> From where I sit (a backend developer, thoroughly burned out by webdev a couple years ago), most of coding I do is software bureaucracy. Turn this data into that data, ensuring module X and Y get paged in the process. Oh, half of the code I'm about to write is implemented elsewhere - quick, figure out how to juggle the dependency graph to somehow route control from here to there and back. This data I want to convert is not of the right colour - oh, I need to pass it through three sets of conversion layers to get back essentially the same, but with a correct type tag on it. Etc.
> It's utterly and mind-numbingly boring, unless you architectured the whole codebase yourself, at which point it's somewhat fun because it's your codebase, and who doesn't like their own Rube Goldberg machines?
> At this point, I've learned a coping strategy: just forget the project scope and focus on your little plot of land. Doesn't matter that the software I wrote half of is going to help people do exciting stuff with industrial robots. What matters is that the customer changed some small and irrelevant piece of requirements for the 5th time, and I now have to route some data from the front to the back, through the other half of the code, written by my co-worker (a fine coder, btw.). So a bunch of layers of code bureaucracy I'm not familiar with, and discovering which feels like learning how to fill tax forms in a foreign country. If I start thinking about the industrial robots I'll just get depressed, so instead I focus on making the best jump through legacy code possible, so that I impress myself and my code reviewer (and hopefully make the 6th time I'm visiting this pit easier on everyone).
> Maybe it's a problem of perceptions. Like in the modern military - you join because you think you'll get to fly a helicopter and shoot shoulder-mounted rockets for daily exercise. You get there and you realize it's just hard physical work, a bit of mental abuse, and a lot of doing nothing useful in particular (at least until you advance high enough or quit). And so I started coding, dreaming I'll be lording over pixels on the screens, animating machine golems, and helping rockets reach their desired orbits. Instead, I'm spending endless days pushing people to simplify the architecture, so that I can shove my data through four levels of indirection instead of six (and get the software to run 10x faster in the process), and all that to rearrange some data on the screen that really should've been just given away to people on an Excel sheet with a page of instructions attached.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24543596
> From where I sit (a backend developer, thoroughly burned out by webdev a couple years ago), most of coding I do is software bureaucracy. Turn this data into that data, ensuring module X and Y get paged in the process. Oh, half of the code I'm about to write is implemented elsewhere - quick, figure out how to juggle the dependency graph to somehow route control from here to there and back. This data I want to convert is not of the right colour - oh, I need to pass it through three sets of conversion layers to get back essentially the same, but with a correct type tag on it. Etc.
> It's utterly and mind-numbingly boring, unless you architectured the whole codebase yourself, at which point it's somewhat fun because it's your codebase, and who doesn't like their own Rube Goldberg machines?
> At this point, I've learned a coping strategy: just forget the project scope and focus on your little plot of land. Doesn't matter that the software I wrote half of is going to help people do exciting stuff with industrial robots. What matters is that the customer changed some small and irrelevant piece of requirements for the 5th time, and I now have to route some data from the front to the back, through the other half of the code, written by my co-worker (a fine coder, btw.). So a bunch of layers of code bureaucracy I'm not familiar with, and discovering which feels like learning how to fill tax forms in a foreign country. If I start thinking about the industrial robots I'll just get depressed, so instead I focus on making the best jump through legacy code possible, so that I impress myself and my code reviewer (and hopefully make the 6th time I'm visiting this pit easier on everyone).
> Maybe it's a problem of perceptions. Like in the modern military - you join because you think you'll get to fly a helicopter and shoot shoulder-mounted rockets for daily exercise. You get there and you realize it's just hard physical work, a bit of mental abuse, and a lot of doing nothing useful in particular (at least until you advance high enough or quit). And so I started coding, dreaming I'll be lording over pixels on the screens, animating machine golems, and helping rockets reach their desired orbits. Instead, I'm spending endless days pushing people to simplify the architecture, so that I can shove my data through four levels of indirection instead of six (and get the software to run 10x faster in the process), and all that to rearrange some data on the screen that really should've been just given away to people on an Excel sheet with a page of instructions attached.