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TL;DR for the article: "OMG, work is BOOOOORING!" See also: the disillusioned former law student who went in to change the world but ended up pushing paper, th

by al2o3cr 13y ago

TL;DR for the article: "OMG, work is BOOOOORING!" See also: the disillusioned former law student who went in to change the world but ended up pushing paper, the disillusioned architect went in to design monuments but ended up designing Wal-Marts, the disillusioned English major who went in dreaming of the Great American Novel but ended up spell-checking ad copy. There is a difference, though: if "wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks" really pisses you off, you can FUCKING CHANGE THAT. Not every discipline has quite that level of flexibility. BTW, GTFO off my lawn.

levosmetalo 13y ago
But then, as a software engineer, you push for a big rewrite, or introduce a new framework / technology, or do some NIH work or over-engineering. And you actually convince business users that it's for the benefit of the product / business / whatever, while you know it's only to keep you, a programmer, from dying of boredom by doing the same repetitive boredom one more time.
bromagosa 13y ago
By the number of people that are pissed off about webdev and still don't success at changing it, and by the amount of "Oh Brand New Automagic Solution for Everything (TM)" coming up every month and still failing at fixing the mess that webdev is... I'd say it's not so easy to "fucking change that".
- informatimago 13y ago
  I don't know if it's easy or hard. I'd bet it's rather on the easy side. What I know is that it's not with having dealines to produce the next product that anybody will have the time to take some step back and come with a better (more automatic) way of doing things. What's painful, it's not doing something repeatitive. It's being presured to repeat it, without being let automatizing it, which is what we should do as programmers.
  - loup-vaillant 13y ago
    I had a colleague once that wanted to invest 4-8 hours writing a script that would save her about 1 hour each time it is run. The script was expected to be ran about once a week. She did the wrong thing and asked her boss. "Not enough time, there's more urgent things to do." She then lost an hour per week, contributing to the general sense of urgency that she lived under. Of course, this wasn't the only such script she thought about by far. ----- My advice: if you can shoulder the risk, automate it before your boss tells you not to.
    - gotrecruit 13y ago
      frankly, it sounds like she could have simply taken the initiative and wrote the script on her own time. seems like she could have simply done it over a weekend, and it would have been worth it if she truly felt that it would save her an hour per week.
      - dack 13y ago
        That might be true - but she should do it only to prove that those kind of investments are worth it, and to gain trust from her boss/team. I think programmers should be paid to not only do the crappy grunt-work, but also for automating it away, even though there will sometimes be cases where it turned out not to be worth it. To me, the automating is part of the job. And sure, I remember when I used to think I could rewrite entire applications in a few hours the "right way", but that was pure inexperience on my part. For a junior dev, they might want to run it by someone more experienced, but otherwise, these kind of tangents can turn out to be some of the most valuable time spent on a project.
      - loup-vaillant 13y ago
        > it sounds like she could have simply taken the initiative and wrote the script on her own time I agree, except no one should ever have to work on their own time. Personally, I think she should have written the script on company time.
      - lttlrck 13y ago

by al2o3cr 13y ago

levosmetalo 13y ago

But then, as a software engineer, you push for a big rewrite, or introduce a new framework / technology, or do some NIH work or over-engineering. And you actually convince business users that it's for the benefit of the product / business / whatever, while you know it's only to keep you, a programmer, from dying of boredom by doing the same repetitive boredom one more time.

bromagosa 13y ago

By the number of people that are pissed off about webdev and still don't success at changing it, and by the amount of "Oh Brand New Automagic Solution for Everything (TM)" coming up every month and still failing at fixing the mess that webdev is... I'd say it's not so easy to "fucking change that".

informatimago 13y ago
I don't know if it's easy or hard. I'd bet it's rather on the easy side. What I know is that it's not with having dealines to produce the next product that anybody will have the time to take some step back and come with a better (more automatic) way of doing things. What's painful, it's not doing something repeatitive. It's being presured to repeat it, without being let automatizing it, which is what we should do as programmers.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  I had a colleague once that wanted to invest 4-8 hours writing a script that would save her about 1 hour each time it is run. The script was expected to be ran about once a week. She did the wrong thing and asked her boss. "Not enough time, there's more urgent things to do." She then lost an hour per week, contributing to the general sense of urgency that she lived under. Of course, this wasn't the only such script she thought about by far. ----- My advice: if you can shoulder the risk, automate it before your boss tells you not to.
  - gotrecruit 13y ago
    frankly, it sounds like she could have simply taken the initiative and wrote the script on her own time. seems like she could have simply done it over a weekend, and it would have been worth it if she truly felt that it would save her an hour per week.
    - dack 13y ago
      That might be true - but she should do it only to prove that those kind of investments are worth it, and to gain trust from her boss/team. I think programmers should be paid to not only do the crappy grunt-work, but also for automating it away, even though there will sometimes be cases where it turned out not to be worth it. To me, the automating is part of the job. And sure, I remember when I used to think I could rewrite entire applications in a few hours the "right way", but that was pure inexperience on my part. For a junior dev, they might want to run it by someone more experienced, but otherwise, these kind of tangents can turn out to be some of the most valuable time spent on a project.
    - loup-vaillant 13y ago
      > it sounds like she could have simply taken the initiative and wrote the script on her own time I agree, except no one should ever have to work on their own time. Personally, I think she should have written the script on company time.
    - lttlrck 13y ago