Name: Anonymous 2013-08-29 0:54
Holy shit, how do you professional programmers do it?
I've been working for a tech startup for the past year or so, coming from a background of writing open source code and academia stuff (did a PhD, etc.). Most of my programming has been on various open source projects (mostly Linux userspace, think KDE et al.) since the early 2000s. The way I wrote code was: a) get a full night of rest, b) read papers/attend class/teach classes/hang out with friends until lunch or so, and then work on code pretty much straight from 15h to 22-23h (sometimes even later), virtually undisturbed by anyone (my grad school lab was in a basement where no one ever came, that was nice).
But now? Oh man. I joined a business guy as a technical cofounder for a startup, we're doing well and as we've gone up in employees (we're at about 20 now, and growing) he's displaced me with more "professional" engineers who plan all sort of kanban and sprints and TDD and continuous integration and 2 year milestones and all that jazz, and I've never been more unproductive in my life. Never being able to write code continuously uninterrupted for more than 45 minutes, having ones-on-ones all the time, meetings and sprint meetings and feedback opportunities and sprint retros and having to write summaries of what I did every day (you'd think they could read git logs?) and having weekly full staff meetings... man I don't know how you guys do it.
I'm waiting for a bit more of my options to vest, and I'm outta here. It seems normal to everyone else around me, but it's making me lose my love of what I do. I can't possibly be the only one.
I've been working for a tech startup for the past year or so, coming from a background of writing open source code and academia stuff (did a PhD, etc.). Most of my programming has been on various open source projects (mostly Linux userspace, think KDE et al.) since the early 2000s. The way I wrote code was: a) get a full night of rest, b) read papers/attend class/teach classes/hang out with friends until lunch or so, and then work on code pretty much straight from 15h to 22-23h (sometimes even later), virtually undisturbed by anyone (my grad school lab was in a basement where no one ever came, that was nice).
But now? Oh man. I joined a business guy as a technical cofounder for a startup, we're doing well and as we've gone up in employees (we're at about 20 now, and growing) he's displaced me with more "professional" engineers who plan all sort of kanban and sprints and TDD and continuous integration and 2 year milestones and all that jazz, and I've never been more unproductive in my life. Never being able to write code continuously uninterrupted for more than 45 minutes, having ones-on-ones all the time, meetings and sprint meetings and feedback opportunities and sprint retros and having to write summaries of what I did every day (you'd think they could read git logs?) and having weekly full staff meetings... man I don't know how you guys do it.
I'm waiting for a bit more of my options to vest, and I'm outta here. It seems normal to everyone else around me, but it's making me lose my love of what I do. I can't possibly be the only one.