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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Hell no. Software comes from software development. And software development is a process. My editor, programming style, directory structures and other personal organizational behaviours do matter. This is work we do, and while the end user's experience may be identical regardless of very different personal development style options, the one which gives me the most comfort and work satisfaction is superior.

Only nobody cares about you.

As in a restaurant, people care about the food, not the cook.

And even if you (and I) mattered, developers of a piece of software are N, where users are 1000N or 100000000N. They matter massively more.

Oh, and there will always be programmers as long as there are money to be made, so the "without me [in particular] there would be no software" argument doesn't hold much either.

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> As in a restaurant, people care about the food, not the cook.

The health inspectors care about both the food and the cook, and the latter's workflow is certainly scrutinized.

If we're going to beat this analogy to a bloody pulp, the health inspector in software land would be technical debt and colleagues.

Not taking care of the process will bury the project, and the users with it. Ryan Dahl's brilliant, but I don't think his entire statement should be adhered to verbatim. It's solid guiding principle, nothing more.

No, the health inspector would be non-existing in most software shops.

What a different industry it would be if all software required independent audits and the public could get access to the results.

Colleagues are non existent in most software shops? I obviously didn't imply there was some independent software inspection service.

I care about how code is written, because I'll have to work on it. My employers care about how code is written, because our reputation is on the line.

It's about solving problems, certainly, but workflows directly contribute to solving problems better, faster and more reliably.

This is like saying "the only thing that matters at this hotel is service". The challenge is hotels that go overboard at the expense of employees wind up with bad service anyway. There's a reason high end hotels treat employees well.

Similarly companies too crazy about short term shareholder value find that it takes committed employees to get long term results.

> Only nobody cares about you.

Except me, I care about me.

And I don't want to use crappy and shitty tools. I want to use good tools. I am less productive when I use crappy tools, it can be done, but then a lot of time is spent fighting the tools not really solving problem.

> Oh, and there will always be programmers as long as there are money to be made

There are not that many good programmers. Or at least they are not the ones throwing resumes around. One has to find them, if they are good they are probably already in a good place and are not looking for job. So you just taking anyone from the street because they did some VBScript in High School you are going to replace one good programmers with even 100 incompetent ones. It is just not how it works.

> And I don't want to use crappy and shitty tools.

Neither does Ryan. That's what the whole rant is about. He just wants to make software for users without having to hack through the forest of bad design decisions that is the modern Linux system.

Yeah I agree with Ryan's point there I was just replying to the GP about how nobody cares about programmers and how programmers who whine and complain are just easy to replace like cogs in a machine.

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