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Comment by samhuk | Hacker News Reader

> In todays field of software development, people don’t come into it

To be as polite as possible without being dishonest; wow, there are a few rather sweeping, unsubstantiated, boiling hot takes embedded throughout there, i've just quoted one.

From my experience, most of what features here just simply isn't true, or is at least very anecdotal. Just as one example, i've never worked for any software company that "wasn't about the users". You really do just only need to look at how much "UX Specialist" roles have meteorically exploded over the last ~decade or so, as companies compete to offer increasingly smoother user experiences, and it is hammered into the actual developers too as a core operating principle everywhere i've worked.

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> i've never worked for any software company that "wasn't about the users"

Startups are going to tend to have devs focused on users and "quality is everyone's job" etc. In fact, you should never hear the phrase "that's someone else's job" in a startup.

Big corp jobs, especially at non-software companies will tend to treat people as isolated cogs in the big machine, a machine you're told by everyone is "someone else's job" to understand and steer.

The article isn't dishonest. It's that the experience of "being a programmer" varies very widely. Our field has no professional standards.

> Big corp jobs, especially at non-software companies will tend to treat people as isolated cogs in the big machine, a machine you're told by everyone is "someone else's job" to understand and steer.

In my experience at a massive company this is spot on, as a mentor it feels like I spend more time on teaching new hires to realize that we're not a "technology company that does X". We are, in fact, a boring X company that uses technology when it's needed. Not everything has a complex technical solution. Sometimes the best thing you can do, even as a software engineer, involves changing processes, organizational structure, or bad habits.

When I read these "software" articles and books it feels like a radically different world than what I do.

> Just as one example, i've never worked for any software company that "wasn't about the users".

Try working for any of the major CAD companies. They are openly user hostile :-)

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