<story><title>The Mature Programmer</title><url>http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2011/11/11-22-11-mature-programmer.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>knieveltech</author><text>&quot;The Mature Programmer would say that &quot;clever code is almost always dangerous code&quot;. But fuck him. The problem is that when you get carried away with being &quot;mature&quot; you suck the joy right out coding.&quot;&lt;p&gt;I counter this with the following:&lt;p&gt;Fuck the joy of programming. On every occasion I&apos;ve seen a multi-million dollar project crash and burn it was directly attributable to PM&apos;s lending credence to developers bitching about &quot;boring&quot; technology.&lt;p&gt;Here&apos;s the real joy of professional coding: 40 hour work weeks with no after-hours crisis pager. The only way you get those is through a rock solid codebase that&apos;s so boring you can ramp up the new guy in two days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shadowsun7</author><text>But he&apos;s not arguing that at all! If you&apos;ve read the entirety of the essay, he&apos;s saying that there has to be a balance between the needs of a job and the compulsion to have fun/showoff/be a hacker. (And he says it in one of the most reasonable ways possible.)&lt;p&gt;I think there&apos;s real value in this. After all, there&apos;s a real motivation to want to write amazing stuff to show off to your friends (e.g make them say &quot;WTF how did you do that?&quot;), as well as &lt;i&gt;play&lt;/i&gt; with new technologies; and as an engineer you have to worry about a different set of important issues (e.g. is the project on time?/ what needs to be refactored?/what to bring up in the next team meeting?). He&apos;s arguing for a way to reconcile the two while at work, beyond just programming on personal projects on nights and weekends^[1]&lt;p&gt;^[1] And that&apos;s leaving out the section at the end where he argues about sticking to a set of engineering best practices, and not trusting yourself to be good enough to know when to break them.&lt;p&gt;PS: Also, see georgemcbay&apos;s comment &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310114&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310114&lt;/a&gt; on how the author knows what he&apos;s talking about.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Mature Programmer</title><url>http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2011/11/11-22-11-mature-programmer.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>knieveltech</author><text>&quot;The Mature Programmer would say that &quot;clever code is almost always dangerous code&quot;. But fuck him. The problem is that when you get carried away with being &quot;mature&quot; you suck the joy right out coding.&quot;&lt;p&gt;I counter this with the following:&lt;p&gt;Fuck the joy of programming. On every occasion I&apos;ve seen a multi-million dollar project crash and burn it was directly attributable to PM&apos;s lending credence to developers bitching about &quot;boring&quot; technology.&lt;p&gt;Here&apos;s the real joy of professional coding: 40 hour work weeks with no after-hours crisis pager. The only way you get those is through a rock solid codebase that&apos;s so boring you can ramp up the new guy in two days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>absconditus</author><text>This is exactly why I still believe that what we do is not engineering. How long would a civil engineer be employed if he refused to use proven techniques and complained that he was not having enough fun on the latest bridge project? This nonsense might be fine for game development, but there is a great deal of software that affects people&apos;s lives. It is time for our profession to grow up.</text></comment>