Developer productivity is not and never was bottlenecked by their tools.
One snap of the fingers in one of the many layers above us and million dollar projects succeed or fail. We are always a fancy dinner or business relation gone sour away from success or failure.
Vim or emacs come into play at layer 245 in the system and their impact on the final business reality is approximately 0,003%.
> Vim or emacs come into play at layer 245 in the system and their impact on the final business reality is approximately 0,003%.
Who cares? One fire or war and a carpenter's work all comes crumbling down. Should he then not care about his work or his tools or materials and nail any old shit together? Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.
Sure, sometimes higher layers end up killing a project before it ships. But there is still a lot of code that ships. For that code, the editor choice may have mattered. I have shipped a lot of code in my day, and since learning vim I have been much more productive. There are projects that may not have even existed were it not for Vim, because I would not have had time to get it done in the tight deadline needed.
But more importantly, I like Vim. It makes me enjoy the process much more. I do carpentry in my spare time, and I think of them much like I do my favorite carpentry tools. While they do enable some projects that otherwise couldn't have happened, most of the time their impact is just improving my experience and quality of output. That matters a great deal to me, regardless of whether it matters several layers up.
You can talk all day about high-level actions and wishes but, at the end of the day, someone needs to write some code. That's me. That's what I do. It matters.
just because the project got cancelled and won't ship doesn't reduce the rate of developer productivity on the project though. it sucks when your code won't ship, but the craftwork imbued in the source is still there.
This anti-learning attitude is common, but I don’t find it admirable.
To me this is like a dev saying “screw Git, I just want to do console.log(). All this complexity is sabotaging my productivity.”
Modern jobs, even health care, require learning about and managing complexity. It’s not just “taking care of people”. Throwing your hands up and saying “I’m old”, which is a lousy excuse because I know plenty able old people and completely digitally illiterate young people, is not a viable solution.
Now, whether we want that as a society is another topic. But for the foreseeable future adapting to complexity and actually taking the time to sit down and learn this shit is IMO the only way forwards.
This is not anti-learning. This would be akin to git changing command names and flags doing exactly the same stuff. After a couple of times happening, even if the changes are somewhat ok, you too would start to be frustrated.
I've seen healthcare management software evolution due to my partner working with it. As in the worst management story, it's pitched to a boss that doesn't need or want to use it, offered to generally the lowest bidder, and then immediately outsourced in parts that rarely work well together taking years to develop.
The UI and workflows are designed by people that will never use it and are just plainly bad. The software/UI takes years to stabilize and reach feature parity to the same level it was before. During that time, it's pretty common to see staff having to use both systems and perform double data entry.
You're not learning to improve anything here. You're substituting a [shitty] tool with another one which does _exactly_ the same.
Sadly in IT this is pretty common. There's nothing special about healthcare.
Businesses are some kind of feudal leftovers that refuse to die. The serfs not only accept it, they actively defend it. Meanwhile the billionaires lean back and smile.
I don’t see why nation states should be democracies, but “businesses” should be private dictatorships. It’s a waste of shared resources. Your personal army of value generating serfs is taking away from our collective capacity to do useful communal work.
I didn't say it was entirely a good thing, hence the importance of the PR review process. As I said, I found numerous bugs, sometimes nasty ones that are hard to identify/fix before they got merged. That engineer was building features really fast, however. Maybe it wasn't 1K lines per day every day, but definitely he did hit that mark on some days.
He was surprisingly skilled considering the volume of code and he had a solid understanding of a lot of advanced concepts and nuance so I know he wasn't blindly using LLMs. He did implement features really quickly and bug density was quite low overall.
I'm sure he could have implemented those features using fewer lines of code, but as the team lead, what can I say to a highly motivated 25 year old who is churning out new features faster than the rest of the team combined? Motivated people aren't typically very receptive to generic feedback like "This is great but you should try to reduce complexity"... Of course, I could provide slightly more detailed feedback, but that would be getting into my personal coding philosophy and didn't quite align with the broader practices of the company (a startup) at the time. There were a lot of things that the company was doing, which is standard (most companies are doing the same) but which I don't agree with and which would sound controversial. I could provide strong arguments for my positions, but humans are flawed, and carefully thought out, nuanced arguments that go against conventional thinking often tend to fall on deaf ears... You can only rock the boat so much.
Also, you don't want to de-motivate a highly productive person. Even if they're productive only in one narrow dimension. With me looking over his code, we could keep complexity under control at a maintainable level. Keep in mind, we were a startup in a competitive, growth sector. So developing features quickly was quite important and throwing away entire features to pivot was considered an acceptable risk.
Yes and doing that requires a solid non-stop and consistent 3 working LoC per minute for six hours straight. I don’t think a human is capable of processing that kind of volume unless it is pure boilerplate.
Charity? I sympathize somewhat, but I’m also disgusted by the utter lack of respect for government and societal service in general. That shit means something.
I wish to believe there are still people that don’t care about making Yet Another few hundred thousand and just want to actually contribute to society instead of working on ad tech or whatever bullshit.
Regardless of whether or not one personally enjoys the work one is doing, if one really is contributing to society, one should get fairly compensated for it.
Additional requirements not common in the private sector, such as rigorous drug testing, ethics codes, requirements on gift reporting, increased surveillance, etc., should come with additional benefits to compensate. Instead, government workers submit to these requirements and a substantial pay cut.
That's mostly because conservatives 1) desire tax cuts at any cost and 2) want to demolish the entire administrative state. The stability and consistency that comes with a well-funded civil servant class are an obstruction to their stated goals.
I vouched your comment, because I think you're precisely making the relevant point in the first two paragraphs.
However, I think you're wrong, at least in part, in your third paragraph. I mean, I think the word "mostly" is wrong in that paragraph. Politicians from all political factions are (quite reasonably) under pressure to lower the cost of doing the work of government, and (quite reasonably) to raise the integrity of the process. Combined with some of the dysfunction inherent in agent-principal problems, I think that's more than enough to cause the problem you're talking about. I experience this firsthand in a jurisdiction that has much less of the "demolish the entire administrative state" that afflicts the American right wing (which I'm guessing is your point of reference).
Mind you, I am not claiming that the problem is not badly worsened by American right-wing politics. I wouldn't know. I'm just claiming that the problem is semi-intrinsic to the situation, and I strongly doubt that it's "mostly" caused by those particular political issues.
I'm confused. You're complaining about the use of the word "charity"?
Background: You make an argument that at least some people should consider putting contributions to society ahead of "making yet another few hundred thousand". I agree with you, at least broadly, and I think the up-thread poster is not disagreeing.
Summary: We're discussing the act of taking a personal financial hit, for the good of society.
The word for that is "charity". That's what that word means.
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I also am sympathetic to the GP's point, about which you are so "disgusted", but I think there's room to disagree there.
I am sympathetic because professionally I do work that many people think is "good for society", I currently earn approximately median income (below mean) for my age/gender/nationality, far far below software engineer pay, and I am treated with unbelievable disrespect by my employer, the government. If I was not trapped in this job by personal circumstance (for now), the disrespect part would definitely factor into my decision making about staying in this allegedly-virtuous job. If you're gonna pay people below market, and you treat them badly, that's not a combination that gets you quality employees. Even if there's some social purpose.
Doing something out of a sense of duty should not require a vow of poverty along with it unless we plan on committing to lifetime benefits and support for the people who take that path (like providing food and housing, because the low end of the GS scales are literally below poverty rates as it is).
>Doing something out of a sense of duty should not require a vow of poverty along with it
The wages offered are hardly poverty - just not competitive with the private sector.
Besides, "doing something out of a sense of duty", when duty meant something, has also often meant doing it for free, or even doing it on one's own dime, and it absolutely meant accepting a pay cut.
If you are a GS-5 (typical entry level government roles, 5 rungs up from the actual bottom of the pay scale, since it's literally impossible to get applicants for a GS-1 role if you tried) and support a family of four you are currently at 2023 rates within 3 digits of income from the poverty line.
If we push it lower how are we not expecting that to require poverty? What legion of people in the US do you reckon even have "their own dimes" to spend on being full time volunteer public servants and can afford to serve from a sense of duty? Retirees?
Giving up 50% or more of your income can be a completely different life. It's not "only" making 300k instead of 400k. Based on the other comment saying G13 or lower is more likely, it's making 115k or less and barely being able to afford a house near not great schools where your kids will probably get a worse education than you did (after all, you presumably have a CS degree since the government fixates on degrees and credentialism).
Not all tech jobs are ads. I work in networking equipment and it pays much, much better.
Anyway, my point was they don't even give respect to the people who do that, and still treat you like their property. Same with the vaccine mandates (especially for remote workers): whether you got it isn't the point. My employers have never asked because it was never any of their business.
Capitalism is a brutal, fatally flawed system that just so happens to work pretty well depending on which side of the game you are on. Sometimes, everybody sort of gets by on it, but that requires sustained heavy-handed out-of-band correction also known as government intervention.
We have set a game in motion that even sounds bad in theory leads to hideous results. That it quasi-works in practice is a goddamn miracle and a testament to our flexibility. I say quasi, because for it to work for the top of the pyramid it requires large swaths of our species to exist in bitter, soul-crushing poverty and, given that morality is not really an issue for us psychopaths, it remains to be seen if our recent penchant for planet-scale destruction has any long-lasting effects on our ability to survive as a species.
I’d be interested in a practical definition of logic truly separated from design in the context of web tech.
The two are so ridiculously intertwined. It’s already a problem within CSS, where layout systems and styling are mixed. Flexbox and grid have nothing to do with colors and gradients, which are again themselves orthogonal to positional properties. Fonts, paddings and margins (in 15 different units, look it up) add to the insanity. Now sprinkle in animations, box models and borders.
One snap of the fingers in one of the many layers above us and million dollar projects succeed or fail. We are always a fancy dinner or business relation gone sour away from success or failure.
Vim or emacs come into play at layer 245 in the system and their impact on the final business reality is approximately 0,003%.