It’s Very Hard to Be Positive
Posted by Noah | Filed under general, technology
I’ve been trying really hard to be more positive lately, more specifically just to keep my mouth shut when I see people walking into the proverbial wood chipper; and I must say it’s very hard.
I wrote a post, a great post, it was about how nutty a certain group of people are because it takes them forever to develop even simple business problem solving applications. However I deleted it because it wasn’t productive, they’re not going to stop and I’m not forced to grind my brain into paste with their bad technology.
What was really bothering me was that they’ve got the corporate buzz and the jobs. They get respect from management types because they spend an awful lot of time and energy looking like they’re really working hard and are busy and writing really good software because they have unit tests and strong types, abstraction and isolation and they bloody well let you know. They take every opportunity to talk about, diagram and extoll the benefits of what they’re doing. In the end they solve the same problem at considerably higher cost and taking considerably longer than I feel is necessary.
Python programmers get no respect. It’s not like our code doesn’t get the job done, does strange things or randomly stops working. It’s not like we don’t have unit tests or that our code isn’t abstract or reusable, and if your code does the job and passes the tests why does it matter if it’s strong typed or isolated? Sure you can make academic arguments as to why, I’m not ignorant, I’m practical think about it, life isn’t an edge case, just because my variables aren’t strong typed doesn’t mean they don’t behave in a highly predictable way. It’s not like their code is based in science and my code is powered by magic ferries. They both run predictably and if you’re so inclined can be proven to operate consistently.
Honestly, I’m jealous. There’s a lot of jobs out there for Java, .NET (sometimes they don’t even specify a language), PHP and surprisingly Perl developers but almost none for Python. Which boggles my mind because it’s a very good language and most people who try it end up liking it. Not to mention from a business case point of view it’s highly productive, I guess it’s getting used a by people in the OSS community and on the cutting edge of a few areas of development and not companies like Initech who I suppose employ the majority of developers. Maybe right now it’s just more irritating because I haven’t been able to find a full time gig so I can stop consulting. It makes me wish I’d sold out and learned .NET or Java a few years back, maybe I wouldn’t even know how monotonous and wasteful my efforts were.
Tags: business, technology, the future
