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This is a collection of expressions of despair by people who work in software.
I'm 10 years into my career, and I'm very tired of team based software development. I still enjoy programming but I've come to dread almost everything surrounding it.
My work / life balance is decent, I work for a pretty good company on a cool product, and my co-workers are good people. I have suffered from mild to moderate depression most of my life, but I'm doing my best to take care of the basics there, and I'm seeing a therapist. I'm beginning to see some of the classic signs of burnout, but I don't think this is strictly a burnout question.
I work well on teams, my teammates like me, but I've always preferred solo work. I think this is a stable personality trait, as I remember feeling like this as early as kindergarten. Other factors include the already incredibly complex social problems that come from developing software with a team of humans, the monster that Agile / Scrum have become, bizarre and poorly thought out technical decisions, failed projects, endless meetings, and being told what to do by people who have never written any code.
Then, in a follow-up comment:
There's an almost religious adherence to broken product management practices. Endless sprints, endless user stories, obsession with "velocity", constant meetings and status updates...all of which grind the actual work to a halt. It's about the appearance of work, rather than the work itself. Developers are considered as code monkeys who need constant attention, not skilled professionals. It boggles the mind that companies pay so much for developers, and then put endless obstacles in the way of them actually getting real work done.
We fucked up. We had no connection to the people in Pete’s life, like his wife and kids. Pete was a full time contractor. This was a typical arrangement for over half of our team. We were scattered all over the world and we got started with a global team in the easiest way, which was hiring engineers as contractors. Pete had no HR, no health benefits, and no employee record with alternate or emergency contacts. We had 600 people in the company, but he was only known to about 10. And from the perspective of his family, they only knew the name of the company he was contracted with and my first name, but nothing else.
When he passed away, his wife had no way to contact me or anyone on his team. When I arrived in the morning, I got a message from our customer support team lead. Pete’s wife had used the technical support chat to get a message to me. She was put in a queue with every other customer user who couldn’t login or forgotten how to access the mobile app. I was gutted by the eventual news and by the fact that Pete’s passing had become a support ticket. This made it so much more devastating.
mourning loss as a remote team
I doubt even 10% of the code I've written over the last 15ish years is still in use, anywhere.
I doubt more than a quarter of it ever had an overall positive effect—monetary or otherwise—large enough to justify the cost of writing it.
I've spent probably a third of my career, spread out here and there, working on projects that all the ICs could tell were doomed for super-obvious reasons (clear failure to find product/market fit then doubling down, entering a market very late and with only a few percent of the investment it would take to have a realistic chance at it, that kind of thing)
Then there are vanity projects like a company's annual investor report app. JFC.
Working in tech feels like being a small part of some kind of horrible random input process that feeds the capitalist pyramid above.
HN Comment: "The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]"
On 2022-02-01, Twitter user @mekkaokereke wrote:
"The smartest engineers are all working on web3!" is just negging aimed at engineers. It's not even close to true. The truth is the same as it's ever been: The smartest engineers are working on whatever they want. Wherever, and with whomever they want.
Prompting this response from @ctrlshifti:
the smartest engineers i know are burned out and starting vegetable gardens
The incentives are still there for churning out more and more code, compile it on more and more CI/CD pipelines, run it on clusters of more and more powerful machines, and interface it to more and more powerful computers in our pockets which have gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage, mad gigahertz multi-core CPUs but somehow still amount to being slow dumb terminals.
Damn, even open source world favors constant churn. New libraries come with breakage that demands every application out there to adapt with little to no reward, those applications aren’t becoming any better, they just keep chasing new languages, new frameworks, new windowing systems, re-solve problems solved long ago, and all of it is just to keep up.
Gosh, there was this comparison on how long would it take to cold boot a machine, open a document in a text processor, and print it out. The contenders were a 8-bit Commodore with floppies and a modern MacBook Pro. Guess what, while Mac won, it wasn’t by a wide margin at all. The Mac could likely easily emulate a dozen Commodores. Where are all the gains?
If I were to become a dictator of a large part of the world, I’d tax heavily all the extra cycles, all extra watts of power wasted, all extra RAM, and all excess bytes sent over the wire, and tax it enough to eat into profits of big tech. Incentives done right would make the developers think of efficiency from day one.
There’s also this thing that while we rely on tech more and more, we are just as far from actually automating the boring stuff away as we have been for the last 40 years. The stories about a plucky worker automating their job and not telling anyone are just as appealing today as they were two decades ago. And all this tech has bugs, is fragile, sucks big time and brings in a lot of frustration.
(Steps away from the soapbox and walks into the sunset.)
I feel you 100%! This is the topic we discuss with friends on a nearly daily basis. We loved the whole idea how we had limited resources and we were forced to read the {man | info} pages, at least in a UNIX-like environment, and of course visit university or public libraries to use them as our source of valuable information...plus we would use it as an excuse to meet with other like-minded people.
Now we feel completely disconnected and detached from each other, hiding behind emojis and smiley faces.
It's a sad SAD world we are currently living in and the majority of people I personally know are looking for an escape plan to give up technology as a whole, (well as much as possible) so we can retain some form of attachment to our previous way of life that felt more humane.
Enough is enough for me...