My working theory about this is that the industry is driven by resume-driven development. Recruiters filter resumes with a keyword based search : 'Do you have React experience ?', 'What about docker ?', 'Do you do Ruby on Rails ?'. If you cannot show experience in the current hotness, your chances in the job market diminishes. So people pick up the new hotness and implement their next solution with that technology whether or not it is the right tool for the job. If we fix the job market, this problem might automatically disappear.<p>Another solution could be encouraging personal projects. Many companies over-work their employees to the point that they cannot do anything in their spare time. Give employees free time and encourage them to play with new technology in their personal projects. The curious ones will have an outlet to channel their energies and you will get a rock solid stack. Also, they will be knowledgeable to take you forward when a problem that requires their newfound knowledge arises in your organization.
I'm coming from learning all about toothpicks and glue, then seeing every problem solved as building things with toothpicks and glue. It was quick and fun at first but my creations were brittle and sometimes were dangerous even. Gradually I became aware of ductape, saws, plywood, nails, hammers, steel, etc, then pre-fabricated parts. Eventually, I ended up buying some from vendors even that had compatible standards so I could make things quicker piecing them together. In the end, just having to try to come up with things that were already made seemed stupid and a waste of my time but unfortunately, that idea only seems to make sense to people that have gone through the same.<p>But it ain't all bad, see. I hear some young folks are coming up with brand new types of toothpicks and glue, hell some of em' I hear put themselves together.
Not sure what the articles point is? That you shouldn't write an application if you can use an off the shelf tool? Who does that?<p>I'm paid to write code because someone wanted an application. I don't think I could tell the customers who buy our application that they should learn some bash or excel and solve their business problems?<p>I assume under some rare circumstances a developer isn't faced with writing an app (site, CAD program, OS, ...) but instead to solve some business problem internal to a business - <i>then</i> you have the option of not writing code.
The major problem of bringing in external technologies is that they take over your architecture, not that they might introduce bugs.<p>There is no catch-all architecture, so there is guaranteed to be some impedance mismatch between the expectations of your project, and the provisions of the 3rd party tool. Heaven help you if you need the facilities of multiple architectures, and try to marshal and connect disparate datatypes and calling/threading assumptions together.<p>As programmers, we work with general purpose programming languages. Many project-specific problems are not difficult to solve in a custom manner, given somebody with enough experience and hindsight to know how to write such a forward-looking thing robustly. It is a serious consideration whether or not to defer your architecture to generic external sources that were not written with your unique needs in mind. And even if you do, it is by far a best practice to ensure that such things live behind an application-specific abstraction separating out your project-specific code from entangling 3rd party code, allowing you to perform the inevitable migration to a different platform later.
This is employer-centric in my opinion - sure you're not paid to write code, and sure you can reuse existing code base in new and exciting ways.<p>But - there's also value in learning new things, in new skills, in new toolsets. Maybe it's not best for the employer, but for you the employee it can help quite a bit.<p>There's a fine balance - ideally your employer encourages you to learn things on the job, and to try new things that may not necessarily make it to production, but improve your skillset overall.
> In fact, code is a nasty byproduct of being a software engineer.<p>This is the core of the matter.<p>This is something Dijkstra, Edward Cohen, Jayadev Misra, and others in and around the formal methods camp have been saying for decades. It is more worthwhile to solve the problem than to guess your program into existence and patch the errors later. To dismiss them is to say you do not appreciate the true difficulty of programming and designing systems.<p>In practice I don't write formal proofs for every line of code -- how exhausting! But I do often write high-level specifications in tandem with the software I'm using to implement it and often one informs the other to the true nature of the problem I'm trying to solve. And I find that as I improve in different logics and predicate calculus I can find and spot the design errors in the structures formed by code that you don't see if all you're doing is trying to "solve the puzzle."<p>The whole approach to guessing your program and patching the bugs later is far too addictive. It saddens me when otherwise good programmers fall into this trap. It creates work for oneself but it keeps you from solving the real problem at hand!<p>Nice article. Not sure about the allure of "Taco Bell," but the spirit is in the right place.
Every now and then we'll see an HN thread that asks something like: what do you know now that you wish you would have known when you started programming?<p>This. This is the thing that took the longest to sink in and had the biggest impact. There were a lot of cool languages, tools, platforms, and systems along the way, and I was stoked picking up each one and coding -- but after decades of that, I realized I was focusing on the wrong thing.<p>I think the thing that convinced me was when I got to start watching lots of technology teams in the wild across multiple organizations. So many times I would see conversations and tons of problem-solving effort being spent on the tools to solve the problem instead of the problem itself.<p>A couple of years ago I was teaching tech practices to a team that was deploying on iOS, Droid, and the web. After we went over TDD, ATDD, and the CI/CD pipeline, I emphasized how crucial it was not to silo. When I finished, a young developer took me aside.<p>"You don't understand. We have coders here who just want to do Java. They want to be the best Java programmers they possibly can be."<p>I told him that he didn't understand. Nobody gave a rat's ass about people wanting to program Java. They cared about whether the team had both the people and technical skills to solve a problem they have. It would be as if a carpenter refused to work on a cabinet because it wouldn't involve using his favorite hammer. You're focusing on the wrong thing.<p>Sadly, once you get this, the industry is all too happy to punish you for it. That's because the resume/interview/recruitment world is interested in buzzwords and coolkids tech, not actually whether or not you can make things people want. This means sadly, in a way, if you continue growing, it's entirely possible to "grow out of" programming.
Actually I'm paid to do this: <a href="http://devhumor.com/content/uploads/images/November2016/modern-software-development-animation.gif" rel="nofollow">http://devhumor.com/content/uploads/images/November2016/mode...</a><p>Writing code is just the only way to do the above since all attempts at making it less text file driven have failed so far.
This is a good article, and the quote in the middle is absolutely amazing -- it belongs up there with some of the most insightful quotes about software ever (and it was not even directly about software).<p>I sum the quote up as, "Systems are sentient beings like the One True Ring, and they will absorb you. Soon, though you believe you are thinking freely, you will actually be merely a part of the System, thinking what it wants you to think." So true!<p>But ... Taco Bell programming <i>still creates a new system</i>. That's a flaw in the article's premise.<p>If you solve a problem by stringing together 11 tools, then yes, you should get some benefits from reusing preexisting tools. But now, you have a system with some rube goldberg characteristics, plus you've written a bunch of "glue code" (which is "new code") in the process.<p>Those systems can often turn out to be more complex.
That only applies to web dev and to a subset of user-mode PC, server and mobile software. While I understand that represents the majority of the software being developed, that article is IMO an incorrect generalization.<p>Some of us do CAD/CAM/CAE, the proven tools either don’t exist, or are targeted towards companies like Boeing and GM and cost a fortune.<p>Some of us work on console games. The environment is pretty close to the bare metal/hypervisor, and typically, there’re significant costs involved in integrating any third-party stuff.<p>Some of us program embedded firmware. Only recently the hardware became fast enough to reuse those proven tools ported from PC, you can’t use those on a PIC16, just not enough resources.<p>That’s just what I personally did/doing over my 16 years in the industry. I’m sure there’re other fields where the proposed approach is inapplicable for various reasons.
It's pretty amusing when you have to keep repeating to a client that the off-the-shelf tool is better, cheaper, and is immediately available to them. Yet they still argue for the development of a new system. So I don't think this push towards custom builds only comes from the developers side of things.<p>And another thing worth pointing out is: most employers hire you to write code. That's the job spec. So don't be surprised that that's what we end up doing.
Wake me up the next time a 5-line shell script in Bash that uses only standard tools and runs off of any default Debian sells with a license cost of $20 (only) -- you know, for the 5 lines, not anything else -- and anyone pays it.<p>Doesn't matter what it does. It is literally impossible to sell even $20 worth of the solution the person advocates. Go ahead: link me to anywhere in the web selling a 5-line bash file without anything else. I'm waiting.<p>You can do a lot in 5 lines, too. lalalala. waiting. While I wait I think I'll make some money coding something people actually pay for. /s<p>Seriously though, while the author's point might stand in many sys admin and even systems integration roles - most of the software world actually pays for deliverables: the clearest example of which is consumers doing so. People would rather spend 20 hours cursing, and then give up, rather than pay for a systems integration script that generalizes and solves their problem. It's what the market <i>demands</i>. This article really would make sense if it came from the person paying -- but it doesn't. nobody who is paying actually says the words the article chose for the title. Yes, you are paid to code.
You know these occasioanl threads about engineer burnouts we see and post on HN? Well, I actually feel that when you are "burned out" and don't feel like writing complex systems is "fun" anymore, you actually become a better engineer - exactly for the reason described in this post.
I can't emphasise how true this is. I've written tonnes of temporary scripts that parse some files or rename some directories, and then later discovered that I could have done it with a single UNIX command.<p>I'm not employed as a professional software developer, so I still don't actually use the helpful UNIX commands. Takes all the fun out of it. :P
If you see yourself as a software developer instead of problem solver, you tend to solve all your problems by writing code. In many cases problems can be solved by adjusting processes, improving culture, education or just by learning to use the current tools in more efficient ways.
Good read. Reminded me of "Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer"<p><a href="http://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2016/01/25/why-i-strive-to-be-a-0-1x-engineer/" rel="nofollow">http://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2016/01/25/why-i-strive-to-be-a...</a>
It is all about efficiency.<p>Can you dig a canal with a tried and true shovel? Yes, you can, but you will need a lot of time and many shovels.<p>Can you cook up bioinformatics analysis in Shell and Awk. Yes, you can, but you if you want a large scale analysis to be done in a reasonable amount of time, you roll up your sleeves and reach for compiled languages, distributed systems and so on.<p>There are downsides in introducing new systems, but it should be weighed against the upside of suitability and efficiency.
I sorta get the idea of the article. Working smart etc. However the incentives in organizations run often counter to that. Gluing together existing pieces to do some grunt work is rarely good for your career. Building new glorious systems is much more likely to do that.<p>Also for orgs that do the developing for other orgs it isn't really optimal to offer the quick and efficient solutions unless competitors are doing the same.
In my current job I get paid for writing emails, reports and filling out forms. Programming is just something I sneak in when no one's watching.<p>The company I work for is super successful so there must be something to it.
I'm paid to keep software systems up and resolve issues. Sometimes this means adding, removing, or modifying code. A lot of the time, it just means clicking the right buttons at the right time. Really, I'm paid to know which of those actions is appropriate in various circumstances, and to get it done when it needs to be.
I fail to see the point of the article. What's the proposed alternative? To become an admin?<p>I also doubt most people write software from scratch. We use a well proven language, ide, compiler and deployment tool. We use existing libraries, frameworks, databases, caches and services.<p>Why doesn't that count as Taco bell programming? When's the last time you wrote code for all these things instead of just assembling all of it together?<p>This article is forgetting the lesson learned, highly configurable generic software that doesn't need a code change to adapt has actually failed us, and is the source of failure. That's why Domain Driven Design was born. Write simple software that target a single domain only. Write one of those for every domain. Do not try to use the same software with multiple tweaks and config hacks for all your domains.
My current team suffers from disgust of Taco Bell programming. I love it, and I push hard to use it for the projects I lead. I've even had other leads scoff at my use of Python because "the GIL will throttle your application!" Possibly, but I understand the performance requirements of my systems and GIL is the last thing I'm worrying about. I'm not going to write my own programming language, or use one that doesn't have a good ecosystem, because an existing language is deficient in some negligible aspect.<p>Engineers who build things from scratch do not understand a very profound fact about software engineering: a computer performs menial, repetitive tasks so you don't have to. Be lazy and use someone else's solution.<p>When I was 14 I remember writing bubble sort from scratch dozens of times, as well as input scrubbing methods and binary search trees. I didn't know about the concept of libraries. Granted the internet (sourceforge, github, etc) wasn't around and I was writing everything in BASIC or Pascal. By the time I graduated high school I understood that writing code was painful.<p>Consequently, it's sometimes alarming that most systems I build rely on thousands of lines of code that I didn't write and rarely ever inspect. But I have to trust other developers in order to get my work done in a reasonable amount of time. I don't even consider myself a good programmer, mostly because I hate writing code. Nevertheless I do deliver useful, valuable systems. I know my problem has already been solved by someone else. I like being lazy. It's my best quality.<p>This isn't addressed in the article, but avoidance of Taco Bell programming is a symptom of a disease. The disease is ignorance; mostly in managers who are out of touch with the technical landscape in which their teams work. Any time I hear of a team building their own tools or doing significant amounts of de-novo work, I try to limit my dependencies on that team. You're never going to ship that shit, buddy, but I solemnly admire you for trying.
"You may not be paid to write code, but when being hired we're going to throw every convoluted or esoteric brain scratching coding test at you for you to pass, which you'll then never have to do again. Until you apply for your next job, that is."
The Basic premise is true. Every line of code that you write is a liability. Best line of code is the one that you don't write. So the corollary is that the less code you use to solve your problem the better.
FTA:<p>> Gall’s Fundamental Theorem of Systems is that new systems mean new problems. I think the same can safely be said of code—more code, more problems. <i>Do it without a new system if you can.</i><p>I agree with the basic idea here, yes. But I would have to disagree strongly with the last part.<p>The problem with <i>Do it without a new system if you can</i> is that we need judgment to decide when to make a new system and when not. Sometimes just writing a small piece from scratch instead of using (and repurposing!) a poorly-matched prior system is a hell of a lot simpler.
This is a great post. I think the "paid to write code" is often a byproduct of environment - whether it's poor engineering leadership, bad productivity measurement, etc.
no, but job adverts are written asking for people to write code and often take tests to show they can write code.<p>Resumes and interviews seem to be heavily focused on if yu can write code. And there will be lots of talk about how much code you have written in the past.<p>which I guess is what the article is really railing against - but what it comes down to is in theory you're not paid to write code, in practice you are.
Agreed. I have always felt that technical people approach their jobs from the wrong side. They cram every technical acronym on the CV in the hope that something will stick. They don't understand business. Business wants value. The CV should concentrate on the value created in your past. If it doesn't get past the recruiters then the job wasn't meant for you anyway. Most techies are programmers who happen to make money at coding, whereas you should be a businessperson who programs; with the difference in attitudes being night/day.<p>Some time ago, I went for a architect role at a telco which was the largest Progress shop in the southern hemisphere. The interviewer asked if I knew Progress and I said "No but that is only knowledge" and talked about successful projects and later found out I was hired because of that sentence. But I knew 15 languages at the time so what's another language, and sure enough, 3 months later I was reviewing Progress code. You have to convince them to hire you because of your perceived value. I have interviewed a lot and it always cracks-me-up when I ask if they know some technical thing and the job-seeker goes "No, but I've heard of it" meaning they are unwilling to admit that they don't know one of the million of technical languages/platforms/etc. We aren't Leonardo daVinci, who was probably the last person on Earth to know pretty much everything. It's OK to say No. So say No and explain why that doesn't matter.<p>Regarding the tools we use, I agree again. I have used the same DBMS for 15 years. I know it, I feel safe using it, I know what it likes and dislikes. The majority of all my coding is in stored procedures in the DBMS and I don't really care what the front-end is, whether it's C or some new-fangled hot platform. The lower level your coding the better. Find something that works at a low level and stick with it.
Meta question: do software developers typically enjoy these types of officious, bossy article that state what is and what must / must not be done?<p>The tone of these types of posts always make me chuckle. And, I see similar types of articles on here often. When I read these, I feel like Dad is mad at me for being a bad programmer.
And people wonder why software quality is going downhill.<p>Of course a Software engineer is paid to write code - if they're not, you probably want a different person.<p>Maybe we need a new job title: "Business Value Expander"<p>Requirements: Glue together everything else that's already been written by other people, and make the business rich.<p>What could possibly go wrong.
I'm paid to kill jobs. I meet with a group of internal customers to ask/watch/learn what they do. Then automate the business tasks so that one person can do the job of the entire group more effectively than before. Then provide pretty charts to the managers as they "downsize" their groups.
"Somebody else has had this problem."<p>(I'm gearing up to build a big distributed "fabric" and reading the SaltStack docs; it's a weird feeling of mixed happiness and disappointment as I discover all the problems they've already solved for me.)
love this, much of my client handling is explaining why they don't want what they thought they wanted, how simpler is easier for them and their users, how functionality driven by need is more powerful than grand all inclusive visions and how as I am seeking a long term relationship, we are here to adapt to change, not to implement a 'final solution'. At the end they more often than not appreciate the honesty and I get the work, when I do the work I'm not questioned on decisions as often as the trust is there. It's a win win scenario.
I was in the UK a few months ago for a meeting and they had a plate of sorts in the room with a list of company guidelines. One of them was ‘Everybody sells’.<p>It seems obvious but I'd never seen it put so starkly.
Yes, we are paid to write code. The final goal is to create a product, and solve problems, yes. However, as a coder you should think about the code, you have to breath the code, you need to feel the code. Quality of the code should become your obsession. Succinct, nice, readable and reasonable code is more likely to lead to a better product. On the other hand - failing, shitty software, often is a downright result of badly written code.
I think I have the opposite issue at my current job as the person in charge wants to put every site, every db, every cron job ,every filesystem on one server and then wonder why we have a io problem...<p>1 instance on aws...sure hope our availability zone stays up next year.
I agree with the insight, the one that says you are trying to solve problems, not write code. But I don't think we're just mixing the same 8 ingredients.
It would be nice if he provided a list of unix tools deemed essential knowledge to any programmer. Anyone care to provide a list of their own essentials?
> You are not paid to write code<p>Well, actually yes, yes I am. You can make a compelling case that this shouldn't be the case, or that they people paying me are shooting themselves in the foot running things the way they're running things, but the fact remains that in today's daily standup/weekly status report/what have you done for me lately "agile" corporate environment, I am absolutely paid to write code and if I don't write code, they'll stop paying me.
"We’re not paid to write code, we’re paid to add value (or reduce cost) to the business"<p>I'm curious to know how many companies Brian has worked for as a software engineer. The majority of the places where I've worked just want you to code. They don't really care about adding value and just want the job done as quickly as possible so customers aren't upset (usually because the sales team promised a feature that should take 2 months in 2 weeks).<p>It's the main reason I quit and started my own company. I was tired of getting into battles with management over the well-being of their own code base and I was tried of being forced to write terrible and hacky code.
I'm pretty sure I am paid to write code that solves problems the business needs. What's this you're not paid to write code meta bullshit?