Once when I was starting out as a software engineer, I worked for an aerospace company. They paid a lot of money to relocate me to another city but the first day I started, the contract I was supposed to work on was canceled and so they told me to sit at a table outside the software development manager's office until they found another project for me. This was before cellphones, and tablets and laptops and mostly desktop computers. I had nothing to do for a month and when my table was overrun by other engineers in the same predicament I was usually down at the corporate library because that was the only place with a chair and desk I could sit at. I didn't want to make it appear as if I was useless. I mean, I just moved 2000 miles, so instead of bringing in books to read, I sat there for about a month reading the same corporate engineering manual, over and over and over. After about a month I was assigned to a project but things didn't get much better. I found out there was a pecking order to the programmers according to what their workspace looked like. On budget scraping projects, engineers were typically forced to work in a room without enough chairs or desks. I say desks loosely because sometimes they just had tables, sometimes card tables. Every day it was first come, first served. Anyway, the point is that we used to refer to a room full of engineers as a bullpen and the work the engineers produced under those conditions, well, bs. When I finally got a cubicle to work in, it was heaven. Fast forward 10 years and thanks to silicon valley, cubicles became bad and bullpens became good. Some genius figured out how to convince developers to work in a bullpen in order to save money on office furniture. And they figured out that they could pay these people less money if they provided them with free processed food and drinks. Pay them less, and take part of the savings to buy cheap junk food to give them so you can take away any reason they should be away from their desk or work a normal 8 hour day like everyone else and go home. That's the software development world for you, particularly silicon valley. Or, at least the image of silicon valley that everyone tries to reproduce.
I heard about this show several years ago but I didn't want to watch it because I figured it would be more bill gates and steve jobs nonsense. There's a disturbingly large segment of the population that think these guys invented computers. I even read a review recently where this nimrod was thanking bill gates for inventing software. In case you're misinformed like this twit, no he didn't. Bill didn't invent software and neither of them invented computers either. Whenever I read stuff about bill&steve, my head wants to explode, so I thought why risk a stroke watching a tv show. I couldn't even make it thru one episode of halt and catch fire, so I figured why waste my time. However, when hbo announced they were streaming the series for free I thought okay, I'll watch one episode.
Software development is boring but it has such a diverse group of uniquely disturbing personalities you have to deal with that it can be extremely funny and also maddening and frustrating which is why I like this show because it captures pretty much all of that. I once had a guy ask me in a phone interview for a job if I liked working with people. I thought it was a trick question so I said sure, I believe a team of people working together can always achieve more than the individual. Okay well, there was a long pause on the phone and then this guy said, well, I'm not; I'm not a people person. I didn't get the job.
If you're reading this review, you've probably already watched the show so I won't recap what the story is about or describe the characters. All I can add is that the technobbable, absurd plots and twists in each show and the characters are hyperboles of the real world but still pretty spot on to the insanity of tech today. There's a few things I would add but every episode is streamed with amazing references and replications to the world I used to work in. I don't know what the background of the writers is but I would find it hard to believe that this isn't inspired and directed by people in the biz. They've nailed it all and hit on a whole bunch of idiosyncratic pimples and nuances. Like, "he's a coder". I don't know if the general public gets it but that's funny. Software developers write code for a living but people who write a lot of code are often looked down on especially if it's in lesser revered languages, like scripting languages. A lot of times the more code you can write in the least amount of time, the more you're looked down upon by other developers. It's like a carpenter who uses too much wood to frame a house. Everybody knows you only need so much wood and so many nails. Anything over that means you're useless.
And the episode about 'spaces' vs 'tabs'. That's also spot on. I've seen developers throw sissy fits over style issues and other innane topics. In the c++ world, it's even more extreme. There's two types of c++ programmers. Those that are practical and have a life outside work and those that are purists and think all code should compile without errors and warnings and if it doesn't, your code sucks and you don't know your asterisk from a period. According to them, your code is a ticking time bomb ready to turn that $150 million mars lander into space junk.
Anyway, imho, the show is brilliant. If you're not in the biz and don't get all the jokes, it doesn't matter. It's not your fault. You're probably better off anyway.
If you're in the biz, there should be something there for everyone. If not, maybe the joke is on you. Think about it.
47 out of 48 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink