I'm a European in my late forties and have been a freelancer for the last five years but I find it harder and harder to motivate myself to continue working. What really takes all joy out of working as a software engineer these days for me are the endless Scrum ceremonies almost all companies in my area have embraced.
In the old days (say until ~7-8 yrs ago) I didn't have to attend very many meetings but of those I had to go to most were useful/necessary. These days I could probably count the useful meetings I attend in a year on one hand but the amount of Scrum-worship-meetings per week requires two hands.
The same amount of actual work I could do in a week in the old days would now take several months because it needs to be planned in detail. And no, not any technical detail, but rather discussions on how to divide it into stories but without doing any proper technical analysis and then straight ahead to story point guesstimates, yay! Then after a brief period of actual coding it's stuck in code review for weeks because no one will look at a PR unless prodded with a stick.
While I do think that code reviews can some times be beneficial, most of the time they are (in my experience unfortunately) pretty useless. Most comments (and I have to admit I'm guilty to this as well) are more bike-shedding than bug-preventing. Complex bugs are rarely found in code-reviews in my experience.
While these are my experiences during the last 7-8 years or so, it's more or less the same on all the half a dozen companies (or so) I've worked for during that period (which is also a very big reason why I've worked on half a dozen companies in that period).
Doing software right will require a lot of planning, irrespective of whether that planning occurs up front or as you go. If you plan more up front, that will eliminate a whole lot of guesswork when the time to do the programming comes. You need systems analysts -- generalists who understand the business and work well with people -- to come in and characterize, in detail, how the business currently works in terms of systems and subsystems, and then propose and design new systems, again to a high level of detail. Once that's done, inasmuch as you need software, producing the software is a simple matter of translating the detailed requirements into language for the machine.
Unfortunately, modern methods are basically just institutionalized guesswork: this is what Agile is all about. It's a methodology designed by programmers for programmers, in order to bamboozle management and inflate the programmers' own sense of self-importance. The correct way to design a business's internal systems, including but not limited to its software, appears to have been forgotten, except a pastiche of it lives on as a strawman called "Waterfall" for Agilistas to take down.
> is a simple matter of translating the detailed requirements into language for the machine.
This is actually the hardest part. I can write detailed requirements about the car I need. Create a PowerPoint presentation that shows a schema of the system and subsystems; the engine block, transmission and steering wheel etc. with lines how they are connected.
That's the easy part. Now you need the team of skilled engineers developing the actual car. And you need them to be experienced and good at it.
You need at least one guy who is able to load a complete mental map of everything that's needed to be engineered. Who understands the business requirements and is able to create a vision for the product and technical solution. He needs to understand databases, web services, authentication, authorization, security, performance, web standards back- and front-end solutions. Be smart about what logical components are needed and have an high level idea how they could be implemented technically. Ideally that guy can also open a repository and read what's going on.
Especially with larger corporations there's still so much potential for automation. Yet what we see is a big fragmented mess. Systems and subsystems that are poorly integrated. Exactly the car you'd expect that was designed in PowerPoint by non-engineers.
> This is actually the hardest part. I can write detailed requirements about the car I need. Create a PowerPoint presentation that shows a schema of the system and subsystems; the engine block, transmission and steering wheel etc. with lines how they are connected.
> That's the easy part. Now you need the team of skilled engineers developing the actual car. And you need them to be experienced and good at it.
In this analogy, the engineers who design the car are the equivalent of the systems analysts. The programmers are the machinists on the shop floor actually building the car.
> You need at least one guy who is able to load a complete mental map of everything that's needed to be engineered. Who understands the business requirements and is able to create a vision for the product and technical solution. He needs to understand databases, web services, authentication, authorization, security, performance, web standards back- and front-end solutions. Be smart about what logical components are needed and have an high level idea how they could be implemented technically. Ideally that guy can also open a repository and read what's going on.
Yes -- that's your systems analyst! More importantly, they need to understand the business and the information needs of the people involved. A high-level, 10,000-foot understanding of technical requirements is important, but the details should be left to the programmers. That's what programmers are good at. It's the big-picture, business-centric, people-oriented view that's missing in today's culture, and prevents us from "building the right thing right".
> The programmers are the machinists on the shop floor actually building the car.
No, because with software there's no human execution. It's the computers that execute the design. The developers design the blueprints of what the computers need to execute. They are the architects.
For an analogy you can probably best compare this with 3D printed houses.
> A high-level, 10,000-foot understanding of technical requirements is important, but the details should be left to the programmers.
But why leave the details to the programmers? Why doesn't the systems analyst produce a proper CAD-like blueprint that leaves no room for interpretation? His system design should produce the exact same result regardless which contractor implements it. Yet that's never the case.
The reason is because he can't. The systems analyst doesn't have a clue what he's designing. If he would be able to write a proper blueprint we could just hand it off to the computer and have it executed. No need for programmers. But now the systems analyst has become a developer.
> Doing software right will require a lot of planning, irrespective of whether that planning occurs up front or as you go.
I'm not opposed to planning but I'm opposed to the kind of meta-planning game that is wont when scrum is involved. I've been in meetings where the thing we're planning is literally to change one line of code and we say as much but the PO still insistently asks if it shouldn't be multiple stories. The whole thing eventually took man days in meetings even though we insisted it was extremely quick. Turns out the whole thing was sold upstream to management as a big feature so a single 1-point story wouldn't cut it.
As a contractor I can at least remind myself that I'm getting paid for sitting through all those meetings but as someone who likes to actually do things I feel like I slowly die inside.
I've similar experiences about Scrum. In the worst case there's one or more developers, usually junior, in the team that are very eager to improve processes. Eventually it's tenth time you are forced to discuss what's the optimal way to define story points.
Tech became too profitable to be left to "those nerds" so now you have very bloated orgs. Though a freelancer should be able to sidestep the grifters unless you're selling yourself as an employee for some reason.
Yeah, my first year as a freelancer was quite sweet actually. Then came the pandemic and me and my spouse got ourselves a vacation house as we couldn't travel any more. While this was a great relief for our mental health during the pandemic, it meant a much higher mortgage so I needed the more stable income.
I get that they're depressing if you let them get to you, but I've always looked at it as I bill the same whether the client wants me in a useless meeting or a useful one. Helps me through.
In the old days (say until ~7-8 yrs ago) I didn't have to attend very many meetings but of those I had to go to most were useful/necessary. These days I could probably count the useful meetings I attend in a year on one hand but the amount of Scrum-worship-meetings per week requires two hands.
The same amount of actual work I could do in a week in the old days would now take several months because it needs to be planned in detail. And no, not any technical detail, but rather discussions on how to divide it into stories but without doing any proper technical analysis and then straight ahead to story point guesstimates, yay! Then after a brief period of actual coding it's stuck in code review for weeks because no one will look at a PR unless prodded with a stick.
While I do think that code reviews can some times be beneficial, most of the time they are (in my experience unfortunately) pretty useless. Most comments (and I have to admit I'm guilty to this as well) are more bike-shedding than bug-preventing. Complex bugs are rarely found in code-reviews in my experience.
While these are my experiences during the last 7-8 years or so, it's more or less the same on all the half a dozen companies (or so) I've worked for during that period (which is also a very big reason why I've worked on half a dozen companies in that period).