>I love that there are so few limits in "software world."
I'd love to visit that world you live in. Software development is nothing but a huge heap of trade-offs based on limitation of all kinds. Money, time, quality, re usability, maintainability, and many more. I'm ready to bet there is no other job out there that is as complex and bound by so many parameters than software development. Maybe hardware development but I put them into the same category personally.
>No pesky laws of physics.
Try low level programming or high performance software. Your worldview will change very quickly. Not everything is fluffy javascript ;)
>No enforced values by one or another interest group.
I'm at a loss of words. Software is what makes the modern world move. You literally cannot avoid interest groups that want to influence you once you have a popular software that is used by millions.
Sure you can write some hobby projects and avoid all of the above mentioned, but once you do something with impact that is used extensively to help people (something everyone should strive for!), all of those issues WILL come to haunt you. No exception!
I live in a very, very real world. I suspect that it may even be the same world that you live in.
It was really a rhetorical exercise. Of course there's all kinds of constraints and whatnot, but, in my case, I started as an EE, working at a company that made fairly advanced microwave equipment, and, there, the laws of physics made it quite difficult to do what we wanted.
Software was like walking out of a tunnel, into a sunlit field. I could go in any direction I wanted.
It really is quite amusing how we like to sling aspersions at each other. I'm not here to compete with anyone. In fact, I find the fact that so many people are so much better at stuff than I am, to be quite comforting.
I love learning.
> but once you do something with impact that is used extensively to help people
If you would've lead in with your background I might have been more careful ;) Just rubbed me the wrong way the way you wrote it, so i wrote my response in a similar manner.
Good software is equally intricate and complex as many other fields that superficially seem more complex, like Rocket Surgery. Unfortunately it has changed a lot over the last 20 years. Just learn to use these libraries, go to a bootcamp and call yourself fullstack developer.
Few people even know what instructions per second even means. Deliver 300MB chat applications or 40GB Games to your customers and call it a day.
Good software development is more than an art or craft, it is seriously hard and takes a lot of experience and it is NOT relaxing at all. It is rare, unfortunately and it's just frustrating to see the decline over the last 20 years.
Point taken. I am used to being around folks that know my deal, and am sometimes too casual in my interactions.
I suspect that we'd probably get along, IRL. I got a gander at your site, and it seems that we have a hardware interaction background.
I'm deliberately trying to reduce my scope. I worked for many years in a fairly major-league Japanese corporation, as part of a big, distributed team. The company was a hardware company, so a lot of our software was designed to either play with, or be embedded in, hardware.
Nowadays, I like to try keeping it to apps for Apple devices. My apps tend to be a fair bit more ambitious than you'd normally see from a one-man shop, but they are still fairly humble, compared to what our teams worked on.
However, I feel that the quality of what I do is better than before; mostly because of my craftsman approach. If you knew the company I worked for, you'd find that ironic.
> I'd love to know what world you live in. Software development is nothing but a huge heap of limiting trade-offs based on limitation of all kinds. Money, time, quality, reusability, maintainability, and many more. I'm ready to bet there is no other job out there that is as complex and bound by so many parameters than software development. Maybe hardware development but I put them into the same category personally.
Theoretical physics?
Car manufacturing?
Rocket building?
Some other forms of engineering?
Just brainstorming, I have no clue. What do you think?
I'd love to visit that world you live in. Software development is nothing but a huge heap of trade-offs based on limitation of all kinds. Money, time, quality, re usability, maintainability, and many more. I'm ready to bet there is no other job out there that is as complex and bound by so many parameters than software development. Maybe hardware development but I put them into the same category personally.
>No pesky laws of physics.
Try low level programming or high performance software. Your worldview will change very quickly. Not everything is fluffy javascript ;)
>No enforced values by one or another interest group.
I'm at a loss of words. Software is what makes the modern world move. You literally cannot avoid interest groups that want to influence you once you have a popular software that is used by millions.
Sure you can write some hobby projects and avoid all of the above mentioned, but once you do something with impact that is used extensively to help people (something everyone should strive for!), all of those issues WILL come to haunt you. No exception!