> Even my last team leader sent me a message out of the blue saying “I think I’ll run a bar. I want to be a bartender and listen to other people’s stories, not figure out why protobuf doesn’t deserialize data that worked JUST FINE for the past three years”.
I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories you can hear.
This is just comparing apples to oranges. Woodworking or any other hobby that you enjoy will be more pleasing than any real job you will do. Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it. Working as software developer can be less so.
It's the timeless notion of "work". All the chaotic constraints thrown at one person: teammates, customers, tooling, psychology, politics.. they will turn anything into a slow boiling hell.
That said some domains are cleaner than others, just like small rivers have clearer water, I remember working in food stores or even mechanics and you don't get the same kind of fatigue as in software engineering. The stimulations are more diverse, a bit deeper (helps getting into flow in a way) and the culture helps (less discussion about shallow things like indentation). Fast food for instance, being a real-time thing requires tight planning and tight execution, no space for slack. It makes you sweat but you get seriously fast and good at your operations. Unlike coding where you can spin in circles for ages never get anywhere, and go home drained feeling useless.
> Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it.
For some. I certainly started that way. But many of my friends at Uni started from a different point. I heard many describing how they choose computer engineering because it is perceived as a good career or because they heard it pays a lot. I'm not sure if those people have the same "Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it." to fall back to.
A lot, most of the people actually who got into software for the past decade or so seem to have been motivated by money. They'd just as easily became doctors or lawyers. And it shows, a lot of software now is just some grey corporate kafkaesque mess.
FWIW this happened during the dot com boom and a lot of them scurried off during the dot com bust. The amount of US salary one can pull with no formal education needed is the driver for this cycle.
My preference in hiring is people that are drawn to computing naturally, they will be there for the long haul.
The people responsible for all the packages on npm, pip, cargo, Conan really really love writing lots of lines of code to solve every imaginable tiny problem. So they are out there.
I got into programming before the past decade and initially it was the lure of a good career i.e. money. But when attended my first class, I instantly knew that this was it. Sometimes the path isn't pretty but it can lead to beautiful places.
I'm not sure it's just the money. You can still do those other things and make good money.
I think a lot of people are drawn into the industry these days from various online communities because you can enforce your particular viewpoint of social order in a small niche and basically be mini-tyrants. This is very western-world specific, but looking at the "communities" around Ruby, Node, Rust, Nix, etc, it looks fairly clear.
I put communities in quotes because I'm referring to those communities within the community that tend to label themselves as the whole community, write petitions to remove undesirables, etc.
The ability to create a space entirely of likeminded individuals that purges undesirables is highly attractive to certain kinds of people. Saw this happening on forums and bbs first decades ago and now it's the governance body of everything.
It's happened in tabletop gaming too -- one local game group I was a part of got co-opted by a guy just through starting a discord and hosting events. Suddenly a very apolitical community started being dominated by tankie politics and banning of members for wrongthink. We were just trying to game with some minis up till then. I got fed up and quit once the guy running the discord started ranting about how everyone in America should be forcibly relocated to cities and reeducated in more progressive values. I'm just trying to point plastic lasers at people and roll dice, my guy.
I am very much this way. Greenfield dev on a project that's interesting is very engaging. Munging through thousands of lines of code trying to find the conditional or field that isn't being set properly, or that is being incorrectly accessed is draining.
Or finding that `savePaypalTransactionToDatabase` doesn't return the row ID, but instead returns true/false to indicate success, and not being able to easily refactor it because god knows where that function is being used, and what sorts of knock-on effects it can have, even with a decent IDE, and deciding "fuck it, I'll just write a wrapper around it that then queries for the
You know what, nevermind, it's Saturday, why am I thinking about work.
I keep reflecting on this, it's always when you get negative mismatch. Being forced to work with the wrong people (too negative, too angry, not motivated) or not having time to work on a good idea or good solution.
When you don't have to suffer these, you can work long, cause it's basically a kind of self fulfilling game.
The key difference is that you are not working on the same side project doing the same thing for 40 hours a week for years. You probably change around you side project every few months and likely don't work on them full time.
The nicest part of working at the bar is when you leave the bar you're done working. Also, you don't need to get your drink pouring approved by another bartender that nitpick small details of what you did to boost their own ego.
I'll be 40 in a few months, so recently I've been a bit more pensive than usual, reflecting on where I'm at in my life. One of my biggest regrets so far is how much time I spent wishing I was somewhere other than where I was.
> I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories you can hear.
I'm assuming that by this you mean that most stories you hear around the bar are just the same stories with different characters and protagonists?
Anything gets old. I feel like a lot of the problems my friends and I have with software work comes down to having to wrangle the same sort of nonsense week in, week out.
Alienation of the workers and all that. Profitable but psychologically damaging. We thrive when we get to be whole persons.
It's not profitable and we should stop saying that. The issue is that there's just not enough quality out there so companies accept less quality and have to start managing for it.
If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.
> If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.
I don’t know this is true. My personal experience across a dozen jobs is that the only metric that really matters is “how low can you go?” Cost is the thing to minimize and quality is the absolute first thing to be considered optional and to be cut to fulfill the cost objective. Closely followed by “how fast can you go?” Not a pleasant way to work.
> Woodworking or any other hobby that you enjoy will be more pleasing than any real job you will do.
I think that you mean that a hobby (that you can pick up and put down as you please) is always more enjoyable than a job (at which you must work, usually on someone else's schedule, to make money), but, just to be quite clear, there's no reason that woodworking can't be a real job.
Programing is fun but it lacks a tangible component, I started my studies as a CS major but after a spending an entire spring break writing and debugging(and basically only those things...eating and sleeping happened if I remembered to) were the second year project. I realized that I would end up working the same way, so I found a major that I can't take with me and isn't just contained in my head.
I worked in the robotics lab at my university for a few months. That was a really nice way of making software more tangible. Seeing things move through physical space made it more real.
I miss working in robotics, in part due to this. Also implenting a complex path algorithm is so much more rewarding than moving data around. The field testing trips were the cherry on top.
Yeah, I know a few white collar workers bartending or in a kitchen, one weekday night or so, but they had a lot of experience with the service industry before they got a white collar job, and worked in lower paying business side and non tech engineering jobs where the extra money was a little more appreciated, if not their main reason for being there. (The bartender wanted “forced” socialization and the cook was a food enthusiast who wanted to keep his skills sharp). I’m not saying a “techie” wouldn’t or couldn’t do it, but if they’ve never done it before they don’t know if they’re the type of person who would be burnt out by it or rejuvenated.
I worked at a bar when I was young, listened to the stories; the most annoying protobuf deserialization issues or 'Agile meetings' are freaking fun compared to the most of the stories you can hear.
This is just comparing apples to oranges. Woodworking or any other hobby that you enjoy will be more pleasing than any real job you will do. Programming is fun, that is why you started doing it. Working as software developer can be less so.