151–160 of 570 posts
There's that nagging idea of the 'real programmer' who is getting paid big money to solve interesting problems. Almost certainly a myth but still a frustrating idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming involves very little creativity compared to actual art, so to call it a "creative art" is a gross exaggeration. A programmer is given a very specific set of tasks (eg. send data from A to B, fix bug, implement X), and his problems are mostly technical. This doesn't even compare to the creativity involved in a real artistic endeavor like designing your own videogame, writing your own screenplay, or composi…
>Lack of creativity is actually one of my biggest complaints with this field. That says more about the artist than the medium. :) Constraints breed creativity!
To make this concrete, in programming, type checking eliminates all the programs which would have a type error so they are good constraints. But some languages constrain you in arbitrary way which hurts. For example, Java doesn't let you do any functional programming and has a weak type system, which means introduces design patterns.
Ian Bogost wrote a good piece on this called "Shit Crayons" comparing games like Spore to Photoshop, where even though Photoshop is more powerful, most of the stuff you can produce is bad, supporting the idea of constraints. But then he took apart Minecraft for being overly restrictive, causing many things like houses to be dull. http://bogost.com/writing/shit_crayons/
Sadly yes. It's been very frustrating at times. I thought of becoming an environment artist for videogames instead. Though OP hasn't asked for the following here goes, I feel the IT field has a lot of people wanting to change career paths, more than any other field because of the following: 1. Programming is an art, if not done right and assuming the product is in continuous development, will come back to bite you in…
This feels like a bold claim. Is there anything to support it?
I would also dispute "The IT field has no concept of overtime pay" as being a meaningful reason - many "white collar" professions don't really pay overtime. (I will say that as a contractor, I managed to negotiate a higher rate for working at weekends a few times, but as a permanent employee, the best I ever managed was "time in lieu", which at least a few times basically meant a lie-in after working late.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming involves very little creativity compared to actual art, so to call it a "creative art" is a gross exaggeration. A programmer is given a very specific set of tasks (eg. send data from A to B, fix bug, implement X), and his problems are mostly technical. This doesn't even compare to the creativity involved in a real artistic endeavor like designing your own videogame, writing your own screenplay, or composi…
Perhaps I've just been lucky with jobs, but my daily work hasn't been "send data from A to B, fix bug" since my first job before college (except for ramp-up time when I was just starting at Google, and even then my manager was like "Do you really want to just be fixing unit tests?". It was "Give quants a development environment where they can quickly write algorithms that will run on our parallel-processing cluster",…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming involves very little creativity compared to actual art, so to call it a "creative art" is a gross exaggeration. A programmer is given a very specific set of tasks (eg. send data from A to B, fix bug, implement X), and his problems are mostly technical. This doesn't even compare to the creativity involved in a real artistic endeavor like designing your own videogame, writing your own screenplay, or composi…
Perhaps I've just been lucky with jobs, but my daily work hasn't been "send data from A to B, fix bug" since my first job before college (except for ramp-up time when I was just starting at Google, and even then my manager was like "Do you really want to just be fixing unit tests?". It was "Give quants a development environment where they can quickly write algorithms that will run on our parallel-processing cluster",…
My solution was to eventually either become a consultant/freelancer, or create my own startup. When I then realized that a tech lead (Staff Software Engineer) spends about as much time doing manager-related tasks as they do developing software, and that a Senior Staff Software Engineer or Principal Engineer is essentially a manager (almost no coding), I knew my days dealing with corporate world BS were numbered.
My plan didn't really fall into place, as I became a Targeted Individual (likely at the hand of one of the idiots managers I had to deal with) 2-3 years after graduating from college. That BS left me sitting in this room for the last 5-6 years being harassed all day long.
After a few years of the torture, I was pretty much done working, as I was now unemployed for too long a period of time, my intelligence and reasoning ability were waning away, and the harassing/intrusive thoughts were still present and were still getting in the way.
Programming is a creative art, and when I say that to my non-programmer friends, they laugh it off, but if you think about it, it is true. Just like artists, the programmers, coders, developers all design and create new things that didn't exist before, and no 2 programs or applications or completely functioning code will be identical for anything other than a fizzbuzz type test. So it is natural for the creatives to…
Programming involves very little creativity compared to actual art, so to call it a "creative art" is a gross exaggeration. A programmer is given a very specific set of tasks (eg. send data from A to B, fix bug, implement X), and his problems are mostly technical. This doesn't even compare to the creativity involved in a real artistic endeavor like designing your own videogame, writing your own screenplay, or composi…
I'd say most interesting programming tasks certainly have elements of interesting artistic tasks. They usually involve a problem that is hard to put in words but needs solving. Especially in the startup context it's fairly close to art (imo) since your canvas is so empty...often you don't even know if you're working on the right problem to boot and will only find out through a process.
I think you should experience how horrible 99% of all other jobs are. Then you will truly appreciate what you have.
As others have said programming is probably the lesser of all evils compared to other jobs though. I don't think there is any other profession where I could so easily get paid as much as I do, and work from pretty much anywhere on the planet.
My mid-term goal is financial independence. I'm 28 and should achieve that in the next few years (I'll probably take short-term contracts and then a big break between rather than quitting completely). I don't really have any other hobbies, so I'm not sure what I'll do then though. I wouldn't mind going back to university to study physics.