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After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

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Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#11

Post by simonw »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #6
simonw wrote: post #4

If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. On top of that there are all of the other professional skills you need to develop to be a really effective software engineer: communication, writing, planning, navigating organizations, figuring out the best thing to build and how to effectively make the case for it. The thing I like most about this career is the amount of depth it has - th…

Sure. But getting ground down by dealing with people around you that generate the same problems over and over, can get tiring. I mean 2 basic areas: 1. Management turnover. New Managers, let's re-invent the wheel again. 2. New hires. Newer programmers that wont believe anything you say until they implement something incorrectly themselves. And you have to deal with fallout. 3. Should add 3rd -- New Framework/library/…

Right, dealing with this stuff is really difficult! That's why I reject the term "soft skills" and use the term "professional skills" instead.

Software engineers who can help convince their organizations to work in the most effective way possible (avoiding not-invented-here and lets-use-the-cool-new-thing and suchlike) are enormously valuable.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#12

Post by sfvisser »

Yes, incredibly difficult. Nearing 20 years in the field now and programming is still as difficult as in at the start. Or maybe more so, because you are so aware things will break on the first try anyways. Always.

Most important lesson for me is to stay close to the problem domain. Think deeply about what your domain means and model in code accordingly.

Staying close to the true meaning of your application beats all other attempts at code maintainability. Types, tests, frameworks, dry, language features, ci pipelines, scrum whatnot. All just fun party tricks that fall short when your building the wrong thing.

Are we building the wrong thing? Almost always.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#13

Post by ben_w »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #7
simonw wrote: post #4

If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. On top of that there are all of the other professional skills you need to develop to be a really effective software engineer: communication, writing, planning, navigating organizations, figuring out the best thing to build and how to effectively make the case for it. The thing I like most about this career is the amount of depth it has - th…

> If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. programming is the act of writing code, it should absolutely get easy. I think you meant software development rather than programming.

Even with just programming, I'd agree with what simonw wrote. Over my life, I've done Commodore 64/BBC/REAL/Visual BASIC, C/C++, IDL, python, bash, Java, PHP, ObjC, Swift, and JS, all of which have their own "right way" as they have different abstractions.

Even just with those last three, the "right way" has changed significantly since I first started using them — used to be of vital importance to understand manual memory management while asynchronous processes could usually be ignored, now it's mostly the other way around (and the other process may be on a different computer on the other side of the planet, let alone a different core).

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#14

Post by tomxor »

> "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."

I would set an even lower bar: "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that they understand." Because it's not as common as you might hope. Yes, a lot of us are only 1 level up from monkeys at typewriters (monkeys at typewriters guided by compiler warnings).

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#15

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

Programming computers ia a wonderful thing.

Programming with the current tools, languages and conceptual models is way too low level, tedious, repetitive, fragile, boring and mostly unnecessary.

That has to change. The reason people find it difficult after such a long time is because it's inherently broken.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#17

Post by cortesoft »

Been programming over 30 years, since I was 8 years old and my dad’s coworker gave me his old BASIC programming books and I was hooked.

I have always found programming easy, and still do. It is just fun, and I still love learning new languages and tools and paradigms. It is still my favorite hobby.

However, WORK is hard. Dealing with office politics and changing priorities and bad leadership and meetings and TPS reports and JIRA tickets and new HR processes every year and mergers and acquisitions and new mandates to switch everything to a different system and all the other corporate bullshit is why they have to pay me so much.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#18

Post by master-lincoln »

simonw wrote: post #10
PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. programming is the act of writing code, it should absolutely get easy. I think you meant software development rather than programming.

Yeah, I mean software development. I don't find the semantic distinction between that and programming particularly interesting myself - why write code if you're not doing that do develop software?

Because you might have architects specifying exactly what needs to be programmed, so the software development part is mostly done.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#19

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

simonw wrote: post #10
PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. programming is the act of writing code, it should absolutely get easy. I think you meant software development rather than programming.

Yeah, I mean software development. I don't find the semantic distinction between that and programming particularly interesting myself - why write code if you're not doing that do develop software?

To me it's the difference between building a road and urban planning.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#20

Post by seanmcdirmid »

cortesoft wrote: post #17

Been programming over 30 years, since I was 8 years old and my dad’s coworker gave me his old BASIC programming books and I was hooked. I have always found programming easy, and still do. It is just fun, and I still love learning new languages and tools and paradigms. It is still my favorite hobby. However, WORK is hard. Dealing with office politics and changing priorities and bad leadership and meetings and TPS repo…

Ya, programming/maintnence/testing are the easy parts of our job. Especially work politics, but keeping up with paper work (OKRs, perf reviews, status reports, design documents that might not ever be read by anyone else...) is the hard part, and I guess why we get paid so much?
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