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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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!
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.
marxist alienation (or even debord/situationist alienation) is a spot-on analysis of this mode of neurosis. kudos.