Development king

I know one person - he is a good developer, but sheer cattle. When he starts talking, I want to fill his face, shut up as you like, just to not hear how right he is. And someone else listens to this extravagant, self-confident scum, they assent to him. Apparently, people love scum, and they should carefully consider why.

Half the trouble, if he was just joking, sort of, "development brings me so many dibs that I will work for two hours and hire three beggar doctors to cut my lawn." Worse when he says seriously: “You started writing code in vain. The irony of this industry is that by becoming a good developer, you acquire skills that lead you to the conclusion that being a developer is bad. ”

Recently, things have gone uphill with him, and where normal people rejoice and flourish, this guy seems to have completely rolled off the coils. We had a good drink, and he told me a lot of sincere shit, which, honestly, I would like to hear back.

Here he drinks and achs. Says:

- I come to the social security agency, like an idiot who started rubbish with them about new challenges and professional growth, and they nod quite. They make a stupid offer, the same as a carbon copy, only the amount grows. It’s ridiculous for the NDA not to let anyone merge these unique forits-if-not-equal-zeros. Wacky table, wacky comp. Comp is always weaker than you want. They are ready to pay you two hundred a month, but they can’t go broke to buy a piece of iron for 80 of them.

Stupid eychars, which are always ten times more than necessary, each of them says ten times more than necessary, they always have a stupid name, a stupid, officious nickname in a stupid Skype / slack that you will be forced to use. A stupid team lead who has been working here for a hundred years, who condescendingly neighing in a social security interview, that I confused Clone and CopyTo, and now, he lowered his gaze and repents for the ridiculous legacy and architecture. In the ass or something he found it in himself!

Then everything is as it should be. Gira, sprints, tasks always and everywhere are the same, ridiculous rallies. People who pretend to understand the non-existent difference between Scrum, Ajail and Kanban. Wise talk about how to do everything correctly. After which all one hell is done as wrong as possible. The timing is the same. There is no budget for remodeling architecture. Not that it was all such a terrible problem, but it is not at all what I dreamed about.

- And what did you dream about?

- I fell in love with the profession when I thought that these were dudes in the garage, with stupid hairstyles, in ridiculous clothes, for days hanging around something that had not happened yet. But this nichrome is not so. Every time you see a pattern, it needs to be automated, and where everything is automated, the enterprise begins - pragmatic and soulless. And this enterprise needs all the same dudes from the garage, but so that they no longer have fire in their eyes. Now they do not need to believe in technology, it is not profitable. They need to believe in the Ajail schedule of features, share business value, and on Fridays depict the whole office that they remember the name of their Something-There Solutions inc.

In general, dudes from the garage would have been thrown into the trash a long time ago, and would have recruited office intellectuals. But the trouble is, only dudes from the garage can write good code. This shit has now turned into a train that cannot be stopped. Today, if you are doing a startup, you spend the first earned dollar on one hundred eychars, so that they build your corporate culture and eychar brand.

And here I am, such a dude from the garage, spanking to work, taking a completely uninteresting task, sawing it on the sly. And everyone around me is so happy, sympathetic. They discuss where they would be better off embedding a zero check. They choose mitaps for the next week. REMEMBER the name of the company where they work. The code is ten times faster than me. Worse, but always faster. Damn, it seems that if I drag my dog ​​to work, even she will write code faster than me.

I really, really want to believe that all these people are pretending. That they, too, are not in a rush to do the same bullshit every day. Write one meaningless module after another. Select abstractions in the code until it can no longer be worked with as if he had no subject area. If they don’t pretend, I’m done.

“Well, that means you're finished, because you just measure people by yourself.” They may like everything.

- I did not believe that they were pretending, and decided to run away from this shit. I transferred to a remote place. I thought I would not see these spiritualized incomprehensibly than rye - everything will be okay. No matter how.

The remote is even worse. Eychary will get you everywhere. Managers too. While I was sitting in the office, at least I could not open a working messenger and mail. They wrote me tons of messages, which I completely do not care, but I did not read them, and it worked. There is no such luxury for remote workers.

The mentality of my compatriots is very simple. If you are a remote worker, then you are not working. We urgently need to call you on Skype, and discuss how you will check everything for zero. Each eychark in the company now considers it his duty to schedule a Skype meeting to discuss whether everything suits you. Even the damn techdir sometimes asks how are you. While I was working in the office, I did not even know that we had a technical director. Apparently, his job is to keep an eye on remote workers. There is only one plus - you can drink at work.

- Man, you’re so wet.

- Alcohol in general becomes a big part of life if you live it like me. I don’t believe in what I’m doing so, that the thought that I will forget about it even for a second fills me with joy. Understand correctly, I hate development, and I love it at the same time. If I were now offered to become a manager, or in general, anyone else with a large upgrade, I would not agree. I can’t give it up. I feel bad every day from what I’m doing, but I know for sure that if I don’t write the code, it will be even worse.

- Well, you constantly moan. Everyone would have your problems.

- I understand that sounds ridiculous for those in a real asshole. But I was in a real asshole. My first days in the army were hell. I grew up in good conditions. And here, on the first day, I come to the army canteen, they give me a plate of slops, a boiled egg and a bag of milk. I didn’t eat slops. And did not eat them for a very long time. I did not go to the toilet for more than a week because I did not understand how this could be done in the proposed circumstances.

There simply were a few holes in the floor, and partitions at face level. I didn’t wash the uniform for a long time, because there they suggested doing it in the SINKS. And now, the tenth day. On the eve, I still tried to wash the shape in the sink - very in vain. She did not become cleaner, but she became wet through. It would have dried out during the night, but one moron decided to smoke in the clean and jerk, the officer smelled, picked us up, and we stood in line at midnight and read the charter. Naturally dressed.

I stood in wet form. The next day, I marching along the parade ground for the fifth hour in a row, +32, my half-wet form is a piece of smelly bacon, my legs do not work, I almost didn’t eat, I didn’t smoke for a week, my stomach was full of shit. On the belt there is a flask from which you can not drink, because the soldier has a flask to be filled by three quarters. And you know what - I didn’t lose heart. I was a little taut, but I did not feel hopelessness. And now she is. But it is possible that if I am a soldier now moving to the future, and I listen to complaints about life from me, the developer, someone will get it in the soup.

- Man, you just burnt out, cool down, it will pass.

- I heard about that. Will not pass. I once took a vacation, went to the sea, drank on the beach for three weeks. When it came time to go home, I was struck by the thought that it would be better for me to put my wife and child on a train, and to run away myself, and to bum on the sea, never doing anything else.

A lot of time has passed since then, and I still hate my job. This is no longer burnout, I seem to have hated it from the moment I received my first task. The shit is that I hate everything else even more. I do not watch films, I do not read art books. My professional deformation does not allow me. I have to study development. Either you write the code, or you think how you will write it, or you read about how to write the code. I play the guitar, because while you are strumming, it’s easier to figure out at what level of abstraction the check for zero will lie most idiomatically.

- When it turns out idiomatic - it's a buzz.

- Yes, I learned to find a micro-buzz. I like to find elegant solutions, but this is a limited thing, because the tasks are the same. Four years ago, I often felt like I came up with an interesting solution. Now I almost never feel it. I like to come up with architecture, but even the architectural tasks are the same. From some point on, you kind of understand the principle, and any, even the most complex system seems quite understandable to you. You can easily decompose it into simpler components, experience has time to decide how they will work much faster and better than the mind.

This ceases to be a creative work, and turns into the selection of the most suitable pattern from your / read practice. I'm like a cloud architect from that meme that just connects the clouds with arrows. There is a mechanical buzz from typing code in a delicious VSCode, but I hate my code itself because it is the same type and terrible. There is a statistical thrill when I sometimes turn into a car for a week and move dozens of tasks from one column of jira to another. And I started trying to live these micro-buzzes. This did not work. It all stinks of enterprise shit from the enterprise.

“It stinks of you from the enterprise itself.”

- The debility of the situation is that I am also successful. Apparently, internal problems attract people. I dont know. I easily find a job, I am respected in teams. They constantly ask for advice, they do not press me that I work slowly. Raise sn without permission. Due to the fact that it hurts me to communicate with happy people from the industry (after all, I'm unhappy), I seem arrogant to them. Due to the fact that everyone speaks to me as arrogant, I became arrogant. People respect arrogant, I have no idea why. My real technical skill does not matter. I mean, it does not affect my position in the industry. Absolutely. Because of this, I am convinced that technically I am miserable.

- Type you arrogant because of self-doubt?

- Just living, and considering yourself shit is too hard. I need self-affirmation, like air. I learned not to be toxic at work, but it got worse. Because I exist not only at work. I’m sitting in some chat room for about thirty people, and I’m frustrated by the poor fellow who have not yet understood that I have nothing else behind my self-esteem, and my heavyweight Signor’s arguments trample them in the mud just because they respect me. I hate myself when I do this, but the thrill of being superior to at least someone is stronger than self-contempt. I hope the people I offended someday stop taking this shit seriously.

Recently, in a chat room, one girl disagreed with me. I don’t remember what the matter was there, but I, as always, rubbed some game for people. And she began to argue with me. I was in the context of her skills, age and character, I got angry and mixed her with shit. I am inside - a very insecure person, so I know very well what kind of strings I have to pull to make an insecure person hurt.

Here she is - a girl developer. Unsure of herself. Everything is very simple here, Russian culture unequivocally determines the female place in society, and she, having become a developer, goes against this. And the world has not yet managed to change, because all the way she is in doubt, and meets with cases that tell her that she is very deeply mistaken. And here I hit. At first, I easily convinced her that she was a crappy developer, then that crappy developers had no place in the industry, and finally I finished off with the fact that she was a crappy developer just because she was a girl, and she had no chance.

Of course, she was very hurt, because if I'm right, her whole life is a big mistake. And my reputation, speaking skills and technical pumping do not leave her any space to think that I could be wrong. I remember my feelings when I did this. I directly told myself - well, you and cattle. But for me it works simply: if you enter into an argument, there is no turning back. Blood is seething, someone is wrong on the Internet. If I do not trample into the earth anyone who disagrees with me, everyone will immediately understand that I am an impostor. They will take away all my money and positions from me, and they will throw me in the trash.

“You just shift the responsibility, but the goat is only you.”

- I do not shift responsibility, my uncertainty is my jamb. I blame others for letting me do this, letting them just because they consider me a good developer. Who is a good developer is right. It seems as if the thought does not fit in the head that a person can write good code at the same time, and be a jerk. And he can, I am a living example.

“Or you are a shitty developer.” Like a man.

“You know, being a good person — I don't believe that anymore.” As if this is not a real concept at all. When I do something that seems bad to me in my inner moral scape, I feel a slight discomfort - a voice of conscience tries to shout to me from under the water column.

But I don’t listen to him, I listen to the mind, which has long been accustomed to thinking of other people as something like Npc from a video game. It’s like I’m playing skyrim, and I have NPS friends, I even love them in a way. But when the Daedric prince asks to bring one of my friends to the slaughter, in exchange for hard rubber chain mail, I look for the first friend I got from NPS, and I say - well, let's go. Moreover, the chain mail itself is not really needed for me, for some reason I just decided to collect all the artifacts in the game. I think this feeling of unreality is due to the fact that now for the developer, reality and the computer world are one and the same. Sometimes I find myself thinking that I feel like in a movie, just walking through the woods. I spend so much time at the computer that the real world has become a fake for me.

- You just ruined the loot, that's all.

- With loot in general a separate story. It’s not very convenient for me to get so much money. For our city with you, the conventional 5 thousand dollars are insane grandmothers. Now I evaluate my skill approximately so, that is, I think that I am no worse than those developers who receive such amounts. I am almost sure that I am worth so much, but every time at the moment when I need to name the amount on the social security fund, I am very uncomfortable.

I sit like this, in training, my hair is unshaven, and I pronounce: 5-6 thousand dollars. I'm afraid to imagine how it looks from the outside. I justify myself simply. In a world where completely useless dumbasses earn millions for photos with their ass on Instagram, it’s not so scary that I get 10 times more than average for quite complicated technical work.

In addition, there is another side. In IT, everyone gets much more than they should. Developers, testers, HR, managers ... The fact that everyone else gets crazy money is an even more egregious ass, I think. For good, they should receive no more money than on equivalent positions in another industry. Eychar, receiving three times more than a doctor - it's just tin. But still, I am often ashamed of my wealth.

When I received an absolutely indecent offer for myself, I decided - now everything will work out. With money and in hell is not bad. Fool. It should have been remembered for a long time that it would not be better. It will never be better. I was a thousand times happier than now, when instead of school I was drinking with the guys at the construction site. So I got a mountain of money, went to the boutiques, scored two trolleys. Dressed up. Updated iron. He invented rich jokes, tested them on all his relatives. Another idiotic same-like-and-all-previous task started to cut, and nothing changed. My wife has become much happier, but it’s even worse for me, because I’m not happy, and when you feel bad, joyful people around me only annoy you.

- Well, you know, now a lot of people came into development for money. There is nothing wrong with that.

“I despise kapets.” They do not like programming, just their mummies forced them to go to universities for programmers, because now they get a lot.

But in general, these ridiculous people are even more useful to them than to me. At least they know what they want. They need to receive money, they take responsibility, are afraid of dismissal, worry about the company in which they work and for the product they make.

“Are you not afraid?”

“I'm not afraid of anything at all.” In my world, any business value is hostile. I kind of believe in some kind of clean, non-commercial programming, but I have never seen it and do not know how it looks. When I try to imagine the perfect code, an entree sheet with DI and tests pops up in my head. What I do at work is definitely not the kind of programming that I believe in. Therefore, I do not allow myself to respect my work, and the work of my colleagues, too.

No, of course I really like money, but they were never the motive. When I dreamed of becoming a programmer, I did not know that we get so much. I have no idea why I'm in development. They will fire me, the company will go bankrupt, the product will break - but I do not care. I'll find a new job, that's okay.

“It's just that your work is stupid.” You work for a soulless business and burn. There are people who are really doing something new.

- Yeah. I came to such people once. The social security passed, and a month later he realized that they didn’t need me to fuck. I am already poisoned by an enterprise. For me, a code that has not gone through eight stages of a review, is not covered by tests, is not documented, and is not coated with a hundred layers of abstraction - it's just a funny bunch of characters that some fool dumped into a git. It’s unthinkable for me to close four features per day. Words - do it so that it works and freeze in the master (God, they didn’t even have a politician on the github !!!) - now I can’t accept it. I left.

- Do not drive fast. There are many cool developers in the world who commit a bunch of code to cool open source projects every day.

“If they would give me their review code, they would smash it to pieces.” But more than anything, I would like to be like them. I'm a hundred times worse than them. As an arrogant person, I hate envy, but I envy terrible and black envy. Today it’s fashionable to give people the idea that everything is the same from birth, but hell, this is not at all. I have been learning to develop all my adult life, but I'm not Linus Torvalds and not Don Syme.

The fact that these bastards exist burns my last straw. The only thing that saved me was the belief that the problem was not in me, but in the industry. But since there is Linus, then I'm wrong. So I should not have become a developer. But the development catches worse than heroin, and I can’t even quit smoking.

“Do you know what I think?” You are an infantile moron and always have been, that's what I think.
You did not solve problems, did not take responsibility. You were constantly told about this, and you passed ears. You grew up in a rich family, used to that others solve any problem for you. And when it didn’t work, you simply waved it off.

Remember, Dad didn’t discourage you from the army after the second expulsion. What did you say then? "Dad is just out of sorts, everything is fine." But he was out of sorts for too long, and you went straight into a solid pile of shit. And now he’s back and you pretend that he’s no longer infantile. Like everyone suddenly began to take you seriously.

But that’s where the story of super-infantility began, buddy.You were hired not for skill, but because you are a talker and hung all the noodles on the dogs. Such a scumbag, like you, is easiest to work in large companies. Of course. The larger the enterprise, the easier it is to do nothing, the more money you will receive, and the easier life will be, right?

In this "easier" you are all understand. The army has not changed anything. The wife and children also did not change anything. Skill and cool work - did not change anything. You stupidly choose the easiest way all your life. The path of an asshole who only wants to receive. The poor people with whom you work do not understand that you are just a parasite who does not give a damn about what they do. If you were called to make a product that will never be released, you would run like a pretty one.

All your articles are the same lie to yourself. You pulled out some kind of failure of yours, worked it out well, asked the editor-friend to work on them with you. And he got what he wanted - commentators drowned you in the pros. Like your next infantile decision is the right one. But in fact - you're just a useless windbag.

- Yes, I'm not the best guy in the world. And certainly not the most useful. But I also have a question for you:

Why is it so easy for me in this industry?

Because it is a paradise for infantile shit that can do nothing but stupid programming. And it brings them such dividends that they don’t need to be able to do anything else - they will solve all the problems in their lives through development. The industry has replaced me with a rich family, where all problems are solved for me simply because I am a talented beloved son. I'm just scared of boredom, because an easy life fucked all my injectors of the hormone of joy to hell.

We have so much ambition, supposedly we are doing very complicated things. We call ourselves software engineers, but we are not engineers at all. Here is my dad - an engineer. He comes to my house, I say - the telly broke. Dad removes the telly from the wall, takes out a screwdriver, conjures for a couple of minutes, says - "You are a moron, your telly has not broken, but the fuse has blown up." He takes the wire, conjures again, the telly comes to life.

My car suddenly stops driving, I stand in the city center, call my father and ask me to tow me to the service. Dad arrives, silently opens the hood, looks for a minute, calls me a moron, takes out a match, conjures - the car starts, I leave. And he’s not such a jack of all trades, he really understands how it all works. He designs and manufactures robotic coal-fired boilers. Dad himself calculates all the heat engineering and thermodynamics of these complex devices. And his calculations agree, these monsters work and heat the water exactly as his father planned, creating their projects.

What am I? I can do that. I say: "hey, sisharp, take the data from the database, sort them as you know how, and then bullet the customomer." If I suddenly have a bug in the root lib that sends network requests, I’ll say: “Well, there's nothing to be done, there’s a bug in the lib, we won’t be able to support such scenarios.” I don’t understand how it all works.

Here Dad is an engineer, and I am a moron. A moron in the world of ordinary people, but a tough guy in the world of developers.

But we have here a cult of rationality and technical skill. Developers are unemotional, thoroughly logical and super rational professionals. They do not know pain and doubt. They don’t watch funny vidos on YouTube, they make fun of those who can’t stand the hot technical dispute. Yeah, well.

All this crap is happening because yesterday’s guys from the garage cannot accept a system in which nobody needs their creativity. Business needs a conveyor that turns items from jiri to pull requests, creativity only gets in the way. But none of us dreamed of becoming such a conveyor. Seriously, how many times we had a case - so you kind of got an interesting task, thought it over carefully, invented a solution, and then some dick says that this is a trivial problem, there is such and such best practice (well-tested by business in practice ), and no one needs your bike. Who do you think you are? No need to invent. Take the best of existing, you have no chance to do something better.

And even if you do, it will be inconvenient for others to work with it, they do not want to understand your code. We have become conveyors, and the pain of the fact that we do not like it is expressed by abstracting from emotions. We suppressed the creators in ourselves, and whatever the pain, we forbade ourselves to believe in pain. Myself and everyone else too.

So the developers have turned into soulless performers of hotel business. The guys from the garage went to the hairdressers, bought normal clothes, and etched the fire from their eyes. They became carriers of corporate culture and business values. When you now offer them to make a cool framework in the context of their task, they tell you: “Business does not pay you money for this. You will gobble up the whole budget, just do the task and take a new one. ”

But I didn’t. I just learned to pretend not to be kicked out. And I do not believe that I can convince anyone. Therefore, I will become even worse than these corporate programmers. I'm over it. My haggard brain will no longer be an incubator for a boilerplate. If a very high skill allows you to work less - I use it.

If only technical skill matters, it’s all about the small. Learning development is easy. It’s easier than being a good person, easier than doing something new. In my opinion, this is generally the easiest thing in the world. And I know how to study it well.

I will become the most disgusting type of people in the industry. Skill and ambition like a rock star, while not for a second believes in what he is doing. Exhaust as from a passenger. In love with technology, but never does more than they ask. The coolest dude in any company, the dad of the lead developer, the one who takes-on-the-board-of-directors. Almost Linus Torvalds, only without Linux and contribution to progress. My skill will give me the right to manage life and death, and a satisfied herd of fans will say that it should be so.

The development king you deserve.

And then you put the skill at the forefront, deny emotions, say about rationality - until you understand, Phil, that you will not get anywhere from the parasite inside. And how many do not write articles that you are good and corrected, you will not improve and do not agree with me. The achievement is great - to chat with the mirror, delve into the soul and not find there anything but a bunch of shit.