Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#461

Post by terminalcommand » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 4:57 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #439

terminalcommand wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a law student, I experience this a lot. Computers and programming were/are my only passion and obsession. My life is dedicated to computers, but professionally I have to be a lawyer. I just had an interview at an IT Law Firm, and made a fool of myself. That's why I completely agree that, we as "people who are good at computers" need to keep seperate identities. Because if you go full Aspergers, you make yourself v…

>Once people realize you're "different", you get the "poor boy treatment" and that hurts. Or worse, once you're pegged as a hopeless geek then people tend to walk all over you and you're not seen as the kind of person who advances, becomes management, etc. You're a freakshow human resource to perform labor that, unfortunately needs to be done, until everything can be a one-click cloud solution. I make a very special…

That's true, most of the time I only say that "I'm good with computers". Nobody understands.

But sometimes, it slips out inevitably.

Regaining your image or just being able to hold your head high requires great effort.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#462

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

dschiptsov wrote: post #285

david927 wrote: post #114

I currently work in a good environment where I'm appreciated and paid well. Not many people in the world can say that, so I have a lot to be thankful for. Programming has done good by me. But I don't love it. Alan Kay is right, it's like building "an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves". There's no eleg…

> an Asperger profession could you, please, elaborate on this meme? And that pyramid, well, it definitely is the way how a corporate and enterprise Java software has been and still being made. Java itself is an ecosystem for creating coding factories - to parallelize the process of coding (one cannot honestly call this programming) among teams of easily replaceable, uniform (in terms of abilities) cheap workers. Ever…

> But there are very few slots available

Is it really true?

Personally, I'm evidence for it, since I spend my days building pyramids, and program only on the side.

But the entire thing does not add-up. The artful activity is so much more productive that I can not stop believing that in any market you are able to create a slot doing it, you will outcompete all the pyramid builders. (Yet this pyramid pays me too well to just abandon it.)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#463

Post by gaastonsr » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #114

I currently work in a good environment where I'm appreciated and paid well. Not many people in the world can say that, so I have a lot to be thankful for. Programming has done good by me. But I don't love it. Alan Kay is right, it's like building "an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves". There's no eleg…

> There's no elegance and no higher vision. It's an Asperger profession; smart but artless.

I guess it's not for everybody. There's always going to be people that whatever they do it's just going to be a job.

While other people find it to be an art. You can say this of finances, music, programming, accounting, anything, really.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#464

Post by amelius » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

Grishnakh wrote: post #459

digler999 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and made a fool of myself. Good. you got out there and made mistakes. Now you can learn from them and you wont ever be that bad henceforth, hereunto. I made a total ass out of my self the first few programming interviews I went to. First one, recruiter called me (woke me up at ~10am) and I thought I'd show "initiative", I said "sure Ill be there in 2 hours". Went totally unprepared, didn't even bring a copy of my r…

>I learned quickly, eventually got good at interviews, and ultimately got a job at bloomberg, which is fairly difficult to get past their interiew process. Bloomberg, where it's just one giant open noisy room? Doesn't sound like much of a reward to me. Personally, I wish I had never gone into programming. I wanted a profession where I could sit in peace and quiet and work on interesting intellectual problems on my ow…

> If I had known this, I would have chosen a different profession, probably something involving medicine

You can still work in a medical field, for example, as a bio-informatician.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#465

Post by Tiktaalik » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

I definitely have. I enjoy programming and I think I'm pretty good at my job, but I can't help but think that maybe there's something out there.

A lot of my most compelling business ideas I've ever come up with haven't been apps or anything I could start programming right away, but rather have been totally different brick and mortar retail businesses. Opening a retail business is something I've thought about doing for a while, but I looked into some of the details and was somewhat turned off by the extremely high startup costs. I simply wouldn't be able to afford it without some partners.

One of my largest interests nowadays isn't software, but rather cities and urban planning. The idea of designing city features that would have a real, dramatic impact on people's every day lives is really compelling to me. I've thought about taking a break from software and working in this area, but at this point I really don't know if going back to school for this stuff is worth it at all. It's unfortunate that I hadn't discovered I was so interested in this topic when I was in highschool or early university.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#466

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC

aquadrop wrote: post #302

david927 wrote: post #114

I currently work in a good environment where I'm appreciated and paid well. Not many people in the world can say that, so I have a lot to be thankful for. Programming has done good by me. But I don't love it. Alan Kay is right, it's like building "an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves". There's no eleg…

> smart but artless So, it's just not for you. You fail to see art in it, That happens, it's ok. Maybe you need to think about gradually moving to the movie business, they need programming too, you know.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#467

Post by david927 » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

gaastonsr wrote: post #463

david927 wrote: post #114

I currently work in a good environment where I'm appreciated and paid well. Not many people in the world can say that, so I have a lot to be thankful for. Programming has done good by me. But I don't love it. Alan Kay is right, it's like building "an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves". There's no eleg…

> There's no elegance and no higher vision. It's an Asperger profession; smart but artless. I guess it's not for everybody. There's always going to be people that whatever they do it's just going to be a job. While other people find it to be an art. You can say this of finances, music, programming, accounting, anything, really.

Notice that I'm quoting Alan Kay. You're not just disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with a Turing Award winner -- and that's not to say that he's right, or by extension that I'm right, but you can't simply hand wave it away as coming from someone who doesn't understand it well enough.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#468

Post by notdonspaulding » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #261

gandolfinmyhead wrote: post #143

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…

Points 1 and 2 can be a good thing, if you have the mental fortitude and cast-iron gullet to specialize in cleaning up other people's messes. There's a lot of money to be made that way. It doesn't tickle the artistic urge the same way greenfield development often can, but that's what creative hobbies are for - I write - and you can derive considerable satisfaction from the knowledge that you're bringing order from ch…

    > if you have the mental fortitude and cast-iron gullet
    > to specialize in cleaning up other people's messes. 
    > There's a lot of money to be made that way.

How does an individual or a consultancy go about finding these messes to be cleaned up? I feel reasonably-qualified to go in and take the necessary steps to get engineering projects back on track, but I'm not sure how you would get started doing that?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#469

Post by rurban » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

I did it a couple of times and always came back.

I started as programmer in school, but decided you don't need to study it. It's easier to learn it by your own. Then I became architect, but mostly automated my problems and solutions. After architecture became tiring, without enough pay, I went to more engineering jobs.

Survey, civil engineering, city planning and finally stage design and film. This was all fun and got well paid, but I ended up as director of SW development soon after. After this was not fun anymore I went into hard core engineering, Formula 1 HW/SW simulation and support, but in the end I did more SW development than HW support. HW is always tricky and unreliable. SW is much more logical and reliable, much easier to analyze. And you are not that dependent on others. In SW it's easy to solve everything by yourself on 10x less time than waiting a year for someone else to approve something or until this piece is replaced.

So I went to full time SW work again, even if I still do work a lot on movies also. This is just for fun, helping out, going to festivals and such.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

#470

Post by JDiculous » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

clusmore wrote: post #184

JDiculous wrote: post #109

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…

>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. I don't think this is a fair comparison. This is actually one of those cases where I like the distinction between "programmer" and "coder". What you're describing sounds like a "coder" or a "code monkey," not at all like what I do in my job. If you were to translate this job ov…

Programming and coding are the same thing. I think the distinction you were looking for was engineer vs. programmer/coder, and programming is simply the implementation part.

What you described seems more like a managerial role and/or an engineering role that also encompasses product/UI design. In my experience, most of the design work - the actual creative part - is delegated to other people, and the actual implementation of these designs is the task of the engineer. As engineers, we're working on the least creative part.