This smacked me in the face, because there is no emotion that feels worse to me than anger. I have never been angry and "felt good" about it, be it at work or anywhere else, and regardless of whether or not my anger was justified.
Mindset is important. If you care about the craft of programming then you can easily get into a mindset that software must be "perfect", which is almost always impossible to achieve, and so you will become continually dissatisfied. I got into this mindset when I was a junior dev, and it only served to fuel frustration for me and others.
I try to take the mindset of "continuous crap reduction". I let go of the things that are out of my control, and seek to reduce the biggest problems that are in my control. Then I can get a "win" every day, and I don't try and fight the stuff out of my control which is only a little crap. I have to try and be principled without being opinionated.
I generally dont mind if someone is angry at me, if it's something I did poorly. Honestly i enjoy it, shows someone cares abt what i output.
However, when people expect to be wronged , and preemptively adopt an agressive posture, before i get a chance to do anything, that's where my desire to cooperate plummets.
> it’s hard to find yourself yelling at somebody about React state management
Some changes have been introduced to ChatGPT web interface. I think to support rich text formatting in the input. Holy shit, it's so slow it's barely usable. Like they repaint the whole conversation just to add one message and I have huge delays > 10s. I am super-angry.
Edit: to add to the conversation, angry engineers as an ahead-of-time proxy for angry customers.
I dislike engineers in general because most of them think like this. they have gone all in on embracing alienation in the marxist sense from their own work product and dont understand people who feel a sense of personal craft and ownership in something.
Imagine if you are making a painting and someone comes along and starts doodling in the corner, or squirting different colors onto your palette. it really f-s up what you are trying to do as an artist and craftsperson.
engineers who are craftspeople cannot tolerate this. but in modern corporate it is expected. engineers who are NOT craftspeople dont care. they are perfect, formless globs of soullness grey goo.
oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years? shrugs. ok, what other toilet do you want me to clean.
This author is that - a robot. A replaceable machined part. management and capitalism love this guy and people like him. they can interview someone else and relace him tomorrow with another grey goo hire that will not complain.
You dislike engineers because they are acting like engineers instead of artists? The typical engineer is a paid mercenary, working to get widget 2.0 out the door. They are not robots, but are paid to play nice with others to advance their employer's interests. To act like a temperamental artiste in that environment would be immature and unprofessional.
To me, that reads as a bit immature, and there were times when I felt exactly like what you described, but switched one project to another and I felt embarrassed from my own past behaviour.
I'm getting paid to build someone else's project. I enjoy the work I'm making so I build it the best I can given the time constraints. I'm a paid worker, not an artists. Every entropy that I add to this system, is entropy that delays capital income to the whole company, so that entropy needs to be productive and not fundamentalist following unnecessary perfectionism. If something can be done quickly but imperfectly and still be relatively well maintained with manageable debt, so be it, that's what delivers the most value to the whole company. It's a bit one sided if I banged by foot no the ground and said "no, this will take 6 more months that what you want because I want it to be done in my perfect way". And this idea of perfectionism crumbles even more when you realise your idea of perfect is not objective. There's always someone else who has a better and more perfect idea than yours.
This doesn't conflict with the programming I do on my personal projects. Personal projects give me more satisfaction than what I do at work, but personal projects don't give me any money, as it should be, or I'd be compelled to work faster.
My work is not a craft, and that's fine. I'm just another human helping other humans advancing the company to acquire more money. I respect and understand my boss's incentives to get more money and they respect my needs to build maintainable software. So, more often than not, we meet in the middle. Sometimes more toward my view, other times towards theirs.
An artist making a painting owns the IP of the painting[1]. A software engineer working for an employer generally does not; the employer (or client) usually owns the IP, and usually has a larger financial stake in the software than any individual.
I think this attitude is fine if you are the sole stakeholder and IP owner (e.g. a personal project or a small business you own). But not for something you are building in collaboration with other engineers for someone else's ownership.
[1] Artists do often make works for client IP, in which cases, they also do not have full creative control of their output!
Almost every painting you've ever heard of has been commissioned and paid for. If I'm painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, for money, and my coworker is fucking up his part, I'm going to be pissed yes. We're supposed to do this 40 hours per week and not care about the output quality? That seems less healthy/ideal than the alternative.
That's really not true. You can have complete ownership of your creative process even if you work toward a brief/goal specified by someone else.
I say this as someone who has edited movie trailers for major motion pictures for 20 years. I have always been able to accomplish my own goals and by whatever means and processes I deemed important and necessary for myself, despite still needing to satisfy the client's objectives.
You do not need to give up your autonomy. The fact that you think so is troubling and speaks to a split in your psyche.
Congratulations and count yourself among the lucky. But if you cannot appreciate that things will not be that way for many employment situations then you don't know how lucky you are.
It's not a matter of luck, it's a function of the degree to which one's psyche is fragmented.
The default in my industry is exactly as you describe. The only reason it isn't so for me is because I refused to give over my autonomy and have remained in touch with my intrinsic motivations. The job/role/industry is irrelevant as far as causation, I'm just mentioning mine for context.
There is a wide gulf between not caring about your work at all and getting angry about it. Plenty of us care about our work and the projects we own, we want them to be solid and will stand up to defend them. None of that requires getting angry about it.
There's even levels to anger, and I don't think this author is referring to venting annoyance or expressing politely to someone that they did something wrong. "Oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years" anyone would get annoyed by that, it's only human. There are plenty of ways people express annoyance. Throwing a fit over it and screaming at your boss or coworkers is just dumb.
(Yes, of course I'd get mad if someone started doodling in the corner of my painting. I'd also get mad if a coworker went on my computer and deleted files at random. These are contrived scenarios that don't apply to 99.9% of regular office work.)
I often hear stories from more toxic workplaces about engineers yelling during meetings, insulting and degrading each other, etc. That's the kind of anger that's unproductive and largely unwarranted unless you're literally working on a life-or-death scenario (which some engineers are, but the vast majority are not).
And that's really what it comes down to. For the overwhelming majority of software projects, it's just not that deep. You mention "artists and craftspeople" but even for them, it's really not that deep. Artists and craftspeople go through tons of abuse, annoying clients, etc. and they don't respond to it by flipping their shit and getting mad. At the end of the day it's just a job, we can value it, but it's almost certainly not important enough to be worth getting angry about.
> Being angry at work feels good.
This smacked me in the face, because there is no emotion that feels worse to me than anger. I have never been angry and "felt good" about it, be it at work or anywhere else, and regardless of whether or not my anger was justified.
Mindset is important. If you care about the craft of programming then you can easily get into a mindset that software must be "perfect", which is almost always impossible to achieve, and so you will become continually dissatisfied. I got into this mindset when I was a junior dev, and it only served to fuel frustration for me and others.
I try to take the mindset of "continuous crap reduction". I let go of the things that are out of my control, and seek to reduce the biggest problems that are in my control. Then I can get a "win" every day, and I don't try and fight the stuff out of my control which is only a little crap. I have to try and be principled without being opinionated.
I generally dont mind if someone is angry at me, if it's something I did poorly. Honestly i enjoy it, shows someone cares abt what i output. However, when people expect to be wronged , and preemptively adopt an agressive posture, before i get a chance to do anything, that's where my desire to cooperate plummets.
> it’s hard to find yourself yelling at somebody about React state management
Some changes have been introduced to ChatGPT web interface. I think to support rich text formatting in the input. Holy shit, it's so slow it's barely usable. Like they repaint the whole conversation just to add one message and I have huge delays > 10s. I am super-angry.
Edit: to add to the conversation, angry engineers as an ahead-of-time proxy for angry customers.
I dislike engineers in general because most of them think like this. they have gone all in on embracing alienation in the marxist sense from their own work product and dont understand people who feel a sense of personal craft and ownership in something.
Imagine if you are making a painting and someone comes along and starts doodling in the corner, or squirting different colors onto your palette. it really f-s up what you are trying to do as an artist and craftsperson.
engineers who are craftspeople cannot tolerate this. but in modern corporate it is expected. engineers who are NOT craftspeople dont care. they are perfect, formless globs of soullness grey goo.
oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years? shrugs. ok, what other toilet do you want me to clean.
This author is that - a robot. A replaceable machined part. management and capitalism love this guy and people like him. they can interview someone else and relace him tomorrow with another grey goo hire that will not complain.
im not for it.
You dislike engineers because they are acting like engineers instead of artists? The typical engineer is a paid mercenary, working to get widget 2.0 out the door. They are not robots, but are paid to play nice with others to advance their employer's interests. To act like a temperamental artiste in that environment would be immature and unprofessional.
To me, that reads as a bit immature, and there were times when I felt exactly like what you described, but switched one project to another and I felt embarrassed from my own past behaviour.
I'm getting paid to build someone else's project. I enjoy the work I'm making so I build it the best I can given the time constraints. I'm a paid worker, not an artists. Every entropy that I add to this system, is entropy that delays capital income to the whole company, so that entropy needs to be productive and not fundamentalist following unnecessary perfectionism. If something can be done quickly but imperfectly and still be relatively well maintained with manageable debt, so be it, that's what delivers the most value to the whole company. It's a bit one sided if I banged by foot no the ground and said "no, this will take 6 more months that what you want because I want it to be done in my perfect way". And this idea of perfectionism crumbles even more when you realise your idea of perfect is not objective. There's always someone else who has a better and more perfect idea than yours.
This doesn't conflict with the programming I do on my personal projects. Personal projects give me more satisfaction than what I do at work, but personal projects don't give me any money, as it should be, or I'd be compelled to work faster.
My work is not a craft, and that's fine. I'm just another human helping other humans advancing the company to acquire more money. I respect and understand my boss's incentives to get more money and they respect my needs to build maintainable software. So, more often than not, we meet in the middle. Sometimes more toward my view, other times towards theirs.
An artist making a painting owns the IP of the painting[1]. A software engineer working for an employer generally does not; the employer (or client) usually owns the IP, and usually has a larger financial stake in the software than any individual.
I think this attitude is fine if you are the sole stakeholder and IP owner (e.g. a personal project or a small business you own). But not for something you are building in collaboration with other engineers for someone else's ownership.
[1] Artists do often make works for client IP, in which cases, they also do not have full creative control of their output!
Almost every painting you've ever heard of has been commissioned and paid for. If I'm painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, for money, and my coworker is fucking up his part, I'm going to be pissed yes. We're supposed to do this 40 hours per week and not care about the output quality? That seems less healthy/ideal than the alternative.
That's really not true. You can have complete ownership of your creative process even if you work toward a brief/goal specified by someone else.
I say this as someone who has edited movie trailers for major motion pictures for 20 years. I have always been able to accomplish my own goals and by whatever means and processes I deemed important and necessary for myself, despite still needing to satisfy the client's objectives.
You do not need to give up your autonomy. The fact that you think so is troubling and speaks to a split in your psyche.
Congratulations and count yourself among the lucky. But if you cannot appreciate that things will not be that way for many employment situations then you don't know how lucky you are.
It's not a matter of luck, it's a function of the degree to which one's psyche is fragmented.
The default in my industry is exactly as you describe. The only reason it isn't so for me is because I refused to give over my autonomy and have remained in touch with my intrinsic motivations. The job/role/industry is irrelevant as far as causation, I'm just mentioning mine for context.
There is a wide gulf between not caring about your work at all and getting angry about it. Plenty of us care about our work and the projects we own, we want them to be solid and will stand up to defend them. None of that requires getting angry about it.
There's even levels to anger, and I don't think this author is referring to venting annoyance or expressing politely to someone that they did something wrong. "Oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years" anyone would get annoyed by that, it's only human. There are plenty of ways people express annoyance. Throwing a fit over it and screaming at your boss or coworkers is just dumb.
(Yes, of course I'd get mad if someone started doodling in the corner of my painting. I'd also get mad if a coworker went on my computer and deleted files at random. These are contrived scenarios that don't apply to 99.9% of regular office work.)
I often hear stories from more toxic workplaces about engineers yelling during meetings, insulting and degrading each other, etc. That's the kind of anger that's unproductive and largely unwarranted unless you're literally working on a life-or-death scenario (which some engineers are, but the vast majority are not).
And that's really what it comes down to. For the overwhelming majority of software projects, it's just not that deep. You mention "artists and craftspeople" but even for them, it's really not that deep. Artists and craftspeople go through tons of abuse, annoying clients, etc. and they don't respond to it by flipping their shit and getting mad. At the end of the day it's just a job, we can value it, but it's almost certainly not important enough to be worth getting angry about.
marxist alienation (or even debord/situationist alienation) is a spot-on analysis of this mode of neurosis. kudos.