I currently work in a good environment where I'm appreciated and paid well. Not many people in the world can say that, so I have a lot to be thankful for. Programming has done good by me.
But I don't love it. Alan Kay is right, it's like building "an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves". There's no elegance and no higher vision. It's an Asperger profession; smart but artless.
I would prefer, if I could retire, to make short films and maybe to write plays. But I can't retire yet. So I'll push stones. It pays well.
Sorry, but I would have to disagree with you on this. I've been programming now for over 35 years, and really cannot see myself doing anything else. I find I can channel my creativity into programming in many ways, and writing a good piece of code gives me the same satisfaction as writing or recording apiece of music. Yes, I am a musician too, and while they are very different, I see a lot of similarities between them too.
ANY job can become a task of 'piling bricks via brute force and slavery' at some point in time. Every good friend who has had a seemingly dream job has broken down and despaired at some of the drudgery involved over a beer.
One of them does, in fact, write plays that do very well in the UK theatre scene and he also writes TV shows that do well locally - but he often speaks of the interminable problems dealing with promoters, agents, crew and transport.
Another good friend tours the world as a physio with an international cricket team. First class flights and hotels everywhere, rubbing shoulders with celebrities. Many of us (thought we) would kill for such an opportunity, but he says he is tired of living out of a suitcase and having to check the local papers under the door every morning to remember which city he is in.
But at least those jobs don't have the stigma of being (in the words above) Asperger professions. This makes it difficult to share your problems with other people, and of course, also because people in general would, I suppose, find the problems that musicians or theatre writers have more interesting, and more approachable than the problems of a software developer.
Also, this makes that a musician can be a "musician" in normal life. He or she doesn't need to change their identity. Developer culture does not blend with the normal world, and as a developer I believe you really have to switch between two worlds. That can be tiring.
remark on a tangent - before siting down to a bunch of tasks I ask myself how I can make this funny/creative, how is it hilarious and how interesting can this be made. suddenly perspective changes.
This is why it's so important for me to work on something people use.
At a previous job I'd sometimes hit a wall. I would log into one of the production API hosts and tail -f the access logs, where I'd see many different people and applications using a piece of software that I'd help write. I'd grab an IP address and geolocate it and see where the person was from.
The humanization of work can be extremely powerful. It reminds you that you're providing value to the world, that you've created something useful even if it sometimes feels so pointless.
Seriously, create a small report based on the logs that tracks visits, popular calls etc. It will do you good every morning to check it (charts and comparisons are great) and it will be an asset when promotion time comes around and you have define your "contribution" to the company :)
Though I know that your intentions were harmless, I'd like to add that it's not a good idea to do such a lookup without a sound reason. At some places where I worked, I could have been fired for doing that unless I was looking to fix a bug and this particular bit of data was essential.
This depends entirely on what you're working on - programming is just a tool to make something after all. As an example, I'm a video game programmer who specializes in gameplay (characters, weapons, metagame, other mechanics), AI, and user experience. This means I'm also part game designer, so there is a ridiculous amount of creativity required for my role on a daily basis (which I absolutely adore). It's really nice not working to a hard spec, a lot of my job is trying different approaches and seeing what's fun.
Well, I have an opposite problem. I work in VFX (visual effects) industry, have dozens of credits on IMDB, but completely adore programming and solving variety of problems that involve data processing and connecting various systems together. Unfortunately, it's too late.
You work in a particular field, is it possible to take your knowledge of the "daily grind" to one of the development houses making tools you use? Is there some software that would be particularly useful that doesn't yet exist? Can you write plug-ins for existing tools (and sell them, a friend did that for audio processing software)?
You have domain experience, you don't have to forfeit it if you make the switch to programming.
I would also like to make short films and plays, as well as improv and acting in local theater. I think it's something you can do in your evenings and weekends. I started doing it recently and realized that I'm not good at it, and it's going to take a lot of practice before I get better. It's important to stay active and keep practicing your hobbies, even while you're working. Because if you wait until you're retired, you might have forgotten how to do things. Or even worse, you might have lost your interest.
No worse than any other profession. Sure, most days I do more of the same, build reports for finance/corporate problems. It's rolling stones up a hill every morning, but that has nothing to do with programming itself. The issue you're describing is that you're working to haul someone else's stones. Fine, all well and good, pay is good. Wouldn't be any different if I was a musician or a painter... all they ever request is that I play Piano Man.
For me the art comes in doing it a different way each time. Maybe it's a function of my inexperience, I've only been doing this for a few years so far but the horizon seems so far away and there's so much to learn that I can't imagine getting bored anytime soon. Everything is amazing and I can't learn it all! In the meanwhile there's stuff to learn outside of tech. Like gardening or baking. Baking bread is a series of simple tricks (temperature of the yeast, bowl type, kneading techniques, etc.) that people do in order to produce an outcome (a certain crust or flavour). I'm struck often by how similar I find it to writing code.
Try rolling the stone with one hand tied behind your back.
> "an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves"
True for outsourced departments of big corporations (Java chicken farms). Not everywhere creating the software is at this stage of development though. There are many creative and agile (not necessary "Agile") businesses and places where creating the software evolved. They are at the stage of XIXth century civil engineering - a lot is being built, plenty of experimenting, people are getting hurt, and most of it collapses. Only couple of magnificent monuments will survive but the rest will be discarded.
So, it's just not for you. You fail to see art in it, That happens, it's ok. Maybe you need to think about gradually moving to the movie business, they need programming too, you know.
>> "I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way." << The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
I learned to pick struggles I love, to pick processes I love and to pick fights I love. Writing code a.k.a. "programming" is a part of struggles I have chosen for myself and I am fine with it. What I learned through the process:
- Do "programming" if you love to pile bricks on top of each other, with no structural integrity, done by brute force as one of thousands of slaves, building a pyramid for someone else.
- Do "programming" if you love to pile bricks on top of each other, sometimes with structural integrity, sometimes with elegance, as a lone wolf or a part of a small team working on its own business. Just remember Derek Sivers.
- Do "programming" as a part of solving your own problems you would otherwise solve by boring manual work. Don't tell about your programming skills to your boss. Make a short day and have a beer while others are solving their own problems with boring manual work! Cheers! Credit goes again to Derek Sivers.
But if you care about "working on the next pyramid" and you are not the pharao... well, to cite Mark Manson, you "are giving too many fucks where fucks do not deserve to be given".
Sorry for the offensive language, blame Mark Manson for it, if you want to.
> I would prefer, if I could retire, to make short films and maybe to write plays. But I can't retire yet. So I'll push stones. It pays well.
Please don't stay because of the pay. You won't look back in 25 years and say "I'm so glad I bought a new iPhone in 2016, but didn't do the things I wanted to in life"
The last company I worked for was full of people only staying because retirement was "only" 10-15 years away, and they were not a healthy/happy lot.
You'd be giving up your life "now" in the hopes of a good life "then", which is insanity.
I have left Software twice now to pursue my goals - the first time I spent two years driving Alaska->Argentina more-or-less on vacation, and right now I'm spending two years driving around Africa. I'm exploring my passions while on the road for writing, photograph, videography, languages, etc. etc. I have less money now, and a lot more happiness.
Quitting a high paying relatively lax job could possibly make your life a whole heck of a lot worse, especially 10 to 15 years from retirement. If anything start building something on the side.
Yes, I use Alan Kay's pyramid image[1] in my talks about software architecture[2][3][4]. But then I compare it to the Cologne Cathedral, which encloses a vastly larger space with vastly more light using 1/50th the material, yet it's the same kind of material: cut stones piled on top of each other.
So there is hope, I think, and that hope, I think, is improving our understanding and practice of software architecture[5].
And it's not like there we don't have examples in software. Let's take Bentley's challenge[6]: Don Knuth with 12 pages of (literate/web) Pascal, Doug McIllroy with 6 lines of shell. Or Nile/Gezira, a modern graphics subsystem (think Cairo or Quartz) in ~500LOC. Yes, 500LOC.
So we need to figure out what makes these examples work so much better and how we can apply what we've learned to make our lives better. That's what I am doing, care to join me? [5]
Notice that I'm quoting Alan Kay. You're not just disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with a Turing Award winner -- and that's not to say that he's right, or by extension that I'm right, but you can't simply hand wave it away as coming from someone who doesn't understand it well enough.
I'd say that's job specific. My engineering role feels very artful, elegant, full of vision. And bruh, the whole "slaves built the pyramids" thing is a myth. Easily Google-able.
And that pyramid, well, it definitely is the way how a corporate and enterprise Java software has been and still being made. Java itself is an ecosystem for creating coding factories - to parallelize the process of coding (one cannot honestly call this programming) among teams of easily replaceable, uniform (in terms of abilities) cheap workers. Every manager will tell about this ideal.
For programming look at PAIP or the lisp code supplement to AIMA - this is programming. Take a look at Plan9 - this is programming. People who have created Erlang were engaged in programming. Code that runs Google's AI is programming. This is an art, same as writing poetry, composition of music, writing symphonies or complex novels.
But there are very few slots available, because demand for programming is very low - it is still difficult and very expensive. Conveyor belt coding, on the other hand, is indeed fits the Kay's pyramid metaphor. And the result of such process is crap - everyone have seen "enterprise code" made by such sweat shops..
The crucial difference between an art and merely piling up more crap is that art means an attempts to approach an ideal, an optimum, perfection - it is, ideally, a reduction process with eventually converges to the closest possible approximation to an ideal. Something like this:
[] ++ ys = ys
(x:xs) ++ ys = x : xs ++ ys
While in the in the second case is just a process of production. Not in the sense of Japanese perfection of every move and detail, but in the sense a hipster produces yet another narcissistic blog post.
> And that pyramid, well, it definitely is the way how a corporate and enterprise Java software has been and still being made. Java itself is an ecosystem for creating coding factories - to parallelize the process of coding (one cannot honestly call this programming) among teams of easily replaceable, uniform (in terms of abilities) cheap workers. Every manager will tell about this ideal.
So is the web today, its bloat eclipsing even Enterprise Java. The idea you described is the idea all businesses pursue, because it's the one of reducing costs and increasing profits.
> The crucial difference between an art and merely piling up more crap is that art means an attempts to approach an ideal, an optimum, perfection - it is, ideally, a reduction process with eventually converges to the closest possible approximation to an ideal.
Unfortunately you can rarely get paid for this.
In a way, I'm happy markets are not efficient. A lot of good, important, useful and/or beautiful stuff would never be done if the market was perfectly efficient.
Personally, I'm evidence for it, since I spend my days building pyramids, and program only on the side.
But the entire thing does not add-up. The artful activity is so much more productive that I can not stop believing that in any market you are able to create a slot doing it, you will outcompete all the pyramid builders. (Yet this pyramid pays me too well to just abandon it.)
I think about leaving programming every day. I love programming, but I'm not sure I enjoy software development as a career.
I enjoy coding and understanding how computer systems work, but I don't care for the constant changes in tools and techniques in certain domains of development. I'd rather practise with and improve my existing knowledge of a subject, instead of constantly playing catch-up with someone else's tools and workflow. I also don't care about waterfall, agile, scrum, kanban, scrumban or any other development methodology that I've missed. I hate that my job has me chained to a desk (sitting or standing) instead of being able to use my body. All of this makes me think that real-world software development doesn't really suit me.
I'm about six weeks into a new job after leaving a company I worked at for just over five years. Amongst many other reasons for leaving, I thought that a new environment would change how I felt about continuing a career in software development, but I'm not sure that it has. I'm aware of how lucky programmers have it, but I can't help feeling like I just want something else. Grass is always greener, etc.
What are the career options that allow one to work mostly by oneself in one-to-two week stretches without having to play the development workflow game with the daily standups and so on?
Sadly I'm not sure what I'd do if not programming, but music is a big interest and I'd considered teaching music.
> without having to play the development workflow game with the daily standups and so on?
It never used to be like this. I think management has reacted to the traits they perceive in programmers - get distracted too easily, work on things that don't need doing, take too long, cannot provide work-time estimates, etc - by putting in place this micro-managing approach: "only do it if it's on the kanban and tell us each and every day what you have done and will be doing". I know agile, etc, weren't designed to do that, but that's what they've been used for whenever I've been subjected to them.
Programming and dev-ops used to be fun, self-directed, creative work which kept me interested for a couple of decades. Now the pace of change (much of it unnecessary or over-sold) and the constant micro-management have me looking for other things to do.
I believe Agile (at least as thought of by management) is designed to make programmers interchangeable. If programmers are interchangeable, they are easily replaceable.
We just started doing "by the book" Agile with daily stand ups. Now that you mention it, it does feel like I'm being micro managed. Put in your time every day so we can email everyone the burn down chart. Lets add some more pressure to the job if you are behind a day. There are no milestones, just an endless grind. I don't know why programmers don't push back against that stuff.
> work on things that don't need doing, take too long
These are also traits of junior developers, who now get boosted into non-junior roles due to demand for developers.
Hiring cheaper juniors and trying to micro-manage them into intermediates... The same approach suffocates eventually when "unaccounted for" tech debt creeps in.
That said, there is also something to certain devs wanting to play with shiny tech (and build their cvs) rather than the best tools for the job. This, along with " cannot provide work-time estimates" point to the need for some senior role who can management overall project development, including goals, estimates, planning and tech stack choices; and this has to be a senior technical role, not a MBA-ed middle manager with a list of methodology-derived rules carved into stone tablets.
Yeah Agile is the assembly-line version of software development. You're reduced to optimizing effort for your very local problem space. And its a grind. The 'sprint' is well-named though - you constantly race toward another crappy feature done with minimum effort.
I think it's just that the business wants to know where their money is actually going (and they have every right to, it's effectively their money, or managed under their auspices). and unfortunately agile is one way they can accomplish that. It's unfortunate because it costs a lot of developer time to go through the motions, and we are the closest witnesses to this overhead/waste.
I think using/not using agile is like doing business with a contract vs a handshake. When there are few enough people who trust each other, you can get by on a handshake. When you get into larger dollar amounts (like paying an office full of developers), sometimes its better to use a contract so you have some perception and promises about where your money is going.
Now, agile is of course not a contract, but if teams meet their deliverables, the business can at least see where their money went, which they are entitled to do.
Look for older development companies, where the developer staff is all over 40. The work tends to be in C/C++, you'll find none of the modern programming fashions (Agile, whatnot...) and they expect you to be a mature adult capable of self managing. They don't care how one works, as long as you own your work, can fix if issues or bugs are found, and can generally operate as a respectful peer to the other developers. The work you'll be given will be significant, you won't be able to slack off, but if you're an individual that appreciates honest, hard work that includes machine learning, advanced math and stats, 3D and GPU programming, plus responsibility for the entire UI, software documentation, and support of your development - its a dream situation. But ya gotta be capable of deep self directed research plus the entire development cycle yourself, as these older development companies tend to have deep libraries of past projects you'll need to learn for the core of whatever they task you to create.
Do you have any examples of this type of company? I'm a sophomore CS student looking to work in Aerospace, and this type of company, where the work is done in a self driven manner and where the work matters, that I'd love to work for.
> honest, hard work that includes machine learning, advanced math and stats, 3D and GPU programming, plus responsibility for the entire UI, software documentation, and support of your development
I'm in an eerily similar situation. Been doing software development for about 5 years (though at different places, doing primarily Android development), am just over 6 weeks at a new job and I'm beginning to feel that software development's just not for me anymore. I don't feel passionate about most aspects of it - constantly playing catchup with the latest frameworks, the development/management methodologies/processes, wrestling with the Android framework, pushing pixels, UI/UX...
There are still elements that I enjoy. I still love the creative, mathematical problem-solving aspects, but those moments feel few and far between.
I also feel at times I'm taking my position for granted - I'm not sure what else I'd do besides programming. I've always had a casual interest in security, so I'm thinking I might look into that. Being a "bug bounty-hunter" seems like a dream, though I'm not entirely sure how realistic that would be!
I also love music, but I think that's even less feasible. I'm not proficient enough to be able to teach it. But I would like to be able to dedicate more time to learning/producing it.
Good luck - here's hoping we find something more fulfilling :).
I'm a freelance programmer without much self-worth, and currently no work. Given the right environment, people and projects (for me), I know I'd be happier and wealthier, and may even thrive. Rather than the abandonment that I've felt on many freelance gigs. With age, I find it increasingly difficult to sit in front of a computer for long stretches of time (more than 4 hours). I've been in a rut, where I've barely earned enough to get by for the last 15 years, and have nothing to show for it, other than a bust shoulder. No landmark projects or piles of cash. Cash would help! My other half frequently tries to talk me out of the profession. I work occasionally with impassioned newcomers, who assume with my depth of knowledge and skill-set I'd be earning shed loads and taking the best gigs. But they have the needed drive and zeal that I feel I could do with a shot of. Or rather, I can program, but I'm not a successful programmer/worker. I still like problem solving, but also appreciate some donkey work. I often think what else can I do, but my imagination and confidence fails me. And I'm too shy to ask for help (UK).
As I've mentioned before I own a gym business (multiple locations) with my wife and some other business partners. Part of the purchase process was financial disclosures of everyone so we all know what each other makes on paper, what we actually take home, household wealth and assets, etc.
I'm 30, younger than my business partners by multiple decades, and am the only one not in a strictly management position. Two of the partners are PEs and I make more than anyone else.
I say this not to brag but only to point out that it takes a lot to leave programming simply because the money isn't there is a lot of other professions. I almost went into civil engineering and I'm glad I didn't, because apparently I would've had to bust my ass to make it into management only to be 20 years older and making less money to boot.
I did see some data on US News Best Jobs on salaries for various positions. It's a roundup of BLS data, and provides data based on location.
I find the data a whisker suspicious, but this is BLS data. Supposedly, the media salary for a software developer in SF is $118k a year. Keep in mind, in San Jose, it is $142k, which sounds more like it.
But now look at salaries for other fields. A registered nurse in SF earns a median salary of $123k. Every time I point this out, I always make sure to emphasize that I am not complaining that registered nurses earn a lot of money in SF - they should! And yes, it is a hard job, but perhaps a rewarding one as well. Would you rather do a hard job that is important and pays well, or log into JIRA to fix bugs and report on them in your daily "standup"?
Dental Hygienists, according to this roundup of BLS data, earn about $102k a year. Ok, that's less than developers, but do 45 year old dental hygienists get run out of the field because they are too old, or because they withdrew for a few years with kids and family responsibilities?
And keep in mind, salaries for lawyers, nurse practitioners, physicians, physician assistants, and other professionals or para-professionals often substantially exceed what software developers get paid. If you want a relatively low stress job, there are better options. If you're ambitious, there are better options as well. In short, you'd better really like code if you ant to do this, and you may find you don't, once you discover what that means on an "agile" team. Great for hobby, sure, so is music, dance, and painting. Do you like it more than music, dance and painting?
The unspoken truth is that Software development isn't really that great a job for the pay, career prospects, and working conditions. It's not horrible, either, but there's no need to scratch our heads about an alleged "shortage". I know the industry has a bunch of reasons they promote for the "shortage", but in the end, it's a market response to pay and working conditions. People with the skill to do this have realized they're better off in a different field.
Thanks, that's very interesting. I often think of doing something else with my life, but the money's good, and the work is easy. Makes it very hard to walk away. Plus over time you (and your family) get used to a certain lifestyle. Golden handcuffs as they say.
I'm aiming for Quant development since I read quantjob.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-to-avoid-quantdeveloper-black-hole.html
Software dev is less about enjoyable hacking, and more about "housekeeping", or a million yak-shaving data management tasks that you are paid to care about.
I'd sooner do something else that merely involves software, but has some other domain of knowledge, and keep the majority of my coding as off-work hobbying.
I think it depends what kinda code you write. Also, what kinda management structure you find yourself in.
Sounds like you're writing code with hard specs (enterprise company?) where you just feel like a cog in this vast code outputting machine. In that case, it's totally natural to feel like you're dying inside. That's natural. We're creative beings, and you either need to find a different job or calibrate other dimensions of your life to meet that need (physical fitness, start a family, serious hobbies, be part of a community).
The actual company feels more on the other side of the spectrum, and has a fairly 'young' culture, along with an overwhelming amount of 'social coding', for want of a better phrase, including various guilds for different technologies, tech meetings, demos, meetups, ad nauseum.
I feel pretty out of place, but I can't help feeling like I just can't cope with this much day-to-day interaction. I just want something quieter, more low key, if that makes sense?
You might consider digging deeper into other professions where programming experience/systems knowledge would be essential.
You might also dig deeper into discovering what you like and don't like about the programming profession:
Do you prefer going to meetings? Do you like solving new problems constantly? What drives your satisfaction? What do you not like about programming? What do you like about programming?
What one person considers to be a lucky profession may not be the same view shared by another :)
When I picture someone with a strong background in programming and CS going into another field I always imagine there's a lot of potential for really understanding problems in that field and applying computing to solve them. Essentially, using computing to really support work in another field rather than just computing for it's own sake.
Thought about it, and then tried it. I followed my dream and started a creative project that had been dogging me for a long time. EVERYBODY wanted me to do it. Family, friends, people on the street with whom I discussed it. I expected it to be a big moneymaker. And it didn't work out. Not only that, but it became very clear that it was a really poor fit for me on a fundamental level.
I'm glad for the experience, though.
Going back to programming, here's what I figured out:
- I was working on stuff I didn't enjoy, with people I didn't particularly care about.
- I was taking on new work projects without any particular selection criteria.
- I wasn't thinking about the kinds of work that got me excited about programming and chasing it down.
So I recently nailed the first two back into place. I'm working closer to my values system rather than paychecks. In exchange, I'm just saving more money so I have more freedom.
Anyway, burnout is real. I thought I was done for sure and that my interest in programming and computers was a thing of the past. But that was just the burnout talking.
It helped to keep a journal during this time. Not a chronicle, but a thought-dump process in which I asked if my life was actually improving daily. That made it pretty quick to pinpoint my frustrations, as you can only write about the same pains a few times before you start to really zoom in on the causes and potential solutions.
This speaks to me. Career curation; making sure it means something. Burnouts can sometimes afford to be selective in their work. Illness is very expensive.
I'd been working at the same job for about ten years, and I started to work on a different group that made the same product with a never technology. I hated that, I found it hard to work in that and I wasn't that productive. Also I had some burnout, some depression, and not much to look forward to...
Except for dancing. I had begun some years prior and I became somewhat good, and I even began to teach.
Then an offer came, resign from the job for money was offered to all, I accepted.
For about two years I just gave classes and worked as staff. Unfortunately the money was not enough.
Then I started helping on the dance school's webpage. The money wasn't enough yet.
So I got a programming job and resigned from most of my job in the dance school. I just teach one hour a week.
I really lost my dream job because of money and not being good enough earn enough to life with that.
I'm sorry but dancing is definitely not one of those professions where "if you believe you can do it".
Depending on the specific dancing style there are strict body types and features that you need to have, and not all of them can be acquired by training. So yeah, nature is not fair but feel-good comedies don't always apply to real life.
Not my kind of site. My dancing information needs are covered by my Facebook feed, the swingdancing reddit and sporadically yahoodi.com.
As I don't think I'll be able to earn my living with dancing, nor will my free time be dedicated to it, I'm trying to finally learn lisp, so most of my news' search is about that.
Also.. I don't like pages with the look and feel that that one has, I know modern pages tend to be like that, but I prefer other kinds of formatting. Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm no longer in your target demographics.
I did consider a career as a lion tamer, but the vocational guidance counselor said I was an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. So I decided to stick with programming.
Yes, I want to do something more meaningful than build and maintain web CRUD apps. Despite the media perpetuating this notion that there's a shortage of engineers, I actually feel that this field, particularly the web space (where most of the actual jobs are), is starting to get really saturated. And from a job security perspective, the barriers to entry are fairly low.
These days I'm most interested in economics and politics because I believe that our most important problems right now are in this realm (eg. poverty, job automation, healthcare costs, housing prices, college prices). The Javascript framework wars are laughably insignificant compared to these problems, yet unlike web development, there aren't enough logically-minded people really tackling these problems. Unfortunately there's probably no job out there that I could realistically obtain that would pay me to work on these problems, thus I'm just saving money for retirement and learning on the side.
Oh man, 1000x this. This election season in particular has made me consider how we could get more smart, rational, self-less people into positions where they could influence the overall outcome positively for the vast majority of the population. I don't think our current political system achieves that outcome.
I'm smart. I think I'm rational. I'm not self-less enough to give up my and my family's financial security to leave the field to tilt at these particular windmills. (I'm unconvinced that any single politician, even the President, could change the systemic problems our system is facing, to say nothing of the likelihood that any individual would be cast aside at some point during the election tournament ladder.)
This is an economic problem at heart. If you could find a way to make investing in, say, peace, or hunger, as tempting to investors as software we could solve the really important problems.
Yes. I love programming, but I really dislike how inactive I must be to work as a programmer. I don't like sitting/standing all day, and being chained to the computer. Short activity breaks, and workouts in the morning and evening don't cut it.
When I'm outdoors and active, I am so much happier. If I am on a multi-day outdoor trip to hike or rock climb, I feel like a completely different person. This is especially true on long trips that last more than a week. I have much less stress. I smile compulsively, instead of baring my usual strained expression. I have more energy. You might think at first that is simply because I am on vacation and I don't have to think about work obligations, but when I am on a normal (non-outdoor) type of vacation, I don't get the same feeling at all. I think it has more to do with the outdoor environment and physical activity.
I recently met someone who works as a park ranger, and I became envious of her job. I would love to patrol the woods all day as a ranger, or to be a mail carrier walking from house to house. I make much more money as a programmer, but "money cannot buy happiness", and I wonder often if I should change course.
I've considered both of those career switches (ranger and mail carrier) myself for those exact reasons. Deliveroo too, as the idea of being able to cycle around all day seems quite appealing.
I'm mostly happy with programming, but I often think I'd like to try working in a coffee shop, especially a Starbucks. I spend so much time in cafes as a customer, and I really appreciate the difference that a barista's smile or greeting can make to my day. I'm curious to experience that from the other side for a while. I also read books about retail businesses & brands & Starbucks & customer experience for enjoyment, but I'm sure practice is wildly different from theory, especially at ground level dealing with customers for long hours.
But I've never tried applying, because I have no retail experience, and my work experience is mostly as a lone-wolf remote developer or indie developer (also I'm middle-aged now). Always thought I'd be laughed out of the interview. But I still think one day I'd like to try.
Barista-turned-programmer here. I was fond of it much of the time, and it was a good experience for me, and I think you would also like it based on what you've written. But keep in mind what you often don't notice from the outside is a lot of standard bullshit like mopping floors, keeping composure toward rude customers, worrying about food-handling/health provisions, etc. And, of many differences between the occupations, no longer being frequently treated like I'm dumb sticks out.
Nonetheless, I say go for it. You would learn a ton and probably become the best kind of coffee snob, one who can back it up with chops ;)
I quite enjoyed working at Starbucks as a teenager, because it gave me a cool that a nerd like me hadn't had before.
Careful about the drudge work though (especially cleaning floors/toilets at the end of the day), and if you're not used to spending all day on your feet you'll feel pretty sore at the end of the first few days!
You should make this happen! I ended up getting a part time over the weekend gig at a San Francisco coffee shop - it was super satisfying to be on the other side.
I made the effort to befriend the baristas since I see them every day anyway. Eventually asked one of them to teach me during slow hours and I started to make my own drink each time I came in. One of them baristas ended up referring me to a different cafe (allowed me to avoid the awkward conversation of a weird looking resume) and I passed the interview by making decent drinks.
I've really thought about this as well, I'd love to work a couple hours in a coffee shop on a weekend. It's mainly the fact that you get to interact with somebody, make them something, and see them enjoy it immediately.
Sometime's it's difficult for me to get motivated to push out code when it's just for myself.
Apparently, there are quite a few of us who enjoy the idea of a coffee shop. I doubt I'll ever do it, but a year ago, I did a cost analysis spreadsheet of opening my own shop, but now a coffee cart seems like a fun side project. :)
I want to start a math-cafe, where the loyalty cards are replaced by puzzles (you solve today's puzzle, tomorrow's coffee is free.)
They have such high margins on individual drinks (and people will totally buy a pastry if the coffee is free) that this shouldn't cost too much. Plus you can always make the puzzles harder, or have 2 or 3 easyish ones and then graduate people onto harder ones that they'll take a few days to solve.
You can imagine how to decorate the place - blackboards for walls, encourage the customers to use them to practise the spare puzzles lying around today, etc...
Why Starbucks? It's the McDonald's of coffee. Pick a local cafe you like and see if they'll hire you part time for weekend shifts. A place that takes pride in their work.
I'm a big fan of Starbucks as a customer. It isn't about the coffee for me (clearly!) so much as the whole experience, the "Third Place" concept. The design of the stores, the comfy chairs, the handfeel of the mugs, the quality of the free WiFi & power points, the opening hours, the lighting, the light jazz music that doesn't interfere with conversation.
If I found a local cafe that paid that much attention to the experience, I'd certainly apply there. But I find many small cafes focus only on the coffee product, but not how the customer feels about the product.
Probably depends where you live. I imagine it would be tough, especially for a one-income family. In Australia however the minimum wage is $17.70/hour, or $22.12/hr minimum if you're a casual worker, so I assume baristas here earn at least that much.
Readit News
But I don't love it. Alan Kay is right, it's like building "an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves". There's no elegance and no higher vision. It's an Asperger profession; smart but artless.
I would prefer, if I could retire, to make short films and maybe to write plays. But I can't retire yet. So I'll push stones. It pays well.
Sorry, but I would have to disagree with you on this. I've been programming now for over 35 years, and really cannot see myself doing anything else. I find I can channel my creativity into programming in many ways, and writing a good piece of code gives me the same satisfaction as writing or recording apiece of music. Yes, I am a musician too, and while they are very different, I see a lot of similarities between them too.
ANY job can become a task of 'piling bricks via brute force and slavery' at some point in time. Every good friend who has had a seemingly dream job has broken down and despaired at some of the drudgery involved over a beer.
One of them does, in fact, write plays that do very well in the UK theatre scene and he also writes TV shows that do well locally - but he often speaks of the interminable problems dealing with promoters, agents, crew and transport.
Another good friend tours the world as a physio with an international cricket team. First class flights and hotels everywhere, rubbing shoulders with celebrities. Many of us (thought we) would kill for such an opportunity, but he says he is tired of living out of a suitcase and having to check the local papers under the door every morning to remember which city he is in.
It is all a matter of perspective.
Also, this makes that a musician can be a "musician" in normal life. He or she doesn't need to change their identity. Developer culture does not blend with the normal world, and as a developer I believe you really have to switch between two worlds. That can be tiring.
I see what you did there :)
This is why it's so important for me to work on something people use.
At a previous job I'd sometimes hit a wall. I would log into one of the production API hosts and tail -f the access logs, where I'd see many different people and applications using a piece of software that I'd help write. I'd grab an IP address and geolocate it and see where the person was from.
The humanization of work can be extremely powerful. It reminds you that you're providing value to the world, that you've created something useful even if it sometimes feels so pointless.
This depends entirely on what you're working on - programming is just a tool to make something after all. As an example, I'm a video game programmer who specializes in gameplay (characters, weapons, metagame, other mechanics), AI, and user experience. This means I'm also part game designer, so there is a ridiculous amount of creativity required for my role on a daily basis (which I absolutely adore). It's really nice not working to a hard spec, a lot of my job is trying different approaches and seeing what's fun.
Your point was good, it didn't need this poor stereotyping.
Dead Comment
You work in a particular field, is it possible to take your knowledge of the "daily grind" to one of the development houses making tools you use? Is there some software that would be particularly useful that doesn't yet exist? Can you write plug-ins for existing tools (and sell them, a friend did that for audio processing software)?
You have domain experience, you don't have to forfeit it if you make the switch to programming.
Are you suggesting that you've learned everything there possibly is to learn, you're already brain dead (and getting paid for it).
Wait a minute...you don't work for the government, do you?
No worse than any other profession. Sure, most days I do more of the same, build reports for finance/corporate problems. It's rolling stones up a hill every morning, but that has nothing to do with programming itself. The issue you're describing is that you're working to haul someone else's stones. Fine, all well and good, pay is good. Wouldn't be any different if I was a musician or a painter... all they ever request is that I play Piano Man.
For me the art comes in doing it a different way each time. Maybe it's a function of my inexperience, I've only been doing this for a few years so far but the horizon seems so far away and there's so much to learn that I can't imagine getting bored anytime soon. Everything is amazing and I can't learn it all! In the meanwhile there's stuff to learn outside of tech. Like gardening or baking. Baking bread is a series of simple tricks (temperature of the yeast, bowl type, kneading techniques, etc.) that people do in order to produce an outcome (a certain crust or flavour). I'm struck often by how similar I find it to writing code.
Try rolling the stone with one hand tied behind your back.
True for outsourced departments of big corporations (Java chicken farms). Not everywhere creating the software is at this stage of development though. There are many creative and agile (not necessary "Agile") businesses and places where creating the software evolved. They are at the stage of XIXth century civil engineering - a lot is being built, plenty of experimenting, people are getting hurt, and most of it collapses. Only couple of magnificent monuments will survive but the rest will be discarded.
The idiom would be monkeys, so monkey typewriter farms?
centers of typewriting excellence?
So, it's just not for you. You fail to see art in it, That happens, it's ok. Maybe you need to think about gradually moving to the movie business, they need programming too, you know.
Deleted Comment
I learned to pick struggles I love, to pick processes I love and to pick fights I love. Writing code a.k.a. "programming" is a part of struggles I have chosen for myself and I am fine with it. What I learned through the process:
- Do "programming" if you love to pile bricks on top of each other, with no structural integrity, done by brute force as one of thousands of slaves, building a pyramid for someone else.
- Do "programming" if you love to pile bricks on top of each other, sometimes with structural integrity, sometimes with elegance, as a lone wolf or a part of a small team working on its own business. Just remember Derek Sivers.
- Do "programming" as a part of solving your own problems you would otherwise solve by boring manual work. Don't tell about your programming skills to your boss. Make a short day and have a beer while others are solving their own problems with boring manual work! Cheers! Credit goes again to Derek Sivers.
But if you care about "working on the next pyramid" and you are not the pharao... well, to cite Mark Manson, you "are giving too many fucks where fucks do not deserve to be given".
Sorry for the offensive language, blame Mark Manson for it, if you want to.
Please don't stay because of the pay. You won't look back in 25 years and say "I'm so glad I bought a new iPhone in 2016, but didn't do the things I wanted to in life"
The last company I worked for was full of people only staying because retirement was "only" 10-15 years away, and they were not a healthy/happy lot.
You'd be giving up your life "now" in the hopes of a good life "then", which is insanity.
I have left Software twice now to pursue my goals - the first time I spent two years driving Alaska->Argentina more-or-less on vacation, and right now I'm spending two years driving around Africa. I'm exploring my passions while on the road for writing, photograph, videography, languages, etc. etc. I have less money now, and a lot more happiness.
So there is hope, I think, and that hope, I think, is improving our understanding and practice of software architecture[5].
And it's not like there we don't have examples in software. Let's take Bentley's challenge[6]: Don Knuth with 12 pages of (literate/web) Pascal, Doug McIllroy with 6 lines of shell. Or Nile/Gezira, a modern graphics subsystem (think Cairo or Quartz) in ~500LOC. Yes, 500LOC.
So we need to figure out what makes these examples work so much better and how we can apply what we've learned to make our lives better. That's what I am doing, care to join me? [5]
[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5hGmXFHQS4
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKY-0atLDAo
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OAtHOLIg84
[5] http://objective.st
[6] http://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and...
I guess it's not for everybody. There's always going to be people that whatever they do it's just going to be a job.
While other people find it to be an art. You can say this of finances, music, programming, accounting, anything, really.
could you, please, elaborate on this meme?
And that pyramid, well, it definitely is the way how a corporate and enterprise Java software has been and still being made. Java itself is an ecosystem for creating coding factories - to parallelize the process of coding (one cannot honestly call this programming) among teams of easily replaceable, uniform (in terms of abilities) cheap workers. Every manager will tell about this ideal.
For programming look at PAIP or the lisp code supplement to AIMA - this is programming. Take a look at Plan9 - this is programming. People who have created Erlang were engaged in programming. Code that runs Google's AI is programming. This is an art, same as writing poetry, composition of music, writing symphonies or complex novels.
But there are very few slots available, because demand for programming is very low - it is still difficult and very expensive. Conveyor belt coding, on the other hand, is indeed fits the Kay's pyramid metaphor. And the result of such process is crap - everyone have seen "enterprise code" made by such sweat shops..
The crucial difference between an art and merely piling up more crap is that art means an attempts to approach an ideal, an optimum, perfection - it is, ideally, a reduction process with eventually converges to the closest possible approximation to an ideal. Something like this:
While in the in the second case is just a process of production. Not in the sense of Japanese perfection of every move and detail, but in the sense a hipster produces yet another narcissistic blog post.BTW, Asperger is this. And it is not that bad.)
So is the web today, its bloat eclipsing even Enterprise Java. The idea you described is the idea all businesses pursue, because it's the one of reducing costs and increasing profits.
> The crucial difference between an art and merely piling up more crap is that art means an attempts to approach an ideal, an optimum, perfection - it is, ideally, a reduction process with eventually converges to the closest possible approximation to an ideal.
Unfortunately you can rarely get paid for this.
In a way, I'm happy markets are not efficient. A lot of good, important, useful and/or beautiful stuff would never be done if the market was perfectly efficient.
Is it really true?
Personally, I'm evidence for it, since I spend my days building pyramids, and program only on the side.
But the entire thing does not add-up. The artful activity is so much more productive that I can not stop believing that in any market you are able to create a slot doing it, you will outcompete all the pyramid builders. (Yet this pyramid pays me too well to just abandon it.)
Dead Comment
I enjoy coding and understanding how computer systems work, but I don't care for the constant changes in tools and techniques in certain domains of development. I'd rather practise with and improve my existing knowledge of a subject, instead of constantly playing catch-up with someone else's tools and workflow. I also don't care about waterfall, agile, scrum, kanban, scrumban or any other development methodology that I've missed. I hate that my job has me chained to a desk (sitting or standing) instead of being able to use my body. All of this makes me think that real-world software development doesn't really suit me.
I'm about six weeks into a new job after leaving a company I worked at for just over five years. Amongst many other reasons for leaving, I thought that a new environment would change how I felt about continuing a career in software development, but I'm not sure that it has. I'm aware of how lucky programmers have it, but I can't help feeling like I just want something else. Grass is always greener, etc.
What are the career options that allow one to work mostly by oneself in one-to-two week stretches without having to play the development workflow game with the daily standups and so on?
Sadly I'm not sure what I'd do if not programming, but music is a big interest and I'd considered teaching music.
tl;dr Woe is me ;)
It never used to be like this. I think management has reacted to the traits they perceive in programmers - get distracted too easily, work on things that don't need doing, take too long, cannot provide work-time estimates, etc - by putting in place this micro-managing approach: "only do it if it's on the kanban and tell us each and every day what you have done and will be doing". I know agile, etc, weren't designed to do that, but that's what they've been used for whenever I've been subjected to them.
Programming and dev-ops used to be fun, self-directed, creative work which kept me interested for a couple of decades. Now the pace of change (much of it unnecessary or over-sold) and the constant micro-management have me looking for other things to do.
We just started doing "by the book" Agile with daily stand ups. Now that you mention it, it does feel like I'm being micro managed. Put in your time every day so we can email everyone the burn down chart. Lets add some more pressure to the job if you are behind a day. There are no milestones, just an endless grind. I don't know why programmers don't push back against that stuff.
These are also traits of junior developers, who now get boosted into non-junior roles due to demand for developers.
Hiring cheaper juniors and trying to micro-manage them into intermediates... The same approach suffocates eventually when "unaccounted for" tech debt creeps in.
That said, there is also something to certain devs wanting to play with shiny tech (and build their cvs) rather than the best tools for the job. This, along with " cannot provide work-time estimates" point to the need for some senior role who can management overall project development, including goals, estimates, planning and tech stack choices; and this has to be a senior technical role, not a MBA-ed middle manager with a list of methodology-derived rules carved into stone tablets.
I think using/not using agile is like doing business with a contract vs a handshake. When there are few enough people who trust each other, you can get by on a handshake. When you get into larger dollar amounts (like paying an office full of developers), sometimes its better to use a contract so you have some perception and promises about where your money is going.
Now, agile is of course not a contract, but if teams meet their deliverables, the business can at least see where their money went, which they are entitled to do.
What kind of company is this?
There are still elements that I enjoy. I still love the creative, mathematical problem-solving aspects, but those moments feel few and far between.
I also feel at times I'm taking my position for granted - I'm not sure what else I'd do besides programming. I've always had a casual interest in security, so I'm thinking I might look into that. Being a "bug bounty-hunter" seems like a dream, though I'm not entirely sure how realistic that would be!
I also love music, but I think that's even less feasible. I'm not proficient enough to be able to teach it. But I would like to be able to dedicate more time to learning/producing it.
Good luck - here's hoping we find something more fulfilling :).
Also, web tech isn't nice to work with...
As I've mentioned before I own a gym business (multiple locations) with my wife and some other business partners. Part of the purchase process was financial disclosures of everyone so we all know what each other makes on paper, what we actually take home, household wealth and assets, etc.
I'm 30, younger than my business partners by multiple decades, and am the only one not in a strictly management position. Two of the partners are PEs and I make more than anyone else.
I say this not to brag but only to point out that it takes a lot to leave programming simply because the money isn't there is a lot of other professions. I almost went into civil engineering and I'm glad I didn't, because apparently I would've had to bust my ass to make it into management only to be 20 years older and making less money to boot.
I find the data a whisker suspicious, but this is BLS data. Supposedly, the media salary for a software developer in SF is $118k a year. Keep in mind, in San Jose, it is $142k, which sounds more like it.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer...
But now look at salaries for other fields. A registered nurse in SF earns a median salary of $123k. Every time I point this out, I always make sure to emphasize that I am not complaining that registered nurses earn a lot of money in SF - they should! And yes, it is a hard job, but perhaps a rewarding one as well. Would you rather do a hard job that is important and pays well, or log into JIRA to fix bugs and report on them in your daily "standup"?
Dental Hygienists, according to this roundup of BLS data, earn about $102k a year. Ok, that's less than developers, but do 45 year old dental hygienists get run out of the field because they are too old, or because they withdrew for a few years with kids and family responsibilities?
And keep in mind, salaries for lawyers, nurse practitioners, physicians, physician assistants, and other professionals or para-professionals often substantially exceed what software developers get paid. If you want a relatively low stress job, there are better options. If you're ambitious, there are better options as well. In short, you'd better really like code if you ant to do this, and you may find you don't, once you discover what that means on an "agile" team. Great for hobby, sure, so is music, dance, and painting. Do you like it more than music, dance and painting?
The unspoken truth is that Software development isn't really that great a job for the pay, career prospects, and working conditions. It's not horrible, either, but there's no need to scratch our heads about an alleged "shortage". I know the industry has a bunch of reasons they promote for the "shortage", but in the end, it's a market response to pay and working conditions. People with the skill to do this have realized they're better off in a different field.
Software dev is less about enjoyable hacking, and more about "housekeeping", or a million yak-shaving data management tasks that you are paid to care about.
I'd sooner do something else that merely involves software, but has some other domain of knowledge, and keep the majority of my coding as off-work hobbying.
Sounds like you're writing code with hard specs (enterprise company?) where you just feel like a cog in this vast code outputting machine. In that case, it's totally natural to feel like you're dying inside. That's natural. We're creative beings, and you either need to find a different job or calibrate other dimensions of your life to meet that need (physical fitness, start a family, serious hobbies, be part of a community).
The actual company feels more on the other side of the spectrum, and has a fairly 'young' culture, along with an overwhelming amount of 'social coding', for want of a better phrase, including various guilds for different technologies, tech meetings, demos, meetups, ad nauseum.
I feel pretty out of place, but I can't help feeling like I just can't cope with this much day-to-day interaction. I just want something quieter, more low key, if that makes sense?
You might also dig deeper into discovering what you like and don't like about the programming profession: Do you prefer going to meetings? Do you like solving new problems constantly? What drives your satisfaction? What do you not like about programming? What do you like about programming?
What one person considers to be a lucky profession may not be the same view shared by another :)
When I picture someone with a strong background in programming and CS going into another field I always imagine there's a lot of potential for really understanding problems in that field and applying computing to solve them. Essentially, using computing to really support work in another field rather than just computing for it's own sake.
I'm glad for the experience, though.
Going back to programming, here's what I figured out:
- I was working on stuff I didn't enjoy, with people I didn't particularly care about.
- I was taking on new work projects without any particular selection criteria.
- I wasn't thinking about the kinds of work that got me excited about programming and chasing it down.
So I recently nailed the first two back into place. I'm working closer to my values system rather than paychecks. In exchange, I'm just saving more money so I have more freedom.
Anyway, burnout is real. I thought I was done for sure and that my interest in programming and computers was a thing of the past. But that was just the burnout talking.
It helped to keep a journal during this time. Not a chronicle, but a thought-dump process in which I asked if my life was actually improving daily. That made it pretty quick to pinpoint my frustrations, as you can only write about the same pains a few times before you start to really zoom in on the causes and potential solutions.
Good luck to you, however it turns out.
Deleted Comment
I'd been working at the same job for about ten years, and I started to work on a different group that made the same product with a never technology. I hated that, I found it hard to work in that and I wasn't that productive. Also I had some burnout, some depression, and not much to look forward to...
Except for dancing. I had begun some years prior and I became somewhat good, and I even began to teach.
Then an offer came, resign from the job for money was offered to all, I accepted.
For about two years I just gave classes and worked as staff. Unfortunately the money was not enough.
Then I started helping on the dance school's webpage. The money wasn't enough yet.
So I got a programming job and resigned from most of my job in the dance school. I just teach one hour a week.
I really lost my dream job because of money and not being good enough earn enough to life with that.
Depending on the specific dancing style there are strict body types and features that you need to have, and not all of them can be acquired by training. So yeah, nature is not fair but feel-good comedies don't always apply to real life.
As I don't think I'll be able to earn my living with dancing, nor will my free time be dedicated to it, I'm trying to finally learn lisp, so most of my news' search is about that.
Also.. I don't like pages with the look and feel that that one has, I know modern pages tend to be like that, but I prefer other kinds of formatting. Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm no longer in your target demographics.
These days I'm most interested in economics and politics because I believe that our most important problems right now are in this realm (eg. poverty, job automation, healthcare costs, housing prices, college prices). The Javascript framework wars are laughably insignificant compared to these problems, yet unlike web development, there aren't enough logically-minded people really tackling these problems. Unfortunately there's probably no job out there that I could realistically obtain that would pay me to work on these problems, thus I'm just saving money for retirement and learning on the side.
I'm smart. I think I'm rational. I'm not self-less enough to give up my and my family's financial security to leave the field to tilt at these particular windmills. (I'm unconvinced that any single politician, even the President, could change the systemic problems our system is facing, to say nothing of the likelihood that any individual would be cast aside at some point during the election tournament ladder.)
When I'm outdoors and active, I am so much happier. If I am on a multi-day outdoor trip to hike or rock climb, I feel like a completely different person. This is especially true on long trips that last more than a week. I have much less stress. I smile compulsively, instead of baring my usual strained expression. I have more energy. You might think at first that is simply because I am on vacation and I don't have to think about work obligations, but when I am on a normal (non-outdoor) type of vacation, I don't get the same feeling at all. I think it has more to do with the outdoor environment and physical activity.
I recently met someone who works as a park ranger, and I became envious of her job. I would love to patrol the woods all day as a ranger, or to be a mail carrier walking from house to house. I make much more money as a programmer, but "money cannot buy happiness", and I wonder often if I should change course.
But I've never tried applying, because I have no retail experience, and my work experience is mostly as a lone-wolf remote developer or indie developer (also I'm middle-aged now). Always thought I'd be laughed out of the interview. But I still think one day I'd like to try.
Nonetheless, I say go for it. You would learn a ton and probably become the best kind of coffee snob, one who can back it up with chops ;)
Careful about the drudge work though (especially cleaning floors/toilets at the end of the day), and if you're not used to spending all day on your feet you'll feel pretty sore at the end of the first few days!
I made the effort to befriend the baristas since I see them every day anyway. Eventually asked one of them to teach me during slow hours and I started to make my own drink each time I came in. One of them baristas ended up referring me to a different cafe (allowed me to avoid the awkward conversation of a weird looking resume) and I passed the interview by making decent drinks.
This line is beautiful. :)
Sometime's it's difficult for me to get motivated to push out code when it's just for myself.
They have such high margins on individual drinks (and people will totally buy a pastry if the coffee is free) that this shouldn't cost too much. Plus you can always make the puzzles harder, or have 2 or 3 easyish ones and then graduate people onto harder ones that they'll take a few days to solve.
You can imagine how to decorate the place - blackboards for walls, encourage the customers to use them to practise the spare puzzles lying around today, etc...
If I found a local cafe that paid that much attention to the experience, I'd certainly apply there. But I find many small cafes focus only on the coffee product, but not how the customer feels about the product.
Dead Comment