They left out naps. More seriously fuck you for dismissing bug fixing, testing and securing as unimportant unproductive things. - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

blowdart.me • 165 days ago

They left out naps.

More seriously fuck you for dismissing bug fixing, testing and securing as unimportant unproductive things.

Comments

corbieailin.bsky.social•165 days ago

OMG, I LOVE documentation, though. Documentation is SO good. And it needs CONSTANT updating!

year2020.bsky.social•165 days ago

Also documentation takes a lot of hot air out of the genius programmer hero wizard cliché. Why many difficult-to-work-with devs hate it is a complete mistery.

corbieailin.bsky.social•165 days ago

It sure does. It really is such a mystery. Bet it's related to why only coding was valued in this report.

lookitup.baby•164 days ago

I think it says a lot about who wrote this that they don’t cite meetings as something that takes away from engineering time

stclairjohn.bsky.social•164 days ago

Meeting are where you, a simple engineer, might encounter the rarest of geniuses, the tech executive.

calavera.dev•164 days ago

that 2 hours meeting every Wednesday that hundreds of people attend because it’s “the church of aws” is definitely not a problem for engineering productivity

alun.pw•164 days ago

Meetings are so pleasurable they don't count as work time.

shyrogan.fr•165 days ago

As a software engineer, if you don’t realise how complex and various our tasks are and how hard it is to measure how productive they are, maybe you suck.

I don’t know where this is from but I know it’s a pile of shit for sure.

baturn.bsky.social•165 days ago

What a weird industry where "fixing problems" gets framed as a bad thing.

casmilus.bsky.social•165 days ago

Unless it indicates the "writing code" was done poorly in the first place.

sinisterbulb.bsky.social•165 days ago

The most valuable people in IT are the ones who can quickly track down and resolve the fuck ups (usually of others…)

mewtype.online•165 days ago

Extra fuck you for dismissing docs writing. AWS already has pisspoor docs!

whisk.bsky.social•165 days ago

after some serious time with GCP I sincerely pine for AWS documentation

integgro.llc•165 days ago

Yeah I'm gonna double down on the fact that they don't get to spend more time coding is entirely because nobody over there is spending time writing docs.
Fuck is that a mess. I have lost weeks to that this year alone.

mewtype.online•165 days ago

My favorite is encountering aws docs that are very out of date and nothing works like that anymore.

integgro.llc•165 days ago

My favorite is switches and configurations that are listed in AWS tutorials and are the only way to make something work, but then are entirely excluded from the actual configuration documentation...

mewtype.online•165 days ago

Horrible

integgro.llc•165 days ago

Deplorable. I cannot believe anyone can actually deploy anything using CDK.

cursed.monster•165 days ago

I’m strongly convinced that a large part of this is that we’ve thrown tech writers to the curb because they are not generating code, so obviously they’re “not productive”, but tasking engineers to document their own shit falls flat ~90% of the time, especially if you’re not allocating time to it.

cursed.monster•165 days ago

Gonna sully Barry’s thread with yet another story from the development of the original Macintosh, but this also hits the nail on the head (and I must say, having recently gone back to Inside Macintosh to write a CTF challenge, it really holds up as developer docs): https://www.folklore.org/Inside_Macintosh.html

zarchasmpgmr.bsky.social•165 days ago

That’s not sullying, good sir.

I remember the reluctance for third-party for Lisa. The S&L I worked at bought several Lisas, and my buddy, the mainframe assembly developer, was really interested. We had to go through a bunch of hoops to get developer doc and the software.

integgro.llc•165 days ago

Oh I agree. Tech writers not being a thing for documentation anymore means the little documentation that is created is only useful to the person that wrote it. But then additionally we are generally so understaffed that docs don't get story points even if in the definition of done. (as you said)

cornanon.bsky.social•165 days ago

Seeing all that described as “undifferentiated” really would explain a lot about how utterly crap their docs are along with the rest.

malware.re•165 days ago

I find it really telling that "changing the AWS UI again for the upteenth time without being asked" isn't one of those "tedious, undifferentiated tasks". Nor, it seems, is "having to learn the new UI you never asked for".

mjollnyr.bsky.social•165 days ago

I bet there's a graphic designer and developer that get great yearly reviews because non technical management sees them making lots of changes and it's just 2 friends redoing the gui over and over

pawelbrodzinski.bsky.social•165 days ago

But seriously, is "time spent on coding" the ultimate goal for AWS?

Because is sure sounds like optimizing for efficiency, not effectiveness.

rapidsjason.bsky.social•165 days ago

Testing, unproductive?

Well, thank you for keeping me and my fellow QA brethren employed I guess. Just don't get mad when we show up at your desk to tell you its broken, again.

cursed.monster•165 days ago

Once again, one of my favorite stories from the development of the original Macintosh: https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

importedreality.com•165 days ago

Also the premise that more time spent coding == good is inherently flawed.

A junior can easily spend 3 hours coding something that would take a senior 1, and the senior's implementation will likely be a lot better.

And yes, there's more to software development than just churning out lines of code.

emma-worthington.bsky.social•165 days ago

Ages ago I worked for a startup run by arseholes that decided to measure our productivity by the number of lines of code written.

A plan with no drawbacks, no sir.

classytart.bsky.social•165 days ago

A little bit of requirements and design might be good, too, rather than just hammering away coding *Whatever* to make a stupid person happy.

cariadcinfra.bsky.social•165 days ago

I work on complex legacy systems, and I probably change the code like once a week, and even then it's mostly one liners or deleting code

netbard.bsky.social•165 days ago

Oh, are we just making up statistics now?

In a post Friday, @netbard.bsky.social said developers report working for Amazon Web Services is the absolute worst.

tanawts.bsky.social•165 days ago

All activities in business are not "problems"
GenAi is not ozempic...

"...So after a few releases the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE."

blowdart.me•165 days ago

bailz.bsky.social•165 days ago

If we want to pretend we're real engineers, a whole bunch of these things fall into the category of coding and "real work" if we're treating the code and the things we build as actual products.

recombobulating.bsky.social•165 days ago

Fucking hell. This is so grim.

rmilnerwatts.bsky.social•165 days ago

What a silly thing to write.

marypcbuk.bsky.social•165 days ago

Undifferentiated? Way to show their whole ass and admit they don’t know anything about developers

awakecoding.com•165 days ago

Who knew that developers are meant to just write code without ever testing or bug fixing it. Some even dare to improve it based on customer feedback, or care about things like "security concerns". It's not undifferentiated, it's literally part of the job

marypcbuk.bsky.social•165 days ago

But it’s not “fun” whined some techbro

ghiberti.bsky.social•165 days ago

& our research has also uncovered that professional footballers have some weeks where they see only 90 mins of "actual football"

ghiberti.bsky.social•165 days ago

"actual coding" lol

michaelruminer.bsky.social•165 days ago

Oh no. You mean they did the work of a software developer - how dare they.

tashasev.bsky.social•165 days ago

brrrrrrrrr goes the pure, distilled “productivity” extraction machine

williamslauram.bsky.social•165 days ago

Sounds about right for any job that requires intense focus to create some out of nothing. There are a lot of planning/prep tasks that enable the work and totally “count” towards productivity.

corleissen.com•136 days ago

Fuck them especially for dismissing documentation as "tedious" and "undifferentiated". Docs are what make code accessible and supportable at scale. They are themselves a form of code for the worst possible operating environment: our fellow humans.

itsgoodtobehome.bsky.social•165 days ago

They just described a phenomenon in the adult world known as "work."

drewski669.bsky.social•165 days ago

Seeing what they class as 'Tedious undifferentiated tasks', I'd be very interested to understand what they define as 'Actual coding'

jmedinaleigh.bsky.social•165 days ago

Undiferentiated tasks... Proceeds to list clearly defined tasks that are part of the job

drbayer.bsky.social•165 days ago

Wait - the company that requires written documents before building any new product or feature calls drafting documents a tedious, undifferentiated task? Cool cool cool.

pdevito3.bsky.social•165 days ago

Lol, how dumb. What do they expect? That we are machines that just sit in front of a computer and write flawless code non-stop for 8+ hours (10+ if at Amazon)? Everything else just happens magically too?

kevdog.bsky.social•165 days ago

Didn’t you know that only greenfield coding is real work?

nop.codes•165 days ago

this does seem to be the prevailing belief 🥴

mi77.bsky.social•165 days ago

And "overseeing releases"? What, the thing that actually puts code in the hands of users? No-one needs that, surely?! 🤦

paxxi.delusional.nu•164 days ago

Compiling your code is largely detrimental as it leads to tedious bug fixing

jhigh2000.bsky.social•165 days ago

Yeah that's complete bullshit. Most of the items on that list fall within the realm of "coding". Coding != Typing.

youngarkas.bsky.social•165 days ago

So, what you are telling me is, that software developers are developing software instead of simply coding something and saying 'ehhhh, good enough' in the end?

patter.bsky.social•165 days ago

what, no meetings? spending a day or 2 per week on standups, retros, ticket refinement, the process that goes around organising what gets built (whether the product is useful or not)

zootius.bsky.social•165 days ago

Cool now they should break down what the CEOs do for their unbelievable remuneration

dneto.dev•165 days ago

Yikes.

basil404.bsky.social•165 days ago

They said tedious and undifferentiated. Not unproductive or unimportant. I imagine the people writing that article do not intend to imply what you’re saying they do.

They’re trying to sell you on using their AI product to improve coder productivity.

boomies-n-zoomies.bsky.social•165 days ago

Writing good tests and documentation is not undifferentiated. There is a huge, meaningful gap between that task being done well or poorly.

basil404.bsky.social•164 days ago

Still playing devils advocate, but I think their point isn’t that it is unimportant but that AI is getting better at this kind of thing faster than other kinds of things.

boomies-n-zoomies.bsky.social•164 days ago

I do not believe that to be true.

basil404.bsky.social•164 days ago

Fair enough, and I’m not really that opinionated about AI. I don’t think that they are trying to be dismissive of the value of that kind of work is all I was saying

zer0mass.bsky.social•164 days ago

Since when do devs fix anything? I thought they left that to tech support.

quaplek.bsky.social•164 days ago

In other news, AWS attacks so-called expert breathers for only spending 50% of their time exhaling

seanstanden.bsky.social•165 days ago

AWS structure their dev teams so they are responsible for all of those areas. In some orgs, those responsibilities are separated vertically such that devs focus more on programming itself while some of the other tasks are undertaken by teams who arent necessarily devs.

seanstanden.bsky.social•165 days ago

I suspect this article is a reflection of some developers opinions on having to do tasks they traditionally havent been responsible for.

bailz.bsky.social•165 days ago

Having experts in each of the things is important, but developers are more empathetic and the quality of things is better when they're responsible for their own on-call, tests, documentation, etc.

seanstanden.bsky.social•165 days ago

I agree and its possible these devs do too, but they are clearly unhappy with the current balance of things.

mgruar.bsky.social•165 days ago

Brought to you by the same people who claim almost 10% of software engineers are "ghost engineers" based on code output alone.

tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social•165 days ago

"fixing problems" - surely much of this takes the form of coding?

oldhobbit.bsky.social•165 days ago

Write code. Works first time. No one needs to check it, no one needs to check the various dependencies, interoperability requirements participate in sprint/scrum meetings ... 🤣 Someone at Amazon has been watching too many hacker films...

davepermen.net•165 days ago

No learning the code base. Only code. No learn!

Lol...

joeydantoni.com•165 days ago

thank you for helping me write my next Redmond column.

blowdart.me•165 days ago

With less swearing I’d hope

joeydantoni.com•165 days ago

Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to swear there.

blowdart.me•165 days ago

Here’s the post itself

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-q-developer-generate-documentation-source-code/

blowdart.me•165 days ago

And the Apple News article where I saw it https://apple.news/AGDKdd6hKQgi_PQQllwt8Tw

joeydantoni.com•165 days ago

also, it's like the writing code part isn't the hardest thing, it's the understanding of what to write is the hardest part.

joeydantoni.com•165 days ago

and like, I have a whole security talk that is centered around "slow down, don't hard code that password"

heyitstodd.bsky.social•165 days ago

I was unaware that "learning codebases" was a superfluous waste of time. Just start coding - I'm sure everything will work together seamlessly.