I don’t entirely subscribe to the first paragraph – I’ve never worked at a place so dear to me that spurred me to spend time thinking about its architecture (beyond the usual rants). Other than that, spot on
I had the same issue with gamedev industry, but thankfully Ive very quickly realized that’s how work works, and you usually have a choice - either earn a good living being a code monkey, or find a job in a small company that has passion, but they won’t be able to afford paying you well, or do it in your free time as a hobby. Capitalism and passion doesn’t work together.
So I went to work part-time in cybersecurity, where the money is enough to reasonably sustain me, and use the free time to work on games in my free time. Recently, Ive picked up an amazing second part time job in a small local indie studio that is exactly the kind of environment I was looking for, with passion behind their projects - but they simply can’t afford to pay a competitive wage. But I’m not there for the money, so Ibdon’t mind and am happy to help them. Since there are no investors whose pocket you fill, but the company is owned by a bunch of my friends, I have no issue with being underpaid.
But it’s important to realize this as soon as possible, before trying to make a living with something you’re passionate about will burn you out. A job has one purpose - earn you a living. Companies will exploit every single penny they can out of you, so fuck them, don’t give them anything more than a bare minimum, and keep your energy for your own projects.
And be carefull with trying to earn a living on your own - because whatever you do, no matter how passionate are you, if it’s your only income and your life depends on it, you will eventually have to make compromises to get by. It’s better to keep money separate from whatever you like doing, and just keep your passion pure.
EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention one important thing - I’m fortunate to not have children, share living costs with a partner, and live in a city with good public transport, so no need for a car, and free healthcare. I suppose that makes it a lot more easier to get by with just a part time.
either earn a good living being a code monkey, or find a job in a small company that has passion
crazy idea: let’s publicly fund FOSS projects so devs working on stuff they like with a passion can actually make a good living and enable sustainable non-profits to hire expertise, marketing and all the stuff a company needs
the result would be actually good software and happy devs
Ok let me know how you plan on getting other people to fund that.
Public funds.
There actually are lots of initiatives (e.g. https://bigdatastack.eu/european-open-source-initiative ) but it’s still young and there are multiple problems between available public money and contributors actually earning a salary.
Money is not the problem.
I believe the author got the wrong job position. If your job title is something like ‘software developer’, yeah you are measured by the amount of lines of code. You should aim for a senior role such as ‘system architect’ or ‘technical lead’, then you have some kind of guidelines from the sales side of business, and your job is to turn them into requirements and produce the final product, and you choose the tech stack and other details that are inconsequential for sales bug will get the programmers flinging keyboards.
I agree.
One can’t claim to love programming while calling the act of writing code being a code monkey. Whatever they actually love about the process may not exist in the industry.
I would suggest they explore alternative roles and perhaps alternative industries. They sound like they are new to the industry so their ability to land a senior role is likely to lead to different disappointments.
The best way to do something, often isn’t the best way to implement something. That’s why this is a senior role. The author does not appear to understand this concept and will be horribly disappointed when their perfect architecture is ignored by the realities of development.
I am genuinely so thankful for my job. Small start up where the founder is funding the whole thing himself and actually works as a dev as he’s able.
The amount of autonomy I’ve had since day 1 is wonderful. I put in a lot of time because I enjoy the work. My pay is a little low but not bad and usually increases by a lot each year. We’re 100% remote.
I just can’t imagine willingly leaving after reading the nonsense that most of you are dealing with. I got so lucky and you can pry my current job from my cold, dead hands.
Unionize
I’m starting to think that “good code” is simply a myth. They’ve drilled a lot of “best practices” into me during my masters, yet no matter how mich you try, you will eventually end up with something overengineered, or a new feature or a bug that’s really difficult to squeeze into whatever you’ve chosen.
But, ok, that doesn’t proove anything, maybe I’m just a vad programmer.
What made me sceptical however isn’t that I never managed to do it right in any of my projects, but the last two years of experience working on porting games, some of them well-known and larger games, to consoles.
I’ve already seen several codebases, each one with different take on how to make the core game architecture, and each one inevitably had some horrible issues that turned up during bugfixing. Making changes was hard, it was either overengineersled and almost impenetrable, or we had to resort tonugly hacks since there simply wasn’t a way how to do it properly without rewriting a huge chunk.
Right now, my whole prpgramming knowledge about game aechitecture is a list of “this desn’t work in the long run”, and if I were to start a new project, I’d be really at loss about what the fuck should i choose. It’s a hopeless battle, every aproach I’ve seen or tried still ran into problems.
And I think this may be authors problem - ot’s really easy to see that something doesn’t work. " I’d have done it diferently" or “There has to be a better way” is something that you notice very quickly. But I’m certain that watever would he propose, it’d just lead to a different set of problems. And I suspect that’s what may ve happening with his leads not letting him stick his nose into stuff. They have probably seen that before, at it rarely helps.
There’s bad code and then there’s worse code. “Best practices” might help you to avoid writing worse code.
Good code might appear occasionally. In the rare event when it’s also useful, people will start to have opinions about what it should do. Suddenly requirements change and now it’s bad code.
