Comment by izacus

Comment by izacus 12 hours ago

8 replies

I think that's a big line between people who work as software engineers becuase they enjoy the work and want to build something and folks who go there to punch the ticket and run back home as soon as possible.

The second group doesn't want to deal with "all the fun crap" and "distractions" that stand in the way of them marking a bug fixed (or, god forbid, actually getting extra bugs/work assigned because some "fun" code might break or cause confusion).

As teams and companies grow, the second group usually outgrows the first and the first group moves on to reform into smaller teams working on something else again.

sumtechguy 9 hours ago

I have had my share of fun things I added to code/environment. Yet then we add 'the new guy'. They spend a long time arguing why that humor should not be there. One project it was a single line comment about new beginnings on the main procedure. That created a 2 hour rant about how unprofessional it was and months of unwarranted verbal abuse. It was literally the only piece of humor in the entire codebase. Super petty. Turned a fun functioning team into a slog of even wanting to go into work and all the rest of team reassigning themselves to other work. I use it as a litmus test these days of what I want to work with. Kind of tempted to add it to interview questions but have not found a proper way to do it.

  • AnimalMuppet 8 hours ago

    Better to reassign 'the new guy', rather than let him destroy the team.

    • sumtechguy 8 hours ago

      Exactly. However, that would mean the boss thought the same, as he was hired specifically for that team. By the time it had happened the boss had not even noticed. Despite the team basically telling him every day in 50 different nice ways. In this case I did not realize it was controlling and manipulative behavior. But I learned and can spot it off pretty quickly now and will make sure it does not happen again.

sdeframond 12 hours ago

Things that seem fun when they are written are often not much so a few years later, without the initial context, when trying to actually "build something".

Fun is good when it is fresh. Fossilized fun is not that fun. It is more like that uncle who heavily tries to be fun at family parties.

  • owebmaster 12 hours ago

    Google is not fun and people that try to be funny from Google are cringe

    • thorin 8 hours ago

      Harking back to the days when people at Apple, Microsoft, Google and Bell Labs had fun. It really happened, allegedly!

    • salawat 10 hours ago

      The young one speaks with enlightenment beyond their years. If only we could all be so blessed.

    • acheron 7 hours ago

      Right? I like jokes in programming. I do not like jokes coming from the evil dystopian megacorp that ruined the Internet.