I love Bisqwit. The software development content is great, but also his overall personality and philosophy really come through in the videos and resonate with me personally. The level of craftsmanship in his videos is far beyond the typical powerpoint slides mixed with live editing. It would take paragraphs to list all the reasons why, just watch them.
I love his videos too, though the fact that he quit working as a developer and got a job as a bus driver makes me worry that our industry is driving away thoughtful, creative craftspeople like him.
It could be that his situation is unique to him, and doesn't generalize at all. But it also seems plausible that the trend toward practices like sprints, stories, and open plan offices that aren't conducive to the kind of deep work that people like Bisqwit do.
It's also entirely possible that the churn and burn approach to development is what is most profitable in most situations, and that deep workers might find themselves relegated to certain niches.
None of that is meant as a knock on agile development, or any other development practices, of course. But I think it's worth stopping to think about what we give up when we dive headlong into the Agile, open office type of workflow. It would be interesting of more teams had the courage to try practices that are definitely not waterfall, but also not Scrum (which is what most shops that call themselves Agile are practicing). Something that values relatively short iterations, but also values the kinds of creativity and deep work that can't easily be broken up into sprints and stories.
Good news - he's just taken another job as a developer :-) He briefly mentioned it in a recent video.
But yeah, his work environment didn't sound great before, and I think he assumed everywhere is a variant of that. Maybe that's true in Finland, but the guy is clearly skilled enough to work at any place he'd choose.
it is amazing to me that this guy earned 20k euros in finland as a developer and went on to be a bus driver where he earned more. He also talked about how he got fired for not handing in weekly reports..Someone with his skills should be able to work anywhere and make a really good living. Anyway, youtube seems like a good way for him to express himself, i hope he will find success.
I just found out about him, and his videos look very interesting, but the way he talks (the timings/accent/stresses) make me completely unable to focus on the content because I keep focusing on the speech. Does anyone else get that?
