Age of article Yes, this article is from a year ago, and yes, it has been posted before here , but I recently discovered it following links from this, the old post has no comments, and I would...
Age of article
Yes, this article is from a year ago, and yes, it has been posted before here , but I recently discovered it following links from this, the old post has no comments, and I would like to share my thoughts on this article and perhaps kickstart discussion on it. @Deimos, if this is in violation of anything (I reread the COC, and I dont think this violates anything), feel free to take down and transfer the text as a comment of the older post.
This idea of home cooked programming is similar to the hobbyist coder, who only codes for the sheer joy of it, but I feel it is a bit more broad and frankly, more profound. We dont learn to cook because its cheaper, even though it is. (most of the time.) We dont learn to cook because its a marketable skill. We dont learn to cook because its a career path. We learn to cook because we want something made by our own hands, made just the way we like it.
Its actually not a foreign concept in other industries. Hobbyist machinists, 3d printer enthusiasts, car geeks, home fabric work (to name a few) have no intention of creating commercially viable products or building their careers with their hobby. Yet it is perfectly acceptable, in their own communities and society at large, to sink large amounts of money and time into these hobbies. Yet when it comes to doing things with computers, whether it be homelabbing, low level electronics design, or coding, there is always a silent pressure to apply those skills to the market in some way, whether it be through selling a product or building ones career.
Why do we, and society at large, have this expectation?
(personal experience incoming)
Though me and the author dont have much in common other than programming (I have never built a GUI in my life!), but this resonated with me in an unexpected way.
Though I am going through college for Computer Science, I silently dread having to use my skills day in, day out, making whatever soulless program The Company thinks will make them the most money that quarter. All the coding (and server management, etc) I have done so far has solely been for the sheer joy of it or because I wanted a tool that I had made personally, instead of trying to wrangle a 3rd party tool into something resembling the shape I wanted in the first place.
Personally, I desperately hope that doing programming professionally will not kill this passion...
This isn’t totally avoidable, assuming you primarily write code for work and do so for a for-profit corporation. BUT. I can say confidently that there can be a huge difference in soullessness...
I silently dread having to use my skills day in, day out, making whatever soulless program The Company thinks will make them the most money that quarter.
This isn’t totally avoidable, assuming you primarily write code for work and do so for a for-profit corporation. BUT. I can say confidently that there can be a huge difference in soullessness between working for a tech company, for whom your software is the primary product, and building tech for a company whose non-software product is something you care about and wish to succeed. For me, at least, switching from large tech companies to building a text editor for a newspaper allowed me to tap in to the satisfaction I get for helping others. Obviously I still work for a corporation (a huge, successful, rich one, that makes their share of pro-profit/anti-human decisions, for sure), but at least on a day-to-day level, I mostly make things that make my coworkers’ jobs easier and better. It’s SO satisfying to fix a bug, because I know I just alleviated a tiny bit of stress for like 2,000 of the most stressed out journalists there are.
All of that said… I expect that I will end up switching careers eventually. Building software is truly enjoyable for me, at basically every level. But it’s also exhausting (to me, at least) to be creative and focused and thoughtful within the confines of a large company, and its stakeholders, and its profit directives.
I doubt that I’ll ever give up coding, though. It’s just too fun.
I really enjoyed this article, and even as a professional software engineer, I still really enjoy this flavor of programming. A few years ago my housemates wanted to start a podcast, and I...
I really enjoyed this article, and even as a professional software engineer, I still really enjoy this flavor of programming. A few years ago my housemates wanted to start a podcast, and I remember spending like three hours hacking together a podcast server with a password protected upload page for them. It still serves two podcast series (registered with Apple and Spotify and everything) to this day. There’s something tremendous about whipping up something simple and single use and small and intimate, especially to use with someone else! (Wow this really is a lot like home cooking)
Age of article
Yes, this article is from a year ago, and yes, it has been posted before here , but I recently discovered it following links from this, the old post has no comments, and I would like to share my thoughts on this article and perhaps kickstart discussion on it. @Deimos, if this is in violation of anything (I reread the COC, and I dont think this violates anything), feel free to take down and transfer the text as a comment of the older post.
This idea of home cooked programming is similar to the hobbyist coder, who only codes for the sheer joy of it, but I feel it is a bit more broad and frankly, more profound. We dont learn to cook because its cheaper, even though it is. (most of the time.) We dont learn to cook because its a marketable skill. We dont learn to cook because its a career path. We learn to cook because we want something made by our own hands, made just the way we like it.
Its actually not a foreign concept in other industries. Hobbyist machinists, 3d printer enthusiasts, car geeks, home fabric work (to name a few) have no intention of creating commercially viable products or building their careers with their hobby. Yet it is perfectly acceptable, in their own communities and society at large, to sink large amounts of money and time into these hobbies. Yet when it comes to doing things with computers, whether it be homelabbing, low level electronics design, or coding, there is always a silent pressure to apply those skills to the market in some way, whether it be through selling a product or building ones career.
Why do we, and society at large, have this expectation?
(personal experience incoming)
Though me and the author dont have much in common other than programming (I have never built a GUI in my life!), but this resonated with me in an unexpected way.
Though I am going through college for Computer Science, I silently dread having to use my skills day in, day out, making whatever soulless program The Company thinks will make them the most money that quarter. All the coding (and server management, etc) I have done so far has solely been for the sheer joy of it or because I wanted a tool that I had made personally, instead of trying to wrangle a 3rd party tool into something resembling the shape I wanted in the first place.
Personally, I desperately hope that doing programming professionally will not kill this passion...
This isn’t totally avoidable, assuming you primarily write code for work and do so for a for-profit corporation. BUT. I can say confidently that there can be a huge difference in soullessness between working for a tech company, for whom your software is the primary product, and building tech for a company whose non-software product is something you care about and wish to succeed. For me, at least, switching from large tech companies to building a text editor for a newspaper allowed me to tap in to the satisfaction I get for helping others. Obviously I still work for a corporation (a huge, successful, rich one, that makes their share of pro-profit/anti-human decisions, for sure), but at least on a day-to-day level, I mostly make things that make my coworkers’ jobs easier and better. It’s SO satisfying to fix a bug, because I know I just alleviated a tiny bit of stress for like 2,000 of the most stressed out journalists there are.
All of that said… I expect that I will end up switching careers eventually. Building software is truly enjoyable for me, at basically every level. But it’s also exhausting (to me, at least) to be creative and focused and thoughtful within the confines of a large company, and its stakeholders, and its profit directives.
I doubt that I’ll ever give up coding, though. It’s just too fun.
I really enjoyed this article, and even as a professional software engineer, I still really enjoy this flavor of programming. A few years ago my housemates wanted to start a podcast, and I remember spending like three hours hacking together a podcast server with a password protected upload page for them. It still serves two podcast series (registered with Apple and Spotify and everything) to this day. There’s something tremendous about whipping up something simple and single use and small and intimate, especially to use with someone else! (Wow this really is a lot like home cooking)