the reality that exists in front of us, not the one you wish it could be.
bdw5204 2y ago
In my experience, most of the corporate world seems to care more about their aesthetic notions of the Platonic ideal of what code should look like than whether or not it works or whether or not it is efficient. Certainly that's my experience from interviews. Maybe the people who care about business value should be the engineering managers not the people who equate their personal aesthetic preferences with the only right way to write code?
- fuzzy2 2y ago
  I’ve had the opportunity to work with lots of mechanical engineering corps to date, and I can confidently tell you: Even if they had some platonic ideal, they would never be able to follow through. The mediocrity of their software development practices is… profound. On all levels of the hierarchy. Sure they care about the ideal of sustainable software development, but they just can’t do it. On the other hand, my employer advertises clean code as a service, and this attracts the kind of developers you describe.
- peddling-brink 2y ago

ckdarby 2y ago

Your "beautiful" code won't be around if the company isn't around. If you want to do that then build a open source project and a company around it.

andrewfromx 2y ago

depends on your manager! I just recently told an engineer "well this is more art vs science, so paint the picture anyway you want" and left it to them to write the code the right way.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

From what they wrote, "small startups" are part of that "corporate world." From my experience, the cultural differences between large corporations, and smaller startups, is night and day. Often, neither one is functional; but they are dysfunctional, in different ways. For myself, I was never happy until I was able to helm my own ship. A lot of folks think that this means "hobby programmer," but I don't actually fit that template.

fireflash38 2y ago
I vote we bring back artisan. Someone who takes pride in their work, to a form of artistry, and just like in a lot of good art: not overly complicated
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  Not all artisanal is simple. Here's a carved rosewood dragon, from Bali: https://imgur.com/a/nwyGSqT https://imgur.com/a/nwyGSqT
- berniedurfee 2y ago
  The starving software artist. I like it! :)

badpun 2y ago

I don't think it's "corporate world", but just capitalism. Non-corporate companies often have thinner margins than corporations and thus skimp on "extras" such as quality, craftsmanship etc. even more.

sokoloff 2y ago
What is a non-corporate company?
- malermeister 2y ago
  State-owned companies or worker-owned coops come to mind.
- badpun 2y ago
  Company that's not a corporation. As per dictionary: - company: a commercial business. - corporation: a large company or group of companies authorized to act as a single entity and recognized as such in law.

PUSH_AX 2y ago

Corporate? I think ultimately we’re talking about any business here. And a business doesn’t exist to facilitate engineers to go back and forth on a PR for a week, or to fantasise about abstractions all day. The entire problem is the vast majority of engineers have an inability to recognise the business function of their output. They live in their own worlds with tunnel vision on minutia. I can’t pin point when this happened but engineering is a complete circus in most companies. The horrifying thing is there is buy in at senior management, like the engineers have convinced everyone that it should take weeks to deliver some trivial feature, because God forbid they don’t deliver it by using every dogmatic and koolaid driven process they’ve picked up from others over the years. You work for a business that’s trying to make money, not a software engineering sandbox charity. Of course there needs to be some balance, but boy is it skewed one way for most right now.

pyrale 2y ago
> The entire problem is the vast majority of engineers have an inability to recognise the business function of their output. Who would have thought this would happens when actual business talks to a business analyst, who talks with a product owner, who talks with the engineer (when a PO proxy didn't manage to squeeze in between them).
- PUSH_AX 2y ago
  I’m sorry but I think it’s cultural, I’ve worked in enough early stage startups where the first engineers are working directly with CXOs, and they’re still firmly living in lala engineering land.

pydry 2y ago

It's not just the corporate world, it's capitalism in general. I could point out a million people who have made rhyming criticisms of this type before programming even existed. Until those criticisms are met with widespread solid agreement instead of outright hostility or even a resigned "well, it's better than all the alternatives" then nothing will change. Ive lost count of the number of times Ive seen programmers complain bitterly about e.g. alienation, forever oblivious to the fact that they are rehashing Marx. This post is no exception. When push comes to shove though, 0 of these people would actually dare to call themselves a Marxist.

p0nce 2y ago
Reading Harry Braverman suitably explains a lot of what is going in programming.
jampekka 2y ago
You're not supposed to connect the dots. That could lead to effective reform.

marginalia_nu 2y ago

I feel this sort of mentality is exactly how you turn into Boeing. Wings staying attached to the plane in air isn't pumping up the KPIs, fire everyone who wastes time on such irrelevant concerns!

pyrale 2y ago

> the bottom line is if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability. That's fine. The issue comes when you fail to explain how stuff like keeping recent versions of your software or taking some time to fix (at least some of) the bugs moves the needle to people that would never fly a plane that doesn't receive maintenance. The issue, in economic terms, is that a significant share of our industry's sponsors are the kind of clients that make a market for lemons.

groestl 2y ago

Programming without moving the the needle on _something_ is, ultimately, ugly. Granted, not all needles are worth money. But for the subset of needles that do, you can bang out all the beautiful code you want, and you will get respect for it, in a functional org, even corporate. Abstractions for abstraction sake are frowned upon for good reason.

forinti 2y ago

Best job I ever had with regards to coding was for a small family business. I had to meet the requirements, of course, but otherwise I had total liberty. OTOH, nowadays I also have to deal with young (and not so young) coders that insist on very baroque designs that don't really help to achieve business goals and actually hinder progress.

ericyd 2y ago

I was coming to say something very similar. The hard truth is that the society-changing projects this person wants to work on are exceptionally rare, and most work boils down to selling products to consumers. Not that I'm saying this is ideal, but if it were easy to create deep and inspiring work that paid well, everyone would be doing it.

swatcoder 2y ago

> It’s not the “programming industry” that OP hates, it’s the “corporate world”. To add to this, the "industry" is very big and fundamentally quite diverse in character. But right now we're on the tail end of a big surge in growth, and those surges tend to introruce a lot of uniformity in their wake. Processes and practices of the orgs are taken as some part of the secret to their success and are adopted by competitors and newcomers, and after a while everybody-ish doing work adjacent to the booming sectors within the industry are approaching it similarly and procedurally. The focus is on outmaneuvering competing businesses for a slice of the growiing pie, and matters of concern of the craft itself or long-term engineering vision are generally deprioritized. This is not a permanent condition or a universal one. All along, there were still people and orgs and departments doing things differently, but they did become harder to spot amidst all the boom chasers. And as the boom tapers or bursts, with competition having less at stake, even the homogenized orgs and departments start having the headroom to take a second look at their processes, procedures, and priorities and again start to diversify. It's reasonable to get discouraged if you've only ever seen the kind of orgs you can't stomach anymore, but a little patience can find you with opportunities you're more comfortable with. Some dedicated pavement pounding and deep digging for the orgs that never hopped on the bandwagon can make it happen to. Different kinds of orgs are out there now, and more will come to look different again in some coming years.

leke 2y ago

This. I've been very happily working in a small company and we recently got a new CTO. In a couple of days we will find out which 6 of us are being terminated. Corporate fat trimmings and all that.

atmosx 2y ago

That is true. But the way you present the reality of the industry makes it sound like anyone could do anything. That is, obviously, not the case. For example, research lab code usually sucks big time, while other industries might higher standards. Some teams try to make up for lack of personnel by implementing extreme level of automation, in that case you need high quality code, with well thought abstractions and there are only so many engineers who will deliver that. So it’s not just “coffee -> code” machine. But the idea that a suit cares about the implementation details, programming languages and such is obviously not true and this community sometimes make it seem as if these things matter. They do to us, engineers, no one else cares much like my wife couldn’t care less about LBJ being better than MJ at basketball (he is not, obviously).

loldk 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago

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racional 2y ago

The corporate world doesn’t give a shit about finesse, abstractions, witty or beautiful code. Right, but that wasn't what the OP was talking about. In fact the issues they were concerned about were pretty much orthogonal to that. You're trying to make their complaint sound lame and pollyannaish, but really it wasn't.

from-nibly 2y ago

Id argue that there is art in figuring out how to continuously churn out features. Its really hard to write your code in such a way it can handle being jerked around, all while not wasting time on what might happen.

gofreddygo 2y ago

> Find comfort in programming outside of the corporate world This is indeed the bitter truth I've learned this last decade in the industry. You're paid to deliver. Whether its efficient, it solved the problem, made any money, ticked some boxes isn't yours to bother or control. Plan tour stuff, do your stuff, be nice to others and sign out at 5. Don't underdo by writing bad code, or not caring of the downstream consequences of your decisions etc. People do get fired for this. More important, don't overdo. Don't try to predict how the product evolves and catch those scenarios, don't fight for your obviously better design, don't try to deliver faster, don't try to fix that bug you found while working on something else you are tasked to deliver. Chasing a promotion is one of the worst kind of stress I brought on to myself. Know the kind of project you're in (high intensity, high growth, mature, next on the chopping block) and act accordingly. Further, take credit and be seen. Do a demo once every quarter, review people's code, show up for design meetings and ask a question, reply to emails/IM's (that show up before 5pm) quickly, deliver on what you said you will. Be seen as a useful resource but push back (with your actions) on the slightest sign of pressure to deliver. Finally, always be prepared to land your next job interview in 2 weeks. Its your workplace. Not your family, nor a body shop.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"... if you aren't moving the needle economically for the company, you're a liability." Being a liability could result in moving the needle, just not the direction the company would prefer.

isakkeyten 2y ago

I wish I had this corporate experience. We focus on finesse, abstractions, witty or beautiful code. I keep being forced to optimise things that we haven't measured, add new lines to places to make the code pretty, rename variables, functions and avoid using Javascript arrays and use the "more performant" sets, etc etc. All of this at the price of the god damn feature never being able to land and my PR staying in limbo for weeks. But this is just another end of the spectrum I guess.

kirso 2y ago

Great observation. I started learning programming years ago and never had an inclination to become a software engineer professionally. Whilst everyone is doomscrolling about AI taking over, I am learning basics and fundamentals of programming and having so much fun. Its the only activity that gives me flow state these days and actually allows to build something from nothing. I wish I could pickup the skills faster, but I also realize that I'd be probably miserable...