this mentality made me doubt and question and delay for too long so i try to push back on it when i see it. You don’t actually need to have always “known” or “shown signs”. If you feel like experimenting you can just try it.
Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield; born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She invented the term "software engineering", stating "I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process."
On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions.
Huh, didn't know about her! She sounds like a badass lady!
People might be more familiar with this viral picture as well, if not the name.
“Margaret Hamilton shown in 1969 standing beside listings of the software developed by her and her team for the Apollo program’s Lunar Module and Command Module.”
My mom was a systems programmer who used assembly language and built a lot of the banking infrastructure!
Originally, programming was actually a woman dominated field because it was considered a subset of secretary work and “beneath men” (it wasn’t for a good reason).
If you watch the recent cummerbatch movie about Turing the eagle eyed observer will notice that nearly everyone who actually interacts with the computer software is a woman.
Not to turn this into a sociology discussion, but for anyone unaware: this is a fairly common pattern.
Women often pioneer fields like this, but as soon as it becomes seen as something “important” out “respectable” then suddenly it becomes male dominated.
The opposite also happens, where as society deems something as unimportant, a male dominated field will become female dominant - see teaching for an unfortunate example of a field that used to be highly paid and respected, and is now largely looked down on.
Sorry, don’t mean to go off on a tangent - it just bugs me and I think more people should be aware of it.
Beer brewing was originally a field dominated by women.
The presitege associated with a position can also change the expected gender. Women traditionally cooked meals at home but “Chefs” are predominately male, especially famous or celebrated Chefs.
You can google “women in computing” for more details, or check out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing - it’s amazing how much women contributed to this field and how little known that appears to be. (I only learned about it a few years ago myself.)
But the gist is:
Early on (i.e. the 1940s and 50s), men thought the prestige and honor was in building the giant machines (which back then could fill a classroom or more). Actually programming them was considered easier, “just like following a recipe”, so women got jobs as “computers” who did this part. To quote that wikipedia article: Designing the hardware was “men’s work” and programming the software was “women’s work.”
Fast forward to the 1970s and people had started realizing that programming was actually hard, and so it was promoted as a field boys should get educated in, while girls were encouraged to instead become nurses and teachers and such.
using a computer traditionally was seen as a secretary job, so it was often dominated by women. its only as of post consumer computer events where a lot more males went into the field due to the large market it offers came in.
I just got a Jr dev job about 3 weeks ago and I haven’t written a single line of code. It’s all been meetings and other shit. I’m kind of ok with that. Lol
I think this is something a lot of people posting here don’t get. You can be a programmer, make apps or games in your spare time, set your own goals and be your own boss, and that’s great. Suddenly you get a “normal” job programming and you have you deal with customer requirements, business nonsense, and working as part of a team; that’s being a software engineer. One isn’t superior to the other, they are just different beasts.
Absolutely. There is very little programming involved in a normal job most of the year. I actually knew that before getting in. I have friends on the same team that have been there before me and they explained things beforehand. I have so many meetings and business stuff daily. We also reach out to users to help them fix issues on their machines, too.
This is not the first time I’ve seen memes like this, and it makes me so glad I’m not involved in programming or software development. I would straight up die.
If you can find a comfy mid level role or a “real” senior role that is mostly code it’s a very rewarding career. But yeah I’d lose it with day long meetings
0900 till 0930 - 15 min standup meeting.
0930 till 1000 - focus time.
1000 till 1100 - Pre meeting for customer meeting at 1100.
1100 till 1200 - Customer meeting.
1230 till 1300 - Post Meeting catchup.
1300 till 1330 - focus time.
1330 till 1430 - JIRA board update meeting.
1430 till 1500 - priorities review meeting.
1500 till 1645 - focus time.
1645 till 1730 - EOD standup.
That concept is lost on so many people and I don’t understand why. One of the last teams I was on had two weekly meetings. One was 9:00 AM Monday morning and the other was 4:00 PM on Fridays. They were both running through all of our projects and always seemed surprised that the Monday update was the same as the previous Friday update.
It is to their advantage to be act surprised, therefore they are “surprised”, see? This was your “opportunity” to show how dedicated you are the company, having worked all weekend long…
“Are you don’t yet? Why aren’t you done yet? Help me update infinite plans that will be outdated in a week. Also, I just promised a bunch of stuff… all that stuff we already promised, I think you can do that faster.”
When I was a dev, I once had a PM with no technical skills that decided he would “learn to program to help catch us up”… He did not succeed.
Hey, at least he had the right idea. He saw that the delay was due to a lack of skilled workers and tried to fix that problem instead of just talking more about the project. That’s more awareness than most PMs have in my experience.
PMs act that way because people above them ask for updates regularly. Bad PMs don’t know how to push back. If you need things done faster, the answer is usually “we need more resources”.
“we need more resources” is bounded by the rate at which you can incorporate new teams members without absolutely destroying your productivity, or having a bunch of untrained fools running around breaking things (of course the later is standard at many places already, so I guess it doesn’t always matter).
The right answer is usually : “No”. Or at least “Prioritize”. Or “This is what we need to get it done” at which point they might start to get software takes time to make decently, and they don’t want software that doesn’t work decently in the first place.
Calling people “resources” and the mindset that delivery teams are just a number that you can spend money to increase is a mark of poor project and personnel management, as well.
If a PM has enough time to try to learn programming on the side, then they are a shit PM. A PM should shield the team from unneccessary meetings, be the main initial contact point and the initial refinement guy. Those are 4 seperate jobs at once.
We do standups twice a week. At worst they run a half hour for my team of about 10 people. Usually we’re done in 15-20 minutes. Please tell me it’s just an absolutely made up joke that you have an hour and 15 minutes of stand up meetings every day. I would shoot myself.
I had a job that had > 1hr standups for our two man project because we met with QA, BA, and management and they wanted everything changed every day so we had to explain why we couldn’t do anything with constantly changing requirements every morning.
The really funny bit is that the Standup comes from Agile, which is a software development process class exactly about being able to cope with frequent changing requirements, and the Standup is definitelly not the point when new requirements are introduced.
It depends VERY much about the content and invitees of the meetings.
If you’re there to give your expert engineering feedback, awesome. If you’re there to receive the information you need in order to provide expert engineering feedback, awesome.
So often, I find, meetings are too broad and end up oversubscribed. Engineers are in a 2 hour meeting with 10 minutes of relevance.
There are serious differences in meeting culture, with vast implications oh the amount of efficacy you can juice from the attendees.
Ehhhh, depends on how your titles work, and I would argue that’s at least a little odd. Most senior engineers I know are ~50/50 code/oversight, at worst. Once you get to Principal or Staff, though, you’re lucky if you write 50 loc/week.
Senior rarely translates to something like architect anymore, it’s at least a level or two up from there.
The beauty of titles like this is that they’re absolutely meaningless.
You can’t compare them between companies, sometimes even departments, you can’t compare them between different industries, and you can’t compare them between countries.
I’m a senior, and my job is currently to sit in meetings most of the day to convince BAs, architects and other team’s leads not to make stupid decisions. The rest of my time I’m communicating the results back to my colleagues and writing escalation mails, because Steve again tried to re-introduce his god awful ideas that we shot down five times before and I’m hereby voicing my concerns in a business-like tone, but actually would want to exterminate him and his entire offspring.
My old project, however, was completely different and I actually spent 70% of my time actually writing code and 20% code-related meetings.
Not really, it’s really largely a technical discussion, but we have a distributed monolith (the architect calls it micro service…) so each change of an interface will percolate through the entire system.
No it isn’t - a senior engineer should be a technical track professional that’s excellent at their job - it’s likely there will be a fair amount of mentorship but that can take many forms including PR reviews and pair programming.
A technical lead, architect, or a front line manager is the one that should be eating meetings four to six hours a day. And absolutely nobody should be in eight hours of meetings a day - even bullshit C level folks should be doing work outside of meetings. Eight hours of meetings means that you’re just regurgitating the output of other meetings.
I’d clarify that having occasional eight hour meeting days isn’t bad, there might be occasional collaboration jam sessions that everyone prepares for… but if your 8-5-52 is solid meetings then nothing productive is happening.
It’s true. I even live in a place where the “Software Engineer” title actually does require a special designation, and I’m a “Software Engineer”, and I have no such designation, so there’s that.
Where I work, Senior Engineer is an IC role. They attend the same meetings as other engineers. Its the Staff+ Engineers and managers that attend more meetings (in ascending order)
I’ve worked in a few places, all with senior engineers, including myself as a senior engineer, all of which the senior engineers spent most of their time actually engineering. If I went somewhere as a senior and was told I was going to be in meetings all day, I would quit because that’s management, not engineering.
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