Software is about people, not code (2020)(letterstoanewdeveloper.com) |
Software is about people, not code (2020)(letterstoanewdeveloper.com) |
Software should be about the code, but not for every person on every project for all parts of that project.
It's great to "wake up" and realize that code doesn't have the intrinsic value you might have assumed, but you can also take that knowledge and go right back to writing beautiful code where it best serves the bigger mission.
Now, that is a letter to new developer that I wish I had read when I was a new developer:
Dear new developer,
Be careful when reading blogs. A lot of stuff you'll read online is insightful, informative, innovative, or inspiring. By all means, enrich your life with what you read, but be sure to also re-read "Wind in the Willows" from time to time and reflect on the character of Mr. Toad.
Regards,
Someone Who Made The Mistake of Putting Certain Bloggers on a Pedestal
Related but not quite the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
“Software is about people” argues:
> I used to think software was fundamentally about code. Experience taught me that I was mistaken. Software is fundamentally an artifact made by people, for people’s purposes, and its success depends on them.
“Software ought to be about people” says:
> Software isn’t necessarily about people, but I believe it should be.
You may argue the latter, but I think the OP believes software is already shaped by humans .
Then I spent a few years in sales (long story) and flipped 180 degrees. Without salespeople (and the customers they bring in) there would be nobody paying our salaries and we all could just go home.
Without salespeople you can't sell software. Without developers, you can't make software. Since we all have to pay bills, selling software is of crucial importance, but that doesn't make the developers less important. It just means that the society we live in makes those who sell as important as those who make. Just like we strive to evolve software development, we should also strive to evolve the society.
I've made software that people happily used without anyone selling it to them or me earning a single cent off of it. At my age, if I had the luxury of not having to worry about money, that's the kind of thing I would be doing all the time.
But to a degree it is also about the code. Sometimes your requirements are: be fast enough. In which case you need to think about code: instructions and data.
The technical means you mention won't give you that. The same people that make the industry "corrupt and incompetent" are leveraging those technical means to make it even more corrupt and less competent. Meanwhile, the rest of us who work in that industry are rapidly losing power to push back.
You can't rely solely on technology to solve problems rooted in human nature. I mean, we have better technology than at any point in human history, and somehow we're regressing on the issue of bodily autonomy.
This is why I'm so frustrated with people who are fanatical about AI adoption. It's not a panacea, it won't usher in some shiny utopia, it's just another technology that can be used both to improve lives and to oppress. If you take a careful look at our society, you can see which of those two uses is currently dominant.
It's about whether your code earns someone money.
Some previous comments:
Enough of these code is worthless propaganda articles.
In many cases the customer and user are not the same (e.g. healthcare, Microsoft’s business, Google, et al)
- Umbrellas are about people, not rain.
- But your umbrella will keep me dry, right?
- The materials, the shape, none of it is really important.
- I'm not sure what you mean. Give me some hard numbers. How much rainfall the fabric can take? Was it built with quality?
- At the end of the day, an umbrella is just a tool.
ehhh. In my experience, being able to code is a necessary but not sufficient skill for a software developer. The only exceptions I've seen is having some extremely deep expertise in a niche technical field (and even then I wouldn't call that being able to code well, so much as technical domain knowledge).
When I was hiring at AWS the view for my team (RDS) was that there wasn't much difference in expectations between algorithmic coding ability for juniors and seniors. The primary technical differentiator for seniors was architectural and operational. But even more important than those was the nontechnical stuff; mentorship, being able to communicate ideas clearly and succinctly (no point in being able to architect a system if you can't communicate it in a way people understand), interacting with other teams, demonstrating understanding customer and business value, etc.
Not having paying customers.
For most problems solvable in code, there are literally infinite valid code representations of possible solutions (at least in higher-abstraction languages, the space is much more bounded at the assembly level). If you consider the subset of those representations that result in sufficiently performant execution, does it really matter which one is running? This is where most programmers will start mentioning clean abstractions and readability and maintainability, but those are concerns of making the code understandable for people reading and modifying that code. The people are still the driving force.
I'm not arguing for slop here - I definitely care about code quality - but it's important to stay grounded in the reason that it matters: people.