Do you love programming for its own sake, or do you do for the outcomes it allows? Depending on which describes you best you will face different pr...
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Intetesting, for once we get to see the other side in an article which does not put pragmatism to the background. I wanted to read dev.to/2018/10/10/beyond-senior-so... but the link seems broken :/
Oops, fixed the link. Try now.
Fixed! Thanks :)
Same here! I think it also has something to do with age and experience, especially if you're a "used to be entusiast". Being a pragmatist also doesn't mean you can't enjoy your work, you might even enjoy it even more because you know when to say no
Hey thanks for writing this!. I hear about this dichotomy a lot but I’ve never understood how people can be strictly one camp or another. I somehow believe anyone who codes has to enjoy it at least a little bit.
I guess I’m in both boats. I got interested in programming because of art, and I want to make my ideas more independently and without hiring programmers, so that makes me a pragmatist. While it’s magical and lovely how compilers, requests, servers, and computers work, to get anywhere in a project I’ve always focused on the visual/experiential result... without thinking about standards. And because standards and robustness is my downfall I decided to get whipped into rigor by getting a job in tech... though kind of burned by it now. I am really starting to probe at how I want programming to be in my life. Obviously I wanted it for work to get better at it, but I would absolutely have more fun just making silly animations and websites... now next how do I just get into a position to sustain my doing of that lol
Excellent article.
I think experience will lead you to pragmatism. That's inevitable and a good sign because it means you are not stalling at your career and you are learning and improving.
But I also think that you can wear one hat or the other based on the work you are doing.
If you work for a company being pragmatic is the right thing to do, always. Things like time-to-market, competitors, client requests are really important and a good-enough solution deployed in 2 months is better than a perfect solution deployed in 6 months. It's not going to be perfect, anyway and with the first approach you have 4 months to improve something that's already being used receiving actual feedback. If you are not pragmatic you are costing money to your company.
On the other hand if you work for open source projects most of the constraints of working for a company disappear and it's the perfect place to let your enthusiast-self free.
The danger with being an enthusiast on an open source project with users is that you stop caring about the users and just care about having fun, and people suddenly get massive amount of work because new API is fun for you but not backwards compatible for them.
So you need to make sure upfront to tell people whether you're doing open source for fun, or to help users. The former is perfectly fine as long as it's communicated up front.
Not my experience, since at past few jobs I've worked at startups doing cutting-edge work, with less than 40 hours a week, and with lots of flexibility. And at this point I'm definitely a pragmatist.
I'm somewhere in between, I think. I enjoy the heck out of programming, but I also ended up where I am because it's a good career (my "twenty year old me" plan was game development but "thirty year old me" is not willing to work the long hours and have the frantic pre-release meltdowns).
I don't write very much code in my spare time but I do mull over problems and have aha-moments in the shower on a regular basis (and I read technical books every single day). I am fond of whatever code I'm asked to write at work, regardless of how simple or non-impactful it might seem, and wouldn't trade it for anything.
Excellent post, I've been thinking about this concepts for a while and now I can label them. I use to be an enthusiast while learning and pragmatic when I work!