Comment by lijok

Comment by lijok 2 days ago

30 replies

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In most companies, writing code is the last thing developers (should) do. You're there to achieve business objectives, and you were hired because someone thought your experience and skillset will be necessary to achieve those business objectives. Sometimes those objectives are met with an excel sheet, sometimes they're met by losely integrating various 3rd parties, sometimes they're met by integrating various libraries, and sometimes it requires treading new ground and writing some real code.

The best web dev isn't the one that knows .Net, React, Svelte, GraphQL, micro-frontends, etc. The best web dev is the one that can convince their manager that their business objectives can be achieved by using WordPress.

noosphr 2 days ago

>The best chemical engineer isn't the one that knows the pressure at which chlorine tanks fail, they are the one that knows chlorine gas can be stored in a garage in coke bottles.

I look forward to the day that software 'engineers' are held accountable to the same degree that all other engineers are.

I've written software for industrial machinery that can kill people if it went wrong. It's amazing how much your views on software change when you realize that your accountability starts at manslaughter and goes up from there.

A human life is valued at around $10m in the developed world, incidentally my first real job was fixing an excel spreadsheet that caused $10m in trade losses after the API it called for exchange rates went stale.

I'm not saying that we arrest everyone who writes a spreadsheet to help them with their job. But _someone_ should have their head on the line when it becomes a business process without oversight that can cause millions in losses, damages or bills.

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  • whstl a day ago

    I don't think this is gonna happen until we're able to say no to stupid shit pushed on us.

    When working as an electrical engineer I never had co-workers fighting me on whether I should do stuff that goes against building code. My building engineering friends never had a product manager say "trust me, we don't need this load bearing wall".

    I know of engineers who did stupid shit at work and got their license revoked, and even some famous ones went to jail.

    Of course there is the famous Steve Jobs story [1] where he forced Burrell Smith to do a stupid PCB and it didn't work, but Jobs was at least willing to accept that this was a test and would take the fall for the spent money.

    [1] https://folklore.org/PC_Board_Esthetics.html

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  • Wurdan 2 days ago

    I look forward to the day when "good code" becomes as obvious as the best practices in some other engineering disciplines.

    I like the Practical Engineering YT channel and one thing I always find interesting is learning about all the research and guidance that exists for things I never thought of. Like there are 400 page documents on how to implement drainage in dams based on decades of experience and post-mortem investigations when things went wrong.

    But it feels like every time I'm involved in a software project, we're starting almost from scratch and just incrementing towards an unknown future which is "good enough". Even if you have a team of experienced developers then the Best Practices at the start of the project are not what they were 2 years prior. The tools that they used on their past projects have evolved (or been deprecated). Or maybe they're being asked to do a bunch of data engineering where they previously did full stack Web development, because org structures are fluid and many IT leaders feel that good engineers can solve any problem with code (ignoring the idea of specialisation).

    This is not to disagree with your point, but more to say that a lot of the infrastructure and professional norms around classical engineering disciplines just aren't there (yet) for developers.

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    • okwhateverdude 2 days ago

      > infrastructure and professional norms around classical engineering disciplines just aren't there (yet) for developers.

      I honestly doubt it will ever get there. Our profession pretty much materialized over night in comparison to other disciplines, and in a rapidly evolving environment, with a much broader application. Only so many bridges/dams/buildings are built in a given time frame and have such incredible capital costs, and human life costs if they get it wrong. It makes sense to carefully curate who and how those things get built. The vast majority of software on the other hand, unless it is for medical/construction/factory equipment that can kill people, is usually super low stakes. And with the democratization of programming in general, even your VBA-curious business analyst can do it in their spreadsheet. Sure I can do the pro se thing in court (and lose my life/freedom), read webmd and treat my own cancer (and die), build my own dam (and flood my neighborhood), but we gatekeep those professions because of the dire consequences of fucking it up. Until software more broadly has those kinds of consequences, there will be no licensure.

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  • lijok a day ago

    I am very glad to hear the positive tone of discourse happening under your thread. I've been arguing for regulation for the software "engineering" "profession" for over a decade now, and am usually met with dramatic recoil.

    You don't need to write pacemaker firmware to produce severely negative outcomes through ineptitude or indifference. I know of a frontend developer whose UX mistake in a financial mobile app triggered a vulnerable customer to end their life. I've heard stories of people ending up in the hospital because of unmet, unvoiced requirements for tasks delegated to junior developers.

    It's a strange world we live in where the "profession" with the most (usually unrealized) potential has no oversight.

    Bob Martin said it best: We either regulate ourselves or we will find ourselves regulated.

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  • esperent 2 days ago

    > chlorine gas can be stored in a garage in coke bottles

    I get the point you're trying to make but you absolutely can't store chlorine gas safely in your garage in a coke bottle. If you try doing this as a business, you'll get shut down hard and possibly some prison time too.

    On the other hand, WordPress is a valid solution for a huge number of businesses. Perhaps the previous commentor should have labored their point and noted that the engineer's skill is required to know when WordPress is a valid option, and also just as importantly, when it's not.

    But suggesting the use of WordPress is in no way comparable to doing something illegal like storing chlorine gas improperly.

    A better comparison would be to using an off the shelf chlorine storage system versus developing your own. For most companies, off the shelf will be the right choice, but others are doing complex things that require them to develop their own systems.

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    • namaria 2 days ago

      I have a fairly obscure domain that gets absolutely bombarded by wordpress related scans. This tells me two things: wp seems pretty easy to misconfigure, and a lot of scripts are looking for these misconfigurations. Based solely on that I would never recommend it to a tech-naive business.

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      • esperent 2 days ago

        We're talking about businesses who have hired a software engineer to advise them on how to set things up correctly. I don't personally have any experience with WordPress, but I assume that it is possible to set up correctly, right? If you hire an expert and pay them to do it, I mean.

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  • Mountain_Skies 2 days ago

    I look forward to the day when software engineers have the autonomy that licensed engineers have, so they can tell managers no and if the manager goes around the engineer, the manager and the company end up directly liable for the damage they create.

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    • godelski 2 days ago

      These are in fact the same thing. It is because an engineer can be held liable that results in them being willing to say no. In general, they probably won't be prosecuted, but a common reason for this is that there will be written records of engineers telling management that there are concerning risks. This also results in the job of a Professional Engineer, who is a person who legally puts themselves on the line. They get paid very well and for good reason, they have a lot on the line themselves.

      I suspect that a big reason CS is not held to the same standards is due to abstraction and that it is still new. But we do live in a time where bad code can get people killed (control systems are the easiest examples), just as building a faulty bridge will. I just hope we don't need a Tacoma Bridge to cause change. Obviously it is harder to figure out things that are more abstract like Social Media (can provide both good and harm).

      But I'd say, you can always say no. If you're not saying "no" now, that's still a choice you've made. A job is very persuasive, and I'm not saying you're bad for just keeping your head down, just that people should consider where they'd draw the line. The line is personal and different for everyone (which is okay!). Having taken traditional engineering courses, I'll note that ethics is frequently discussed and you're likely to be told you should try to define your line before you asked to cross it. If you don't, you'll likely to cross the line without knowing, as you just didn't know what it looked like. You can always redefine the line as you get more resolution (it continuously updates) but it's much harder to say "no" when you haven't given it much thought.

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      • necovek 2 days ago

        The main reason we are at a point we are is that it is possible to build very complex software systems cheaply: both the tools and building blocks are abundant and available to everyone.

        If an engineer tried to build a skyscraper or a bridge, they'd meet challenges other than them having knowledge or professional certification.

        And to your point, if anyone ever asked an engineer to insert another floor between 8th and 9th floor of a 15 story building, they'd laugh at them. In software engineering, this is possible even if hard.

        And finally, because of software living a much different life, it will be hard to define criteria for good software.

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  • cced a day ago

    Developers should get the axe even though there’s an entire process behind pushing code out to production? QA, UAT? Surely people sign off on what’s being pushed out?

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sharkweek 2 days ago

Oh wow… the WordPress example…

Worked at a SaaS company that had a fantastic product and a great tech team that had built it.

We also did a lot of data-based research and published it as white papers for lead gen.

We wanted to start publishing more content on our site to expand reach, so the team decided a CMS would be a solution for the researchers and content marketers to publish without any tech involvement.

Well it turns out our CTO, for a few justifiable reasons if we’re painting with a broad brush, absolutely loathed WordPress. So despite our arguments an integration would be easier/cheaper/less time consuming for everyone, we built our own CMS instead.

And we, of course, ended up with a significantly worse version of WordPress that the content folks all hated.

So it goes.

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godelski 2 days ago

I think your model has faulty assumptions. It makes the assumptions that the companies and managers actually know what the business objectives are. Or rather, what the business objectives that will make money are. I think we all have seen examples where maybe an afternoon's worth of work could fix some feature that is frustrating users, but since there's not a clear "value" ascribed to it, it gets pushed off. While simultaneously we've seen tons of money dumped into things neither users nor investors want and that end up failing.

If we're handed an engineer title, I think we should be engineers. Which requires you to be a bit "grumpy". That is because the job of an engineer is to find problems and then fix them. I say "grumpy" because it is your job to find friction in a system and remove it. What I've often seen though is that acknowledging friction is interpreted as rejection and not as part of the process to make things better. Unless we get to the magic land of perfection, the job of identifying issues and improving will always be extremely valuable and naturally lead to increased revenue[0]. There's a lot of things that go into making a product "good" and this can't be entirely done from technical skills, but it is a critical aspect. Look at Steve Job's Apple. The genius was the mixture of form and function. You make computers that are powerful, have good software, AND the UI/UX is far from a second thought. Good UI/UX and shitty code don't make a good product, similarly neither does shitty UI/UX and impressive code (backend devs don't rule the world)

  > The best web dev is the one that can convince their manager that their business objectives can be achieved by using WordPress.
Seems like your developer is a manager. This has perverse incentives and I don't think this is the right way to frame things. As an example, in law you wouldn't want a lawyer to win just because they were better at arguing. Obviously this happens and a charismatic lawyer can win despite the facts not being in their favor, but I think we all can agree that this is not what we want a justice system to look like. We want facts and the law to matter more while a lawyer's charisma (or lack of) is an unavoidable fact of life. Just a limit in the underlying mechanisms in which we communicate. Every job has politics and you can't get rid of them, but you don't want politics to rule the job. That wouldn't create the most value for the company, though it might for a person at that company.

[0] Obviously you have to weigh the costs that it takes to fix things. But identification is often cheap and easy. At least the first step of identification anyways.

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dxroshan 2 days ago

I disagree with you. According to your definition of best developer, is one with a skill for persuade manager enough for building complex we apps and services? A developer is hired to write code and they achieve business goals by writing code and building software. Writing code is the skill they have and that is why they are hired.

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vborovikov 13 hours ago

But I don't want to configure WordPress. I like to write and debug code. If it's not required for the business, I'm not interested in working there at all.

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makstaks 2 days ago

I think it depends on your company rather than saying "most". If you are in a software company (i.e. you sell the software you write), then your value is the unique IP you create from writing code. In that case, hopefully a larger portion of your day is coding.

edit: When I say coding, I don't mean plumbing code, I mean something that is actually a unique invention.

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compootr 2 days ago

... or ones that can convince them not to use WP! (RE: matt mullenwag's breakdown/mental issues)

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