Approaching obsolescence
Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you. I’m easing into retirement. Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out. Why? I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked. Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”. Overall, what has burnt me out is *complexity *and *instability*. I’ll break those topics down a bit. Everything in modern IT is *complicated *and *fragile*. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all. That leads naturally to the problem of *dependencies*. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on. I often hit incomprehensible blocker *problems *for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right. *The Web* -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight. *Git *-- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun. *Fads *-- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon. Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head. - Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. - I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. - I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. - My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). - Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. - Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. - My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary. In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned. I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came. *Greg Keogh*
I will very much miss you Greg. Your anger at the things you mentioned acted as a proxy for mine, so I didn't have to get angry myself. Whenever I was frustrated, I knew I wasn't alone. Thank you for always taking the time to list your trevails. I learnt quite a few things along the way. Good luck with all you do and I genuinely hope you enjoy your time in the garden. Cheers Dave On Mon, 7 Oct 2024, 12:09 Greg Keogh via ozdotnet, <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you.
I’m easing into retirement.
Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out.
Why?
I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked.
Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”.
Overall, what has burnt me out is *complexity *and *instability*. I’ll break those topics down a bit.
Everything in modern IT is *complicated *and *fragile*. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all.
That leads naturally to the problem of *dependencies*. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on.
I often hit incomprehensible blocker *problems *for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right.
*The Web* -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight.
*Git *-- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun.
*Fads *-- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon.
Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head.
- Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. - I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. - I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. - My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). - Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. - Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. - My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary.
In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned.
I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came.
*Greg Keogh* -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
Indeed. Who is going to pick up the batton of being so eloquently pissed off? On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 12:30, David Burstin via ozdotnet < ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
I will very much miss you Greg. Your anger at the things you mentioned acted as a proxy for mine, so I didn't have to get angry myself. Whenever I was frustrated, I knew I wasn't alone.
Thank you for always taking the time to list your trevails. I learnt quite a few things along the way.
Good luck with all you do and I genuinely hope you enjoy your time in the garden.
Cheers Dave
On Mon, 7 Oct 2024, 12:09 Greg Keogh via ozdotnet, <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you.
I’m easing into retirement.
Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out.
Why?
I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked.
Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”.
Overall, what has burnt me out is *complexity *and *instability*. I’ll break those topics down a bit.
Everything in modern IT is *complicated *and *fragile*. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all.
That leads naturally to the problem of *dependencies*. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on.
I often hit incomprehensible blocker *problems *for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right.
*The Web* -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight.
*Git *-- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun.
*Fads *-- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon.
Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head.
- Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. - I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. - I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. - My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). - Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. - Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. - My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary.
In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned.
I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came.
*Greg Keogh* -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
-- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
Good luck with it, Greg. I will miss your emails here. I read your email below and can relate to 99% of it. In particular, it’s ridiculous what now passes for software engineering. The engineering aspect seems long gone. “Oops something went wrong” is now standard error handling. I also learned to use systems in the days where, when something went wrong, people wanted to know why, and they fixed it. It’s probably increasing complexity that’s stopped real exploration of issues. And the dependency pain is also beyond crazy. Every time I open a VS project that I haven’t opened for 3 months, I know I’m going to spend hours, just trying to get back to where I was last time I opened it. I had one recently that I just couldn’t solve. After 4 hours, I felt I was further from where I started. It was just endless circular dependencies in libraries that I didn’t write, and that the authors had used “to save time”. Initial development time is always the metric, never ongoing maintenance and development. The other big aspect is the churn. You mentioned web apps. I’ve watched those teams constantly rebuilding what they already had, endlessly for over 20 years. It’s interesting to imagine where we could have been if they’d just kept moving forward instead of in a constant rebuilding mindset. I’m just glad that I’ve been spending most of my time in data and analytics, but sadly, those teams are now affected by the same illness. Regards, Greg Dr Greg Low 1300SQLSQL (1300 775 775) office | +61 419201410 mobile SQL Down Under | Web: https://sqldownunder.com<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sqldownunder.com_&d=DwMFAg&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=2rgtwrXggQFZiZbisdwDooYFalucb-vLhjG0McaanBZKn0UVuognuHqfHnjp2AVc&m=I23jyX4AKIv9q2x7A3CQAer9PGCjq8R6DwW7BE1IAhZ1JbigKMrMPRCjs6AqW7h3&s=o3oFliHztOF8D9Nbqaa7KQdqC-zkQNXWl4IqnEG58Wc&e=> | About Greg: https://about.me/greg.low<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__about.me_greg.low&d=DwMFAg&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=2rgtwrXggQFZiZbisdwDooYFalucb-vLhjG0McaanBZKn0UVuognuHqfHnjp2AVc&m=I23jyX4AKIv9q2x7A3CQAer9PGCjq8R6DwW7BE1IAhZ1JbigKMrMPRCjs6AqW7h3&s=NsAibgiqfCxsyc8m2DBKogKQcs3OqE3mkyCjmpoYxTk&e=> From: kirsten greed via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Sent: Monday, 7 October 2024 12:49 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Cc: Greg Keogh <gfkeogh@gmail.com>; David Burstin <david.burstin@gmail.com>; kirsten greed <kirsten.greed@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Approaching obsolescence Indeed. Who is going to pick up the batton of being so eloquently pissed off? On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 12:30, David Burstin via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>> wrote: I will very much miss you Greg. Your anger at the things you mentioned acted as a proxy for mine, so I didn't have to get angry myself. Whenever I was frustrated, I knew I wasn't alone. Thank you for always taking the time to list your trevails. I learnt quite a few things along the way. Good luck with all you do and I genuinely hope you enjoy your time in the garden. Cheers Dave On Mon, 7 Oct 2024, 12:09 Greg Keogh via ozdotnet, <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>> wrote: Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you. I’m easing into retirement. Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out. Why? I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked. Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”. Overall, what has burnt me out is complexity and instability. I’ll break those topics down a bit. Everything in modern IT is complicated and fragile. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all. That leads naturally to the problem of dependencies. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on. I often hit incomprehensible blocker problems for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right. The Web -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight. Git -- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun. Fads -- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon. Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head. * Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. * I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. * I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. * My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). * Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. * Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. * My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary. In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned. I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came. Greg Keogh -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/ -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
Hi Greg, Bring back dumb terminals and vt100s when life was easy and predictable. Many of us have had the same experience as you what you have expressed. Perhaps after a nice break of constant weed killing you might get a new lease on life and comeback to do some development as a new framework to beat all frameworks is magically invented (but requires rewrite of all existing working systems). Kind Regards, Steven Parish Software Architect [signature_656824960] BusinessCraft Pty Ltd | www.businesscraft.com.au<http://www.businesscraft.com.au/> | M: 0417 688 599| T:02 4965 5555 | Level 1, 418-422 Hunter Street, Newcastle, NSW 2300 From: Dr Greg Low via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Date: Monday, 7 October 2024 at 1:10 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Cc: Greg Keogh <gfkeogh@gmail.com>, David Burstin <david.burstin@gmail.com>, kirsten greed <kirsten.greed@gmail.com>, Dr Greg Low <greg@sqldownunder.com> Subject: RE: Approaching obsolescence Good luck with it, Greg. I will miss your emails here. I read your email below and can relate to 99% of it. In particular, it’s ridiculous what now passes for software engineering. The engineering aspect seems long gone. “Oops something went wrong” is now standard error handling. I also learned to use systems in the days where, when something went wrong, people wanted to know why, and they fixed it. It’s probably increasing complexity that’s stopped real exploration of issues. And the dependency pain is also beyond crazy. Every time I open a VS project that I haven’t opened for 3 months, I know I’m going to spend hours, just trying to get back to where I was last time I opened it. I had one recently that I just couldn’t solve. After 4 hours, I felt I was further from where I started. It was just endless circular dependencies in libraries that I didn’t write, and that the authors had used “to save time”. Initial development time is always the metric, never ongoing maintenance and development. The other big aspect is the churn. You mentioned web apps. I’ve watched those teams constantly rebuilding what they already had, endlessly for over 20 years. It’s interesting to imagine where we could have been if they’d just kept moving forward instead of in a constant rebuilding mindset. I’m just glad that I’ve been spending most of my time in data and analytics, but sadly, those teams are now affected by the same illness. Regards, Greg Dr Greg Low 1300SQLSQL (1300 775 775) office | +61 419201410 mobile SQL Down Under | Web: https://sqldownunder.com<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sqldownunder.com_&d=DwMFAg&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=2rgtwrXggQFZiZbisdwDooYFalucb-vLhjG0McaanBZKn0UVuognuHqfHnjp2AVc&m=I23jyX4AKIv9q2x7A3CQAer9PGCjq8R6DwW7BE1IAhZ1JbigKMrMPRCjs6AqW7h3&s=o3oFliHztOF8D9Nbqaa7KQdqC-zkQNXWl4IqnEG58Wc&e=> | About Greg: https://about.me/greg.low<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__about.me_greg.low&d=DwMFAg&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=2rgtwrXggQFZiZbisdwDooYFalucb-vLhjG0McaanBZKn0UVuognuHqfHnjp2AVc&m=I23jyX4AKIv9q2x7A3CQAer9PGCjq8R6DwW7BE1IAhZ1JbigKMrMPRCjs6AqW7h3&s=NsAibgiqfCxsyc8m2DBKogKQcs3OqE3mkyCjmpoYxTk&e=> From: kirsten greed via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Sent: Monday, 7 October 2024 12:49 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Cc: Greg Keogh <gfkeogh@gmail.com>; David Burstin <david.burstin@gmail.com>; kirsten greed <kirsten.greed@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Approaching obsolescence Indeed. Who is going to pick up the batton of being so eloquently pissed off? On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 12:30, David Burstin via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>> wrote: I will very much miss you Greg. Your anger at the things you mentioned acted as a proxy for mine, so I didn't have to get angry myself. Whenever I was frustrated, I knew I wasn't alone. Thank you for always taking the time to list your trevails. I learnt quite a few things along the way. Good luck with all you do and I genuinely hope you enjoy your time in the garden. Cheers Dave On Mon, 7 Oct 2024, 12:09 Greg Keogh via ozdotnet, <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>> wrote: Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you. I’m easing into retirement. Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out. Why? I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked. Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”. Overall, what has burnt me out is complexity and instability. I’ll break those topics down a bit. Everything in modern IT is complicated and fragile. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all. That leads naturally to the problem of dependencies. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on. I often hit incomprehensible blocker problems for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right. The Web -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight. Git -- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun. Fads -- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon. Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head. * Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. * I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. * I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. * My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). * Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. * Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. * My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary. In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned. I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came. Greg Keogh -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/ -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/ Disclaimer The information contained in this e-mail and any attachments are strictly private and confidential. This e-mail should only be read by the intended addressee. If you are not the intended addressee, you are strictly prohibited from using, reproducing, disclosing, or distributing the information contained herein and any attached files and/or documents. Unless stated otherwise, this email represents only the views of the sender and not the views of BusinessCraft. Before opening or using any files and/or attachments, we recommend you run your own virus protection, as although we will not knowingly transmit a virus, BusinessCraft accepts no liability for virus transmission
I feel I sit in the same boat, although I simply got severely bored with the mundane repetitive tasks that we all need to do just to keep things working. I am so glad copilot came along to help me with the mundane tasks so that I can focus more on the things that matter. I think that will probably keep me going hopefully for the next 10 years. On Mon, 7 Oct 2024, 1:08 pm Dr Greg Low via ozdotnet, <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Good luck with it, Greg. I will miss your emails here. I read your email below and can relate to 99% of it.
In particular, it’s ridiculous what now passes for software engineering. The engineering aspect seems long gone.
“Oops something went wrong” is now standard error handling. I also learned to use systems in the days where, when something went wrong, people wanted to know why, and they fixed it. It’s probably increasing complexity that’s stopped real exploration of issues.
And the dependency pain is also beyond crazy. Every time I open a VS project that I haven’t opened for 3 months, I know I’m going to spend hours, just trying to get back to where I was last time I opened it. I had one recently that I just couldn’t solve. After 4 hours, I felt I was further from where I started. It was just endless circular dependencies in libraries that I didn’t write, and that the authors had used “to save time”. Initial development time is always the metric, never ongoing maintenance and development.
The other big aspect is the churn. You mentioned web apps. I’ve watched those teams constantly rebuilding what they already had, endlessly for over 20 years. It’s interesting to imagine where we could have been if they’d just kept moving forward instead of in a constant rebuilding mindset.
I’m just glad that I’ve been spending most of my time in data and analytics, but sadly, those teams are now affected by the same illness.
Regards,
Greg
Dr Greg Low
1300SQLSQL (1300 775 775) office | +61 419201410 mobile
SQL Down Under | Web: https://sqldownunder.com <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sqldownunder.com_&d=DwM...> | About Greg: https://about.me/greg.low <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__about.me_greg.low&d=DwM...>
*From:* kirsten greed via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> *Sent:* Monday, 7 October 2024 12:49 PM *To:* ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> *Cc:* Greg Keogh <gfkeogh@gmail.com>; David Burstin < david.burstin@gmail.com>; kirsten greed <kirsten.greed@gmail.com> *Subject:* Re: Approaching obsolescence
Indeed. Who is going to pick up the batton of being so eloquently pissed off?
On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 12:30, David Burstin via ozdotnet < ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
I will very much miss you Greg. Your anger at the things you mentioned acted as a proxy for mine, so I didn't have to get angry myself. Whenever I was frustrated, I knew I wasn't alone.
Thank you for always taking the time to list your trevails. I learnt quite a few things along the way.
Good luck with all you do and I genuinely hope you enjoy your time in the garden.
Cheers
Dave
On Mon, 7 Oct 2024, 12:09 Greg Keogh via ozdotnet, <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you.
I’m easing into retirement.
Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out.
Why?
I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked.
Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”.
Overall, what has burnt me out is *complexity *and *instability*. I’ll break those topics down a bit.
Everything in modern IT is *complicated *and *fragile*. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all.
That leads naturally to the problem of *dependencies*. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on.
I often hit incomprehensible blocker *problems *for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right.
*The Web* -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight.
*Git *-- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun.
*Fads *-- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon.
Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head.
- Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. - I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. - I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. - My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). - Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. - Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. - My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary.
In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned.
I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came.
*Greg Keogh*
-- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
-- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
-- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
Here me out .. I have this new idea .. we take a declarative language like xml and mix it inline with an ecma style language .. to build ui Nobody’s done this before … righ … Greg +1 on your points sadly the industry often ignores the past to make the new all over again with less If I knew what I now know today I would have worked 100x harder on wpf and Silverlight vision Today I work mostly with c++ and its full circle for me --- Regards, Scott Barnes On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 11:10 AM, Greg Keogh via ozdotnet < ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you.
I’m easing into retirement.
Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out.
Why?
I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked.
Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”.
Overall, what has burnt me out is *complexity *and *instability*. I’ll break those topics down a bit.
Everything in modern IT is *complicated *and *fragile*. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all.
That leads naturally to the problem of *dependencies*. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on.
I often hit incomprehensible blocker *problems *for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right.
*The Web* -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight.
*Git *-- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun.
*Fads *-- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon.
Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head.
- Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. - I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. - I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. - My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). - Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. - Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. - My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary.
In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned.
I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came.
*Greg Keogh* -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
Interesting reading this thread. I learned to code in 78 and have been doing this as a pro for nearly 40 years. I'm really sorry you're burning out mate. Me? I feel completely the opposite. So many new things to learn. So many new people to work with. So many interesting problems to solve that I would never have thought about. Computers and software still fill me with wonder and awe despite me never having touched an assembler in 30 years. Or perhaps it's because I took a decision decades ago that I hated ui work. So much effort for so little reward. I don't know. But I feel more charged these days than I ever was when I was doing grunt programming, scouring books and obscure documents to solve problems. Also I'm sure the new ai tools we're getting are making a massive positive difference to me feeling this way. I hope the change will bring the joy of making things back to you Greg. All over YouTube, I follow creators who've moved on from software to making things out of real materials. Perhaps that's where we all go one day. Preet On Mon, 7 Oct 2024, 21:18 Scott via ozdotnet, <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Here me out .. I have this new idea .. we take a declarative language like xml and mix it inline with an ecma style language .. to build ui
Nobody’s done this before … righ …
Greg +1 on your points sadly the industry often ignores the past to make the new all over again with less
If I knew what I now know today I would have worked 100x harder on wpf and Silverlight vision
Today I work mostly with c++ and its full circle for me
--- Regards, Scott Barnes
On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 11:10 AM, Greg Keogh via ozdotnet < ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you.
I’m easing into retirement.
Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out.
Why?
I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked.
Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”.
Overall, what has burnt me out is *complexity *and *instability*. I’ll break those topics down a bit.
Everything in modern IT is *complicated *and *fragile*. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all.
That leads naturally to the problem of *dependencies*. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on.
I often hit incomprehensible blocker *problems *for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right.
*The Web* -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight.
*Git *-- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun.
*Fads *-- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon.
Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head.
- Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. - I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. - I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. - My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). - Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. - Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. - My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary.
In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned.
I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came.
*Greg Keogh* -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
-- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
It’s actually a really topical discussion for me at present. A while back, I had a friend who noted that he loved seeing people who’d built a lifetime technical career. I’ve been building a new site, a video podcast, etc. for “Tech Career for Life”. For the podcasts, I’m keen to have a number of people who’ve been in the industry for a long time, to talk about what they did, what they think is important for building a long-term successful career in tech, and the advice they wish they’d had early on, that might help someone starting out today, or who’s in a rut. I’ve got a few shows pre-recorded with some interesting people. So, if a few of you are interested in being featured in the video podcasts, little reply me to let me know, and we’ll work out a plan. I’d like to make it a useful resource. Regards, Greg Dr Greg Low 1300SQLSQL (1300 775 775) office | +61 419201410 mobile SQL Down Under | Web: https://sqldownunder.com<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sqldownunder.com_&d=DwMFAg&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=2rgtwrXggQFZiZbisdwDooYFalucb-vLhjG0McaanBZKn0UVuognuHqfHnjp2AVc&m=I23jyX4AKIv9q2x7A3CQAer9PGCjq8R6DwW7BE1IAhZ1JbigKMrMPRCjs6AqW7h3&s=o3oFliHztOF8D9Nbqaa7KQdqC-zkQNXWl4IqnEG58Wc&e=> | About Greg: https://about.me/greg.low<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__about.me_greg.low&d=DwMFAg&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=2rgtwrXggQFZiZbisdwDooYFalucb-vLhjG0McaanBZKn0UVuognuHqfHnjp2AVc&m=I23jyX4AKIv9q2x7A3CQAer9PGCjq8R6DwW7BE1IAhZ1JbigKMrMPRCjs6AqW7h3&s=NsAibgiqfCxsyc8m2DBKogKQcs3OqE3mkyCjmpoYxTk&e=> From: Preet Sangha via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Sent: Monday, 7 October 2024 9:11 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Cc: Greg Keogh <gfkeogh@gmail.com>; Preet Sangha <preetsangha@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Approaching obsolescence Interesting reading this thread. I learned to code in 78 and have been doing this as a pro for nearly 40 years. I'm really sorry you're burning out mate. Me? I feel completely the opposite. So many new things to learn. So many new people to work with. So many interesting problems to solve that I would never have thought about. Computers and software still fill me with wonder and awe despite me never having touched an assembler in 30 years. Or perhaps it's because I took a decision decades ago that I hated ui work. So much effort for so little reward. I don't know. But I feel more charged these days than I ever was when I was doing grunt programming, scouring books and obscure documents to solve problems. Also I'm sure the new ai tools we're getting are making a massive positive difference to me feeling this way. I hope the change will bring the joy of making things back to you Greg. All over YouTube, I follow creators who've moved on from software to making things out of real materials. Perhaps that's where we all go one day. Preet On Mon, 7 Oct 2024, 21:18 Scott via ozdotnet, <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>> wrote: Here me out .. I have this new idea .. we take a declarative language like xml and mix it inline with an ecma style language .. to build ui Nobody’s done this before … righ … Greg +1 on your points sadly the industry often ignores the past to make the new all over again with less If I knew what I now know today I would have worked 100x harder on wpf and Silverlight vision Today I work mostly with c++ and its full circle for me --- Regards, Scott Barnes On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 11:10 AM, Greg Keogh via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>> wrote: Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you. I’m easing into retirement. Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out. Why? I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked. Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”. Overall, what has burnt me out is complexity and instability. I’ll break those topics down a bit. Everything in modern IT is complicated and fragile. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all. That leads naturally to the problem of dependencies. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on. I often hit incomprehensible blocker problems for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right. The Web -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight. Git -- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun. Fads -- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon. Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head. * Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. * I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. * I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. * My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). * Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. * Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. * My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary. In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned. I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came. Greg Keogh -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/ -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
Greg, what would OzDotNet/AusDotNet be without you on it? It’s been a pleasure interacting with you here and catching up at various events (including an airport in the Whitsundays!) over the past 20 odd years. Enjoy that retirement. Don’t be a stranger. From: Greg Keogh via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Sent: Monday, October 7, 2024 12:08 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Cc: Greg Keogh <gfkeogh@gmail.com> Subject: Approaching obsolescence Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you. I’m easing into retirement. Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out. Why? I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked. Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”. Overall, what has burnt me out is complexity and instability. I’ll break those topics down a bit. Everything in modern IT is complicated and fragile. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all. That leads naturally to the problem of dependencies. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on. I often hit incomprehensible blocker problems for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right. The Web -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight. Git -- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun. Fads -- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon. Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head. * Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. * I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. * I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. * My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). * Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. * Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. * My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary. In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned. I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came. Greg Keogh
Hey Greg, This whole email resonated, it's software garbage piled on top of garbage on top of garbage for decades, yet somehow it runs the world. 😂 These bits definitely hit all the way home though: * /I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. / * /I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails./ It works on my machine so often that we just follow the old joke and package up and ship the whole machine now (docker, k8s). I've also lost count of the times everything is compiling then suddenly a mysterious version mismatch error a few hours later requiring the .vs folder or nuget cache blown away, astounding. AI will surely save us. /s 😉 Enjoy the garden, the list won't be the same! cheers, Tony On 7/10/2024 11:07, Greg Keogh via ozdotnet wrote:
Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you.
I’m easing into retirement.
Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out.
Why?
I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked.
Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”.
Overall, what has burnt me out is /complexity /and /instability/. I’ll break those topics down a bit.
Everything in modern IT is *complicated *and *fragile*. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all.
That leads naturally to the problem of *dependencies*. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on.
I often hit incomprehensible blocker *problems *for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right.
*The Web* -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight.
*Git *-- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun.
*Fads *-- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon.
Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head.
* Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. * I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. * I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. * My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). * Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. * Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. * My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary.
In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned.
I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came.
/Greg Keogh/
My biggest gripes at the moment are (1) not enough greenfield projects anymore. (2) wishing that I could get some more serious and consistent time on enterprise tech stack, such as AWS, k8s, Github Actions etc. I do get to touch them occasionally, but it always seems to be some adhoc bits and pieces and nothing that is a meaningful chunk of work, and by the time I get to it again, I've forgotten it all again. (3) Wishing I could do some sort of event driven architecture or something new like AI. I have all these skills and they give me legacy crap. Meanwhile some projects do pop up, but they are implemented elsewhere. It irritates the crap out of me. (4) Having to support so many legacy projects. I have upgraded a bunch by stealth and luckily I was backed by my boss, but they do have a policy of "it aint broken so don't fix it" so it could have been worse. (5) Having to support so many legacy projects that are on tech stacks that turned out to be faddish. If someone tells you to use NodeRed because it is low code, don't believe them - it's a dog's breakfast of graphical icons with no easy way to debug it. I spent years on Angular but these days don't want to go anywhere near it. They did Angular with a nodejs backend so no one in my .net team really wants to touch it. They sacked the perl guy so yay, my team has to know how to support a couple of perl products too. (6) Expecting to do so much more with so much less. People leave and they won't replace them. My direct team has to support a whole bunch of apps but there are only 5 of us. (7) Wanting to be a contractor again because the pay is so much better, but knowing that high paying quality contract jobs seem to be few and far between at the moment. Most companies don't want to hire a contractor team lead. Also feeling that I'm underpaid by about $30k. Probably just means I should find a new job, but I'm a team lead and that reduces the size of the market for me in a time when there doesn't appear to be many quality jobs on offer. Also, the thought of having to do the hiring dance again. Argh! On Tue, Oct 8, 2024 at 8:07 PM Tony McGee via ozdotnet < ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Hey Greg, This whole email resonated, it's software garbage piled on top of garbage on top of garbage for decades, yet somehow it runs the world. 😂 These bits definitely hit all the way home though:
- * I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. * - * I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails.*
It works on my machine so often that we just follow the old joke and package up and ship the whole machine now (docker, k8s). I've also lost count of the times everything is compiling then suddenly a mysterious version mismatch error a few hours later requiring the .vs folder or nuget cache blown away, astounding. AI will surely save us. /s 😉
Enjoy the garden, the list won't be the same!
cheers, Tony
On 7/10/2024 11:07, Greg Keogh via ozdotnet wrote:
Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you.
I’m easing into retirement.
Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out.
Why?
I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked.
Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”.
Overall, what has burnt me out is *complexity *and *instability*. I’ll break those topics down a bit.
Everything in modern IT is *complicated *and *fragile*. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all.
That leads naturally to the problem of *dependencies*. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on.
I often hit incomprehensible blocker *problems *for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right.
*The Web* -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight.
*Git *-- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun.
*Fads *-- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon.
Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head.
- Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. - I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. - I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. - My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). - Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. - Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. - My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary.
In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned.
I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came.
*Greg Keogh*
-- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
Hi Greg Everything you say resonates with me, I have been thinking for a few days, how should I respond.... Then I saw this... [image: image.png] Take care out there and find what you want to do, do it well Dont do what some other person wants you to do, do what floats your boat Us old farts have helped far too many other people make a dollar, now it is time for us to do whatever All the best Greg H On Wed, Oct 9, 2024 at 3:27 PM Tony Wright via ozdotnet < ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
My biggest gripes at the moment are (1) not enough greenfield projects anymore. (2) wishing that I could get some more serious and consistent time on enterprise tech stack, such as AWS, k8s, Github Actions etc. I do get to touch them occasionally, but it always seems to be some adhoc bits and pieces and nothing that is a meaningful chunk of work, and by the time I get to it again, I've forgotten it all again. (3) Wishing I could do some sort of event driven architecture or something new like AI. I have all these skills and they give me legacy crap. Meanwhile some projects do pop up, but they are implemented elsewhere. It irritates the crap out of me. (4) Having to support so many legacy projects. I have upgraded a bunch by stealth and luckily I was backed by my boss, but they do have a policy of "it aint broken so don't fix it" so it could have been worse. (5) Having to support so many legacy projects that are on tech stacks that turned out to be faddish. If someone tells you to use NodeRed because it is low code, don't believe them - it's a dog's breakfast of graphical icons with no easy way to debug it. I spent years on Angular but these days don't want to go anywhere near it. They did Angular with a nodejs backend so no one in my .net team really wants to touch it. They sacked the perl guy so yay, my team has to know how to support a couple of perl products too. (6) Expecting to do so much more with so much less. People leave and they won't replace them. My direct team has to support a whole bunch of apps but there are only 5 of us. (7) Wanting to be a contractor again because the pay is so much better, but knowing that high paying quality contract jobs seem to be few and far between at the moment. Most companies don't want to hire a contractor team lead. Also feeling that I'm underpaid by about $30k.
Probably just means I should find a new job, but I'm a team lead and that reduces the size of the market for me in a time when there doesn't appear to be many quality jobs on offer. Also, the thought of having to do the hiring dance again. Argh!
On Tue, Oct 8, 2024 at 8:07 PM Tony McGee via ozdotnet < ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Hey Greg, This whole email resonated, it's software garbage piled on top of garbage on top of garbage for decades, yet somehow it runs the world. 😂 These bits definitely hit all the way home though:
- * I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. * - * I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails.*
It works on my machine so often that we just follow the old joke and package up and ship the whole machine now (docker, k8s). I've also lost count of the times everything is compiling then suddenly a mysterious version mismatch error a few hours later requiring the .vs folder or nuget cache blown away, astounding. AI will surely save us. /s 😉
Enjoy the garden, the list won't be the same!
cheers, Tony
On 7/10/2024 11:07, Greg Keogh via ozdotnet wrote:
Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you.
I’m easing into retirement.
Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out.
Why?
I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked.
Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”.
Overall, what has burnt me out is *complexity *and *instability*. I’ll break those topics down a bit.
Everything in modern IT is *complicated *and *fragile*. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all.
That leads naturally to the problem of *dependencies*. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on.
I often hit incomprehensible blocker *problems *for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right.
*The Web* -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight.
*Git *-- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun.
*Fads *-- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon.
Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head.
- Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. - I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. - I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. - My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). - Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. - Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. - My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary.
In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned.
I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came.
*Greg Keogh*
-- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
-- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
Greg, You need to have a plan for what you're doing next. The brain is like anything else in the body... use it or lose it. On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 11:10, Greg Keogh via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Hello everyone, it's not Friday, but I have an announcement and tale that might interest you.
I’m easing into retirement.
Companies I’ve been working for are being sold, retired or are no longer developing new software. Running out of legacy work would drive a regular dev to seek new work, but in my case, I declined to create a LinkedIn page, or send out feelers through contacts for new work, because… I’m burnt out.
Why?
I learned to code in 1975 and became an official programmer in 1981. I wrote FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, assemblers and various JCLs and scripting languages on Honeywell, FACOM and IBM mainframes. Things were simpler back then of course because you moved inside the ecosystem of a particular manufacturer and had high-level support and voluminous and accurate documentation. If you wanted to solve a problem or do something edgy, then an answer was nearby. It was a different simpler world, but … everything worked.
Now, well into the 21st century of IT, everything doesn’t work. My wife often hears me shout from the other end of the house “Everything f***ing doesn’t work”. I also only semi-jokingly say I’ll have these words carved into my gravestone: “Everything f***ing doesn’t work all the f***ing time”.
Overall, what has burnt me out is *complexity *and *instability*. I’ll break those topics down a bit.
Everything in modern IT is *complicated *and *fragile*. Every new toolkit, platform, pattern, library, package, upgrade, etc is unlikely to install and work first time. I seem to spend more time getting things working and updated than I do actually writing software. In a typical working month I might have to juggle Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, Google, Amazon, Azure, .NET, Python, PowerShell and C++, and they all have different styles and cultures. Software engineering has fractured into so many overlapping pieces that I’m tired of trying to maintain competence in them all.
That leads naturally to the problem of *dependencies*. Just having so many moving parts with so many different versions available produces dependencies more complex than abstract algebra. How many times have you hit some kind of compile or runtime version conflict and spent hours trying to dig your way out of it? (A special salute to Mr Newtonsoft there!) Or you install A, but it needs B, which needs C, and so on.
I often hit incomprehensible blocker *problems *for which web searches produce absurd and conflicting suggestions which don’t work anyway. All I can do is futz around and change things randomly until things work again. I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know what went right.
*The Web* -- Browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the HTTP protocol, JSON and REST can all burn for eternity in fusing hellfire. About ten years ago I told my customers I refused to write any more web UI apps. However, I was forced to do so a few times and I’m still scarred by the horror. It’s just over 30 years since the web became public and we’re still attempting to render serious business apps using dumb HTML. HTML5 is the joke of the century (so far). I still lament the loss of Silverlight.
*Git *-- Someone is lucky I don’t own a gun.
*Fads *-- An exercise for the reader: name all the platforms, kits, patterns and frameworks that you know were once the coolest thing and now might only be found in history articles. An advanced exercise is to speculate on which currently cool things will be gone soon.
Finally, here is a list of typical things that give me the shits, just as they pop out of my head.
- Attempting to compile projects that have been idle for a year or more will usually fail due to changed dependencies or deprecations and it can take hours to get them going again. - I develop and test something with great care, then deploy it and it crashes. This is part of the general “it works on my machine” disease. - I can stop successful work on Friday night, then resume on Monday morning and everything utterly fails. - My USB microscope and music recording both stopped working recently, and it took me a week to discover that it was a block by Windows 11 app security (I thought it was a hardware or incompatibility problem due to lack of clear error messages). - Security! Walls, barriers and hurdles of security everywhere to crash through. Yes, I know we need security everywhere to stop the black hats, but it’s also stopping developers. Lord knows how many times I’ve hit run or debug on my own PC and I get “Access denied” and hours of research will be required. I’m also fed-up with ceaseless 2FA requests via email or SMS. - Everything about mobile devices. The ludicrous variety of devices and brands makes app development a nightmare. Then you must struggle through the variety of labyrinthine publishing processes. - My final entry is simply the tiny “thousand cuts” that torture you during development: version mismatches, inconsistent behaviour, strange errors, editor quirks, missing files, etc. All the little personal problems that slip between the cracks of bigger issues I’ve previously mentioned. Your mileage may vary.
In summary, being a software engineer is now so exhausting that after 40+ years of a generally enjoyable career immersed in programming and computer science I’ve reached a point I never thought would arrive… I’m burnt out. Even working on my hobby projects has become a burden because they suffer from many of the impediments previously mentioned.
I still plan to attend some upcoming conventions and Meetups, and I’ll be watching the forum, but my posts will diminish because I’m probably out trying to prevent the garden and house from disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came.
*Greg Keogh* -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
participants (12)
-
David Burstin -
David Connors -
David Kean -
Dr Greg Low -
Greg Harris -
Greg Keogh -
kirsten greed -
Preet Sangha -
Scott -
Steven Parish -
Tony McGee -
Tony Wright