I think programming is easy. When I sit down to code something, it feels deterministic, and everything falls into place. I attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. If I hadn't been this way when I started, I probably wouldn't have started. 2) I've been practicing hard, 25 years. That's a lot of time to try a lot of ways to do a lot of things, and find what works.
Here's what's difficult for me, and what only gets more difficult as my own time grows shorter and I'm less agreeable to wasting it: Working on teams, under managers, within organisations. Sitting in the third meta-meeting that week, listening to posturers quibble over what Agile means, rolling my eyes thinking obviously it's anything but agile. Performance reviews and arbitrary subjectivity-based rewards dressed in time-consuming process they swear will make it more objective. Perennial "Strategic Roadmap Shifts", listening to yet another CEO spout boilerplate bullshit about how this is the one way to glory, never shall we mention that one from just six months ago - that never happened. And that means another project cancellation. Then one by one the coworkers you like the most get fed up and leave, until the day it's your turn to get fed up and leave. On to greener pastures to enjoy a few months of a semblance of accomplishment before the whole cycle starts to repeat again. All that is what never gets any easier for me. Like everybody always says, "It's the people!"
When you start your post with "I have a high IQ so programming's easy for me", I indeed believe that working with other people might be a problem for you.
But I would still add that I'm doubtful that someone can work on large projects and not have communicating and working with other people be an actual part of programming (rather than that "other problem", "people").
If your projects need you to produce code that other people will modify, I would claim that your coding is going to be a matter of communication. Perhaps you write one-shot firmware for toasters or missiles so this doesn't apply. But I think any student of programming in general tends to see the task as a process of communication and not just cleverness. On this subject, I'd recommend Steve McConnell's Code complete.
Spot on. For the most part I think you can take anyone on HN to build 90% of the applications out there. After all, it mostly boils down CRUD (different levels), with the other 10% requiring specialized knowledge of algorithms and certain systems. All this to say that coding is the easy part. The more time-consuming part is figuring out exactly what the end users need, whether that involves communicating directly with them or with a project manager. After it's shipped? Even more communication because there will be some bug that you, or your test suite, would not have caught from an everyday user, and there's only one way to find out how to reproduce it...
The other situation where communication is important is once you have a large enough application that you have to start dealing with other people's code and design.
There is a lot of hellish bureaucracy in even the best of these situations but I think there is none-the-less some important learnings available there.
Rather than focusing on the IQ remark, I'll mention that the entire point of this post is that programming is not just “sit[ting] down to code something”. A program written in a vacuum when you're sitting in your chair is useful to precisely one person at precisely one point in time: you, right now.
When you're working on teams, under managers, within organizations, you're working to build something that's useful for other people. One of those other people may, coincidentally, be you, but you are not the only such person. Even more importantly, you're working to produce code that can be understood by other people. But that doesn't require an IQ 3 standard deviations above anything, it requires understanding how the people around you think and how you can put your thoughts in a way that they can understand.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't useless meetings in the world, the world is full of them. And your ultimate conclusion is, like Joe Armstrong's, that the difficult isn't in producing stuff the computer can understand; the complexity lies in the fact that it's for people. However, programming without an understanding of the people who will use your program is like a factory worker whose job is putting a screw in the right place on the car. The work is pointless if the end result isn't a car someone wants to use.
If we could specify software as easily as a single model year of a single car, we could factory work that software and you could just code without worrying about people. But we don't seem to be able to do that, because software is so malleable that we can't resist the innate desire to reshape it constantly.
Anyway, back to the point: yes, the difficult part is the people. But it's also the most important part. Here's a suggestion for avoiding the feeling of wasting time: try to embrace the fact that people are important to the process, and challenge your intellect by trying to understand what those people want and how you can match users' expectations while keeping the overhead for developers to a minimum. It's a hard problem, but once you get your head into it it can be as fun to solve as how to architect an application.
This is why, when I see 22-year-old kids in interviews claiming 10 years of programming experience, that's a negative signal for me. Commercial programming is solving problems you didn't choose, in a language that's not your favourite, using existing code you didn't write, for people you would never have met outside the job, in less time than you would like. In most real situations writing the code is the easy part, figuring out what it should actually do is the hard part. Claiming 10 years experience only shows that this candidate doesn't even know what experience is.
Well there's professional experience and non-professional/hobbyist experience. In your interview you should probably clarify that. They're both different but I think there is value to the things teenager might have learned working on some toy project.
Sure, and I value that, it's how I got started myself. But the experience of working on your own projects only translates to a fraction of the work a professional programmer does.
10 years experience would put you at the level of a lead programmer, or an entry-level architect.
Well, sure, and ten years' experience working for some other company with their technologies and in-house legacy code, libraries, design methodologies, and idiosyncratic ways of using even open source tools is not ten years' experience anywhere else.
A 22 year old with ten years of programming experience has ten years of experience doing what he's been doing. He may have built a Mongo-based sports statistics website for his high school. A 32 year old with ten years of corporate dev may have been creating in-house database utilities for MegaCorp's 20 year old Oracle customer database. He's had ten years of corporate database development experience. Is his experience clearly more suited to a Mongo-based startup selling hats to sports fans because his experience was corporate?
Or is it not a matter of corporate vs non-corporate experience but just how much experience doing which of the things we need someone to do?
Regardless of age, I'd much rather take the developer with experience using one or more relational database systems. It's much easier and effective for them to downgrade their knowledge and experience to the MongoDB level than it is for somebody with only MongoDB experience to upgrade to a proper understanding of database systems.
Part of the "corporate experience" is working with teams on existing code under strict deadlines. That's not something you can just learn on your own, unfortunately. I would, hands down, take the 32-year-old in this scenario (all else being equal).
Fair enough. I just felt like that was probably something I was guilty of when younger. If you have no pro experience and you are asked that question then your most likely instinct is provide a number and base it on hobby projects. Later on you realize there are other ways to answer such a question :).
> In most real situations writing the code is the easy part, figuring out what it should actually do is the hard part.
true that. i said more or less the same thing myself shortly after starting work at a big company. just replace "real" with some variation of "business" or "corporate."
not that there's anything wrong with making money or working at large corporations, but just like a 12-year-old might not have any idea what corporate experience is, someone who learned to program at school doesn't know what the experience of mowing lawns in order to buy a compiler is like for kid.
yes try holding together a crufty pile of code that is your companys old billing system.
And when you have your first 1,000,000 month you CTO (who i think reported to vint cerf ) nudges you saying this had better be right or we are both of a job.
Maybe the kid has been contributing to open source projects? It seems like there are a lot of teenagers sending pull requests to prominent Github repos these days.
Wow, the IQ thing really got under peoples skin, but I think his point is that the hard part of being a really good programmer is dealing with all the bullshit that managers invent to keep the mediocre programmers on the straight and narrow.
Problem being, those efforts essentially make one programmer indistinguishable from another by putting shackles on everyone. I admit there's a certain logic to it, building a business that's dependent on one person's talent can be dangerous. Better to make people interchangable.
All the same: Can you imagine John Carmack writing Doom back in the 90s having to deal with what most coders have to deal with nowadays (With all the "agile")? "No sorry John, you can't commit your highly inventive code without a proper story. We're going to need to have a planning meeting on this and size up story points. Please take a defect off the list. We don't need any heroes or cowboy coders."
I have to object that there is seriously more to project management than keeping the "mediocre programmers" in line.
I mean, there are overly ambitious programmers that do have to be reigned in, there are people held back by whatever structure you might and many variations of this.
And code has to be appropriate for it's purpose. I'm sure the code for Doom is great for Doom. If it is "cowboy code", it's probably not what anyone would want for an inventory control program that will be passed to someone else in six months.
But that's kind of the point isn't it: project management, and especially agile, is about making work predictable. There's an undeniable business logic to this that I wouldn't refute.
Yet works of greatness are almost never predictable. You can't reign it into story points or whatever. There's too many false starts, or sudden insights. It certainly takes process and discipline, but not necessarily the kind that can be measured and reported.
That's probably fine for most business, because your inventory control program doesn't need any individual brilliance; but I think it can be frustrating for really good programmers because they do want to create a work of greatness.
Yet works of greatness are almost never predictable.
Actually, most great artists work with a lot of constraints. There are many great realist painters who accept the constraint of realistically representing the world. Any programmer works with the constraints of the machine.
And working in the constraints of project management and multiple-person provides plenty of room for creativity I would say. Yes, you have the constraint of the code working and you have the constraint of the code being understandable. You might even have the constraint of telling the other programmers how to do the difficult thing you can do and they can't. Greatness is possible there given that greatness is possible with code that compiles as opposed to code which is merely unpredictable.
And project managers are always happy to have people finish faster than expected.
> I attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. (...)
A person with an IQ at or above 145, who is also fully conversant with reality, would know that IQ testing has a reputation nearly as bad the field of psychology that popularized the activity in the first place.
A person of your age should know better than to use IQ as a point of argument -- assuming the IQ score is real and has created a tangible intellectual outcome.
I've never used my IQ as justification for anything, granted, but I had no idea it wasn't considered a solid measurement. I just assumed it was like most of the other tests I did well on, and filed it away.
> I've never used my IQ as justification for anything, granted, but I had no idea it wasn't considered a solid measurement.
It isn't remotely a "solid measurement", in fact it's a field surrounded by justified controversy on multiple grounds. The two primary objections are that (a) the tests favor certain population groups and discriminate against others for reasons other than intelligence, and (b) existing tests only really measure a person's ability to take intelligence tests.
> You're paying more attention to it than I am.
Yes, but I'm paying exactly the same amount of attention to it as the original poster, with a different perspective.
I understood the parent to be saying that they disagreed that "someone that smart would have known IQ is bogus", not that they disagreed that "IQ was bogus".
> I understood the parent to be saying that they disagreed that "someone that smart would have known IQ is bogus", not that they disagreed that "IQ was bogus".
Yes, and because of how the post was worded, we may never know. I suspect (and acted on the idea that) he was disagreeing about my claim about the veracity of IQ testing, but that's just a guess.
I think the wording is reasonably clear, and you are misreading it. "I disagree" alone tells us little, but all of the support below seems to serve much more strongly to justify disagreement with "you should know ..." than with "IQ ..."
No, actually, below the ambiguous "I disagree", we find "I've never used my IQ as justification for anything, granted, but I had no idea it wasn't considered a solid measurement." That seems clearly to point to a disagreement with the presumed objectivity of IQ testing, not its application to the OP.
Well, apparently it is not clear, because it seems "clearly" to me to mean the other. You are taking "I had no idea that X" to be a claim of "not X"; I think it is a claim that they had no idea that X - and the pragmatic purpose of this in the conversation was "... and therefore, I don't think having no idea is crazy". I think your interpretation in this context is - at least - uncharitable.
> Well, apparently it is not clear, because it seems "clearly" to me to mean the other.
Let's look at the original exchange. The person to whom I replied said, "I've never used my IQ as justification for anything, granted, but I had no idea it wasn't considered a solid measurement."
I replied, "It isn't remotely a "solid measurement", in fact it's a field surrounded by justified controversy on multiple grounds" ... and more in this vein.
How is that in any way ambiguous? It's a discussion of the credibility of IQ testing.
> I think your interpretation in this context is - at least - uncharitable.
My interpretation is based solely on the words used in the exchange. Charity has no role.
Again, "I had no idea it wasn't considered a solid measurement" does not mean "I am asserting it is a solid measurement". It is quite obviously not the same statement (use of the past tense, for one - they make no claim about what ideas they have now), "from the words in the exchange". It is true that sometimes "I had no idea that X" is used to mean "I don't believe you that X." It is also frequently used sarcastically to mean "obviously X". But from context, I think the statement was quite literally a statement that they had no idea. This was relevant because, again, you had just asserted to someone else that it was unreasonable to have no idea.
Lastly, charity has a role in any conversation - particularly those involving disagreement. If your conversation partner might be saying something stupid or something reasonable, taking the reasonable interpretation or checking what they meant produces better conversation. I myself would sometimes do well to remember that, in the heat of discussion.
You are not being ambiguous. The poster who replied to you did not want to engage in an exchange with you, so he retreated from it - thus his use of the past tense "had" in reference to his prior belief. Given that every argument he provided referred to his not caring about the importance of whether IQ matters, I think this is the only reasonable way to read his post.
from your link: "The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns stated that in the United States IQ tests as predictors of social achievement are not biased against African Americans since they predict future performance, such as school achievement, similarly to the way they predict future performance for Caucasians."
so the consensus in psychometrics is that iq tests are not systematically biased against particular groups.
and of course it measures a lot more than a person's ability to take intelligence tests". just look at the "social outcomes" section of the wikipedia page...
> The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns stated that in the United States IQ tests as predictors of social achievement are not biased against African Americans since they predict future performance ...
The flaw in the reasoning should be obvious to anyone but a psychologist -- the test outcome becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, rather than an unbiased predictor of future performance. The contempt for science among psychologists is shocking.
> so the consensus in psychometrics is that iq tests are not systematically biased against particular groups.
Psychologists also came to a consensus among themselves (and, as usual, without any scientific evidence) that Asperger's was a real mental illness, and that Recovered Memory Therapy was a real therapeutic method. Fortunately, and to some extent because of these credibility issues, society is in the midst of dumping psychology as a serious endeavor:
In summary, until there is some science in brain research, all this talk about IQ testing is overreliant on effects without any clue about causes -- on descriptions without explanations.
Notice the name of President Obama's recently announced program -- the "Brain Initiative", not the "Mind Initiative". The handwriting is on the wall.
the point is that they predict future performance equally for different groups, not just that they predict performance. your language is alarmingly exaggerated and pompous for someone who lacks basic reading comprehension skills and is entirely ignorant about the subject of intelligence testing.
Quote: "However, IQ tests may well be biased when used in other situations. A 2005 study stated that "differential validity in prediction suggests that the WAIS-R test may contain cultural influences that reduce the validity of the WAIS-R as a measure of cognitive ability for Mexican American students,"[123] indicating a weaker positive correlation relative to sampled white students. Other recent studies have questioned the culture-fairness of IQ tests when used in South Africa.[124][125] Standard intelligence tests, such as the Stanford-Binet, are often inappropriate for children with autism; the alternative of using developmental or adaptive skills measures are relatively poor measures of intelligence in autistic children, and may have resulted in incorrect claims that a majority of children with autism are mentally retarded."
Just one sample from a large literature on this topic.
> your language is alarmingly exaggerated and pompous for someone who lacks basic reading comprehension skills and is entirely ignorant about the subject of intelligence testing.
Nice argument. Do give us more samples of your logically flawed reasoning. The readers of this forum will surely appreciate your credibility sacrifice.
"the mismeasure of man" is a garbage book by the noted fraud and liar steven jay gould. it certainly should not be used as any sort of reference on intelligence testing.
I don't know enough about The Mismeasure of Man to say whether it's correct or not, but Steven Jay Gould is about as eminent a biologist as there has ever been. The allegation that he is a "noted fraud and liar" is a pretty gross mis-estimate his work, and my personal opinion is that a misapprehension at this level makes it very unlikely that you have good reasons for believing what you do. To casual lurkers: what the user "truthteller" has just said is essentially alarmist garbage, and you should regard their claims with skepticism of a pretty high degree.
In the future, note that calling someone a "noted fraud and liar" is a very serious claim, and you should think carefully about who you level it against. It's powerful language, but used against the wrong person, will make you look silly, and not them.
I've seen truthteller's comments before. He should probably be hellbanned but he's flown under the radar for some reason. He's been around for 119 days, has tons of comments and only a comment karma of 37.
You called India a "shit hole". The entire country. Do I have to be an Indian nationalist to not see that kind of a comment as inane? If you had some kind of comment to make about the positive side of British Raj and the crown's denial of Indians right to govern themselves, it probably required maybe a less "shit hole" of a comment.
Quote: "The first edition of The Mismeasure of Man won the non-fiction award from the National Book Critics Circle; the Outstanding Book Award for 1983 from the American Educational Research Association; the Italian translation was awarded the Iglesias prize in 1991; and in 1998, the Modern Library ranked it as the 24th-best non-fiction book of all time.[10] In December 2006, Discover magazine ranked The Mismeasure of Man as the 17th-greatest science book of all time."
the opinions of ignorant journalists are not really relevant. it was strongly criticized by experts in the relevant area. do you realize how intellectually lazy you look when you form strong opinions on subjects without even doing basic research first?
If self-reference were a disease, you would be in an emergency room. You know nothing about me or the research I have conducted, apart from the fact that your argument represents an all-too-common logical error.
> the opinions of ignorant journalists are not really relevant.
> it was strongly criticized by experts in the relevant area.
So, which is it? Did journalists decide, or did experts decide? And do you know why neither of those sources carry weight in science, a field where evidence trumps eminence?
Do you know why I'm playing you along, even though you have nothing to contribute to this discussion? I just want the readers in this forum to see what passes for reasoning among psychologists and their supporters.
at this point you are just embarrassing yourself with your weird crusade attack "psychologists and supporters". I'm sure most readers in this forum feel intuitively that mental ability can be measured with some accuracy, so I doubt you will convince many people. and anyone who cares to look will find a vast psychometric literature that supports the validity of IQ.
I don't need to. The director of the NIMH already agrees with me, and high-level policy changes are under way to permanently change the status of psychiatry and psychology, demote them to the status of astrology. Didn't you get the memo?
> ... anyone who cares to look will find a vast psychometric literature that supports the validity of IQ.
Yes, that works for people suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias, and who can't grasp basic scientific principles. The rest of us will continue practicing science and advocating in favor of neuroscience as psychology's obvious replacement.
IQ testing will become valid only when it is based on science rather than anecdote. Assuming that ever happens.
For anybody reading this in the future, "truthteller" isn't the voice of reason in this thread, he/she is a troll.
The link above by defens is a legitimate criticism of The Mismeasure of Man and is well worth reading. It doesn't speak to the overarching theme of the book, which is it's attack on the goals and the content of intelligence testing, but to a mischaracterization that Gould made of the conclusions of someone else's research, turning them into a bit of a straw man representing subconscious testing bias. It definitely weakens Gould's case in that regard.
> The link above by defens is a legitimate criticism of The Mismeasure of Man and is well worth reading.
I agree completely -- the Gould book was an important contribution to the debate about IQ testing, and it contained a number of errors. Both of the above statements are true -- indeed, it's rare for such an important work of this scope to be error-free.
It's my hope that, as psychology is replaced by neuroscience (a process now under way), the role of opinions will be substantially replaced by scientific evidence, which until now has been in deplorably short supply in this field.
You do not understand "ordinary people." To you they are 'stupid fools' -- so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience -- but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.
Find a way to do your programming with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! This is my advice, my friend.
Technical or mathematical smarts doesn't necessarily translate to wisdom, and as many of the comments herein show, perhaps hinders wisdom.
Perhaps we are governed by idiots. Yes, I'm sure that if we were governed by people with "HN smarts" and worldview, I'm sure society would be so much better off. After all, look at all the great things Silicon Valley and startups are doing to make the world a better place!
Do you think that your inability to relate to other people in your organization is related to your obvious superiority complex?
No one cares what your IQ is. There are many different kinds of intelligence and some of them, like social and emotional intelligence, also contribute to your personal success within any particular organization.
I find it a little amusing that you would talk about social and emotional intelligence, right after you directly accuse someone of having a superiority complex.
No one cares what vis IQ is, but they care how good ve is at programming, and ve attributed vis programming ability to vis IQ. Do you think that connection is false, i.e. that there is only weak correlation between programming ability and IQ?
I won't dispute that the things called "social intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" exist, but is it really correct to refer to them as intelligence? I think that unduly twists the language to make a social point.
I relate to straight shooters who say what they see. I understand that fronting, ass covering, being indirect, and speaking the mel[odious] language of business are ways to play the game.
Mention of IQ induces reflexive invocation of multiple intelligences like ipecac, but IQ-style intelligence is directly relevant to programming.
High emotional intelligence makes it worse when you're in a toxic corporate environment.
The only people who are overly concerned with IQ and take advantage of every opportunity to mention their own score are the people who have nothing to offer but an IQ score. You come across as incredibly haughty and condescending.
I agree that his comment seemed haughty, but I'd like to mention that yours does as well.
I disagree that "only people who are overly concerned with and take advantage of mentioning their IQ". More likely, it's just that smart people with empathic intelligence don't mention it. You know, because they realize that others don't like feeling "dumb".
Straight shooters are great, but you will NEVER have a positive reaction when you talk with people about your IQ. Especially when 145 is so much higher than most. If you have a 145 IQ and you mention it to 1,000 people, you've just pissed off 998 of them.
Look, I'm so bright that people can't look at me without wincing. (At least I assume that's why they can't bear the sight of me.) But even after decades of experience, I still find programming difficult. It's not just people issues; it's technically demanding, too.
It wouldn't be if I had just gone on writing orbital mechanics software in Fortran decade after decade, getting more automatic with each passing year, but that's not what "programming" means to me. Every decade or so there is a sea change: corporate mainframes > personal computers > database-backed websites > online economy > mobile > ?
Within each paradigm, there are new platforms with new languages, APIs, libraries, and tools that matter. Yes, I learned years ago how to manually lay out the logic for looping and branching and recursing and callbacking. Like manual-focus Nikon lenses, they're all still useful today.
But it's maddening that the advanced skills that give me leverage in one era are built into the APIs, libraries, and frameworks of the next and no longer give me any advantage. It's maddening that no matter how much I learn, every new team seems full of people half my age who know far more than I do about the tech stack we're using, and I have to wait for the next technology pivot (sometimes more than a year!) to obsolete their advantage and reset the game yet again.
Having to rebuild your skillset over and over is both a technical and emotional challenge that makes software development ("programming" in the real world) hard.
You sound like a jerk man, I'm as smart as you (and many people here are way, waaaay smarter than you and me together).
It took you 25 years to get where you're right now, does that mean programming is easy? It's the total opposite. In most professions you're ready after 4 years of training, in contrast programming not really.
I don't know how old you are, definitely older than me, but I really hope you don't tell those things you just commented to "the people" you work with.
After 10 years in the industry I relate to that second paragraph far too well. What makes programming hard is that people who aren't programmers don't understand what we do.
I think this really cannot be understated. It will help you get ahead and in many, many different ways while also strengthening your base knowledge and understanding of the subject matter.
I guess I should have put more than 10 seconds in to my first reply, but I totally agree. That's the hard part.
Now I'm in a senior role I spend most of my time explaining what has to be done. All the hows and whys take a long time to explain thoughtfully. If all you can do is "I'm smarter than you and I say so" that's not a good explanation.
I know we like to complain how meetings and presentations take up valuable programming time, but without them there's no way to explain to a CEO what unit tests are for, or why we're now adopting JQuery and removing Prototype from our 5 year old application.
It's always possible, but you have to be aware of what everyone else who supports your organisation values.
> I think programming is easy. When I sit down to code something, it feels deterministic, and everything falls into place
this is something i've always felt and was always confused by when I saw others coding. Nothing was ever "hard," coding just made sense to me. So logical, so easy to do, concepts may be difficult to grasp at first, but it never took long to grasp and commit it to memory.
(Sometimes things fall apart in implementation but we won't go down THAT route)
Most of the time software is fairly 'easy', find the source problem, map out a solution, use your design patterns, and then implement it. I am NOT book-smart by any means (and 5 years Marine Corps vs College did not help that(though going back now while working in the industry seems to be helping to fix it somewhat), however I've always clicked with programming. Sure at times I lack experience that someone who has 10-15 years experience in a certain language might have, but 90% of the problems really only need 2-3 years experience to come up with workable solutions.
I consider myself lucky though, my first job was re-writing an entire code-base to OOP with only one Senior Dev (who was hired a month after me) for guidance. And he taught me everything you could learn, involved me fully in decisions and together (yes a full team of two lol!) stood up Agile Development practices.
I really think that a combination of variously-challenging levels of work combined with an excellent mentor, and being treated as a full-equal is the key to training software engineers to be amazing engineers and giving that 'click'. But I will also say, it takes a certain type of person, some of the people I've seen in school will never be amazing, they lack the flare of passion, but I do believe that the certain type of person needed, is more relevant in Software Development.
Are there no aspects of programming that present any sort of challenge to you? Lockless concurrency? cryptography? The various things that the AI community has been struggling with over the last quarter-century?
Just because a possible alternate explanation is put forward does not imply that explanation is deemed probable. It can simply be more information to consider.
Here's what's difficult for me, and what only gets more difficult as my own time grows shorter and I'm less agreeable to wasting it: Working on teams, under managers, within organisations. Sitting in the third meta-meeting that week, listening to posturers quibble over what Agile means, rolling my eyes thinking obviously it's anything but agile. Performance reviews and arbitrary subjectivity-based rewards dressed in time-consuming process they swear will make it more objective. Perennial "Strategic Roadmap Shifts", listening to yet another CEO spout boilerplate bullshit about how this is the one way to glory, never shall we mention that one from just six months ago - that never happened. And that means another project cancellation. Then one by one the coworkers you like the most get fed up and leave, until the day it's your turn to get fed up and leave. On to greener pastures to enjoy a few months of a semblance of accomplishment before the whole cycle starts to repeat again. All that is what never gets any easier for me. Like everybody always says, "It's the people!"