>Bureaucratical bullshit to get simple things done
>Lack of product vision where everyone from sales to marketing to support is driving it.
>Lack of ownership in product; the inability to effect a positive change.
>Pointless meetings and discussions.
>Process, procedures, having the upper-hand, and getting things done taking a back-seat.
I'm fortunate enough to not have to deal with this the majority of the time and I'm still sick of programming. I couldn't imagine doing anything else for a living though. Maybe I'm just sick of working all the time.
I've been professionally doing this since 1997. I've been through the Windows revolution, the internet revolution, the cloud revolution, the iPhone revolution.
Just brainstorming as to why
- I'm sick of being spied on all the time.
- The interwebs is dead.
- I'm sick of new frameworks that don't really offer anything new except to obsolete old frameworks that work fine.
- You can't just write something neat and make any money off of it unless you allow yourself to get hijacked by some VC or other investor.
- The market for software is flooded by absolute crap software with massive marketing budgets.
- There are a lot of people who got into it for the money are hell to work with.
Maybe I'm just old. I certainly don't do much coding on the side. About 5-6 years ago, I'm program almost every waking moment, now I don't wanna touch an IDE outside of work.
- "Requirements" that don't mean anything and change on a whim
- Project management and issue tracking that is nothing more than a pretend game played for pretend by everyone involved yet is more important than actual results
- "We should do X" for two years, but we are still for some reason doing Y
- I'm tired of sprinting
- Incompetent managers that take a team of reasonably competent and intelligent software engineers and turn them into a void of non-productivity, where you send requirements and requests to simply vanish and never result in anything.
- A devops department that is chock full of talented individuals who are helpful and friendly and yet still take 2 weeks to turn around "Hey can you click the button in AWS to provision a new instance?"
- Knowing that this company that purposely hires middle tier talent (which I'm actually okay with, C students still build most of the world) and can't get out of it's own way still manages to run the entire industry, own the vast majority of the market, and basically takes it's profit as a tax on every consumer, and will never have to change.
Completely agree. Its just a logical segment of time to cut up and review at the end of each segment. Even just better phrasing could help here like a "phase".
Have you tried switching to Linux, at home and at work, and only coding in C and C++ and Bash, and working with mostly true nerds on boring things?
I'm only a few years into my career, but I'm already depressingly conservative/hyperreactionary with respect to modern technology and feel as you do about most software work. I feel dysphoric toward any web tech, for example, for reasons I can articulate and others I can't. So I'm wondering whether being sick of programming at large is just a matter of years passing or environment.
>Have you tried switching to Linux, at home and at work, and only coding in C and C++ and Bash, and working with mostly true nerds on boring things?
I've been doing Linux for quite a while. I've really gotten into it the last 5 years. I do all our server builds and maintenance as one of my hats. I do really enjoy working with Linux. I haven't done C,C++ in decades. I did Obj-C when the iPhone first came out and really enjoyed it, particularly with the old school memory management. I like being close to the metal.
I've been doing C# for the last 15 years or so and enjoyed it for the first 10 years, but don't like the new iteration of the syntax. It seems like going backwards to me. Let's see how much shit we can put on a single line. That used to be a meme.
An old high school buddy of mine is really into ML and I'm trying to absorb his passion, but it's not quite taking. I hope I can get back into it at a personal level. I do miss enjoying it.
I've been on Macs since 2008 or so because it's close to *nix. I got spoiled by the hardware. Anyone recommend a laptop that is 16:10 and close to the Apple hardware that runs Linux? My laptop of choice was Thinkpad back in the day, but they all went to 16:9 which is annoying AF to me. 16:10 seems to be making a comeback though.
This is good advice. Nowadays I still earn my money from IT but I don’t do any programming. On my free time I’m doing my own stuff at my own pace mostly on Linux and C. It’s wonderful.
There was a Microsoft employee a while ago that had a psychotic break and stabbed some of his employees at the Redmond campus; I know another one from Intel that got sick of it all and went to start a brewing company in Columbia with a wife 40 years his junior.
I don't think about this a lot, but perhaps I should.
I am sympathetic to the pains discussed here, but that sounds like a psychotic and deeply disturbed individual whose traits were not attributable to programming or tech in general.
Might as well have been an industrial engineer or lorry driver.
"Entfremdung" in work is a real thing, but mentioning this kind of case and thinking up associations is not doing this idea any justice.
Yes, I think a big factor was his early life and then further drug "adventures" (was put on adderall at 5 y.o. -- by his admission -- become dependent on it and then fell into meth and the rest).
If you read some of his journals I think this, and a different sort of familial alienation (which led to another sort of social alienation) led to this chain of events. An alienation nonetheless, but yes not exactly job-caused (though it cannot be ruled out as a factor).
I'll add mine, constant logical inconsistencies. If a team is following a roadmap, then you are NOT doing agile, you are not pivoting on a very frequent basis, the team is following a project plan! What's worse, because the agile verbs and nouns are sprinkled in there, somehow a process that is focused on NOT bring predictable (as who knows what the customer feedback will be) - somehow that is supposed to create predictability, and even one where the error bars get smaller as things are predicted further out into the future.
None of it makes sense... yet somehow it is supposed to, and with accountability.
I'm sick of object oriented/non-functional programming. It's soul crushing to constantly be fixing problems that wouldn't have happened in the first place if people just handled things immutably.
Object oriented and immutability are not mutually exclusive.
Would I be correct in assuming that you're tired of people not doing proper data engineering, and in general having a irresponsible disregard for it?
At least, "soul crushing to constantly be fixing problems that shouldn't have happened in the first place" resonates a lot. But I mostly see it as a result of the aforementioned.
Yeah in theory one can do everything correctly with assembly language. That sort of argument misses the point entirely.
When you have to touch code that several other people work on, guardrails are the only guarantee you have that someone else didn't take shortcuts and left unnecessary levels of complexity behind for you to untangle.
I often feel this way l only to realize that the real cause is that the software was written before planning the architecture first. Usually caused by the rush to a minimum viable product rather than maintainability. Immutably can definitely lighten that burden though. The worst case is opening the code and finding mountains of global state that can be modified from who knows where.
When I see "state seeds" planted unnecessarily (sometimes by me!), I come down on it in code review, lest they germinate into bugs. ;p My team is receptive, and we refactor to remove them. Maybe that's why my soul doesn't feel anywhere near crushed, even though I totally empathize with the problem.
I've noticed those kinds of posts. I mean, actual work can be hard, and work situations can vary a lot depending on the work environment, but, at least in my case, that's completely different to "programming". I wish I had more time for "programming"... I enjoy it a lot, I've always enjoyed it, you can do so many interesting things in a creative kind of way. So many different complex things to understand... If I didn't have to work, I'd have a lot of spare time and I'd probably invest it in, well, programming. There are several source codes I'd like to understand better and analyze, just for intelectual curiosity. I'd have the time to study the source code of several operating systems, implementations of programming languages, and tools that I really would like to know more deeply. I'd have more time to review the source code of videogames, demos, and other interesting programs, and create my own just for fun. I would have more time to create interpreters, read old documents on programming theory, contribute to open source initiatives, learn new programming languages... Programming can be fun. It's a pity to see people burned out. In any case, it's also true that there's more to life than this. :) Try surfing, pottery, yoga, horticulture, real-life drawing or calligraphy instead!
I've been professionally doing this since 1997. I've been through the Windows revolution, the internet revolution, the cloud revolution, the iPhone revolution.
Just brainstorming as to why
Maybe I'm just old. I certainly don't do much coding on the side. About 5-6 years ago, I'm program almost every waking moment, now I don't wanna touch an IDE outside of work.The grind continues.
What about:
- "Requirements" that don't mean anything and change on a whim
- Project management and issue tracking that is nothing more than a pretend game played for pretend by everyone involved yet is more important than actual results
- "We should do X" for two years, but we are still for some reason doing Y
- I'm tired of sprinting
- Incompetent managers that take a team of reasonably competent and intelligent software engineers and turn them into a void of non-productivity, where you send requirements and requests to simply vanish and never result in anything.
- A devops department that is chock full of talented individuals who are helpful and friendly and yet still take 2 weeks to turn around "Hey can you click the button in AWS to provision a new instance?"
- Knowing that this company that purposely hires middle tier talent (which I'm actually okay with, C students still build most of the world) and can't get out of it's own way still manages to run the entire industry, own the vast majority of the market, and basically takes it's profit as a tax on every consumer, and will never have to change.
> I'm tired of sprinting
Completely agree. Its just a logical segment of time to cut up and review at the end of each segment. Even just better phrasing could help here like a "phase".
Have you tried switching to Linux, at home and at work, and only coding in C and C++ and Bash, and working with mostly true nerds on boring things?
I'm only a few years into my career, but I'm already depressingly conservative/hyperreactionary with respect to modern technology and feel as you do about most software work. I feel dysphoric toward any web tech, for example, for reasons I can articulate and others I can't. So I'm wondering whether being sick of programming at large is just a matter of years passing or environment.
>Have you tried switching to Linux, at home and at work, and only coding in C and C++ and Bash, and working with mostly true nerds on boring things?
I've been doing Linux for quite a while. I've really gotten into it the last 5 years. I do all our server builds and maintenance as one of my hats. I do really enjoy working with Linux. I haven't done C,C++ in decades. I did Obj-C when the iPhone first came out and really enjoyed it, particularly with the old school memory management. I like being close to the metal.
I've been doing C# for the last 15 years or so and enjoyed it for the first 10 years, but don't like the new iteration of the syntax. It seems like going backwards to me. Let's see how much shit we can put on a single line. That used to be a meme.
An old high school buddy of mine is really into ML and I'm trying to absorb his passion, but it's not quite taking. I hope I can get back into it at a personal level. I do miss enjoying it.
I've been on Macs since 2008 or so because it's close to *nix. I got spoiled by the hardware. Anyone recommend a laptop that is 16:10 and close to the Apple hardware that runs Linux? My laptop of choice was Thinkpad back in the day, but they all went to 16:9 which is annoying AF to me. 16:10 seems to be making a comeback though.
This is good advice. Nowadays I still earn my money from IT but I don’t do any programming. On my free time I’m doing my own stuff at my own pace mostly on Linux and C. It’s wonderful.
I feel like I'm looking in a mirror. Everything you wrote is me 100%.
There was a Microsoft employee a while ago that had a psychotic break and stabbed some of his employees at the Redmond campus; I know another one from Intel that got sick of it all and went to start a brewing company in Columbia with a wife 40 years his junior.
I don't think about this a lot, but perhaps I should.
Is this the MS employee you are talking about?
https://www.geekwire.com/2023/suspect-in-alleged-stabbing-of...
I am sympathetic to the pains discussed here, but that sounds like a psychotic and deeply disturbed individual whose traits were not attributable to programming or tech in general.
Might as well have been an industrial engineer or lorry driver.
"Entfremdung" in work is a real thing, but mentioning this kind of case and thinking up associations is not doing this idea any justice.
Ah, Joey! That's the one.
Yes, I think a big factor was his early life and then further drug "adventures" (was put on adderall at 5 y.o. -- by his admission -- become dependent on it and then fell into meth and the rest).
If you read some of his journals I think this, and a different sort of familial alienation (which led to another sort of social alienation) led to this chain of events. An alienation nonetheless, but yes not exactly job-caused (though it cannot be ruled out as a factor).
I'll add mine, constant logical inconsistencies. If a team is following a roadmap, then you are NOT doing agile, you are not pivoting on a very frequent basis, the team is following a project plan! What's worse, because the agile verbs and nouns are sprinkled in there, somehow a process that is focused on NOT bring predictable (as who knows what the customer feedback will be) - somehow that is supposed to create predictability, and even one where the error bars get smaller as things are predicted further out into the future.
None of it makes sense... yet somehow it is supposed to, and with accountability.
Taking real disconnect breaks (more than one week) also help a lot. Some people, including me until recently, don’t seem to do this often or at all
I'm sick of object oriented/non-functional programming. It's soul crushing to constantly be fixing problems that wouldn't have happened in the first place if people just handled things immutably.
Object oriented and immutability are not mutually exclusive.
Would I be correct in assuming that you're tired of people not doing proper data engineering, and in general having a irresponsible disregard for it?
At least, "soul crushing to constantly be fixing problems that shouldn't have happened in the first place" resonates a lot. But I mostly see it as a result of the aforementioned.
Yeah in theory one can do everything correctly with assembly language. That sort of argument misses the point entirely.
When you have to touch code that several other people work on, guardrails are the only guarantee you have that someone else didn't take shortcuts and left unnecessary levels of complexity behind for you to untangle.
I often feel this way l only to realize that the real cause is that the software was written before planning the architecture first. Usually caused by the rush to a minimum viable product rather than maintainability. Immutably can definitely lighten that burden though. The worst case is opening the code and finding mountains of global state that can be modified from who knows where.
When I see "state seeds" planted unnecessarily (sometimes by me!), I come down on it in code review, lest they germinate into bugs. ;p My team is receptive, and we refactor to remove them. Maybe that's why my soul doesn't feel anywhere near crushed, even though I totally empathize with the problem.
I've noticed those kinds of posts. I mean, actual work can be hard, and work situations can vary a lot depending on the work environment, but, at least in my case, that's completely different to "programming". I wish I had more time for "programming"... I enjoy it a lot, I've always enjoyed it, you can do so many interesting things in a creative kind of way. So many different complex things to understand... If I didn't have to work, I'd have a lot of spare time and I'd probably invest it in, well, programming. There are several source codes I'd like to understand better and analyze, just for intelectual curiosity. I'd have the time to study the source code of several operating systems, implementations of programming languages, and tools that I really would like to know more deeply. I'd have more time to review the source code of videogames, demos, and other interesting programs, and create my own just for fun. I would have more time to create interpreters, read old documents on programming theory, contribute to open source initiatives, learn new programming languages... Programming can be fun. It's a pity to see people burned out. In any case, it's also true that there's more to life than this. :) Try surfing, pottery, yoga, horticulture, real-life drawing or calligraphy instead!