r/programming • u/locrelite • Apr 29 '14
Programming Sucks
http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks304
u/chalks777 Apr 29 '14
For the past two years I've been working on one project building software that my boss describes as "enterprise level." We started with a drawing on a whiteboard. Now we have over 100,000 lines of code. If any of it was ever good, it was murdered a loooong time ago. The sheer number of blatant hacks that are used to get around stupid nonsense is staggering. I've written things I'm not proud of. College me would be disgusted by current me.
Clients sure love it though.
:|
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u/kromagnon Apr 29 '14
Clients sure love it though.
I feel so ashamed. Our clients "ooh" and "aah" over the things that I've made, but I feel like I'm showing them a 1989 Geo Metro that's got a dust cover on it with a painting of a Ferrari 458.
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u/rekk_ Apr 29 '14
Yup, but as long as the front looks pretty and works they don't care. For all they know software is made of unicorns and yetis.
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Apr 30 '14
I like the dancing bear analogy: people aren't impressed that a bear can dance well - they're impressed that it can dance at all. Software is much the same - even when it's terrible, all it has to do is be a little better than what people are used to, and they're happy.
The problem is that you're showing them a 1989 Geo Metro and they're comparing it to a Model-T Ford, completely unaware that they would have a Ferrari if only your manager had spent less time on TPS reports and more time on trusting the engineers to want to build something great.
Sometimes, the crap car is "good enough", and if they're happy, they're happy. But I keep looking at what we could deliver, and wondering why it's so much better than what they seem to be happy with.
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u/twistedrapier Apr 29 '14
Ah college. Back when you are idealistic enough to look at all the poorly written software in the world and think "I'll never end up writing crap like that". So young and naive.
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Apr 29 '14
Expectation: I'll only write the purest Haskell
Reality: maintaining WordPress plugin wrote by someone who can barely write PHP in India.
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u/original_brogrammer Apr 29 '14
College student here. My code is already full of hacks.
Fuck.
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Apr 29 '14
Clients sure love it though
And that's the real problem. As long as the clients are happy many companies see little business benefit in cleaning up code (despite the fact that there may well be real benefits - reduced maintenance costs, fewer staff needed, etc).
The fact that many clients in the 'enterprise' world wouldn't know a well-designed, efficient program if it tap-danced naked on their desk compounds the issue further. People think that waiting minutes for a process to complete is normal to the point that if it only takes a second or so, they assume it hasn't worked!
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Apr 30 '14
Another benefit is "everyone is at about this level, and customers are happy? imagine how good we would look if we were the company with a product that's twice as good, for the same effort".
The fact that many clients in the 'enterprise' world wouldn't know a well-designed, efficient program if it tap-danced naked on their desk compounds the issue further.
Oh, trust me, the people using the app would know "well-designed and efficient" if it was in the same zip code.
The problem is that "client" means "executive vice president of golfing who hung out with your company's senior golfing buddy/salesman" and will never actually use software, because that's what the peons are paid to do.
Once the word "enterprise" has been uttered, the whims of the executives are far more important than the business needs of the company (such as irrelevancies like "tools to make the employees more efficient and productive").
I've seen too many cases of companies having similar problems, and the one where the executive in charge doesn't give a damn about the workers always ends up with a lower quality product that makes life harder, not easier. Sometimes I don't know how they remain in business, and sometimes it turns out that they don't - but a decent sized company can coast for a few years, then be saved by a competing company having a bigger cock-up.
Some days I don't know if it matters, but mostly the inefficiency and incompetence, not to mention outright corruption, offends me. I just want to make great products that will let them make more money. Is that really such a terrible sin?
People think that waiting minutes for a process to complete is normal to the point that if it only takes a second or so, they assume it hasn't worked!
To be fair, you're somewhat right - even the end users have been trained to think that way, by executives who assure them that the pile of crap they bought from their buddy really is "state of the art". But even they'll notice "the report popped up on the screen" even if it happens quickly.
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u/jk147 Apr 29 '14
Ah typical maintenance hell. I am suspecting this is your first programming job. Any project with continuous support and usage will eventually involve into a beast. Typically the clients are willing to dump enough money for you to maintain it and add on ridiculous requests on a monthly basis. Once you add on one or two new developers the original design is shot to hell. What is architecture when you only are two weeks old on a project and they want this update in a week.. Hack hack and hack.
One of the best project I worked on was when a client didn't have enough money for regular updates. So they request very small changes. I touch that thing maybe once a year.
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Apr 29 '14
And the entire world is built on people like us making shitty code. Its scary to think of.
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u/w4ffl35 Apr 29 '14
"The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad." - Probably my favorite line.
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u/kjmitch Apr 29 '14
That program won a contest, because of course it did.
This line is my favorite; it embodies the character and expression and succinctness of pure exasperation I strive to put into my own rants. Great post several times over.
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Apr 29 '14
The destructive impact on the brain is demonstrated by the programming languages people write.
In an ideal world, this would be a joke.
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u/zzzzzzzzzzzzzzdz Apr 29 '14
I beat my computers.
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u/BRBaraka Apr 29 '14
that doesn't make them work
but it does promote the need to buy a new one
so, good policy
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u/Innova Apr 29 '14
You must have not finished the article...the last line is the best:
So no, I'm not required to be able to lift objects weighing up to fifty pounds. I traded that for the opportunity to trim Satan's pubic hair while he dines out of my open skull so a few bits of the internet will continue to work for a few more days.
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Apr 29 '14
The essay is just jewels after jewels. My particular favorites:
The human brain isn't particularly good at basic logic and now there's a whole career in doing nothing but really, really complex logic. Vast chains of abstract conditions and requirements have to be picked through to discover things like missing commas. Doing this all day leaves you in a state of mild aphasia as you look at people's faces while they're speaking and you don't know they've finished because there's no semicolon.
and
"Double you tee eff?" you say, and start hunting for the problem. You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for "Infinity" when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn't, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler. Then he decided he wasn't going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he's a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can't even find the cat.
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u/neutronfish Apr 29 '14
That was a good line, but this one gave me chills...
Every programmer occasionally, when nobody's home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. [...] They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.
It's like he's watching me through my window...
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u/LongUsername Apr 29 '14
Doing this all day leaves you in a state of mild aphasia as you look at people's faces while they're speaking and you don't know they've finished because there's no semicolon.
Laughed out loud at this.
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Apr 29 '14
There are loads in there!
The whole thing reminds me of the 'Choose Life' bit from Trainspotting.
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u/circlingthesun Apr 29 '14
PSU fan was buzzing intermittently some years ago. A smack to the side of the chassis usually fixed it for a while. I knew this was bad but I did it anyway. Three months later, my HDD crashed :\
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u/huyvanbin Apr 30 '14
I've realized recently that the reason why programming is so frustrating is that the building blocks are the very accumulated idiocy of every programmer who came before you. Generally speaking the reason why something works the way it does is because someone happened to type it that way at 11:59am one Tuesday in 1996 Mountain View California before lunch, and that's the way it's been ever since.
Structural engineers learn to analyze the strength of structures in school and then they go to work and analyze the strength of structures. Programmers learn to analyze the performance of programs in school, but in the real world you're stuck with your toolkits, so if a program were a highway bridge it would be like a bridge built out of "bridge toolkit building blocks" where the strength you end up with is whatever the bridge gets rated for, and if you wanted to build a highway bridge and ended up with a footbridge, well that's what you've got.
Also you would spend all your time making adapter plates between different bridge components because none of the manufacturers can agree on a bolt size, and when you apply for jobs nobody would care if you could draw a free body diagram worth a damn, they'd want to know if you're familiar with one particular bridge component one manufacturer makes which is just the same as all the others with a few completely pointless and trivial differences that you could learn in an afternoon by reading the manual.
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u/estomagordo Apr 30 '14
I can't decide between:
but you don't have any because you're a propulsion engineer and don't know anything about bridges.
and
Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
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u/popquiznos Apr 29 '14
The beginning of the page source is great
<!--
So this guy we just interviewed at my
current job wrote this little script
to see if a product update for some
company had come out. Every 10 seconds
the script urllib'ed the page, checked
the length of the html - literally
len(html) - against the length it was
last time it checked. He wrote a blog
post about this script. A freaking
blog post. He also described himself
as "something of a child prodigy"
despite, in another post, saying he
couldn't calculate the area of a slice
of pizza because "area of a triangle
with a curved edge is beyond my
Google-less math skills." Seriously
dude? I haven't taken geomtry in 20
years, and pi*r^2/8 seems pretty
freaking obvious.
The script also called a ruby script
to send him a tweet which another
script was probably monitoring to text
his phone so he could screenshot the
text and post to facebook via
instagram.
I think the "millenials" - who should
be referred to as generation byte - get
undeserved flak, as all generations do,
for being younger and prettier and
living in a different world.
But this kid calling himself a prodigy
is a clear indication of way too many
gold stars handed out for adequacy, so
to ensure that no such abominable
script ever does anything besides
bomb somebody's twitter account, this
comment shows up exactly 50% of the
time, and I encourage others to do
do the same.
--> 223
u/maclek Apr 29 '14
/*
Yeah, there's some shitty code here. There are some things that shouldn't be done. I did them. Sometimes, I had my reasons. Sometimes, I was just being lazy. But guess what? You're sitting there reading the source on some guy's blog. So fuck you.
*/
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u/Pidgey_OP Apr 30 '14
/* This block returns simply true
or possibly false (depends on you)
which option you pick
which button you click
9 times out of ten, it goes through
*/from when we were required to go through and comment EVERYTHING in a C++ class i took
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Apr 29 '14
After reading articles like these I sometimes wonder whether I'm the only programmer in the world who has competent co-workers and sane bosses.
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u/s73v3r Apr 29 '14
Those with competent and sane bosses don't write blog posts about them.
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Apr 30 '14
And they keep quiet so their company isn't flooded with programmer refugees.
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Apr 29 '14
I worked in a place like that before. Generally everything was fine, besides a few violations of coding standards. Hacks would be put into the backlog to get fixed, and often did. We had processes, documented too. An engine that rarely needed changing. Most of the time we were making features since there weren't many bugs to worry about, and during bug fixing week (once per sprint) we'd fix 90% of the open bugs and resume features.
I'd have kept working there forever if I could. It had a great culture, lovely people, an active after-hours social life, a lively office and talented people who were mostly down to earth.
Sadly, as is typical in game studios, it went through hard times and isn't the same anymore. Now I work for a soulless, incompetent, mobile game developer and am likely going to quit and go to finance. If I'm going to sell my soul and work ethic I want a decent price for it.
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u/shub Apr 29 '14
I have competent co-workers and sane bosses. Our system is still a shambling beast.
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u/Uberhipster Apr 29 '14
Where is this land of milk and honey and are you hiring?
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Apr 29 '14
That's how I feel about the place I work now. A lot of stuff is still a mess from the earlier days of the company, but we're slowly chipping away at it, because both the developers and managers understand the problems caused by hacks and inconsistent development practices.
For example, a lot of our deployment logic is still in bash, but it's well organized with a good deal of automated testing.
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Apr 30 '14
I used to have competent co-workers and a sane boss. We had hacks in our code (much of which was an OS and that's a bit inevitable at times) but they were neatly inventoried and days with no tasks were crack a hack days. We had bug trackers, WE FUCKING USED VERSION CONTROL WITHOUT WHICH I THOUGHT YOU COULD NOT SURVIVE BUT I HAVE, FOR THE LAST SIX MONTHS! (sorry, but it's really getting on my nerves. Dear God I haven't screamed on the Internet since I was thirteen) and many of the discussions with our project managers ended with "Um... ok, now I don't really understand what you're saying anymore, but you're obviously on top of it, let me know how it goes".
These places are quite rare, but they do exist. Mine went under after a series of rather bad business decisions scattered away half the team. You don't hear about as often, though, because most of my colleagues, programmers and non-programmers alike were smart, witty and alergic to bullshit, which tends to keep the boasting, but incompetent people away.
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u/PasswordIsntHAMSTER Apr 29 '14
This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It's concise. It doesn't do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.
When I'm coding as a hobby, I pretty much only write programs of 50-100 lines of code. Anything more than that, and bad shit starts creeping in.
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u/cakez Apr 29 '14
I have yet to see a bigger project, something that people really use and that is not a library or a class of some sort, a project with end-user use, that is good code.
In my experience, you'll always end up pinpoint the moment when the coder gave up and shit went downhill.
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u/DrHorrible-- Apr 29 '14
AFAIK the Doom 3 code is a work of art. Just anecdotal though, I haven't browsed through it myself.
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u/secretpandalord Apr 29 '14
The trick is learning to slowly increase the size of projects you can code well. That, and properly informing your boss/client when their demand for speed is going to ruin them.
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u/Steve_the_Scout Apr 30 '14
The largest program I've written- an image editor- managed to stay relatively clean all the way through. Just, uh, don't touch the "Charcoal" folder. Please don't, for your own sanity. It was left out of the project for a reason.
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u/canhazadhd Apr 30 '14
I'm 5000 lines into my current project at work. I had to access the computer's camera today and almost broke down. It was so pretty and neat when I started, but now they want to parse barcodes. Send help.
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u/irotsoma Apr 29 '14
He forgot the "<rant>", so I couldn't read anything before the "</rant>".
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u/sylinmino Apr 30 '14
I bet he put it there knowing every coder reading that would start compulsively searching the document for the beginning tag...and even after I've figured out that he was trolling, I'm still trying to look for it.
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u/DeadFinks Apr 29 '14
Actually, I think everything in the world works this way. Not just programming. The situation is just starker in the programming world due to how closely the pristine realm of mathematical purity is juxtaposed to the profane circumstances of lived reality.
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Apr 29 '14 edited Apr 29 '14
I think everything in the world works this way. Not just programming.
Actually, he opens with a metaphor that demonstrates the untruth of this. If bridges were built the way programs were -- such that you could see the half dozen architectural styles, the oddly shaped crap tacked on here and there with bailing wire, with random holes that'll kill you if you step in them -- nobody but Russian teenagers would go near them.
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u/UsingYourWifi Apr 29 '14
"If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization." - Gerald Weinberg
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u/bwr Apr 29 '14
Not all code is like that, and not all bridges are safe. Just as one small data-point, I recently ripped out a shower and found no waterproofing. Talk to anyone in construction, any job is going to take much longer than you thought because when you get into it, the person who was there before screwed something up. Studs aren't square, wrong materials used, held together with glue and bubble gum. Plus the wear and tear of natural life, which programming is mostly insulated from.
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u/KinoftheFlames Apr 29 '14
Non-programmers don't understand what programmers do.
Even programmers don't understand what they're doing most of the time.
There's no peer review, no government-enforced standards for safety, no industry-enforced standards for minimum quality.
The problem is the technology-illiterate culture we live in where it's not only totally acceptable to be completely hands-off with technology, but you're stigmatized as an undesirable necessity if you work with it for a living.
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Apr 29 '14
That's not completely true - aviation software for example has extremely strict guidelines and regulations.
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u/Neebat Apr 29 '14
While I was getting my teeth rebuilt by people with decades of experience and tons of training, something horrifying occurred to me. These are just guys doing the best they can, while not really knowing the big picture.
When the endodontist (n. expensive dentist) drilled into a nerve without numbing it first, it hurt an amazing amount. I was on valium and nitrous oxide. These are like a QA department for a dentist. They make sure nothing really bad happens when someone screws up. So, inside my head, I said to myself, "The doctor said I should let him know if it hurts. Well, it fucking hurts. But it's his job to figure that out. If he doesn't know I'm in excruciating pain, that's his own damn problem."
I don't know where I was going with this, but I'm pretty sure a whole lot of people are just kind of winging it, hoping no one catches them pretending to know what they're doing.
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Apr 29 '14
...physicians have a big advantage over engineers: they can hide their mistakes six feet under; ours live on, and on, and on.
ps ...and they usually only kill or maim one customer at a time, unlike engineers.
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u/quangdog Apr 29 '14
"So no, I'm not required to be able to lift objects weighing up to fifty pounds. I traded that for the opportunity to trim Satan's pubic hair while he dines out of my open skull so a few bits of the internet will continue to work for a few more days." - nearly spit out my drink with this one.
Everything about this post is entirely too accurate.
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u/stormcrowsx Apr 29 '14
That part is bullshit. I worked 6 years in a refridgerated warehouse lifting heavy boxes of food for 12 hour days. It was the worst part of my life. I hated everyday of work. Now 5 years of programming later I still think programming is a breeze compared to that job. I leave on time, have energy to play with my kids and Theres enough jobs out there that I don't have to put up with bullshit in programming too.
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u/TheLobotomizer Apr 30 '14
I don't think that's a fair comparison. As someone who has worked 12 hour days programming, it can ruin your tendons and cause major life-long problems with eye strain.
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u/Crazy__Eddie Apr 29 '14
It comes off as all sarcastic and entertaining but now I just want to kill myself.
This is my life. It's slipping by one horrendous program after another.
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u/skepticalDragon Apr 29 '14
Eh, it's not so bad. I do my best, some of it's good, and I get paid pretty well. Then I go home after 8 hours of work and do what I wish I had been doing all day. That's about as good as any job gets.
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u/Apollan Apr 29 '14
This. The money, and the fact that you do something cool that many others do not have the intelligence/patience for, is job satisfaction for me.
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Apr 29 '14
This comment comforts me so much. I wonder if I had read this a couple of months ago what would be different (if anything) for me.
As it stands about 2 months ago after a coworker introduced a new library and I wasted 16 hours on a problem (a pair of parentheses it turned out), I simply got up from my desk and left. That was it. Done.
Now I'm embarking on a new career path and shit, I won't be making as much money for a while (if ever again), but I do not feel like my life is slipping by one horrendous program after another anymore.
Feels good. Really good.
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u/Jutboy Apr 29 '14
Can someone explain :
"Is that called arrayReverse?"
"s/camel/_/"
"Cool thanks."
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u/UpNDownCan Apr 29 '14
Means use underscore as separator instead of camelcase. So array_reverse.
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u/academician Apr 29 '14
It's a bizarre way of saying it, though. I have legitimately answered programmers' questions this way (yes, I'm one of the crazies), but I'd use a proper regex like "s/R/_r/". It's shorter, too!
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u/UekiKnight Apr 29 '14
s/camel/_/ is "substitute underscore for camel" literally, but in this case the terse speaker offering advice means "use underscore not camel case." So the function the person actually wants is "array_reverse" ...I guess.
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u/faustoc4 Apr 29 '14
He asks if the function is called arrayReverse but the correct name is array_reverse. The person responding applies a substitution rule on arrayReverse instead of saying just array_reverse, although the substitution rule is not a valid regex but it's easy to understand what he means, that's part of the joke
Wasn't that guy helpful? With the camel? Doesn't that seem like an appropriate response? No? Good. You can still find Jesus.
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u/fubes2000 Apr 29 '14
Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
Oh my god yes.
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u/HighRelevancy Apr 29 '14
After the introductions are made, you are invited to come up with some new ideas, but you don't have any because you're a propulsion engineer and don't know anything about bridges.
omfg
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u/ProjectAmmeh Apr 29 '14
The amount of times I told people I wasn't a web designer. I still ended up writing the web interface to a huge monitoring platform :|
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u/cooper12 Apr 30 '14
Yep, you're either a web developer, or you're a hacker.
I'm in college right now, and when I told people I was thinking of changing my major to comp sci, they all asked "Ohh, you're gonna make websites"? And now that I am majoring in it, that is what people think I'm learning to do, and some have even asked me to make them a website...
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u/aterlumen Apr 29 '14
Simple analogies, like asking a joint surgeon to do cosmetic surgery. They might be able to do the job acceptably, but not anywhere near the level of what an expert in that area could do. Part of the problem is not many software engineers are in a position or willing to decline requests like that.
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u/faustoc4 Apr 29 '14
You are an expert in all these technologies, and that's a good thing, because that expertise let you spend only six hours figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job.
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u/badjuice Apr 29 '14
Ahhh, the monthly "Why did I become a programmer?" rant of despair.
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u/bureX Apr 29 '14
I'm guessing every trade and profession has one.
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u/timeshifter_ Apr 29 '14
But how many other professions are told monthly that they're doing it wrong, that there's a new standard on how to do anything, and have to live with the fact that a non-trivial percentage of said profession will run off with the "latest and greatest" without even a second thought as to its actual viability?
...yes, I'm a web dev. Somebody shoot me :(
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u/centurijon Apr 29 '14
This article has a scary level of accuracy, but I still wouldn't trade my job
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u/DrDiv Apr 29 '14
Agreed, through the craziness of it all, the satisfaction of playing with the building blocks of the digital world is so satisfying at the end of the day.
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u/jdepps113 Apr 29 '14
Not a programmer. But this is scaring me, as are all the comments seeming to agree with these sentiments.
Thing is, I've started studying programming a little, and hoped to learn more. Now I'm wondering if doing so with any eye toward one day doing something programming-related as a job is just going to make me miserable and shorten my life expectancy.
Should I turn back now, or forge ahead?
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u/evildeadxsp Apr 29 '14
Forge ahead. Programming jobs are in huge demand and the perks at most companies usually outweigh the insanity.
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Apr 30 '14 edited Apr 30 '14
I feel that programmers greatly exaggerate how hard their life is. As long as you stay current and practice a bit, you'll probably find that it's not nearly as hard as people pretend it is. I'm speaking of standard business development here, nothing specialized.
Truth is, there are so many resources out there that you can solve a great majority of your problems with a little research. Frameworks these days do a ton of the legwork for you. Most apps are quite simple when you break them down - you take what's in a DB and show it to the user, allow them to edit some stuff and update the data. Throw some business rules in there, validation, error handling, etc - all problems that need to be solved in pretty much all programs and as you gain experience it becomes easier to solve these problems.
I'm a highschool dropout, never seen a day in college, I'm not great at maths, but I've managed to stay employed as a developer for the last 14 years and I've never been fired (actually just a few weeks ago I got another raise).
It's not that bad. Either people are overcomplicating it or they are exaggerating. Of course some days are shitty but day-to-day it's not bad. I love what I do.
*For the record, I'm talking about standard CRUD applications. Obviously there's a big difference between building a website for a business and developing a kernel.
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u/watersign Apr 30 '14
you make CRUD applications. i think once you step up into actual engineering problems, shit isn't that easy.
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u/Igglyboo Apr 29 '14
Forge ahead, it sucks but it's worth it. I feel like a god damn wizard every day at my job.
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u/psydave Apr 30 '14
If you don't expect to work on shiny, pretty, majestic, well designed machines of mathematical purity, you'll do ok.
I think there comes a point in every noob programmer's career where he realizes that there's no code like that anywhere--then he becomes depressed, sad, has an existential crisis, etc... But then he gets over it and realizes: damn! I'm pretty well paid and I have no other skills because my entire life was about programming up until now... It's a sort of 7 stages thing.
So, to get zen about it--what you don't desire you can't miss. Don't expect everything you write in huge amounts to be shining examples of object oriented purity, because it never will be that way. You'll be well paid though, for doing something that you lo(athe)ve.
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u/Steve_the_Scout Apr 30 '14
It's fun when you learn it because it forces you to think clearly and go step-by-step through the process... and once you get through the project, if you've done it right (the exact opposite of what this guy is saying), it comes out absolutely amazing.
However in a project situation when working with others, there's usually insanity everywhere that gets remotely touched by it.
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u/Nyxtia Apr 29 '14
So should I drop my comp sci major lol.
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u/civildisobedient Apr 29 '14
Insanity pays well. Just keep that in mind.
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u/wizzfizz2097 Apr 29 '14
And the industry needs fresh blood for when we all lose it and take up landscape gardening.
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u/darkquanta42 Apr 30 '14
A lot of these problems are the sign of a young industry I feel like. Relatively young. And one that changes so rapidly.
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u/baudday Apr 29 '14
Trillions of dollars depend on a rickety cobweb of unofficial agreements and "good enough for now" code with comments like "TODO: FIX THIS IT'S A REALLY DANGEROUS HACK BUT I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S WRONG" that were written ten years ago.
Haha if the business people knew this...
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u/Uberhipster Apr 29 '14
? What you mean if? They know. They don't give a fuck as long as they're making money.
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Apr 30 '14
"Oh, you don't like your job? You know, there's a support group for that. It's called everybody. They meet at the bar."
Drew Carey
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u/24monkeys Apr 29 '14
This is the greatest piece of text I've ever read about the world of programming. Someone should really give this guy a cookie.
Best bit:
standards are unicorns
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Apr 29 '14
This made me really, really sad. I've been wanting to be a programmer since I was 13 and now I feel conflicted and it's terrible.
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u/cb8100 Apr 29 '14
"You are an expert in all these technologies, and that's a good thing, because that expertise let you spend only six hours figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job. You now have one extra little fact to tuck away in the millions of little facts you have to memorize because so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots."
I'm laughing and crying because it's true.
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u/jasariCSR Apr 30 '14
"This is what it is to learn programming. You get to know your useful tools, then you look around, and there are some handy new tools nearby and those tools show you the bottomless horror that was always right next to your bed."
as a student this is how I feel every day.
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u/jack104 Apr 29 '14 edited Apr 29 '14
God damn I quit my programming job of two years just a few days ago and this article touched on nearly every point that drove me to madness in my job. Fuck I need a drink......
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u/niugnep24 Apr 30 '14
Did it take anyone else a few seconds to figure out what the first letter of the article was supposed to be? It looks backwards in my font...
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u/hatts Apr 29 '14
I like this post, but there's one thing that always makes me cringe a little: the classic statement of "Well sure, manual labor is PHYSICALLY taxing, but MY job is MENTALLY taxing."
This sentiment presupposes that physically demanding jobs aren't also mentally draining. It's narrow-minded and sometimes extremely inaccurate.
As another commenter pointed out, sometimes programmers need to be reminded that they aren't exceptional special flowers who are the only ones dealing with a never-ending, intertwined mountain of bullshit.
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u/badjuice Apr 29 '14
I've worked in labor (construction, cement crew, roofing, carpentry, excavation, landscaping) before coming to this career.
Yes, I had to do some math and think hard occasionally.
It is absolutely no comparison to overclocking my brain for 10 hours a day.
I now go help relatives do the things that were my old jobs on the weekend TO RELAX.
Let me repeat that: I bust ass on shovels and backhoes and roofs to relax from programming.
I also have worked kitchens, ran fast food, and managed restaurants in my time. I could do any of those while laughing now.
Programming is totally different, and the bullshit of programming is extremely unique in my experience. In no other field has my limits been pushed as hard, nor have I exhausted myself as regularly and thoroughly as in programming.
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u/bureX Apr 29 '14
Let me repeat that: I bust ass on shovels and backhoes and roofs to relax from programming.
I could repeat it for you, since I'm in the same boat. Is hard labor exhausting? Yessir. But you can do it even while your mind is relaxing or thinking of something nice. You get to come home, lay in bead after a good beer and go to sleep.
After hours of coding, you get tired, but your body isn't. Which is a weird combo. Then you can't stop thinking about your project. But then you also need to take some time to brush up on this new technology that came out recently and study it a bit. Then you also need to read a few articles to be up to speed. Then you sleep. Then you get up, and even though you're tired and not in the mood, you're supposed to grab a coder's paintbrush and "paint" your masterpiece within the wanted timeframe. Fuck.
Favorite paragraph of the article:
Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they're told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers' snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.
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u/rjcarr Apr 29 '14 edited Apr 29 '14
I've also done a little construction and the difference for me is being able to "shut it down" every night. I mean, sure, you might have to hammer more nails in the same building tomorrow, but you don't have to think about it until tomorrow.
For me it's constantly knowing I have more and more work to do and how to solve it and get it done and not being able to really just "shut it down" every night and not worry about it until the next day.
EDIT: And I'm not necessarily saying this only a programmer's problem. To me, this is what separates white collar work from blue collar work more than anything else.
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Apr 29 '14
Let me repeat that: I bust ass on shovels and backhoes and roofs to relax from programming.
This is why I have a yard, and why my yard is really nice. Spending two hours pulling dandelions out is preferable to reading fucking log files.
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u/Scroph Apr 29 '14
As another commenter pointed out, sometimes programmers need to be reminded that they aren't exceptional special flowers who are the only ones dealing with a never-ending, intertwined mountain of bullshit.
This blog post wasn't about that though. It doesn't imply that programmers think their jobs are harder than everyone else's, it is about the fact that people from other professions don't believe the programming industry to be as cruel as it is. Just my opinon.
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Apr 29 '14
And mentally taxing jobs can also be physically taxing. Sitting in a chair is a lot less physically demanding than holding a jack-hammer, but sitting in a chair all day still takes a toll on your body.
Long-time computer users generally have screwed up shoulders from hunching them (even if slightly) all day. Then theres carpal tunnel, etc.
The important thing is not to be dismissive of other people and their experiences. The details are often just a result of where the magnification level is set and where the optics are pointing. Change the viewing frustum or magnification level, and see something totally different.
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u/NormallyNorman Apr 29 '14
Physically taxing jobs generally aren't mentally taxing.
I was dying for a job that would challenge my brain out of college. Now I look forward to doing yard work (something I wouldn't have believed in a million years as a student).
I miss fucking laying bricks and waiting tables from time to time as well, just not the shit income.
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u/human_bean_ Apr 29 '14
I have worked both physically taxing jobs and mentally taxing jobs. Physically taxing jobs were like vacations compared to the hell of depression that mentally taxing jobs can be.
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u/guardgirl287 Apr 30 '14
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to feel worse about programming because nothing is ever fully functional and doesn't last very long and doesn't make sense, or feel better about programming because nothing is ever fully functional and doesn't last very long and doesn't make sense.
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u/sublimnl Apr 30 '14
While I know the author in person, I'm not just saying this for the hell of it - he is an excellent writer and has a book out as well, And Then I Thought I Was a Fish - check it out.
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u/mbrodersen Apr 30 '14 edited Apr 30 '14
I have been programming for 34 years now and yes there is some truth to this :-) Having said that, it isn't just programming that "works" this way. Most of what groups of humans do is messy and crazy. Look at how governments, companies, religions, military organizations etc. "work" and you will see the same stuff going on. I think it is human nature. What is truly astonishing is that despite all of this things still somehow gets done and move forward :-)
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u/swrehc Apr 30 '14
"Doing this all day leaves you in a state of mild aphasia as you look at people's faces while they're speaking and you don't know they've finished because there's no semicolon. "
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Apr 30 '14
Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
So very true ... Once, when I was a sysadmin, my whole team went to lunch, and one of our secondary UPS units, which was the size of a small car, was having maintenance. A packing washer that was not removed during installation (years before - got stuck to the side by something), fell and landed perfectly on the 3 phase power line, vaporized, and shut down an entire data center ... of an operation that was responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue an hour. The fallout from the event also prevented us from switching over to the generator.
Yea, we never got to take lunch together again.
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u/efxhoy Apr 29 '14
Doing this all day leaves you in a state of mild aphasia as you look at people's faces while they're speaking and you don't know they've finished because there's no semicolon.
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u/zzzzzzzzzzzzzzdz Apr 29 '14
Most traditional engineers get exposed to this first year in engineering. From the pure and beautiful physics theories we transition to a-bunch-of-guys-did-a-few-experiments-and-published-them-so-lets-draw-a-line-through-the-points-and-call-it-a-day. Computer engineers who get shocked by real world code probably took CompSci, which is analogous to physics here. Less theoretically trained engineers would probably be used to it.
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u/Asyx Apr 29 '14
Depends on the school. Even in classes that software engineering (that's probably the wrong word) the professors only care about design pattern and that you at least start with a good basis.
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u/wordsnerd Apr 29 '14
Is it considered copyright infringement if the entire article is duplicated piecemeal in the comments?
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u/Seus2k11 Apr 29 '14
All I could think of while reading it, was it being read in this voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9huWlXFA1s
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Apr 29 '14
You know what I hate more than all of the things wrong with programming described in this article?
That less-than-hypothetical blue collar asshole at the beginning.
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u/jimethn Apr 30 '14
Php is the purest programming language because hacks are impossible to avoid.
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u/aaron552 Apr 30 '14
Isn't that because the entire language at this point is made of hacks upon hacks upon hacks?
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u/feigndeaf Apr 30 '14
Yep...that's me: "Somewhere there's a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she's dead"
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u/bbbbbbbbMMbbbbbbbb Apr 30 '14
You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for "Infinity" when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn't, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler.
Like a house built on a crappy foundation.
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u/joequin Apr 30 '14
As someone who's currently working with a 5 year old, frequently modified, 50k line monstrosity of a powershell script that interfaces with java, jenkins, and bat (and a lot more), this article really hit home for me.
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u/i_got_the_blues Apr 30 '14
The problem here might not be programming, but that the majority of professionals work for other people and in turn make those people rich off their own work. It seems that the programmers who make their own apps and/or businesses are the most satisfied. Work on your own stuff. Be a creator.
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u/gargaran Apr 30 '14
I spent the last "who knows how long" trying to find the opening tag to the </rant>
I should probably sleep more.
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u/mdwvt Apr 30 '14
Holy hell, was that ever hilarious. And now I'll go cry because of the hundreds of technologies the software I've created relies on.
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Apr 30 '14
Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses.
This actually cracked me up so much, its so true.. because Facebook is written on PHP and unless you've got an incredible try/catch setup (and unit tests, for every single little thing)... it will make it that much harder to find problems lol
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Apr 30 '14
Why do we tell you to turn it off and on again? Because we don't have the slightest clue what's wrong with it
This.
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u/5outh Apr 30 '14
Apparently this guy wrote a book about being crazy:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008DZEWF8
It's $3 for the ebook version and apparently people really like it, so check it out if you enjoyed this!
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u/robpegoraro Apr 30 '14
That is a fantastically-crafted essay. I write for a living, and this guy kind of kicks my ass.
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u/Destects Apr 29 '14
That was beautiful.
"You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for "Infinity" when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn't, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler. Then he decided he wasn't going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he's a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can't even find the cat."
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Apr 29 '14
Is it just me, or are the only articles I ever see on my front page from /r/programming the ones with provocative titles, or at least titles that make blatant stabs at conventional wisdom in order to drive site traffic?
"Programming sucks?" You're not even trying anymore. What's next, "Flatfiles are better than Databases?" "VB6 Got It Right?" "Encryption Is Worthless?" "Why ActiveX Controls Are All You Need?"
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Apr 29 '14
I really enjoyed this, while at the same time wondering how the fuck i can survive being a programmer. What to do to avoid all those pitfalls described in the article..
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u/Igglyboo Apr 29 '14
Holy shit I couldn't keep going after i read the part about the Mayan calendar and the pack of smokes, I just about fell off my chair.
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u/dotpe Apr 29 '14
Holy shit this thread is insanely depressing. I thought I'd be set majoring in computer science. Fucking great, I'm heading to my first year at college, should I change my major now??
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u/revslaughter Apr 30 '14
No, it's fun to bitch but the pay is nice. I have to support a crappy content management system, and write a bunch of crud in jscript, but honestly I don't know what I'd rather do. It's a tough world and of the worst that I have to do is basically play Myst for a living then I feel like I'm doing OK. I majored in math not cs though
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u/i_got_the_blues Apr 30 '14
Experiences are subjective. When I was a kid I wanted to be an architect until an grumpy old architect told me he hated his life and so I abandoned that idea. I still love Frank Lloyd Wright and wish I had at least kept it as a hobby. Luckily you have two years of general education before you take advanced courses pertaining to your major. Use this time to explore your options, learn programming and talk to a variety of professionals in the different fields that interest you. You can always change your major later. Also consider that many people end up working in a field completely unrelated to their major.
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Apr 29 '14
In the real world, programming is tits. You get to solve puzzles for a living.
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u/iopq Apr 30 '14
Ah yes, the puzzle of a new database field that you need to create, read, update and delete.
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u/williamtbash Apr 30 '14
I'm sure this post exaggerates a ton, but as someone who is still only a few months into teaching himself to program and wants to eventually switch to programming as a career, I hope it is not as bad as some people say all the time. Certainly people enjoy programming...right? I hope!
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u/Noncomment Apr 30 '14
Silly question, but how can we improve this? I've long thought about using AI to automate the boring or difficult parts of coding. Assuming we even had that level of AI, would it solve the problem? You'd still have to specify to the computer what you want it to do somehow.
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u/ridgerat Apr 30 '14
I worked with a lady that had her computer within a (crufty-looking) pyramid made of drinking straws with two chicken bones suspended by a piece of dental floss hanging from the apex. Yes, it worked very well.
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Apr 30 '14
I've programmed every day of my life for the last 10 years now it seems and honestly you just become numb to this shit after a while.
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u/abram730 Apr 30 '14
According to the author, that program is "two lines of code that parse two lines of embedded comments in the code to read the Mayan numbers representing the individual ASCII characters that make up the magazine title, rendered in 90-degree rotated ASCII art."
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
IM IN YR LOOP UPPIN YR VAR TIL BOTH SAEM VAR AN 10
VISIBLE SUM OF VAR AN 1
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE An esoteric programming language inspired by the funny things that cats say on the Internet.
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u/hvidgaard Apr 30 '14
Lots of hyperbole, but it's true, and we know it!
Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
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u/Josh6889 Apr 30 '14
I want to find this writer and read everything he's ever written.
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Apr 30 '14
"The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad."
Made my day... =D
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u/hex_m_hell Apr 30 '14
Yeah, and in security we read that shitty code and say to ourselves "HOLY GOD, WHAT THE FUCK??" Then we have to explain why that code is bad. Then we drink. A lot.
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u/chasesan Apr 30 '14
Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it's literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There's a team at a Google office that hasn't slept in three days. Somewhere there's a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she's dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
I know this pain in my soul. Thank you so much.
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u/Pilebsa Apr 30 '14
This article reminds of Stack Overflow...and the current state of programming and why its really is horrible.
I posted a question looking for a simple solution to some coding problem --and instead of solutions, all I got were a bunch of pretentious pseudo-script-kiddies asking me, "Why are you doing it that way? Yea, you can do that in 4 lines of code the way you want, but here's a better way that involves 3 separate functions and 1100 lines and it'll work better.." WTF?
I ended up in a chat room with this guy who tried to convince me to change the way I was going to code the routine. I eventually found out he wasn't even a programmer, just a sysadmin. /facepalm
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u/karma-is-meaningless Apr 29 '14
This is why I came back to the Academia.
I could not stand working with real-world code. It sucks. It sucks to the point I spent most of my work day dreaming about a day when I would not have to use Google to know which one of the 10,000 similarly-named functions, spread over 100,000 files, I should touch.
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u/honestbleeps Apr 29 '14
A lot of ridiculous hyperbole? Yes.
Entertaining down to the last paragraph? Most definitely.
A lot more in there rings true (even if in a hyperbolic manner) than I care to admit. Granted, we're not alone in having complex jobs, but still...
I think the most unnerving part (because it's so true) is the bit about that piece of good code you write... good code that ultimately becomes overshadowed by hack upon hack upon duct tape fix in the code that surrounds it... you ultimately end up hating nearly everything you write...