I started my programming career teaching myself to script and code to write tools to automate large aspect of my electrical engineering job. Eventually I hit the point, where my tools were getting huge and complicated and I realized that my professional software skills were lacking and I couldn’t just keep producing this untested spaghetti code and hope to actually get things done in manageable way.
I then left for the world of professional software engineering, and in the time since, I’ve seen two companies that actually build software properly, and three companies producing worse code with worse practices than my self taught code from years ago.
Quite frankly the world of software development is downright embarassing to work in at times. I don’t think we necessarily need to gatekeep software development with engineering degrees, but I do think that all developers should be required to take engineering ethics courses to understand their own responsibilities to push back and say no, this is not done and shippable until it’s properly built and documented.
I wish I had some hippocratic style oath I could lean on to not release unsafe, unoptimised, barely tested, possibly maintainable code.
Alas all I have is good, verbose comments and an email here or there expressing my concerns.
i started in a similar fashion (but through IT instead of electrical engineering) and i’ve also left the world of professional software engineering a couple of months ago, but not because of the bad code bases.
it feels like bad/spaghetti code with bad practices are more common than not and i’ve always wondered if the relatively intense level of gatekeeping in the software engineering field is a manifestation of a false mass belief that an engineering degree will automatically result in better code.
i’ve also left the world of professional software engineering a couple of months ago
What are you doing now? 🙂
I have no intention of leaving my web dev consultant career, I’m loving it, regardless of poor practices (it’s not so bad in the places I’ve been). But I’m curious what kind of careers people find after software development.
I started my programming career teaching myself to script and code to write tools to automate large aspect of my electrical engineering job. Eventually I hit the point, where my tools were getting huge and complicated and I realized that my professional software skills were lacking and I couldn’t just keep producing this untested spaghetti code and hope to actually get things done in manageable way.
I then left for the world of professional software engineering, and in the time since, I’ve seen two companies that actually build software properly, and three companies producing worse code with worse practices than my self taught code from years ago.
Quite frankly the world of software development is downright embarassing to work in at times. I don’t think we necessarily need to gatekeep software development with engineering degrees, but I do think that all developers should be required to take engineering ethics courses to understand their own responsibilities to push back and say no, this is not done and shippable until it’s properly built and documented.
I wish I had some hippocratic style oath I could lean on to not release unsafe, unoptimised, barely tested, possibly maintainable code.
Alas all I have is good, verbose comments and an email here or there expressing my concerns.
i started in a similar fashion (but through IT instead of electrical engineering) and i’ve also left the world of professional software engineering a couple of months ago, but not because of the bad code bases.
it feels like bad/spaghetti code with bad practices are more common than not and i’ve always wondered if the relatively intense level of gatekeeping in the software engineering field is a manifestation of a false mass belief that an engineering degree will automatically result in better code.
What are you doing now? 🙂
I have no intention of leaving my web dev consultant career, I’m loving it, regardless of poor practices (it’s not so bad in the places I’ve been). But I’m curious what kind of careers people find after software development.