
Why I learned to "make things" - mh_
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3370-why-i-learned-to-make-things
======
kyllo
Yes. And this is in a company where many other people are programmers.

If you are in a corporate environment surrounded by people who don't know how
to write code, or even barely know how to use Excel, it cannot be overstated
how valuable a basic knowledge of even something like VBA, and a little SQL,
can make you.

I started learning to program because I was tired of being faced with the same
business problems and productivity drags over and over again. Like being asked
to log into a legacy system, look up some performance numbers, copy/paste them
into a spreadsheet and e-mail it to management. I've even seen people summing
numbers together with a calculator and then typing the sum into an spreadsheet
because they didn't know about formulas in Excel. That knowledge could free up
at least an hour of that person's time per day, which really adds up over many
years on the job.

Not everyone needs to actually be a hacker, but everyone who's even remotely
curious about programming should learn some basic skills in order to automate
tasks and make oneself more productive, if nothing else.

~~~
lectrick
When I visit "business type" offices, I am constantly shocked at the amount of
wasted time that goes on that I see. The examples you cited are merely the tip
of the iceberg. Part of the reason I'm a programmer, I think, is because I
absolutely ABHOR wasted/duplicated effort. This "natural programmer laziness"
has always pushed me to figure out the way to "automate out all the boring
parts".

I think it's a huge market opportunity for a programmer to merely show some
poor bastards how to NOT get by via emailing spreadsheets back and forth.

~~~
kyllo
Yes. There are so many companies with wasted productivity in repetitive
business process waiting for someone to automate them or "DRY them out." One
of the worst examples I saw was a woman whose entire job, as far as I could
tell, consisted of downloading a list of system-generated pickup numbers every
day and e-mailing it to people. This person was probably being paid between
$40-50k per year to do a job that could be completely automated by a few lines
of scripting code.

Not that I think automation should be used to lay people off. But if the job
she was doing were automated, they could have her on the phone talking to
customers and helping out the overworked customer service staff with the call
queue instead, with no net expense to the company.

~~~
Wingman4l7
Why shouldn't automation be used to lay people off? Eliminating busywork jobs
is a big deal -- how are we going to get to a post-scarcity society otherwise?

~~~
polshaw
Unless/until there were a revolution, increased automation leads to increased
inequality rather than a 'post-scarcity society', though.

~~~
Wingman4l7
Should we restart the buggy whip assembly lines to "re-create" all those jobs?
What about all the jobs lost to car assembly robots, which probably pushed
down the cost to make said cars?

Increased automation doesn't have to mean increased inequality -- ideally, it
would lead to a gradual reduction in average work hours. Working hours for
people in first-world western nations are evidence of this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_i...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_in_working_hours)

~~~
arjunnarayan
I think the lesson of the 21st century is that people don't want reduced work
hours. They'll just work as hard as they can for even more utilons/status
points/dollars.

I mean, it's not like Paul Graham ever had to work another day after he sold
Viaweb. Nevertheless, you see him still working. (And he's not an outlier.)

~~~
Wingman4l7
That's not necessarily true. There was a study making the rounds ~2 years ago
done by two Princeton researchers, indicating that once you hit ~$75,000+ a
year in income, your emotional well-being doesn't significantly improve past
that amount.

It follows that if you could make $75,000+ working 20 hours a week, you'd be
quite happy. I know I certainly would =) _(Yes, I'm sure there have been
studies done on the correlation of life satisfaction and keeping busy; that's
what hobbies are for! I'm sure there are plenty of happy, busy retired
people.)_

<http://wws.princeton.edu/news/Income_Happiness/> (press release)
<http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011492107> (actual study)

------
kevinconroy
This is great. I wish more business analysts had this mentality of "it's
faster to learn it myself than wait for a developer." That's a quality to look
for when hiring.

~~~
breckenedge
I come from a Business Analysis background, now a full-time programmer. I love
your mentality, but it can be frightening for employers. Many do not share
your opinion. Over the years, I have also become somewhat reluctant to write
code when it isn't specifically in my job description.

For me, it's always been a balance of sustainability, maintainability, and
competitive advantage: What happens when I leave the company? Who's going to
fix my bugs and restart the server? And then there's the flip side: If we
don't innovate, isn't that the same as giving an advantage to our competitor?

~~~
11001
> What happens when I leave the company?

And this is exactly why programming makes you more valuable and puts you in a
much better position to negotiate promotions. You give them better "machinery"
for better productivity, but they need you to operate it! Now if you leave
they are taking a significantly larger step back than if you hadn't built
things for them in the first place.

~~~
breckenedge
I'd rather not have that kind of relationship with an employer. It's a
perfectly rational position, I just think it will eventually hold you back
from your full potential.

I didn't learn to program because I wanted to keep my job. I learned
programming because, frankly, it was fun and challenging.

------
diego
I find it sad when someone talks about "learning to making things" as if he
had discovered the moon. Humans have been "making things" since the dawn of
times out of necessity. Going through life without the need to "make things"
is a relatively recent phenomenon.

~~~
sp332
Making little things, temporary things, things for your own use, is still
pretty common. Making serious things, or making things seriously, is a skill
that has to be learned.

~~~
diego
It seems to me that the post is more about the former than the latter. It's
not like he built an airplane from scratch by himself; he contributed to
building tools for internal use at a small company.

~~~
larrys
"It's not like he built an airplane from scratch by himself"

How true. Amazing what passes off for high fives on HN. Anybody ever watch any
documentaries on the real world showing what people with serious jobs build
and maintain everyday? (I saw one last night about the complexity of the
military supply chain ships near Somalia).

Many of these posts that I see here on HN seem like the equivalent of a kid in
elementary school bringing home an art project to show their parents and
grandparents who exclaim how wonderful an achievement and how promising they
are.

These posts do serve a purpose though. They bring traffic and exposure to the
poster's company website (in this example 37signals but there are many others)
by highlighting some simple revelation or discovery.

~~~
ajaymehta
I think this is a really cynical perspective. Nowhere is the author claiming
he's making something superior, or matches up to the best of "makers" in our
society.

Look around at most of the people you interact with every day. Many of them
are stuck in a cycle of not making things, and this guy worked hard enough to
break that cycle for himself. He found his calling in writing code. That is
inspirational, and something to be proud of.

------
rana-khandkar
""Before I could actually make things, I felt like an outsider – who was I to
provide advice to these people who actually made things?""

This is so true specially when you are working with an amazing team.

------
beambot
_Six or seven weeks after I started..._

What exactly were you doing for 6-7 weeks? If you know MatLab & R as well as
you claim, I'm hard-pressed to believe that _all_ you accomplished was one git
commit, one git clone, and some copying and pasting.

EDIT: My point being... he was already a "maker" -- just not using web
technologies.

~~~
kevinskii
Nowhere did he say that was _all_ he accomplished, and whether it was or not
seems beside the point.

------
why-el
A little meta, but this design makes it hard to comment on posts! I spent
about a minute trying to find the comments section, which is a click away, as
opposed to a simple scroll.

~~~
debacle
Maybe that's the idea.

~~~
dhh
That's exactly the idea.

~~~
dfxm12
But then it only really works once, right? I mean, it's not _harder_ , it's
just _different_.

~~~
jpdevereaux
Once is probably enough to stop a good chunk of spam and general thoughtless
comments, with how powerful first impressions are and all. (@dhh: does it
work?)

