Ask HN: What's likely to suck in any development job? - PopeDotNinja
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philwelch
Also, every tech stack sucks, and if your tech stack doesn't suck, either you
haven't worked with it long enough to get disillusioned or you're not doing
anything particularly hard.

The grizzled old guys who say that something "doesn't suck" and mean it as
high praise aren't just understated cynics; if anything, they're getting swept
up in a wave of irrational exuberance.

Edit: Also, there are never enough conference rooms.

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speedplane
Ha, I don’t even think about tech stacks sucking, I just deal with their
suckage as part of the job. If I had the time to make my own stack I would,
and it would be amazing initially but probably suck a year or two into it.

Kudos to the sucky stacks that managed to stick around.

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superfamicom
You will get excited by some new technology, but eventually burn yourself out
on programming, from doing it all day, to the point of never getting to use
that new exciting technology for anything personal.

It is very hard to break this cycle, but not impossible.

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potta_coffee
There will always be ugly legacy code. There will always be competing
interests between departments / stakeholders, etc (Development vs Marketing vs
Sales vs Executive). There will always be some shitty person that makes your
life difficult.

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cimmanom
Tech debt. You’ll never have time to pay it all down and even when you do, it
starts accruing again quickly. If you can’t live with a certain baseline level
of imperfection, you may want to look for another career.

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sethammons
Tech debt is like real debt. In business it should be leveraged for growth,
but beware of interest payments.

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amai
Everybody, including yourself, will always underestimate the complexity of
your tasks.

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arduinomancer
The worst is when you're in a meeting with a non-technical manager and another
developer is like "this task is trivial, I could do it in X hours".

It's becomes like a weird intimidation thing where people don't want to argue
back because non-technical managers might think you're just slow at
development or don't know what you're doing.

~~~
quickthrower2
Touche. Don't want to lose the reverse auction!

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speedplane
Being too good. There’s nothing worse than being an amazing developer, with
bosses without clear visions of what to build.

Every project you’re assigned takes you 3 days instead of the slotted 3 weeks
and you start getting board out of your mind.

Eventually, you start making silly and fun side projects to alleviate the
boredom. Eventually your silly side projec turns into a real product, and
maybe you have a customer or two.

Maybe you quit your job to jump right into it. Maybe it succeeds or fails.

The moral of the story: a boring job is the worst but can also be the best.

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k0t0n0
Some projects never ends. i can't work on long projects i sort of lose
interest after some time.

~~~
Rjevski
Contracting is a good option for this. You move around every 6 months or so
which means you don't really spend enough time to get burned out by any single
project.

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fulafel
>> 80% of programming jobs will have you work on something that is not
meaningful to you personally or address big problems like climate change,
corruption or other significant miseries that plague the world.

(It's of course possible to get a job that doesn't have this problem!)

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speedplane
Sometimes working on the smaller problems can be more rewarding than being a
drop in the bucket for bigger problems.

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fulafel
Yes, hence the "or" :)

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speedplane
Your “or” referred to significant maladies. By smaller projects, I’m referring
to something smaller than that.

Creating a government website as a contractor, allowing folks to communicate
across great distances, programming accounting software for a hospital,
building test hardware for a racecar... none of these will save the world, but
there is plenty of meaning in each, depending on the person.

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detaro
Which would clearly fit the part before the or: "meaningful to you
personally"?

~~~
speedplane
Fair, my point was only that there are ways of being gratified without
succumbing to the cliche of changing the world.

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seattle_spring
In my experience: issue management, because every company has required JIRA
for some strange reason.

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Rjevski
I never really get the hate for JIRA.

When configured & used properly, it's a lovely tool. When interviewing with
companies, them using JIRA is a huge plus for me personally and I would
definitely rank them higher than those using something else.

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dagw
Agreed. Admittedly I've only used JIRA at a couple of smaller places with
small teams, and perhaps it fails if you have massive dev teams, but so far
it's been pretty great.

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cimmanom
Every other tool I’ve seen used would be an even bigger clusterfuck with
massive dev teams. I can’t even start to imagine trying to manage tasks for
500 people in Trello or Asana or that rinky dink tool that I can’t remember
what it was called. None of them have enough structure to keep track of the
work of 5 people, let alone 100 times that.

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nubb
If you work at my employer, having to write secure code seems to be the bane
of these developers existence.

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amai
People much less smart than you will manage your project and will try to tell
you what to do.

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he0001
I would say the tech envy and the closely related “if we use this new
technology X we will solve all our problems” instead of actually doing the
hard work to be able.

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tomjen3
Meetings, bosses, limited independence, severe time-drain.

The tech is always behind, what should take 1 minutes will take two days.

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sethammons
Legacy code and legacy architecture :)

