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Maybe this is a neurodivergent thing, but I have, as long as I can remember, always had the following progression in my mind: "What are you doing? No, that's th

Maybe this is a neurodivergent thing, but I have, as long as I can remember, always had the following progression in my mind: "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?" and I'd continue a few times seeking the "larger problem, the more basic problem being solved" that whatever I was doing "really is". That "basic problem" was "communicating" far more frequently than I expected, and that "communicating" was often just translating between things, people and software, or people and people, or software and software. But it's almost always communicating.

nuancebydefault 1y ago
Indeed. If we SW developers define ourselves as 'coders', we could easily end up into this identity crisis which the article seems to refer to. But in fact we are much more than that. We are problem solvers and a big part of it is understanding, defining and refining the problem itself and in finding an elegant solution. The meaningfulness comes from all the communication and experimenting involved with that process, and in the creativity needed to design an elegant solution. In fact the more boring part is often the coding itself.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  This is the frustrating part of software engineering too; the coding itself is the "boring" part, but for me and many others it's also the most fun and gratifying part, the thing you really want to be doing. Something to grow out of I suppose, but still. The AI vendors want to sell to upper management that that part is what's slowing their company down or costing a lot of money, but I don't think it's that. And in a few years (or now already), AI tooling will probably be an accepted part of the toolchain, but software engineers will always be necessary. Cobol said you won't need coders anymore because it's basically English. Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing. No-code platforms said you won't need coders anymore because you can just click and drag. AI evangelists say you don't need coders anymore because you just type in a prompt and working software comes out.
  - bsenftner 1y ago
    "Software engineering" is a communications problem, and software engineering degrees do not even teach or approach teaching communications. That's a huge disconnect. I still can't understand why the larger industry does not see what our entire industry does is a communications and translation problem/solution/service. So much of what people try to do breaks down at the basic communications level, yet nobody seems to realize it is the communications at fault. And that effective communications is a teachable formal subject. (So, anyway, what I'm doing now is creating class courseware that teaches effective communications for developers.)
    - yomismoaqui 1y ago
      That reminds me of a phrase that I read some years ago: "A typical Google engineer could describe their job as ‘taking protocol buffers and turning them into other protocol buffers’."
    - skydhash 1y ago
      If you take a software engineering textbook, you’ll see there’s nothing about code other than a chapter about methodology. It’s mostly about decomposing problems and stating criteria for a good solution. Which by itself is a lot of writing and talking.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    > Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing. The ability for people to express themselves online on their own domain has regressed immensely since WYSIWYG editors were taken off the market. I don't know who to blame, but the way it is now that you have to learn to code and to be a Linux server admin just to have a website is very damaging. WordPress does not help much at all in that department, it only makes it worse for people who aren't database admins and PHP developers and want to have a functioning website. I think it only became the "standard" because it was free. Same thing for Linux as the host OS. I hope things turn around. There's some small hope with services like Fastmail offering an easy interface for publishing your webpage and Wix and the likes which are at least something.
PunchTornado 1y ago
I don't understand how does this help if, yes, communicating, is what we are doing most of the time.
- bsenftner 1y ago
  It's a framing mechanism, where when one identifies with "writing code" and gains a sense of purpose doing that, and then automation starts "writing code", does that trigger a loss of a sense of purpose? By framing one's innate skill as communicating it should not matter what medium one operates, they are still using non-casual and specific communications to do their job, even when code generation, or ad copy generation, or a talking spokesperson video is the result. Also, consider that a really good communicator often ends up running the places they are at, simply because they leave a wake of understanding behind them. That's really good for business operations.
analog8374 1y ago
Good strategy! One of mine is to ask myself "what is my attention on?". You'd be surprised at how often the answer is, "a bunch of thoughts".
fellowniusmonk 1y ago
Culture has created this odd myth that if something is semantic it doesn't matter. That communication is just another soft skill. Humans make meaning, we are the only source of complex, long term, meaning generation we have ever observed. We emit meaning the way a star emits photons. Sure, a lot of natural processes would still exist if we weren't around. But in this universe, perhaps the only one that exists, we are the ones making meaning. Sometimes tge meaning exists physically in our imaginations, sometimes it maps to external facts, but everything that rationally coheres, creates and explains comes from us.
- tofuahdude 1y ago
  I really like the way you said we emit meaning. It is kind of funny, that we seek meaning and/or purpose in everything - our lives, our actions, our thoughts - but there is a nice change in perspective in considering it as something that we produce rather than find.
  - fellowniusmonk 1y ago
    Humans are evolved creatures that are very resilient across environments. Any species that has this trait must not get stuck in local maximums, at an extreme that's why the koala is just not a resilient species, over confidence. We are an anti-niche species, to avoid this we must have a certain percentage of our population that has doubt, existential crisis that shakes us out of a well worn path. This always amazes me. If you deeply, emotionally _know_ that life has meaning, there will be some existential nights where you you will think "but maybe life doesn't have meaning", and if you _know_ life is meaningless you will sometime find yourself thinking "maybe there is meaning", our brains try to keep us from getting stuck. Humility in the face of the unknown. As a species, just amazing stuff. The cycle of confidence and doubt is absolutely amazing, it's kept us from getting stuck. Keeps us from having "target fixation" and lawn darting into the ground. Some individuals have these values tuned at extreme ends, the full distribution is represented by humanity. The most overconfident and the most anxiety ridden, this is all in our spectrum, and it turns out better or worse for each individual. The great thing is that we can share ideas and examine our priors. I used to believe that "nothing" was a real thing, but it's only an abstraction, nothing has never been observed it's only "real" in our imaginations. There's no such thing as nothing as far as anyone has observed or proven. Same thing with meaninglessness, nothing is meaningless, there are just bits of meaning maximally un-complex and decohered. You can use photon emissions from stars for RNG, humans have made even RNG have rich meaning and high practical utility.
munchbunny 1y ago
> often just translating between things, people and software, or people and people, or software and software. But it's almost always communicating. How true this is. How much of our code, how much compute power, and how much human energy is spent entirely on transforming data from one encoding or schema to another, for the purposes of being able to apply some algorithm or human process to it? Sometimes I feel like it's at least half of our silicon, electricity, and human time spent just doing that transforming.
jancsika 1y ago
Do you do the same with emotions? E.g., a) What is this emotion, b) no, that's the undue amount of stress from this particular encounter, c) larger, basic emotion that is the reason you're ruminating about a total stranger taking 20 seconds at the counter to decide on a coffee order after waiting 10 minutes in line... :)
- bsenftner 1y ago
  No, I treat emotions as yet to be vocalized or identified observations. Emotions are like unsaid statements, hanging in a pregnant pause. If I find myself caught up in emotion, that is a likely scenario where bias can enter my self conversation, and being aware of the danger of self conversation bias, I turn my suspicious self against myself and re-center logically. Wash away that emotion with analysis and awareness.
  - whatevertrevor 1y ago
    I find trying to hide and wash away emotions tends to be a dangerous strategy long term. I get that sometimes emotions are unproductive for the task at hand, but the longer you keep washing them away with "logic", the stronger they keep returning at inopportune times. The long term strategy that works for me is to acknowledge them, actually listen to them, but also recognize I have the ability to act despite them. Easier said than done of course.
    - bsenftner 1y ago
      My use of "wash away" is more like "transform from unstated feeling to stated feeling with new analysis minimizing bias, for future decisions". It's not a suppression, it's a making stated what was unstated before. It's an attempt at self honesty.
      - whatevertrevor 1y ago
        Ah fair enough, that wasn't completely transparent to me. "Fighting and hiding emotions is counterproductive if your goal is clarity and internal harmony" is a life-lesson that took me all too long to learn, so I'm a bit militant about pushing back on the "fight/hide/ignore" approach to this.
RataNova 1y ago
Framing it all as "communicating" is oddly clarifying. It explains why misalignment causes so much friction
siavosh 1y ago
I often find myself asking the same pair of questions "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?", and it usually leads to "this is nonesense, it's paying civilizational debt based on a series of decisions that thousands of people made with no clue of where it would lead". Which then is usually followed with "what should you be doing?"...which depending on the day usually ends up being half-jokingly: "I should be living in a small community far from capitalistic excess."

nuancebydefault 1y ago

Indeed. If we SW developers define ourselves as 'coders', we could easily end up into this identity crisis which the article seems to refer to. But in fact we are much more than that. We are problem solvers and a big part of it is understanding, defining and refining the problem itself and in finding an elegant solution. The meaningfulness comes from all the communication and experimenting involved with that process, and in the creativity needed to design an elegant solution. In fact the more boring part is often the coding itself.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
This is the frustrating part of software engineering too; the coding itself is the "boring" part, but for me and many others it's also the most fun and gratifying part, the thing you really want to be doing. Something to grow out of I suppose, but still. The AI vendors want to sell to upper management that that part is what's slowing their company down or costing a lot of money, but I don't think it's that. And in a few years (or now already), AI tooling will probably be an accepted part of the toolchain, but software engineers will always be necessary. Cobol said you won't need coders anymore because it's basically English. Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing. No-code platforms said you won't need coders anymore because you can just click and drag. AI evangelists say you don't need coders anymore because you just type in a prompt and working software comes out.
- bsenftner 1y ago
  "Software engineering" is a communications problem, and software engineering degrees do not even teach or approach teaching communications. That's a huge disconnect. I still can't understand why the larger industry does not see what our entire industry does is a communications and translation problem/solution/service. So much of what people try to do breaks down at the basic communications level, yet nobody seems to realize it is the communications at fault. And that effective communications is a teachable formal subject. (So, anyway, what I'm doing now is creating class courseware that teaches effective communications for developers.)
  - yomismoaqui 1y ago
    That reminds me of a phrase that I read some years ago: "A typical Google engineer could describe their job as ‘taking protocol buffers and turning them into other protocol buffers’."
  - skydhash 1y ago
    If you take a software engineering textbook, you’ll see there’s nothing about code other than a chapter about methodology. It’s mostly about decomposing problems and stating criteria for a good solution. Which by itself is a lot of writing and talking.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  > Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing. The ability for people to express themselves online on their own domain has regressed immensely since WYSIWYG editors were taken off the market. I don't know who to blame, but the way it is now that you have to learn to code and to be a Linux server admin just to have a website is very damaging. WordPress does not help much at all in that department, it only makes it worse for people who aren't database admins and PHP developers and want to have a functioning website. I think it only became the "standard" because it was free. Same thing for Linux as the host OS. I hope things turn around. There's some small hope with services like Fastmail offering an easy interface for publishing your webpage and Wix and the likes which are at least something.

PunchTornado 1y ago

I don't understand how does this help if, yes, communicating, is what we are doing most of the time.

bsenftner 1y ago
It's a framing mechanism, where when one identifies with "writing code" and gains a sense of purpose doing that, and then automation starts "writing code", does that trigger a loss of a sense of purpose? By framing one's innate skill as communicating it should not matter what medium one operates, they are still using non-casual and specific communications to do their job, even when code generation, or ad copy generation, or a talking spokesperson video is the result. Also, consider that a really good communicator often ends up running the places they are at, simply because they leave a wake of understanding behind them. That's really good for business operations.

analog8374 1y ago

Good strategy! One of mine is to ask myself "what is my attention on?". You'd be surprised at how often the answer is, "a bunch of thoughts".

fellowniusmonk 1y ago

Culture has created this odd myth that if something is semantic it doesn't matter. That communication is just another soft skill. Humans make meaning, we are the only source of complex, long term, meaning generation we have ever observed. We emit meaning the way a star emits photons. Sure, a lot of natural processes would still exist if we weren't around. But in this universe, perhaps the only one that exists, we are the ones making meaning. Sometimes tge meaning exists physically in our imaginations, sometimes it maps to external facts, but everything that rationally coheres, creates and explains comes from us.

tofuahdude 1y ago
I really like the way you said we emit meaning. It is kind of funny, that we seek meaning and/or purpose in everything - our lives, our actions, our thoughts - but there is a nice change in perspective in considering it as something that we produce rather than find.
- fellowniusmonk 1y ago
  Humans are evolved creatures that are very resilient across environments. Any species that has this trait must not get stuck in local maximums, at an extreme that's why the koala is just not a resilient species, over confidence. We are an anti-niche species, to avoid this we must have a certain percentage of our population that has doubt, existential crisis that shakes us out of a well worn path. This always amazes me. If you deeply, emotionally _know_ that life has meaning, there will be some existential nights where you you will think "but maybe life doesn't have meaning", and if you _know_ life is meaningless you will sometime find yourself thinking "maybe there is meaning", our brains try to keep us from getting stuck. Humility in the face of the unknown. As a species, just amazing stuff. The cycle of confidence and doubt is absolutely amazing, it's kept us from getting stuck. Keeps us from having "target fixation" and lawn darting into the ground. Some individuals have these values tuned at extreme ends, the full distribution is represented by humanity. The most overconfident and the most anxiety ridden, this is all in our spectrum, and it turns out better or worse for each individual. The great thing is that we can share ideas and examine our priors. I used to believe that "nothing" was a real thing, but it's only an abstraction, nothing has never been observed it's only "real" in our imaginations. There's no such thing as nothing as far as anyone has observed or proven. Same thing with meaninglessness, nothing is meaningless, there are just bits of meaning maximally un-complex and decohered. You can use photon emissions from stars for RNG, humans have made even RNG have rich meaning and high practical utility.

munchbunny 1y ago

> often just translating between things, people and software, or people and people, or software and software. But it's almost always communicating. How true this is. How much of our code, how much compute power, and how much human energy is spent entirely on transforming data from one encoding or schema to another, for the purposes of being able to apply some algorithm or human process to it? Sometimes I feel like it's at least half of our silicon, electricity, and human time spent just doing that transforming.

jancsika 1y ago

Do you do the same with emotions? E.g., a) What is this emotion, b) no, that's the undue amount of stress from this particular encounter, c) larger, basic emotion that is the reason you're ruminating about a total stranger taking 20 seconds at the counter to decide on a coffee order after waiting 10 minutes in line... :)

bsenftner 1y ago
No, I treat emotions as yet to be vocalized or identified observations. Emotions are like unsaid statements, hanging in a pregnant pause. If I find myself caught up in emotion, that is a likely scenario where bias can enter my self conversation, and being aware of the danger of self conversation bias, I turn my suspicious self against myself and re-center logically. Wash away that emotion with analysis and awareness.
- whatevertrevor 1y ago
  I find trying to hide and wash away emotions tends to be a dangerous strategy long term. I get that sometimes emotions are unproductive for the task at hand, but the longer you keep washing them away with "logic", the stronger they keep returning at inopportune times. The long term strategy that works for me is to acknowledge them, actually listen to them, but also recognize I have the ability to act despite them. Easier said than done of course.
  - bsenftner 1y ago
    My use of "wash away" is more like "transform from unstated feeling to stated feeling with new analysis minimizing bias, for future decisions". It's not a suppression, it's a making stated what was unstated before. It's an attempt at self honesty.
    - whatevertrevor 1y ago
      Ah fair enough, that wasn't completely transparent to me. "Fighting and hiding emotions is counterproductive if your goal is clarity and internal harmony" is a life-lesson that took me all too long to learn, so I'm a bit militant about pushing back on the "fight/hide/ignore" approach to this.

RataNova 1y ago

Framing it all as "communicating" is oddly clarifying. It explains why misalignment causes so much friction

siavosh 1y ago

I often find myself asking the same pair of questions "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?", and it usually leads to "this is nonesense, it's paying civilizational debt based on a series of decisions that thousands of people made with no clue of where it would lead". Which then is usually followed with "what should you be doing?"...which depending on the day usually ends up being half-jokingly: "I should be living in a small community far from capitalistic excess."