Software should be about the code, but not for every person on every project for all parts of that project.
It's great to "wake up" and realize that code doesn't have the intrinsic value you might have assumed, but you can also take that knowledge and go right back to writing beautiful code where it best serves the bigger mission.
Now, that is a letter to new developer that I wish I had read when I was a new developer:
Dear new developer,
Be careful when reading blogs. A lot of stuff you'll read online is insightful, informative, innovative, or inspiring. By all means, enrich your life with what you read, but be sure to also re-read "Wind in the Willows" from time to time and reflect on the character of Mr. Toad.
Regards,
Someone Who Made The Mistake of Putting Certain Bloggers on a Pedestal
I think people are one factor. Source does, when done well, communicate intent and implementation precisely to other people. If the language has enough semantic information it can communicate some part of the specification as well. Knowing what to write and ensuring your software does what you think it does is an important part of a project. It takes working with people to build the correct understanding of the specification and requirements.
But to a degree it is also about the code. Sometimes your requirements are: be fast enough. In which case you need to think about code: instructions and data.
When I was a developer I thought “without me all the people in the building have nothing to sell and they can all just go home”.
Then I spent a few years in sales (long story) and flipped 180 degrees. Without salespeople (and the customers they bring in) there would be nobody paying our salaries and we all could just go home.
Without salespeople you can't sell software. Without developers, you can't make software. Since we all have to pay bills, selling software is of crucial importance, but that doesn't make the developers less important. It just means that the society we live in makes those who sell as important as those who make. Just like we strive to evolve software development, we should also strive to evolve the society.
I've made software that people happily used without anyone selling it to them or me earning a single cent off of it. At my age, if I had the luxury of not having to worry about money, that's the kind of thing I would be doing all the time.
When you're first starting out as a junior software developer, normally you do focus on just the job in front of you, i.e., the code, and the seniors have to deal with everything else. As you mature into your role, you gradually increase the scope of your work and start to take bigger and bigger views of the problem, which involves more communication and more people. That's just the natural progression of a software development career, not some big bombshell secret.
Close, but no. Software is about the mind, and its ability to shape (and be shaped by) its environment. Software was about "people" back when we had to pool our keystrokes together just to keep simple websites running - now we have the technical means to face the true nature of the problem, which is political: just like people have autonomy over their bodies, they deserve autonomy over their software, without having to rely on a corrupt and incompetent industry, addicted to ruining their own products for profit.
> just like people have autonomy over their bodies, they deserve autonomy over their software, without having to rely on a corrupt and incompetent industry
The technical means you mention won't give you that. The same people that make the industry "corrupt and incompetent" are leveraging those technical means to make it even more corrupt and less competent. Meanwhile, the rest of us who work in that industry are rapidly losing power to push back.
You can't rely solely on technology to solve problems rooted in human nature. I mean, we have better technology than at any point in human history, and somehow we're regressing on the issue of bodily autonomy.
This is why I'm so frustrated with people who are fanatical about AI adoption. It's not a panacea, it won't usher in some shiny utopia, it's just another technology that can be used both to improve lives and to oppress. If you take a careful look at our society, you can see which of those two uses is currently dominant.
Software can be modeled as a social relation. Unless you're manufacturing your own chips from scratch, that is. Charging people for software never sat right with me.
they are not saying code is worthless. they are saying that code which serves nobody is worthless. if you think that website sucks, it probably means that whoever is behind it don't know (or care) that a user like you exist, which is a pity.
Not really, even with a venture backed company. The investors only care if they believe there will be paying customers, and at the end of the day those are people.
In many cases the customer and user are not the same (e.g. healthcare, Microsoft’s business, Google, et al)
More accurate to say restaurants are about people, not food. May be an apt analogy - chefs and cooks spend their time in the kitchen preparing food for a diner they don’t see.
Very weird title since it implies software is not about code which makes 0 sense. Yes, people skills are part of every profession but software jobs still hire based on how good your coding is primarily.
> software jobs still hire based on how good your coding is primarily
ehhh. In my experience, being able to code is a necessary but not sufficient skill for a software developer. The only exceptions I've seen is having some extremely deep expertise in a niche technical field (and even then I wouldn't call that being able to code well, so much as technical domain knowledge).
When I was hiring at AWS the view for my team (RDS) was that there wasn't much difference in expectations between algorithmic coding ability for juniors and seniors. The primary technical differentiator for seniors was architectural and operational. But even more important than those was the nontechnical stuff; mentorship, being able to communicate ideas clearly and succinctly (no point in being able to architect a system if you can't communicate it in a way people understand), interacting with other teams, demonstrating understanding customer and business value, etc.
Okay sure but would you say software is not about code? Yes of course people skills matter I get it but the baseline is still code, no? Isn't it then weird to say software is not about it but rather people?
Tired of these absolutes.
Software should be about the code, but not for every person on every project for all parts of that project.
It's great to "wake up" and realize that code doesn't have the intrinsic value you might have assumed, but you can also take that knowledge and go right back to writing beautiful code where it best serves the bigger mission.
> Tired of these absolutes.
Now, that is a letter to new developer that I wish I had read when I was a new developer:
Dear new developer,
Be careful when reading blogs. A lot of stuff you'll read online is insightful, informative, innovative, or inspiring. By all means, enrich your life with what you read, but be sure to also re-read "Wind in the Willows" from time to time and reflect on the character of Mr. Toad.
Regards,
Someone Who Made The Mistake of Putting Certain Bloggers on a Pedestal
"Software [ought to be] about people, not code"
Related but not quite the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
I think people are one factor. Source does, when done well, communicate intent and implementation precisely to other people. If the language has enough semantic information it can communicate some part of the specification as well. Knowing what to write and ensuring your software does what you think it does is an important part of a project. It takes working with people to build the correct understanding of the specification and requirements.
But to a degree it is also about the code. Sometimes your requirements are: be fast enough. In which case you need to think about code: instructions and data.
When I was a developer I thought “without me all the people in the building have nothing to sell and they can all just go home”.
Then I spent a few years in sales (long story) and flipped 180 degrees. Without salespeople (and the customers they bring in) there would be nobody paying our salaries and we all could just go home.
You should have stopped at 90 degrees ;)
Without salespeople you can't sell software. Without developers, you can't make software. Since we all have to pay bills, selling software is of crucial importance, but that doesn't make the developers less important. It just means that the society we live in makes those who sell as important as those who make. Just like we strive to evolve software development, we should also strive to evolve the society.
I've made software that people happily used without anyone selling it to them or me earning a single cent off of it. At my age, if I had the luxury of not having to worry about money, that's the kind of thing I would be doing all the time.
Sales is part of the capitalism layer that sits atop the actual work. Same as CEOs.
Two things can be true simultaneously. Neither function works without the other.
The conjoined triangles of success.
And without the farmers pulling the potatoes out of the ground, we would all starve and die. So who is necessary, really?
Anywhere we can read some of your story? I'm always curious about devs that went into sales, or sales from a dev perspective
When you're first starting out as a junior software developer, normally you do focus on just the job in front of you, i.e., the code, and the seniors have to deal with everything else. As you mature into your role, you gradually increase the scope of your work and start to take bigger and bigger views of the problem, which involves more communication and more people. That's just the natural progression of a software development career, not some big bombshell secret.
Close, but no. Software is about the mind, and its ability to shape (and be shaped by) its environment. Software was about "people" back when we had to pool our keystrokes together just to keep simple websites running - now we have the technical means to face the true nature of the problem, which is political: just like people have autonomy over their bodies, they deserve autonomy over their software, without having to rely on a corrupt and incompetent industry, addicted to ruining their own products for profit.
> just like people have autonomy over their bodies, they deserve autonomy over their software, without having to rely on a corrupt and incompetent industry
The technical means you mention won't give you that. The same people that make the industry "corrupt and incompetent" are leveraging those technical means to make it even more corrupt and less competent. Meanwhile, the rest of us who work in that industry are rapidly losing power to push back.
You can't rely solely on technology to solve problems rooted in human nature. I mean, we have better technology than at any point in human history, and somehow we're regressing on the issue of bodily autonomy.
This is why I'm so frustrated with people who are fanatical about AI adoption. It's not a panacea, it won't usher in some shiny utopia, it's just another technology that can be used both to improve lives and to oppress. If you take a careful look at our society, you can see which of those two uses is currently dominant.
It's really about neither.
It's about whether your code earns someone money.
Software can be modeled as a social relation. Unless you're manufacturing your own chips from scratch, that is. Charging people for software never sat right with me.
Great article, I will have more meetings and care less about the code quality. I am sure everything will work out fine.
The compiler doesn't care whether your code is elegant. Your coworkers do. That's literally why code quality exists.
(2020)
Some previous comments:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41566097
Why does the https://fusionauth.io/ website suck then?
Enough of these code is worthless propaganda articles.
they are not saying code is worthless. they are saying that code which serves nobody is worthless. if you think that website sucks, it probably means that whoever is behind it don't know (or care) that a user like you exist, which is a pity.
a truism but also not that interesting. why is this getting upvoted?
Every product is about people.
For now. Will that remain true?
Every product is about investors.
Investors are people
[citation needed]
No u
Not really, even with a venture backed company. The investors only care if they believe there will be paying customers, and at the end of the day those are people.
In many cases the customer and user are not the same (e.g. healthcare, Microsoft’s business, Google, et al)
Exactly, so the most important thing is convincing investors there will be paying customers.
Not having paying customers.
How to make a people problem worse:
- Umbrellas are about people, not rain.
- But your umbrella will keep me dry, right?
- The materials, the shape, none of it is really important.
- I'm not sure what you mean. Give me some hard numbers. How much rainfall the fabric can take? Was it built with quality?
- At the end of the day, an umbrella is just a tool.
“Eventually I realised restaurants are about diners, not knives.”
More accurate to say restaurants are about people, not food. May be an apt analogy - chefs and cooks spend their time in the kitchen preparing food for a diner they don’t see.
Very weird title since it implies software is not about code which makes 0 sense. Yes, people skills are part of every profession but software jobs still hire based on how good your coding is primarily.
> software jobs still hire based on how good your coding is primarily
ehhh. In my experience, being able to code is a necessary but not sufficient skill for a software developer. The only exceptions I've seen is having some extremely deep expertise in a niche technical field (and even then I wouldn't call that being able to code well, so much as technical domain knowledge).
When I was hiring at AWS the view for my team (RDS) was that there wasn't much difference in expectations between algorithmic coding ability for juniors and seniors. The primary technical differentiator for seniors was architectural and operational. But even more important than those was the nontechnical stuff; mentorship, being able to communicate ideas clearly and succinctly (no point in being able to architect a system if you can't communicate it in a way people understand), interacting with other teams, demonstrating understanding customer and business value, etc.
Okay sure but would you say software is not about code? Yes of course people skills matter I get it but the baseline is still code, no? Isn't it then weird to say software is not about it but rather people?
Don't they now hire based on AI token use?
touche