Woo for Its Own Sake
20% content, 80% sneering and self-pleasuring about inferior other people. It&#x27;s not that solid trustable systems don&#x27;t exist, or are a bad idea, or chasing the new-shiny doesn&#x27;t happen, but they&#x27;re not really what the post is <i>about</i>.<p>&gt; <i>underpaid compensated in self esteem [..] manager saying “dude yer so fookin smart” [...] brainlet payment system.</i> [..] <i>benefit to boring languages is people concentrate on the problem not interesting complexities of tool</i><p>Missing the point raised earlier: &quot;the problem&quot; being solved is that work is boring; Woo isn&#x27;t added &quot;for its own sake&quot;, it&#x27;s added because being an interchangable cog in a relentless productivity optimization machine isn&#x27;t what humans exist for, no matter how much employers and the author would like that to be so.<p>&gt; <i>people who feel like every line of code has to be innovative</i><p>Employees don&#x27;t get paid or promoted for saying &quot;this is good enough, let&#x27;s take 18 months off&quot;, but they do for adding a new widget or showing off to the boss. Broken incentives lead to people following them.<p>&gt; <i>like bike-shedding, but more perverse</i><p>It&#x27;s <i>pleasure</i>! <i>Spit</i>! Disgusting, sinful and shameful, and the people who enjoy it are inferior. Get back to the grindstone!<p>&gt; <i>you are presumably solving real world problems which someone pays for</i><p>&quot;Impress my manager&quot;, &quot;buy some food&quot;, &quot;survive this stupid doomed project nobody wants that doesn&#x27;t have the political backing or funding to get to its impossible goals&quot; are problems people solve for money. Jobs where people solve real world problems seem a small subset of jobs.<p>&gt; <i>about as necessary and in demand as riding to work in silver pants on a unicycle</i><p>The way someone commutes to work has so little to do with anything that it&#x27;s a big reinforcement this is about image, not engineering.<p>&gt; <i>developers [..] are often child-like in their enthusiasm for new and shiny things</i><p>Everyone knows that companies are at their best when petrified, stagnant, resistant to change and unwilling to entertain new ideas, right?<p>&gt; <i>Engineers are different: they’re trying to solve a problem</i><p>No-true-Scotsman so that &quot;Engineer&quot; now means person who tries to solve a problem (only using existing tools and techniques), and people titled or qualified as &quot;engineer&quot; who aren&#x27;t trying to solve problems, or anyone who is trying use a new approach to solve a problem or doesn&#x27;t have the same constraints and goals are &quot;not real engineers&quot;.<p>&gt; <i>Engineers understand it’s OK to solve the problem with ephemeral, trashy, but fast-to-market solutions</i><p>Nothing the world loves more than falling bridges, burning skyscrapers. A moment ago the important thing was to build stable, long-term, easily maintained systems with boring technologies (a classic description of &quot;engineering&quot;). Now Engineers are building ephemeral trashy minimal viable products? Is trashy and ephemeral &quot;engineering&quot; now? (No, the point is who to mock and shame, and who is superior).<p>&gt; <i>if the product manager is going to change it all next week</i><p>Could be related to why the idiot in the clown shoes is enjoying building it in Haskell, knowing that it won&#x27;t need to be long-term maintainable because it doesn&#x27;t matter anyway. No, it must be because they&#x27;re inferior to the blog post author, who is all about solving real world problems like making sure software engineers know their status is beneath him.<p>&gt; <i>Engineers also plan for the future [..] critical infrastructure that lives [..] depend on</i><p>Engineers do the right thing in the right circumstances, and you can tell they are engineers post-hoc when it worked? Handwave away any critical infrastructure which failed as &quot;not built by engineers&quot;, e.g. Boeing must have put no engineers on the Maxxx, you can tell because it killed people.<p>&gt; <i>Consider a previous era; motors for small fishing boats. [...] So the motors of the early days were extremely reliable.</i><p>Consider survivorship bias, the unknown number of fishing boats with more complex motors that worked just fine, the unknown number with simple engines that were unreliable and unfixable out on the water. Pointing out that some simple reliable engines exist does not show that &quot;motors of the early days were reliable&quot;.<p>&gt; <i>Such engines are useful enough they remain in use to this day</i><p>Maybe simpler engines are simply cheaper and the lack of emissions regulations or any performance or luxury equivalent of a Ferrari commercial fishing boat hasn&#x27;t caused much engine change over time? Complex systems can be useful enough that they remain in use to this day, too.<p>&gt; <i>this design still sold by the Sabb company in Norway [..] they’re definitely more reliable where it counts</i><p>More reliable than what, exactly? Are there competitors making complex and unreliable fishing boat motors that leave people stranded and dying, have been making them for 70 years and nobody notices and they still have customers? No, the alternative is a strawman sneer comparison, a solar powered Sterling engine. Point to a commercial fishing company run by a unicycling strawman using solar powered Sterling engines and then going bankrupt? Anyone?<p>&gt; <i>in the engine room, you are filled with confidence[..] If you find some jackass on a unicycle, maybe not so much.</i><p>And you should judge by how they appear, and not by their track record or by talking to them, since this whole blog post is entirely about who is high status and respectable and who is inferior by image and not really about whether you get home from your fishing trip.<p>[cont]