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- Hacker News
- Great article, I will have more meetings and care less about the code quality. I am sure everything will work out fine.by negativi
- The compiler doesn't care whether your code is elegant. Your coworkers do. That's literally why code quality exists.by rambojohnson
- (2020)
Some previous comments:
- It's really about neither.
It's about whether your code earns someone money.
by lenerdenator - a truism but also not that interesting. why is this getting upvoted?by luckydata
- Software can be modeled as a social relation. Unless you're manufacturing your own chips from scratch, that is. Charging people for software never sat right with me.
- What about charging people for electronic books? From an IP perspective, code is just a really bad book.by bumby
- Near everything is a social relation, if I'm understanding your point right. Why is charging for software different from charging for most any other thing?by xboxnolifes
- When you're first starting out as a junior software developer, normally you do focus on just the job in front of you, i.e., the code, and the seniors have to deal with everything else. As you mature into your role, you gradually increase the scope of your work and start to take bigger and bigger views of the problem, which involves more communication and more people. That's just the natural progression of a software development career, not some big bombshell secret.by WCSTombs
- Close, but no. Software is about the mind, and its ability to shape (and be shaped by) its environment. Software was about "people" back when we had to pool our keystrokes together just to keep simple websites running - now we have the technical means to face the true nature of the problem, which is political: just like people have autonomy over their bodies, they deserve autonomy over their software, without having to rely on a corrupt and incompetent industry, addicted to ruining their own products for profit.by livingsoft
- > just like people have autonomy over their bodies, they deserve autonomy over their software, without having to rely on a corrupt and incompetent industry
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.
by CodeMage - I think people are one factor. Source does, when done well, communicate intent and implementation precisely to other people. If the language has enough semantic information it can communicate some part of the specification as well. Knowing what to write and ensuring your software does what you think it does is an important part of a project. It takes working with people to build the correct understanding of the specification and requirements.
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.
by agentultra - John Carmack made a similar point:
"Software is a just a tool to help accomplish something for people - many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don't over focus on the specifics of the tools"
That said, I don't think Carmack would ever say that software isn't about code. It's more that code should be written and evaluated based on how much net value it delivers to people, not on arbitrary technical metrics.
by fasterik - "Software [ought to be] about people, not code"
Related but not quite the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
by knuckleheads - Raising the is–ought fallacy here i s a category mistake that weakens the author’s argument.
“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 .
by quinncom - When I was a developer I thought “without me all the people in the building have nothing to sell and they can all just go home”.
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.
by JSR_FDED - And without the farmers pulling the potatoes out of the ground, we would all starve and die. So who is necessary, really?by janandonly
- Anywhere we can read some of your story? I'm always curious about devs that went into sales, or sales from a dev perspectiveby wonger_
- Two things can be true simultaneously. Neither function works without the other.by arcwhite
- You should have stopped at 90 degrees ;)
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.
by CodeMage - Tired of these absolutes.
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.
by randusername - Software is about all the thingsby cortesoft
- Of course CS is about code. To say otherwise is absurd. And organizational climate can be a huge problem to doing "business" in the drucker, Deming, ishikawa, munger, buffet sense.
And there too CS must work in business ... these ties are not optional carrying large magintudes.
by scrubs - > Tired of these absolutes.
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
by CodeMage