But a credible threat it isn't. You know this, I know this, and every reader of this message knows this, too.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43057930

Points: 64

# Comments: 46

Being able to learn from others' mistakes is generally considered to be a sign of aptitude.

Also I'm pretty sure employers don't generally pay for, or care about, the commute times of employees…

Normally, it is often useful for a program to receive all the configuration from all sources. ("This flag is normally set to TRUE, has been set to FALSE on this system, has been set to TRUE by the user, and now there's an environment variable that says one thing and a command line flag that says something else.") Sometimes, integrating several incoherent settings into one is dependent on its consumer, or even the setting itself. Sometimes, you would like to be able to debug how different settings interact with one another. Sometimes, different settings can be merged without issue.

CCL exposes everything to the program receiving the config, which is something (some) people seem to abhor. I can see how wanting to hide information can be both useful and detrimental, so I'm wondering if this issue is actually orthogonal to configuration languages, meaning CCL, and others, shouldn't even concern themselves with it.

One of them is a software developer who basically does just that, implement requirements. To enable an engineering department with this type of developer, management needs to already have developed a pretty good view on the business processes that could benefit from automation, or that could become feasible in the first place through software. It is understood that a 5% improvement on the critical path can be more difficult, yet still more worthwhile than a 50% improvement in some less important part of the system. To gain this understanding, management needs to know what is technically possible and perform lots of requirements analysis. After that, well-defined work packets can be handed down to rank and file engineers, and then everyone is on their merry way.

The other kind of software engineer performs most of this support work on their own. Such an engineer has additional responsibilities, but can be useful in many more places because the surrounding support structures don't need to exist. You might not even have to give them specific guidance. However, it means that to use this kind of engineer effectively, you have to expose them to accidentals like time, money and risk, or they will not be able to accurately assess where their talents would be most useful.

Many organizations will actually have both types of engineers. But invariably, the perception of how valuable they are will be heavily skewed in favor of the latter kind of engineer. In the hands of management, they handle like a chef's knife, while the "pure" type of engineer would feel more like a cookie cutter. Even the sharpest, most efficient and most perfect cookie cutter will have a hard time to be perceived as more valuable than a reliable multi-use tool that needs next to no setup for decent results.

The point is, maybe you really hate all that stuff. Nothing stops you from being an awesome cookie cutter. More power to you. I suspect, however, that most of your colleagues would regard that as a career-limiting move.

I suppose it could be helpful to think of a job designation such as "software engineer" as sort of a shorthand for "businessperson whose toolbox is one of a software engineer" as long as we're in that employer-employee relationship, and if we want to exclude all the pesky business stuff from our daily doing, it cannot be in the context of that relationship.

This also means that all the usual problems of deficient software craftsmanship, such as inconsistencies, accidental complexity, faults, low velocity, and so on, aren't even problems as far as the employer is concerned as long as there is no impact to the business.

In a way, it's inconsistent of you to be concerned that any of these problems is going to cost the business money. Either you accept the task of deciding what's good or bad for business, or you don't.

Some devs who dislike actually engineering around time, money or risk constraints at work do open source stuff in off hours where that stuff doesn't matter. The one to decide if that's worthwhile to you is yourself. In the context of a business, engineering is simply a requirement to what's actually its goal, which is of course making gobloads of money, consistently, with minimal effort.

One thing that I can see though is that in many of these cases where engineering is asked to work on high-impact issues, engineering doesn't actually have all the information, or the toolset required to draw conclusions from it. In that sense, yes, demanding that from engineers comes across as a bit lazy. Nevertheless, it's not like you have to prove to e.g. Netflix that the service doesn't meet your requirements anymore: the onus is on them, and the same way it's on engineers to prove that their salaries are warranted. Of course, that goes both ways, and your employer can fail to meet your own requirements.

The option to have less agency is one that many employers will gladly grant you, but we are not married to companies, and these arrangements have to make sense for us as individuals as well. Hamstringing ourselves from being able to demonstrate our worth doesn't feel like the correct course of action, even if we care more about our produced engineering artifacts than even its buyer does.

You may think that this kind of deliberation is outside of the context of what being an engineer is, but it's certainly not outside of the context of what being an employee is. If you wish to be an engineer and not be saddled with business stuff, don't demand compensation, or only token compensation, which is what I alluded to at the end of my last post. In the context of business, all parties need to constantly prove that what they're providing is worth more than what they're asking for.

You can work at a company that asks for "impact", and be given a degree of agency for determining which problems are worth solving, and solve them, hopefully leading to increased revenue, reduced costs, or reduced risks. Or, you can not do that, do whatever Jira asks you to do next, and have no case as to why the company should give you more money or indeed continue to employ you in favor of another engineer who can demonstrate more of an "impact".

If you really don't want to engage in that sort of thing, I'm sure there's a lot of companies that'll let you be a fungible code monkey for pennies…

I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrators percolating through the prison slavery system.

As contributors, we enjoy a lot of trust, as we should. That's why it's not a problem if we make seemingly random changes that don't necessarily make a lot of sense, but seem relevant to security, when they actually fix an issue in the code. After all, it's necessary to prevent bad guys from gaining sensitive information, and to keep your colleagues from being unduly bothered with challenges they could possibly help with.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ressikan_flute

This is actually not that uncommon.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FantasyKeepsake

Fixed-point combinators can be made to work with tail recursion, so I don't think tail recursion forces anyone to name anything. Certainly, how easy it is to go with this particular approach depends a lot on the semantics of your chosen (or imposed) programming language.