Never Be Angry at Work

reply00r123•about 3 hours ago

I dislike engineers in general because most of them think like this. they have gone all in on embracing alienation in the marxist sense from their own work product and dont understand people who feel a sense of personal craft and ownership in something.

Imagine if you are making a painting and someone comes along and starts doodling in the corner, or squirting different colors onto your palette. it really f-s up what you are trying to do as an artist and craftsperson.

engineers who are craftspeople cannot tolerate this. but in modern corporate it is expected. engineers who are NOT craftspeople dont care. they are perfect, formless globs of soullness grey goo.

oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years? shrugs. ok, what other toilet do you want me to clean.

This author is that - a robot. A replaceable machined part. management and capitalism love this guy and people like him. they can interview someone else and relace him tomorrow with another grey goo hire that will not complain.

im not for it.

ranguna•11 minutes ago

To me, that reads as a bit immature, and there were times when I felt exactly like what you described, but switched one project to another and I felt embarrassed from my own past behaviour.

I'm getting paid to build someone else's project. I enjoy the work I'm making so I build it the best I can given the time constraints. I'm a paid worker, not an artists. Every entropy that I add to this system, is entropy that delays capital income to the whole company, so that entropy needs to be productive and not fundamentalist following unnecessary perfectionism. If something can be done quickly but imperfectly and still be relatively well maintained with manageable debt, so be it, that's what delivers the most value to the whole company. It's a bit one sided if I banged by foot no the ground and said "no, this will take 6 more months that what you want because I want it to be done in my perfect way". And this idea of perfectionism crumbles even more when you realise your idea of perfect is not objective. There's always someone else who has a better and more perfect idea than yours.

This doesn't conflict with the programming I do on my personal projects. Personal projects give me more satisfaction than what I do at work, but personal projects don't give me any money, as it should be, or I'd be compelled to work faster.

My work is not a craft, and that's fine. I'm just another human helping other humans advancing the company to acquire more money. I respect and understand my boss's incentives to get more money and they respect my needs to build maintainable software. So, more often than not, we meet in the middle. Sometimes more toward my view, other times towards theirs.

ldx1024•about 2 hours ago

You dislike engineers because they are acting like engineers instead of artists? The typical engineer is a paid mercenary, working to get widget 2.0 out the door. They are not robots, but are paid to play nice with others to advance their employer's interests. To act like a temperamental artiste in that environment would be immature and unprofessional.

t098i3•about 1 hour ago

An artist making a painting owns the IP of the painting[1]. A software engineer working for an employer generally does not; the employer (or client) usually owns the IP, and usually has a larger financial stake in the software than any individual.

I think this attitude is fine if you are the sole stakeholder and IP owner (e.g. a personal project or a small business you own). But not for something you are building in collaboration with other engineers for someone else's ownership.

[1] Artists do often make works for client IP, in which cases, they also do not have full creative control of their output!

popalchemist•about 2 hours ago

marxist alienation (or even debord/situationist alienation) is a spot-on analysis of this mode of neurosis. kudos.

Never Be Angry at Work

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews