Happy coders
Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, you don’t work hard. I just worked a 1984-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”
They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Great.
Let’s talk about programming.
Office Space
How to lose your minds at job:
- Negotiate about requirements with managers or PMs who just don’t seem to understand anything but still have really strong opinions.
- Plan the future releases
- Interview
- Review other people’s code
- Change variable names because that’s the only thing reviewers ever comment on in your code.
- Re-run tests on code that didn’t change except for the variable names
- Fix infrastructure problems and other people’s bugs so that tests on your resubmitted code can actually complete again
- (Much later) fix the real bugs that slipped past the reviewers because they were obsessed about variable names
- Argue with other people about their bugs
- Deal with irate/panicked users
- Deal with internet/mailing-list trolls
- Travel to and speak at conferences
- Integrate your new code with six other projects, all of which you consider misguided or broken, because politics
- Change compilers/frameworks/whatever six times during each project
- Email, email, email, email, IRC, email, email
- Watch people on competing projects steal all the limelight by lying shamelessly about their own capabilities and yours
- Deal with panicking PMs
Alienate your co workers and hire people that share these traits:
- ego-maniacs
- “gifted” people
- single-minded focus on technology versus a well-balance life of wide ranging interests
- nerd-offs where two “gifted” people bombard each other with their tech knowledge until one storm offs or they diverge into a tangential conversion about gaming, conspiracy theories or how most people are stupid
- the non-technical project manager that essentially becomes the time-tracker for the project reminding you five times a day how behind schedule we are
- the non-technical CEO-type that calls a monthly “team” meetings to boost moral by forecasting all the “great things” coming down the pipeline as long as everybody works hard to keep him or her (usually him) living the easy life of planning monthly meetings while the cash rolls in and is dispersed to his senior management
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
How to get frustrated:
- The most challenging problems you solved were during your interviews.
- The data structures and algorithms you practiced for a year to get this job are all forgotten within 3 months of doing maintenance, attending meetings and drinking the kool aid.
- The pay is too much for pretending to be a geek. One layoff and you are irrelevant to the world. You know it.
- The stock grant is great. But someone above is paid even more to burn you out and replace you with someone more energetic and cheaper.
- The idea is not to innovate, do the right things in the right way, serve customers or to make the world a better place. Those things are just part of the script to hire people. The idea is to save your job at the cost of others.
- The meetings are scheduled to debate why you declined to fix those 200 low priority bugs filed by the star tester in one day. The tester has promised his wife to get the promotion this time. Let’s meet again tomorrow. Same room.
- The boss thinks software development is just calling some APIs. So, they wouldn’t see any point in approving your team change request.
- The miracle happens. You suck it up and deliver outstanding performance with some innovation. Bosses gather in a room to discuss how to take credit. You can stand at the door or leave.
- The goof up happens. Bosses gather to lynch you in the center of the same meeting room.
- The real estate broker who helped you find your dream house has more net worth than you. He has agricultural property too. He gifts you peanuts grown in his farm which seem heavier than what your boss gives you.
- The common man outside thinks you are an Einstein. But, you know you are merely a tubeless tire whose whole purpose of existence is to hold air under high pressure to let your bosses have a smooth ride.
- The doctor says there is no more room for your blood pressure to increase. You tell him your organs are in IT. He tells you they are in SH IT.
- The option to quit isn’t there anymore. You are married, have kids and 2 home loan EMIs. You promised to the world that you will give your kids a great life. Just like your’s. Ahem