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Search - "#motivation #truth"
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A lot of the people are complaining about working in inhumane conditions. I want to debunk some bullshit that I think is causing this.
Devs are hard to find. That makes you valuable. A good dev that actually works for 30-40 hours per week is extremely hard to find.
The relationship with your employer / client should be simple: you work, they pay. What you do NOT:
1. Do not take responsibility for other people's decisions
2. Do not internalize other people's problems (you've got your own, better stick to them)
3. Do not let ANYONE guilt trip you into anything that you're not indeed guilty of.
4. Do NOT work for an effective rate that's significantly lower than you know you can get elsewhere.
There are indeed some utterly evil assholes out there that will try to manipulate you, into thinking that you're "part of the project", or that "you're all a team". Yeah, you are, but when it comes to making money, you'll only get the salary, regardless of how successful your work will be. THEY have a motivation to stay up late, to work extra hours, etc. You DO NOT. If you do that, and don't get paid extra, you're working for free, which means that you're not a professional.
Are you a professional? Then have respect for yourself, and bill for every fucking second of your time. Don't let the assholes think they own you.
As a professional, you MUST do EXACTLY what you're paid to do. No more, no less. Well, if you're feeling good about it, then you can do slightly more. And anyone that's demanding more, basically has no respect for you, and doesn't consider you a professional. That is the plain truth. See it as it is, and handle those scumbags accordingly.5 -
Serverless and death of Programming?!
_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.
_Long Rant_
Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.
_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.
So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...
_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.
_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...
On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.
On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...
It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...2 -
My master thesis is in ramble.
What I thought to be an achievable task in the beginning turns out to be very challenging.
My skill is not up to it.
The assistant prof I worked with is also not very helpful. I thought he's already familiar with the lib I will work with, turns out he's not so I have to study it by myself.
Me : **Asking question A**
Him : **Explaining B, C, D that's not really related to A. My question went unanswered.
Him giving me explanation on things that I already knew**
Me : "How about this code? Can we please focus on the code?!"
Him : **Finally explains the code so I can move forward a little**
Apparently I have to grow fangs and horns to scare people to give me what I want. :/
He and my prof are not in sync about how to solve the task.
They told me that even though I was behind my deadline (30% progress at 50% time), I still have some time before the deadline of the thesis.
The truth is, if I no longer believe that I can solve it, even if they gave me a time extension, it's going to be useless.
My motivation of finishing it is fading away. It's not a subject that I enjoy, the people I work with are not helpful.
I have been in depression for 2 months, and it's taking a toll on my health.
I am seriously considering dropping it and just let go of my master degree. There are many people who can work in IT even though they don't have proper formal education eh?5