Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.
Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul.
I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems and get paid the market rate for my skills. Not prepare endless PowerPoints for my skip-level, who has no ownership but has to act in their own best interests in a swamp of principal-agent problems.
This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?
At a level or two down from the abstraction of company size, crafting hobbies are also a reprieve from the tyranny of linters. So many programmers today believe that code is always better when it all looks identical. Consistency is a good thing, but not when it's expected to be absolute. Programming should actually allow for creativity, and where you decide to add spaces and newlines can actually add subtle but important communication as to the significance of a particular part of one's code. Most places I've worked in the last 6 or so years are obsessed with tooling and add so many lint rules that it's often impossible to merge your pull request if you decide to format your code in a way that violates the rules in some trivial way.
With woodworking, you can just do the thing. OK, I don't do woodworking myself, but both of my parents do, and I know that they don't spend their time bikeshedding or homogenizing their work. The tools they use are intended to help them accomplish something and aren't there to prevent you from doing anything.
It's possible to do personal software projects however one wants, but one will no doubt be faced with the modern compulsion to want to "do the right thing" and add a bunch of time wasting tooling. If you don't, and you share your code, inevitably someone is going to want to add a bunch of rules and bureaucracy to your software that was already working and free of serious problems in the first place.
Consistency is critical for reducing mental load when working as a team. Format your personal projects however you want, but when collaborating your editor should apply the standard format every time you save.
Maybe I'm not articulating my point very well.
I absolutely agree that consistency, in principle, is usually a very good thing.
My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing, which it's not. Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time and unnecessarily tyrannical.
In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between 100% consistency and say 95%.
It's far more important that APIs and other conventions are consistent. When constructs in the code aren't consistent, it can be an absolute nightmare. When code isn't formatted well, it's usually just annoying and can be trivially fixed with automation.
If everyone doesn't follow the standards all the time then there are no standards.
Code is not art, it's instructions.
If you can't write instructions without adding your own avant garde whitespace brush strokes to it then yes coding for a professional company may not be your jam.
This is one of the major differences between hobby programming and work programming. When you're writing code as a hobby, it can be anything you want: code can be art, instructions, math, beauty, a means to an end, an experiment... At work, code must ultimately be a tool that creates profit. It has to be manageable, consistent, and boring.
It is a mistaken idea that work programming is or must be boring. I think you might mean "boring" as opposed to unnecessarily "creative" or complicated. But not all work code is boring, boiler-plate code.
I think of "boring" in this context the same way my dentist calls me a nice, boring patient. He means no surprises for either of us, nothing out of the ordinary, just a mouth in good shape with maybe a cavity or two.
That's how I like to see code. I don't want to struggle to figure out what you're trying to do. I want to be able to read your code and understand it easily and get on with what I need to do.
The opposite of this, keeping the medical context, would be the orthopedic surgeon who was so excited about how badly my then 25-year-old wife had smashed her wrist. "I never see this much joint damage in someone so young. It's incredible." Not words you want to hear from a doctor!
I'll slightly disagree here because code needs to be read by a computer and by your human teammates.
There are times when I'm frustrated because prettier is making a necessary but unintuitive choice and causing my code to become harder to read. But those are rare, and I would never trade them for the guarantee of readable code the other >99% of the time.
Yes, this is fundamentally where I disagree with the person you're responding to and what seems like most programmers (or perhaps mostly web developers). If code is just instructions, it would look barely comprehensible to [most] programmers.
Again, maybe I came off as more extreme than I actually am, because I think that consistent formatting is a very good thing most of the time, but that last 5-10% that programmers in positions of power fetishize is where things can get frustrating and time can get wasted.
The worst is when linter rules are used for things that should be evaluated by a human being in code review. At a previous workplace, someone thought it was a marvelous idea to try and enforce things like functions having no more than 6 lines or some other poppycock. My current workplace is OK, but even then there are some stupid rules like not being allowed to assign `this` to a constant, even though the function in-scope is being re-bound by some stupid middleware making it impossible to use fat arrows or `.bind` (in JavaScript). Sorry, but I'll assign whatever the f*** I want to a constant that isn't escaping the current scope in any way. What's also funny is that I've never worked anywhere that didn't have `eslint-disable` sprinkled everywhere. In many cases, these rules should be warning instead of errors, but because programmers love errors for some reason, virtually every rule violation needs to be an error.
Well I'm quite proud of having owned a certain repo at work which takes exactly this approach. If I have to disable a rule more than once, I take a good look at whether we need it at all, so we have extremely few `eslint-disable` comments in the entire codebase. It's one of the cleanest and most transparent codebases I've worked in -- but that's also an artifact of me spending long stretches working in it alone and having little oversight of how I spend my time. So there's a tradeoff :)
Does your company not just use an automatic formatter? Set a prettier config, format the entire codebase and never have to deal with another formatting change in a PR ever again.
There's formatting, and there's linting.
But my issue with formatting, while great most of the time, is that sometimes I want to violate it, and tooling around automatic formatting and format validation is usually installed with the intention that it is 100% correct all the time. Sorry, but as a senior programmer, sometimes it really should be up to me to decide whether code belongs on a single line, and I don't want to fight against automatic formatting or the CI pipeline throwing a hissy fit when I desire that discretion.
On the contrary, as a senior developer you should be able to look at and see the team-wide benefits of consistency. You don't have to handhold new junior devs to learn the style, you don't need to watch their PRs to see if they're being consistent, and you don't need to argue with other senior devs about whether something should be on a single line or not. You just let the automatic formatter do its thing.
Being a senior eng isn't about always knowing what's right, it's about knowing how to keep the team moving efficiently.
Arguing about what 5% is appropriate is a significant distraction. I do not believe that any benefits from allowing these discrepancies are superior to the reduced mental load in authoring, reading, and reviewing code of "the linter is automatic and true". If a rule can be written into a linter, simply have it automatically formatted and never argue about it again. It eliminates entire classes of argument.
Yes.
That is unless one believes to have good reason to violate that rule, in which case suddenly time is being spent having practically the same conversation in this part of the thread that I started.
The point of automatic formatters is that they are universally enforced. There is no violation of the rule, even if you have a "good reason". If you have a pattern of good reasons, you can write to whoever controls your team's coding standards/linter rules and suggest a tweak, but you never have one-off violations, you just accept the automatic format.
How can it be a waste of time? The whole point is to avoid wasting time talking about formatting on PRs or seeing line noise on PRs because people have slightly different preferences or settings for code formatting.
Right, exactly. Code formatting should be fully automatic (format on save, verify on commit) so that no one has to waste any time thinking or arguing about it, ever.
I think you are contradicting yourself a bit with
The point being that something small might have significance to one person but not the other.
And that consistency is probably important, but there is a difference between consistency of your stuff and consistency between your stuff and stuff of others.
So I think what it boils down to is that crafting hobbies are often more fulfilling not (only) because they have tangible outcomes, but because you can do them on your own and on your terms.
If you were to do woodworking where you craft one piece of a bigger thing (say a part of some larger furniture), you would also have to produce very homogenic and precise output. And it probably would not be very fun and fulfilling.
Yeah, that's totally fair. I think conversations can be had with such cases, and I think that trying to effectively eliminate the conversation is a bad thing, which relates closely to my overall objection. Ironically, it ends up in conversation anyway unless a developer is always a good little goober and never marches out of sync.
Maybe my mindset would be different if I saw great software around me, but I see mostly crappy and user-hostile software these days. I'm not sure whether strict formatting "standards" is of meaningful benefit for the users.
Yeah, I guess you've identified where my thought in response to woodworking falls apart. haha If it were one's employment, it could indeed be as confining as being a programmer at BigCo.
I think you’re selling you example short here. Linting and formatters should be about applying a minimal acceptable limit to code, not diluting everything to the same mediocrity. It’s been a long time since I ran into a formatter that I hate out of the box.
I think I agree. I've some seen anal linting rules that straight up make you refactor your code to make it fit. That I can't stand
What I love, is a code formatting check on the server side. Just check that the code is properly formatted using Biome or Prettier. Everyone can set it up in their editor, or run it manually however they want, and nobody ever has to think about it.
What I absolutely detest, is any kind of code formatting comment on a PR. If it cannot be enforced automatically, it’s not worth arguing about, and definitely not something to hold a PR up for.
How you choose to add whitespace to your code is not a meaningful outlet for creativity. Linters are a great tool for eliminating bike shedding.
I don't think wood working per se gives you more flexibility than building software. It's wood working as an individual, not part of a team, so you can make your own decisions and not answer to anyone. If you were a one man software consultant you would have the same amount of autonomy.
I'd like to mildly disagree. Using whitespace to group functionality together in "paragraphs" and aligning the horizontal indentation in the clearest possible way is not too far away from editing a short story to make it flow better.
Earlier today my linter rearranged multiple "key: value" one-liners into two-liners and the end result is both objectively and subjectively worse.
I normally just auto-apply `black` to my code, but occasionally I feel the need to have things arranged in a way that is easier to read -- e.g. a list of several dictionaries. In that case, I just put a comment telling it to stop reformatting at the start of the block, and another at the end.
Yeah, it's proto-editing, but with such limited degrees of freedom in the activity your creative options are pretty limited and as time goes on and on the endeavor starts to look like this: https://xkcd.com/915/
As a one man software consultant, I just want to point out that you are working with clients, in their systems, on their problems. You provide advice, they make the decisions they deem best for their company.
You get to choose the problem spaces and teams, which is a degree of autonomy. But it is not quite so free as “making your own decisions and not answering to anybody.”
If you want to sell your woodwork you would have similar issues.
Yep. Imagine being a woodworker on a massive project like a large sailing vessel or Japanese castle. Suddenly coordination and collaboration requirements go right back up. Now you can't just wing your project. You've got to make sure the part your building matches the agreed upon spec and hope the teams you're "integrating" with have also followed the spec. When one of those teams gets "creative" suddenly things aren't fitting together and progress on the ship crawls to a halt.
It’s devex. Not for you, but for the reader. It’s part of the craft. We can argue about whether craftsmanship is creative or skill, but at the end of the day it’s satisfaction that they are chasing. Satisfaction they are denied at work.
Not that they can’t find at work. It’s actively taken away from them.
This is a take I don't think I've seen before. Is someone actually mad prettier is changing their single quotes to double quotes? Are they mad some line is breaking at some word?
Certainly I've never been. I use linters / formatters even when I'm working solo because the mere concept of having to think where to break lines is meaningless disruption from the actual goals I have.
If you _really_ want to break a line somewhere, just add a comment in between and your linter will comply.
Strict adherence to formatting rules can impair readability, yes.
Before back-tick strings in JS, it was useful to employ both single/double quotes for strings -- you'd use one most of the time, and then if you needed to embed a bunch of that quotation mark in a string literal, you'd switch to the other one.
A formatter with naive "single quotes only" rule would obliterate the last one to: unless you remember, before you hit save, to add a directive like: I still use linters and formatters every day, and on balance I think they're good to have, but it's ridiculous to pretend they don't have downsides, or that there isn't room for the occasional dash of human intervention in the automation; hence, the linters which have // linter pwease directives.The key point here is that the formatter has to be sufficiently advanced to know to do the right thing the vast majority of the time. Once it gets there, and once you've gotten used to the code it produces, it's better. Note that the "prettier" formatter will do the right thing in JS here, at least with the default config. It will even switch "\"string\"" to '"string"' for you.
Linting is a bit of a different beast, because linting includes changes to the code behavior itself, not just syntax. In JS there are so many footguns, that linting can often be pretty involved/strict. I think most of the people who don't like linting in JS either aren't aware of the footguns, or don't do very much code review and haven't worried themselves much with "what sort of bizare and unusual ways can this fail" sort of a thing.
Seriously. Python Black is a godsend. I don't have to waste brain cells on formatting minutiae, just right-click and go "format my code, please." It's consistent, it works, and IDGAF about the details.
The only formatting that drives me up the wall is people using K&R braces in C# or Java. It's not 1970 anymore, and we're not all typing on green-screen terminals. It's like people fetishizing vim or emacs over modern IDEs.
..huh? But either way, should you ever be annoyed by K&R again next time you work with C#, you can trivially change it by setting csharp_new_line_before_open_brace = none in .editorconfig and running dotnet-format tool against solution files.
Yes, both of these.
Obviously there are huge benefits to auto-formatting in large teams and popular open source projects, but some people also find benefit in having control of alignment, line breaks, indentation etc.
for some people talking about whether it's best to put a curly brace on its own line or on the same line as an if condition is like talking about which religion is the one true path to paradise...
If you use linters without auto formatters you are choosing tedium.
I curse the inferior linter formatting and at the same time would not have it any other way because why? Some diva would come in and put up a MR reformatting half the code base to their preferred way, mixed in with the actual change they are making and I would have to hunt for the actual changes in the reformatting noise. And then we would spend half a day arguing about it like in the good old days. Fast forward six months and there would be 6 different code styles in the codebase and it would just be terrible.
:deep breaths:
Why not just set up a rule to auto-format the code before it is committed so that nobody wastes time discussing formatting trivialities and the repo stays consistent?
It would be fantastic if there was a good normal-form formatter I could use for local work, and let automation format the code back to lint style. Unfortunately with something like IntelliJ/Java the commit-time reformat is not reversible. Maybe google's Java formatter is, hmm.
In JavaScript land, prettier auto-formatting the code on file save is quite lovely.
I would not be a fan of commit hook auto-formatting.
Sorry. Guilty party here. I used to be that diva at times, but also came around to your point of view after being on the other side of that several times myself.
But I think the biggest thing as I move up and spend more time reviewing code than writing it...style preferences make it so much easier to review code. Linters have given back years of my life at this point!
In my experience, it is not the divas who are the problem, but inexperienced developers (especially ones from non-CS background) who have a weird/no sense of formatting. I have seen my share of strange, inconsistent formatting in code reviews with junior developers.
I've worked in a place where reviews were obsessed with coding style. No one noticed serious bugs, but forget a space in the right place and you'd be doomed. And yet people still managed to rewrite stuff to their preferred style while managing to not violate any rule. No prescription about function and variable names? they'd change every single one their way. No prescription about argument alignment, they'd change it. Everything not esplicitly forbidden was an outlet to express their creativity or maybe tame their frustration.
I think you’re romanticising woodworking a bit here. A large saw is specifically built to allow doing a single, precise cut, in exactly the same way, over and over again. The tools are absolutely made to prevent you from messing up the various ways, it’s just that you don’t use the professionals tools at home.
And indeed that’s something I’d apply to software: both hobbyists and small companies are tempted to use professional tools (as in, intended for lots of engineers collaborating) for small projects or a low number of collaborators that don’t warrant such stringent rules.
Highly compensated people doing manual labor for fun are romanticizing woodworking. Full stop.
Trying to de-romanticize it means you have absolutely no idea what motivates most of us.
Signed, someone with restored antique Stanley wood planes, Japanese saws and who drools over Lee Valley product reviews.
Most of the stuff in the lee valley catalog is the same garbage you can get at rockler or any other tool outlet. The only thing possibly drool worthy are the Veritas tools. For the longest time I felt the same as you, I had assumed everything from LV was the same quality or at least close to the Veritas line. The truth is most of the LV stuff is garbage. On the other hand everything from Lie Nielsen is phenomenal, it's just not always in stock.
I spent a lot of time searching for and restoring old tools. I finally realized I was spending way more time on the tools than actually using them.
That’s not the arrangement of the words “Rockler” and “garbage” that will get you upvotes in r/woodworking.
If you had a Woodcraft in town you’d only go to Rockler for things you can’t find at Woodcraft. Which is largely cabinet-making and air handling equipment.
Lee valley and veritas are mostly making reproductions of golden age Stanley tools before the race to the bottom (what the kids call enshittification) started, with a few omissions or improvements. They aren’t garbage, they’re low volume. That makes them less appropriate for people being paid by the hour or piece.
I live equidistant, 15 minutes, from a Rockler and two Woodcrafts and I am not concerned about what would get upvotes in /r/woodworking.
I went to rockler this morning to get a reamer because the only reamers at Woodcraft are for pen making. With the exception of big brands like festool or powermatic most of the tools they sell at rockler are not great tools. This reamer is not great.
Ignoring hand tools, which give you precise, tactile control ... I'd still argue with this.
There are tools for specific things and they're meant to reduce error. But a router (woodworking) can be used to do half the stuff you want/need to do. A table saw can make straight cuts, rabbets, joinery.
The tools themselves (outside of specialty ones) are generally multi-purpose and allow for experimentation and creativity.
Programming tools are no different. All tools are like this.
OP's complaint is about syntactical differences and that's just because his team doesn't agree with him.
And tbh, to me, the fun creative part in programming lies in architecture, not how I space my code. With woodworking, the creative part is how I put it all together but not the actual cutting part.
Shouldn't all the lines of code uploaded in a pull request be automatically formatted into the coding style preferred by the reviewer anyway? It should be like an automatic translation done by some bot or something.
What bot? You create a branch, you push button in github UI, merge request is created. There's no bot.
It's not a bot but formatters like prettier for example make it very easy to set them up as git-hooks, where the formatter is applied on commit. Meaning, unless you specifically commit without hooks, all committed code should comply with the formatter.
For linting (e.g. eslint in the JS-space), this is also possible, however, most linting-processes tend to run just long enough to be annoying when run on every commit. In the monorepo I work on we created a command "prep-pr" which specifically addresses this issue - run it before creating a PR, and the CI-pipeline will mostly be green, at least in terms of linting/unit-testing.
That desire is in conflict with a desire for the reviewer to see only the changes and many of the diff tools don’t diff this reformatted code against that reformatted code but rather work on the pre-reformatted.
It could obviously be done, but involves a yak shave that isn’t clear that it brings enough value to be worthwhile.
That's my main concern, I want to review the changes, not formatting opinions.
We can't check in anything that fails the linter, but we can also automatically format the code very easily.
Isn't this part of the problem? If the purpose of code is to be understandable, the important communications shouldn't also be subtle. Your intention that the extra empty line before a block of code signals "This is the important part" is likely to be entirely lost on a reader of the code (especially in a codebase where the formatting isn't consistent so those spare lines are littered everywhere). Much better to leave a comment saying "there's a subtle but important thing going on here".
Sure, but don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Well-meaning engineers frequently don't document their code at all. It's why I advocate programmers at least use descriptive variable names and function names; what I call "self-documenting code".
It still falls short of well-documented code but, as I say, gets you "good".
For sure, well-written code often doesn't need comments to explain itself; my point was that "there's an extra space here so you know this bit is important" is pretty much the opposite of that.
I do use whitespace (empty lines) to "group" parts of a function the way paragraphs group thoughts in prose. For a function it might be as simple as param-check, setup, loop, tear-down. But it makes it a little clearer that some lines of tightly-grouped code represent an "activity" (sub-activity?).
As an example, your own comment three above is split into three parts (quote and two sections of your own). Plus my comment here, split into two.
Code has its own flow and natural groupings just like human language, and adding spacing to match makes it easier to understand even though it is subtle.
My theory is that excessive linter rules might be a symptom of trying to compensate for the weaknesses of a programming language. I see it a lot in Python and JavaScript projects where the language gives very litte guarantees about anything.
If you use a programming language that affords some guarantees like Haskell or even just C#, people seem to be less interested in linters.
Linting reduces the expressiveness of a language so that a large team can have some consistency.
It’s not necessarily a weakness of the language.
Languages like Haskell, C#, and Java don’t have the same amount of expressiveness as js, python, or ruby, so they don’t benefit as much from a linter, though I know places that use one for C# to prevent usage of the ‘var’ keyword
I have that at my current place with var in Java.
And enforcing new lines on else or catch after the brace, completely different to the language guides.
It looks a fucking mess.
It’s okay to want more.
If there's a small team, individual freedom can be perfectly fine, as everybody knows everyone and it's easy to talk with each other in case there are discrepancies.
For larger projects however, not having tooling set up that enforces certain consistency is an absolute showstopper for me. I'll either introduce it or I'll quit; I simply do not want to waste my time with developers squabbling over arbitrary formatting-choices or irrelevant coding-style-details that can easily be enforced by some tooling.
Of course, developer-experience is paramount. Meaning, the tooling must be easy-to-use and generally not stand in the way. Otherwise it can indeed create a lot of friction which will annoy everybody. But once this has been set up (properly!), it will make a lot of silly discussions and choices obsolete.
I hear you. But I’ve been programming for 30 years and I have some strong intuitions around where my code needs an empty line to space things out. Stuff like that. The day I first tried gofmt and it removed some of my carefully considered whitespace, I turned around, put blood on my hands in the old way and made a promise to the night that my soul belongs to me and gofmt will never sully my code with its corporate BS aesthetic.
Some consistency in a codebase is good. Naming consistency. Indentation. But people go too way far with it. Who cares if your JavaScript makes consistent use of semicolons? It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.
This is why linters are configurable; if your team doesn't care about consistent use of semicolons, ignore that linter.
Right?
Sure; but when I join a team and they've already got a linter set up with stupid pedantic rules, they never seem to appreciate my complaints about it. "Oh god, can we not have that conversation again!". I understand. But nobody is happy.
Carpentry isn't my jam, but I've taken up piano. I love it.
"No pre-push linter" is the hill I'll die on.
Could you elaborate? My team is currently looking at adding a pre-push linter to replace the annoying CI linter.
Linters as gatekeepers are bad in my opinion, and ones that prevent you from pushing as pre-push hooks are the worst offenders.
I'm just happy to have gone six years without wasting half a day a month debating about formatting or whims.
When code formatters were new, they insisted on vertical in addition to horizontal spacing rules, and that pissed a lot of wise people off.
These days they are pretty good at preserving vertical separation if it already exists and adding it if it’s missing.
I'll take the tyranny of the linter tool over not having it at all (and I've had both). At least with my current project, it's single-handedly helped catch tricky React re-render bugs, because it warns me when I'm missing a dependency, or also warns me ahead of time if I'm likely to encounter a re-render every frame (and what's causing it), etc.
Also it's helped keep unused garbage out of the codebase also, which people tend to leave in there otherwise.
Also prettier has helped in me no longer reviewing MRs where every single line shows up in a file because their local machine has a different tab indent set or a different way to handle newlines (like with or without carriage returns, IIRC).
Sure it styles some things that aren't my preference, but I don't have to do it myself, it just automatically changes it all, so I can deal with it.
And if something is especially annoying or causes issues, I can usually get an exception added to the configuration, at least on my current team.
Thank you for that: "linters" (but as a person's role, not as a tool).
Pretty sure that contributed to my early retirement from the industry. It didn't used to be that way — perhaps because there were fewer cooks; perhaps because of a more cavalier, cowboy-style approach to coding.
I definitely preferred the days of the open range....
Symptom of nothing better to do, I have found ;)
Hard to picture someone who values their time blocking PRs on tiny stylistic nits.
What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be the best way to do it to me
Doing the boring job at all is a waste of 50+% of your waking hours? By all means, do it if it makes the remaining 50% more enjoyable, but I think it’s possible to have both.
I want to have my cake and eat it too.
But you know, at the end there should be someone who is cleaning the toilets and taking out garbage. You eating the cake and having it is a bit selfish.
Just because someone's cleaning the toilet doesn't mean that everyone must struggle. Yes, life's not fair to everyone, some people starve right now, while other throw away kilograms of food. Some people clean toilets while other people were born with gold spoon in their mouth and will enjoy whatever they want for the rest of their lives.
Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender to the world fairness, I think.
But there is something to be said that some people are born into situations that force them to adopt a very risk adverse posture. If you don’t have any safety net, “daring to work at a place that does not suck” takes on a different risk profile and doesn’t necessarily generalize well as a strategy.
Me living in a 4 BR house with only our 4 family members instead of us taking in a stranger is also a bit selfish.
Everyone does some level of selfish things; trying to shape work so that you find it enjoyable (and therefore likely something that others would also find enjoyable) is an acceptable form of selfishness to most.
I think it was Joel Spolsky, who said one of his responsibilities as CEO of a new startup was cleaning the toilets until they could afford to pay a janitor.
I thought it was a good reminder to have an attitude of just seeing what needs to be done and doing it.
Why can't we just automate the terrible jobs out of existence? There's no good reason why we can't have a machine that cleans the toilet or takes your trash out to the street. Plus a self-driving machine that picks up your trash.
Possible, but unlikely today. I think the advice being converged on is not to let the possibility of 100% enjoyment ruin one's actual, real-life situation. Attain it if you can, but don't spend your life rueing its absence.
It's more so true today than ever before, where there are more companies than ever willing to consider allowing software developers, and some other kinds of knowledge workers, to work any where in the world.
It gives you more opportunities to find that combination of work you find meaningful, coworkers you mesh with, flexibility, and decent compensation, than any other time in history I'm aware of.
It's still not easy. Just easier than in the past.
I completely agree. As you stay, it's still not easy, especially in the post-ZIRP economy. Do I deserve to work with a team of interesting people, on a product I can be proud of, on a team that gives me flexible work hours? I sure do. But finding it is a big challenge for me, so I'm still going to celebrate the freedoms my current job gives me until I can find the right one.
It is risk assessment/management.
The non-boring companies I've worked for have had problems of wanting to work you at 150% of your schedule, quite often illegally. It is insanely rare that you'll get a job that keeps you busy (only) 8 hours a day constantly. Either the place is always on fire and has 12 hours of work a day, or you'll have it better managed and work will be bursty with the majority of the time under utilized. Spend that extra time being taught stuff on the company dime.
Because it’s soul destroying knowing your talents are wasted for 40+ hours a week
It’s only soul destroying if you let it be. As someone who grew up in poverty and spent most of my 20s working at a call center and pawn shop, I feel like the luckiest person in my family with my soul destroying corporate job.
It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind. You don’t have to wait for something in the future to be happy now.
The illusion paradigm
By saying you want to be happy, you’re already telling yourself there’s a gap between your state currently and that you wish to accomplish
“I’ll be truly happy WHEN”
When comes and goes, rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy. All done”
Fully agree, it’s a state of mind.
I’d also add most people who say they want to be happy don’t seem to be looking for happiness but rather contentness, but I digress
I've heard this, but only from people who had been in an very shitty situation and then got out. Happiness is a state of mind, but misery is a set of circumstances, and the latter precludes the former unfortunately.
That's not "soul destroying", it's real life. The vast majority of people in this world have to do a job that they aren't in love with so that they can pay the bills. Anyone who is privileged enough to be in a highly paid tech job should be extremely thankful. Not only do we get paid well, we have to work 1/4 as hard as the people busting their asses for a living. We have a real sweetheart deal even if our jobs aren't always everything we would like.
There's something to be said for being able to look back and see a bridge or road or house of piece of furniture or an automobile you built, and see it's still being used and providing value to someone. Even if the monetary compensation was only mediocre.
Because it’s soul destroying knowing that to get medical insurance, it is directly tied to your employment. If not for that, people would gladly pursue their interests and passions without the fear of a bankrupting medical incident.
There's something especially soul destroying about doing work you know is useless and meaningless:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf3SGGAJWbA
It sounds like modern day slavery, or perhaps more precisely "corvee" labor. You have to toil away on your master's land before doing your own thing. I find it unbearable, but sadly much of the world has to deal with it.
You don’t “have to”, you “choose to”. There are plenty of paths out there. Slaves or serfs actually didn’t have a choice.
But I could only make a third the money doing the thing I really want to do! /s
You are mocking the suffering of actual slaves by comparing a modern highly compensated office job to slavery.
In corporations is not a lot of money, almost never the market rates. In my big non-IT company I am paid at rates lower than any external company we contract for projects, even if their people are always lower qualified.
Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.
If you were comparing what the other company was charging your company for their developers: Labor and software services have different markets. Because, among other things, tax/insurance regulations and the expectations of contract longevity are not the same. A software shop needs to charge 2-3x salaries to be profitable. I was referring to a theoretical free market for labor.
If you were comparing salaries, either your company was compensating you with extra prestige, job security, etc. or you were underpaid.
I am comparing manager/architect positions in Europe with long-term (5+ years) contractor positions in India. Yes, I know contracting is more expensive than employees, but not to this level. We use contractors because internal developers would be paid so bad, nobody would apply (and they don't).
I'd say they pay bad so they don't have to have the local employees that would be protected by strong local laws. Contracting is effectively cheaper, mostly because the company doesn't care about the health of the local company/economy.
Sometimes jobs aren't just boring, but one is constantly stressed by absurd deadlines or communication efforts with bosses/customers whose expectations are both in line with business practices and out of reality. You surely get back home with a nice check, but no energy or will to spend it on anything fun. Being good at forgetting the workplace and associated problems when one walks out of there is an art not everyone can master, especially among those who actually love their jobs.
I have a hobby that involves metalworking and building and it was strongest and I was at my most hobby-productive during a time I worked for a soul-destroying FAANG full of unreasonable expectations, stress, awful management, and so on. I think for the sake of your mental health, you really need to get good at "forgetting the workplace" and switching to fun mode. It's a skill like anything that you can practice. I know people who can't separate, and they take their misery from work and spread it into their home life. It's awful, especially for their family.
There is a difference between a job not being fun/being boring and actively dreading to do a job because of deadlines/management/etc
The former is tolerable for many, the latter usually isn’t for long
Willing to bet that most people who take up something that pays much less don't have kids
Aren't you afraid that the "fast-growing" small company will soon become a large company, with all the problems you mentioned you want to avoid?
Isn't it possible to just go looking for another fast-growing small company when your current employer reaches that stage?
I just think that they wrote "fast-growing" as a positive attribute, when the logic of the comment would make it a negative attribute.
Of course you can go looking again. But why not look for a slow-growing or not-growing small company, so you don't need to go looking so often?
Yes, fast-growing companies can grow out of my preference zone and as other commenters said, jumping ship when that happens may be the correct way to go.
There are other issues with slow-growing or not-growing companies. When the company is not growing, people are incentivized to take a zero-sum approach to their work relationships. If the pie is not growing, you need to guard your own slice and take from others. This creates a toxic environment. If the company is growing, then collaborating on growing the pie can become the shared attitude.
Oh, I think people take a zero-sum approach in growing companies as well. Maybe even more so.
https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted
Slow growth and no growth companies tend to be under a lot of pressure for cost-optimization (which makes sense in a lot of ways, but is grueling to live through…)
It happens but then it's time to find the next one.
This comment hits the crux of what OP was really getting at. It's not that software itself is an inherently bad trade; it's what's been happening to it and why.
Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.
It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.
As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.
This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.
The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.
I’m going to seize on one phrase:
I’ve said this a million times on this forum.. the little trick whereby people who were once employees became merely _human resources_ has done more to damage work-life in this world than anything else I can think of.Its natural to exploit resources to their fullest. Labeling humans as resources is inherently dehumanizing and desperately needs to end.
I've lost my cool one time when a very young "manager" asked: "Do we have a backend resource on this call?"
It really got my blood boiling and I've said something very similar to: "No we don't have a resource on the call, we have engineers, colleagues, employees, humans and friends on this call. Resources are air, water, memory, cpu and time, please don't call people like that". This followed by silence, and a lot of red faces.
Couple of weeks later, had a talk with my manager who is a true and true programmer I really respect. And then he says something with that "resource" referring to our team members...
I have experience across various industries, and many professions think very highly of themselves. But over here I have seen the working population be so easily manipulated, self-effacing, and self-abnegating. Most of the time bad managers just say "jump!" and engineers just ask "how high?".
I like the big companies because I can be paid a hefty six figure salary while working 4 hour days and spending the rest of the hours doing woodworking, gardening, home remodeling, baking, exercising, reading, etc.
It's an odd thing - at all the big companies I've worked for, you can usually get all your work for the day done in 4 hours. Between meetings and status waste, that's all anybody expects from you.
What you personally do is only part of your job. Communicating with others is probably at least the other 50%. Even if your an individual consultant your clients will expect you to communicate with them.
I worked for big companies, startups, and freelance. If you don’t take control of your career you will be unfulfilled. Software has the pick of the litter. The winning combination is a big company and a role you chose. Security, compensation, and creativity all in one. Startups are 90% likely to fail, contracting will set you back late in life if you don’t hustle all the time. YMMV but nothing beats a blue chip.
One man's garden of eden is another's hell on earth. I've gone back and forth between big and small. I'm genuinely happy at small companies with tight knit teams (getting abused by csuite for shit pay ofc). At big companies I get extremely depressed in a corporate hell scape mostly surrounded by people that have maintained sanity by dissociating from the job and collecting a paycheck.
I'm trying to start my own business now without going down the consulting route. At the very least I tell myself that the spoils of the hustle go to me. Let's see how this phase goes.
This entire thread is full of “well for me…”. So I added mine. It’s obvious this is purely anecdotal for everyone.
I learned to play the game. I too really enjoy being able to talk directly to the client while building, but I also learned to play the game of cogs, where I am separated from the client by layers of increasingly clueless management. I balance the insanity with pursuing photography.
All of this is hitting too close to home!
I work for a large company , and I love people I'm with and had some great challenges and accomplishments, but yeah... There's still a creative urge that's left not completely filled. So I ran a photography business for a decade!I loved interacting with happy and involved clients, and creating something that brings them immediate joy :). I don't have time anymore to do it professionally but I still do it for friends and family ( while I work with my therapist to survive my day job :)
I'm one of those creative types. I have woodworking shop, I'm a musician, my wife and I are part-time performing magicians.
I've only ever worked for small start-ups. Including my own which paid the bills for 15 years.
Working for start-ups does not solve the problem for me.
The problem for me is that I need to give a shit about WHAT I'm creating. And I find that after 25 years of working in the tech industry professionally, as an end user the older I get the less interest in modern technology I have.
It's hard for me to not see the negatives. I want a car that I can maintain myself and that does not talk to a network for critical functions. I want a fridge that just cools my food and doesn't come with an app or "smart" features. I have zero interest in AI. I love writing code, and I'm already over-burdened by poor code quality that I've inherited and that was written by inexperienced devs. I don't need AI generating code for me that I then need to review and refactor. It's faster and more fulfilling for me to write it myself. I never got on the smart phone bandwagon. Yes, I own one, but I often forget where I left it and when I find it the battery is usually dead because I haven't touched it in days. I don't want a "smart home." I'm not a gamer.
So in my off hours, I find that I spend my time doing things that don't touch modern tech at all.
So yeah, I find myself constantly planning my exit strategy from the industry. I enjoy coding, making things and solving problems but I don't enjoy modern technology the way that I used to. And making products that I wouldn't use myself is what I find soul crushing.
As an aside, high skill and low excitement is a great recipe for composure. It makes me think of a veteran I once knew. He once talked us out of a sticky situation because seeing his calm demeanor, the authority figures had no reason to suspect we were up to something.
This really struck me because I'm realizing it is soul destroying but have gotten competent, and even good at it. I was involved in my family's small business and some of my own startup attempts and consulting, so I remember those feelings.
I get what you're saying, but for the author of the article it seems the opposite issue. He seems to (mostly) live from his own software products, and his two main points of stress are unreasonable customers & his own inability to let things go when fixing/working on stuff.
Depends on the industry. I've been doing iOS for over a decade. You're right in that there are different dynamics with enterprise that can wear you down. I find that to be less so the case with jobs in the retail sector. Things are always fluid and changing there.
Still, this is a very subjective statement. As someone in my middle ages, I've come to appreciate and understand how views change over time. The 20-something me would have jumped over to new jobs every 2-3 years. The 40 something me recognizes value in work/life balance, stability, and a more defined and often opportunistic growth path in larger companies. And it's at this stage that while I may not fully comprehend the occasional stubbornness of 60-something devs, I can at least approach their way of thinking as not wrong. When you have a spouse, family, and mortgage to support, the potential upsides of a smaller, more nimble company just don't overcome the peace of mind of being in the corporate world.
There are plenty of big tech or big tech adjacent public traded company jobs paying far better that are still majority coding and with a lot less speed pressure than an early stage startup, among other things allowi Ng for an earlier retirement.
Will take one of those instead, any day.
Another idea: work for an IT services big company. Then you'll have a lot of change, will be much less of a cost center (only at times) and talk directly to the customer to solve their problems. Not the same as a startup of course, but at least on paper it looks like checking your points with slightly less stress or risk.
I run my own self-funded solo business. I talk to my customers and make a meaningful difference in their daily work. If I do my job right, they gladly pay me subscription money. I'm pretty happy with this, especially given that I choose my tools and technologies, and that my customers are smart engineers.
At small companies, across a long career, I’ve solved the same problems many times. But that’s not the part that stings the most.
What grinds my gears is failing to solve problems I’ve already solved. At some point you have to convince others that a plan is good. Your arguments might not work on a new team. You might not know what the secret sauce was that got you consensus last time. Or after years of getting your way you may forget some of the arguments for an idea.
Because mastery is, at the end of the day, converting an intellectual process into intuition, so you can go faster. Once a decision process is successfully ingrained, the intellectualized path is dead weight.
There’s a lot of vaguely intellectually lazy, cheap instead of frugal thinking, and ethically challenged people in or around our industry, and the collective weight of it causes pushback on progress.
Cheers! Nonsense is tiring, nonsense breeds detachment, and I daresay most humans will detach from sources of constant nonsense. (As well as from economies of constant nonsense. See: advertising, social media)
We can agree that PowerPoint is a lossy encoder for instances of Conway's Law.
But to your point about Small versus Large entities...
There are many well-travelled roads to Unfulfillment in the software business. Both Small and Large entities have the problem known as people.
Although it's true that corporations tend towards uncalled functions and structured madness, small shops can amplify the oddities, mistakes, and loyalty-antipatterns of principal's exclusive control. And people at a small shop will often work longer hours just to sort these problems.
These people are lucky and are doing what is healthy. They are the tool-maker sort of person and are fortunate to have the time to extend their skills and knowledge.
Same. The enterprise can be enjoyable from some aspects, but in the end the soul-suck isn't worth it to me. I think a great skunk works team with a big budget is probably the dream, but short of those rare and difficult-to-get opportunities, the startup/small-tech co is the place to go for people like us. Some are better than others at faciliting honesty, but it's far more common IME than big corp.
I think there is something special about physical creativity that scratches a certain part of your even if you have a very fulfilling day-job.
"Even" Chris Lattner (of LLVM and Swift fame) which I as an outsider at least would say have a fulfilling job dabbles in the occasional woodworking: https://nondot.org/sabre/Woodworking.html
I work for a digital services consultancy handling large gov't contracts. It has all the problems of every large organization, public or private, but it's not overly demanding. The work is more challenging from a people perspective than a technical one.
But, as in my last big project, I'm building something well that makes a concrete difference in people's lives, internally and externally. In my previous project, the software we delivered saved hours a day for clerks who were typically very overworked, and we received grateful emails telling us that they'd been able to sit down for lunch for the first time in years. In the current project we're bringing GIS capabilities and full accessibility to a gov't online service--we have a mandate to ensure it works properly with screen readers, and we're actually doing new work on making map features accessible to the visually impaired.
So much of the motivation for geeks is technical satisfaction that we can miss many other forms of fulfillment in our technical jobs. Having worked on the web since the late 1900s, through multiple hype waves and "oh, we're doing this again" moments, I find the non-tech, more people-oriented rewards much more satisfying.
Also, I'm building out the wood shop I want. :)
I was in a fast-growing company (although adjacent to Tech), that grew "big" and went though tons of extra bureaucracy where you will spend months fighting for some stupid change that makes all the technical sense. Now the company is sinking, I hope I will be fired and with the severance package I can enjoy life for 6-8 months and then go find again a company where I can fix things and impact someone's life in a mostly positive way. Wish me luck.
I think those people also are more likely to have the work life balance to pursue hobbies where most people doing fast growing/early stage startups are off balance. I personally don’t care what I spend my time on at work, I’ve found even when I enjoy the work, it doesn’t increase my fulfillment in life over the long term. So I try to optimize the life part of the ratio as much as I can, at times at expense of the work side of the ratio.
You hit on a really key point here:
I finally identified that at my last job, and have begun actively working to make that happen. For example, I transitioned internally to a "platform" team so that I know my customer—my fellow product developers at the company.
This has resulted in me being MUCH happier with my day-to-day work.
Vigorous exercise and a love of food gos miles for managi g the creative soul.
Side projects and meditation supplements.
Each year passes and O learn more about myself so hurray growth?
Guilty (although retired now). When I could apply creativity to my job, I did so, but I think I prefer to have had the outside-work activities to have been my creative outlets.
The application to express creativity in software is fairly narrow in comparison to other activities and, as was pointed out in this thread, physically creating with your hands (rather than virtual creating with your keyboard) is ... real.
I am very good at designing and creating software products from scratch. Was doing it for few years a an employee of smallish company that served numerous clients. I then went on my own and kept doing the same. I have my own product that brings in some money. Also I design and develop software product to various clients. I've had ups and downs but in average am very happy, not overworked, have more than enough time for myself and like my job which is basically a hobby paid for by the clients. My client are usually small to medium size that are not really in software but for one or another reason software runs their business.
When you are young and especially when you don't have a family to support, you move to some place where you like to work. When you are older and opportunities are rare (and agism is huge in the industry), you just take what you can and escape any way you can, like video games or side passions of any sorts. I bought a motorcycle when I was over 30 years old for commuting (heavy traffic, the bike was saving hours), but after a few years I started to take motorcycle trips in the weekends and, once in a while, across Europe. But it can be anything that you find enjoyable, the point is that you have to try different things and see what you like, when I was 20-25 years old I had no desire to ever buy a motorcycle. Now, if it's a light rain, I am happy to take it for a ride.