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We’re definitely in a moment. I’ve seen a large shift away from discipline in the field. People don’t seem to care about professionalism or “good work”. I mean

We’re definitely in a moment. I’ve seen a large shift away from discipline in the field. People don’t seem to care about professionalism or “good work”. I mean back in the mid teens we had the whole “move fast and break things” motif. I think that quickly morphed into “be agile” because no one actually felt good about breaking things. We don’t really have any software engineering leaders these days. It would be nice if one stood up and said “stop being awful. Let’s be professionals and earn our money.” Like, let’s create our own oath.

gedy 2y ago
> We don’t really have any software engineering leaders these days. It would be nice if one stood up and said “stop being awful. Let’s be professionals and earn our money.” I assume you realize that you don't get very far in many companies when you do that. I'm not humble-bragging, but I used to say just this over past 10-15 years even when in senior/leadership positions, and it ended up giving me a reputation of "oh, gedy is difficult", and you get sidelined by more "helpful" junior devs and managers who are willing to sling shit over the wall to please product. It's really not worth it.
- layer8 2y ago
  It’s a matter of getting a critical mass of people who do that. In other words, changing the general culture. I’m lucky to work at a company that more or less has that culture.
  - dclowd9901 2y ago
    Yeah I’ve found this is largely cultural, and it needs to come from the top. The best orgs have a gnarly, time-wisened engineer in a VP role who somehow is also a good people person, and pushes both up and down engineering quality above all else. It’s a very very rare combination.
- matrix87 2y ago
  If it's a mature system and management is highly risk averse, not fucking up means more than slinging shit quickly
photonbeam 2y ago
Need to make software developers legally liable like other engineers, that will cause a huge behavioral shift
- avgDev 2y ago
  IMO, if you want to write code for anything mission critical you should need some kind of state certification, especially when you are writing code for stuff that is used by govt., hospitals, finance etc.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Certifications by themselves don’t help if the culture around them doesn’t change. Otherwise it’s just rubber-stamping.
    - bc569a80a344f9c 2y ago
      Not certification, licensure. That can and will be taken away if you violate the code of ethics. Which in this case means the code of conduct dictated to you by your industry instead of whatever you find ethical. Like a license to be a doctor, lawyer, or civil engineer. There’s - perhaps rightfully, but certainly predictably - a lot of software engineers in this thread moaning about how evil management makes poor engineers cut corners. Great, licensure addresses that. You don’t cut corners if doing so and getting caught means you never get to work in your field again. Any threat management can bring to the table is not as bad as that. And management is far less likely to even try if they can’t just replace you with a less scrupulous engineer (and there are many, many unscrupulous engineers) because there aren’t any because they’re all subject to the same code of ethics. Licensure gives engineers leverage. Super unpopular concept, though.
  - morgante 2y ago
    Certifications and compliance regimes are what got us into this mess in the first place.
- hnick 2y ago
jjav 2y ago
> We’re definitely in a moment. I’ve seen a large shift away from discipline in the field. People don’t seem to care about professionalism or “good work”. Agreed. Thinking back to my experience at a company like Sun, every build was tested on every combination of hardware and OS releases (and probably patch levels, don't remember). This took a long time and a very large number of machines running the entire test suites. After that all passed ok, the release would be rolled out internally for dogfooding. To me that's the base level of responsibility an engineering organization must have. Here, apparently, Crowdstrike lets a code change through with little to no testing and immediately pushes it out to the entire world! And this is from a product that is effectively a backdoor to every host. What could go wrong? YOLO right? This mindset is why I grow to hate what the tech industry has become.
cyanydeez 2y ago
Greed and MBAs have colonized the far ends of the techno sphere.
totallywrong 2y ago
As an infra guy, it seems like all my biggest fights at work lately have been about quality. Long abandoned dependencies that never get updated, little to no testing, constant push to take things to prod before they're ready. Not to mention all the security issues that get shrugged off in the name of convenience. I find both management and devs are to blame. For some reason the amazingly knowledgeable developers I read on here daily are never to be found at work.
- dclowd9901 2y ago
  Yes. I’ve had the same experience. Literally have had engineers get upset with me when I asked them to consider optimizing code or refactor out complexity. “Yeah we’ll do it in a follow up, this needs to ship now,” is what I always end up hearing. We’re not their technical leads but we get pulled into a lot of PRs because we have oversight on a lot of areas of the codebase. From our purview, it’s just constantly deteriorating.

gedy 2y ago

> We don’t really have any software engineering leaders these days. It would be nice if one stood up and said “stop being awful. Let’s be professionals and earn our money.” I assume you realize that you don't get very far in many companies when you do that. I'm not humble-bragging, but I used to say just this over past 10-15 years even when in senior/leadership positions, and it ended up giving me a reputation of "oh, gedy is difficult", and you get sidelined by more "helpful" junior devs and managers who are willing to sling shit over the wall to please product. It's really not worth it.

layer8 2y ago
It’s a matter of getting a critical mass of people who do that. In other words, changing the general culture. I’m lucky to work at a company that more or less has that culture.
- dclowd9901 2y ago
  Yeah I’ve found this is largely cultural, and it needs to come from the top. The best orgs have a gnarly, time-wisened engineer in a VP role who somehow is also a good people person, and pushes both up and down engineering quality above all else. It’s a very very rare combination.
matrix87 2y ago
If it's a mature system and management is highly risk averse, not fucking up means more than slinging shit quickly

photonbeam 2y ago

Need to make software developers legally liable like other engineers, that will cause a huge behavioral shift

avgDev 2y ago
IMO, if you want to write code for anything mission critical you should need some kind of state certification, especially when you are writing code for stuff that is used by govt., hospitals, finance etc.
- layer8 2y ago
  Certifications by themselves don’t help if the culture around them doesn’t change. Otherwise it’s just rubber-stamping.
  - bc569a80a344f9c 2y ago
    Not certification, licensure. That can and will be taken away if you violate the code of ethics. Which in this case means the code of conduct dictated to you by your industry instead of whatever you find ethical. Like a license to be a doctor, lawyer, or civil engineer. There’s - perhaps rightfully, but certainly predictably - a lot of software engineers in this thread moaning about how evil management makes poor engineers cut corners. Great, licensure addresses that. You don’t cut corners if doing so and getting caught means you never get to work in your field again. Any threat management can bring to the table is not as bad as that. And management is far less likely to even try if they can’t just replace you with a less scrupulous engineer (and there are many, many unscrupulous engineers) because there aren’t any because they’re all subject to the same code of ethics. Licensure gives engineers leverage. Super unpopular concept, though.
- morgante 2y ago
  Certifications and compliance regimes are what got us into this mess in the first place.
hnick 2y ago

jjav 2y ago

> We’re definitely in a moment. I’ve seen a large shift away from discipline in the field. People don’t seem to care about professionalism or “good work”. Agreed. Thinking back to my experience at a company like Sun, every build was tested on every combination of hardware and OS releases (and probably patch levels, don't remember). This took a long time and a very large number of machines running the entire test suites. After that all passed ok, the release would be rolled out internally for dogfooding. To me that's the base level of responsibility an engineering organization must have. Here, apparently, Crowdstrike lets a code change through with little to no testing and immediately pushes it out to the entire world! And this is from a product that is effectively a backdoor to every host. What could go wrong? YOLO right? This mindset is why I grow to hate what the tech industry has become.

cyanydeez 2y ago

Greed and MBAs have colonized the far ends of the techno sphere.

totallywrong 2y ago

As an infra guy, it seems like all my biggest fights at work lately have been about quality. Long abandoned dependencies that never get updated, little to no testing, constant push to take things to prod before they're ready. Not to mention all the security issues that get shrugged off in the name of convenience. I find both management and devs are to blame. For some reason the amazingly knowledgeable developers I read on here daily are never to be found at work.

dclowd9901 2y ago
Yes. I’ve had the same experience. Literally have had engineers get upset with me when I asked them to consider optimizing code or refactor out complexity. “Yeah we’ll do it in a follow up, this needs to ship now,” is what I always end up hearing. We’re not their technical leads but we get pulled into a lot of PRs because we have oversight on a lot of areas of the codebase. From our purview, it’s just constantly deteriorating.