I’m not going to lie, that last one is the hardest thing for me.
After years of trades i always loved having a physical thing you can touch and feel at the end of the day. I’m in university for tech, and i’m still struggling with the lack of achievement. I don’t often get to see someone use a thing I worked on, so it kinda feels like I spent a lot of time doing nothing.
A few years ago, corps were just throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick. Everybody who wasn’t a software company decided they were now a “software company”. I liked the salary that came with it but the actual projects sucked. Working on stuff you know is DOA is very demoralizing.
I work in a manufacturing plant. I am not a programmer, but I work with several supporting my projects on the manufacturing equipment. I find it wild that they stay in the front office building all the time, and are generally resistant to coming out on the plant floor and seeing the physical stuff being made because of their programs. That’s the best part IMO!
I feel you. Certain professions have an emptiness to them because you don’t know if what you do matters.
I did about 15 years as a medic in a rural area. And while the saying is “You work on family and friends”, I often had no clue if the people I scraped up and treated in the back of my bus lived or died. Once I dropped them at the ER, that was it. It was just a black hole that I could very rarely get a glimpse into. It left a real empty spot inside not knowing if what you did mattered.
So, go home tonight, pour a whisk(e)y and do what I did-- pretend it does.
But why should we think so much about the final result when it’s out of our hands? Without you, these people probably wouldn’t have gotten any care whatsoever (or at the least, delayed with it -> higher risk for worse results).
Unless you did stuff to worsen their condition, you’ve undoubtedly saved many lives, and many people are very thankful for your contributions. So, thank you!
If we discount natural human curiosity, knowing how your efforts turned out can be very important to getting better at your job. If the only way you can know how it turned out is if someone yells at you for screwing up, that’s a poor way to improve your skills.
If you a designing a new UI for a program, it’s good to know that the end user liked how you rounded that one icon, but the color pallet could be a bit brighter. It’s how we improve and get better. To not know often leads to mediocrity because your attitude can quickly become “Eh, didn’t get yelled at, good enough.” How many bad bad UIs are out there?
Same for me, knowing that how I treated a patient in something small could make a huge difference in their out come before we even got to the hospital. And not knowing how the outcome turned out slowed my personal development as a medic. It’s not about being ‘good enough’ but doing the very best you can each time you get paged out. Because when someone calls for that ambulance, it’s very often the worst day of their lives. And they are often pretty sure they might well die. At that point the last thing you want is a Good enough’ attitude.
What helps me when I feel like this is making something for myself. A script that automates something I do or a program that I will use. Then I do feel the accomplishment everytime I use that thing
And that’s why today is shell script Friday! I always try to do some little thing on Friday that makes things easier for me and my team. Not always a shell script but always something I can finish in a day. I don’t always succeed but I can usually come up with something cool.
Robotics (or more broadly mechatronics) is a super interesting field. To do the work at the mechanical/electrical interface is really hard.
The field of industrial controls skips the hard part and just buys stuff that is pre-designed to move. Then those pre-designed pieces are made to fit and work together. It’s like complicated Legos and is honestly very fun and rewarding.
If you want to do programming with a physical result, controls engineering is a great option. I would recommend shooting for the hard stuff (real programming - DSP, FPGA, etc) knowing you’ve got a safe fallback with industrial controls (PLC programming).
I had a gig lined up 20 years ago to write control software for steel-cutting robots at a gulf coast shipyard. I was super-excited about this and had visions of getting them all to dance in unison to The Blue Danube (after hours, of course). Then hurricanes Rita and Katrina hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud, and that was the end of my robotics career. :(
I used to struggle a bit with that. My first full time job was at a startup making puzzle/logic games and I was hoping that at one point everybody is going to play them and I’ll be able to say “yeah, I worked on that”. Needless to say it wasn’t that successful at all, but I learned not to care that much. Money’s in my bank account, food is on the table, everything’s fine.
On the flip side, software not being material is also a plus - you make it once and distribute it an infinite number of times.
I used to work for a major cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. Although working for them was kind of like working for Darth Vader, I did take some pride in the fact that our app had millions of daily users. Eventually I learned that essentially all of those daily users were faked and that nobody actually used the shit (and they only installed the app in the first place to get a discount on their cable bills). Then I was only able to take pride in the fact that we were essentially scamming the c-suite and the shareholders out of millions of dollars a year.
Bombast retired this app three years ago, so they at least realized they weren’t making any money off of it. It was always understood to be a loss leader of sorts, but I don’t think they were ever really fully aware that even its utility as a loss leader was being greatly exaggerated.
Bombast is strangely competent in a weird way. During my time there, I frequently worked under vice presidents (they have hundreds of these in their corporate structure) who ranged from grossly incompetent to clinically insane, but they were always disappeared within weeks of my being assigned to them. I assume they were fired and escorted out of the building immediately, but I wouldn’t entirely rule out murder.
Also strangely incompetent in weird ways. The founding Roberts died in 2015 and many people wore his signature bowtie to the corporate memorial service to honor him. The scuttlebutt was that everybody who wore a bowtie was fired shortly afterwards. I know for sure that this was the case with my own boss. I could never hope to explain why this was done.
I’m not going to lie, that last one is the hardest thing for me.
After years of trades i always loved having a physical thing you can touch and feel at the end of the day. I’m in university for tech, and i’m still struggling with the lack of achievement. I don’t often get to see someone use a thing I worked on, so it kinda feels like I spent a lot of time doing nothing.
That’s why so many programmers want to work in game development. It feels good when you made something that brings people joy.
And that’s why game developers are paid terribly
A few years ago, corps were just throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick. Everybody who wasn’t a software company decided they were now a “software company”. I liked the salary that came with it but the actual projects sucked. Working on stuff you know is DOA is very demoralizing.
I work in a manufacturing plant. I am not a programmer, but I work with several supporting my projects on the manufacturing equipment. I find it wild that they stay in the front office building all the time, and are generally resistant to coming out on the plant floor and seeing the physical stuff being made because of their programs. That’s the best part IMO!
I feel you. Certain professions have an emptiness to them because you don’t know if what you do matters.
I did about 15 years as a medic in a rural area. And while the saying is “You work on family and friends”, I often had no clue if the people I scraped up and treated in the back of my bus lived or died. Once I dropped them at the ER, that was it. It was just a black hole that I could very rarely get a glimpse into. It left a real empty spot inside not knowing if what you did mattered.
So, go home tonight, pour a whisk(e)y and do what I did-- pretend it does.
But why should we think so much about the final result when it’s out of our hands? Without you, these people probably wouldn’t have gotten any care whatsoever (or at the least, delayed with it -> higher risk for worse results).
Unless you did stuff to worsen their condition, you’ve undoubtedly saved many lives, and many people are very thankful for your contributions. So, thank you!
If we discount natural human curiosity, knowing how your efforts turned out can be very important to getting better at your job. If the only way you can know how it turned out is if someone yells at you for screwing up, that’s a poor way to improve your skills.
If you a designing a new UI for a program, it’s good to know that the end user liked how you rounded that one icon, but the color pallet could be a bit brighter. It’s how we improve and get better. To not know often leads to mediocrity because your attitude can quickly become “Eh, didn’t get yelled at, good enough.” How many bad bad UIs are out there?
Same for me, knowing that how I treated a patient in something small could make a huge difference in their out come before we even got to the hospital. And not knowing how the outcome turned out slowed my personal development as a medic. It’s not about being ‘good enough’ but doing the very best you can each time you get paged out. Because when someone calls for that ambulance, it’s very often the worst day of their lives. And they are often pretty sure they might well die. At that point the last thing you want is a Good enough’ attitude.
What helps me when I feel like this is making something for myself. A script that automates something I do or a program that I will use. Then I do feel the accomplishment everytime I use that thing
And that’s why today is shell script Friday! I always try to do some little thing on Friday that makes things easier for me and my team. Not always a shell script but always something I can finish in a day. I don’t always succeed but I can usually come up with something cool.
That sounds much better than “push it to prod Friday” lol
That reminds me, I have a PR to merge.
LGTM
You may enjoy the robotics field of programming ngl. Or embedded systems if you still want more coding than engineering.
Robotics (or more broadly mechatronics) is a super interesting field. To do the work at the mechanical/electrical interface is really hard.
The field of industrial controls skips the hard part and just buys stuff that is pre-designed to move. Then those pre-designed pieces are made to fit and work together. It’s like complicated Legos and is honestly very fun and rewarding.
If you want to do programming with a physical result, controls engineering is a great option. I would recommend shooting for the hard stuff (real programming - DSP, FPGA, etc) knowing you’ve got a safe fallback with industrial controls (PLC programming).
I had a gig lined up 20 years ago to write control software for steel-cutting robots at a gulf coast shipyard. I was super-excited about this and had visions of getting them all to dance in unison to The Blue Danube (after hours, of course). Then hurricanes Rita and Katrina hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud, and that was the end of my robotics career. :(
I do industrial automation and despite all the difficulties I enjoy it.
I used to struggle a bit with that. My first full time job was at a startup making puzzle/logic games and I was hoping that at one point everybody is going to play them and I’ll be able to say “yeah, I worked on that”. Needless to say it wasn’t that successful at all, but I learned not to care that much. Money’s in my bank account, food is on the table, everything’s fine.
On the flip side, software not being material is also a plus - you make it once and distribute it an infinite number of times.
I used to work for a major cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. Although working for them was kind of like working for Darth Vader, I did take some pride in the fact that our app had millions of daily users. Eventually I learned that essentially all of those daily users were faked and that nobody actually used the shit (and they only installed the app in the first place to get a discount on their cable bills). Then I was only able to take pride in the fact that we were essentially scamming the c-suite and the shareholders out of millions of dollars a year.
It’s somewhat amazing to be able to pull this off - and also speaks of the layers and layers of management in modern corporations.
Did the c-level folks find out eventually?
Bombast retired this app three years ago, so they at least realized they weren’t making any money off of it. It was always understood to be a loss leader of sorts, but I don’t think they were ever really fully aware that even its utility as a loss leader was being greatly exaggerated.
Bombast is strangely competent in a weird way. During my time there, I frequently worked under vice presidents (they have hundreds of these in their corporate structure) who ranged from grossly incompetent to clinically insane, but they were always disappeared within weeks of my being assigned to them. I assume they were fired and escorted out of the building immediately, but I wouldn’t entirely rule out murder.
Also strangely incompetent in weird ways. The founding Roberts died in 2015 and many people wore his signature bowtie to the corporate memorial service to honor him. The scuttlebutt was that everybody who wore a bowtie was fired shortly afterwards. I know for sure that this was the case with my own boss. I could never hope to explain why this was done.
Full stack baby