I personally never found "programming" difficult, the difficult part is understanding large systems and finding the correct abstractions and most of all communicating these thoughts to other programmers. If programming starts to feel difficult its usually because I failed in one of those other areas or was forced to work on legacy projects where other people failed to make the best decisions.
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
#32Been 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…
Generally agree. Although I also find different types of hobby programming hard too, like trying to use a FLIR Lepton with a Pi Zero 2. I also think things are getting harder at work because the disorganization is increasing and the number of integrations are increasing the number of blackboxes in the system that when I started over a decade ago.
Yeah, I guess the words "hard" and "easy" are oversimplifications of what I am trying to say... a lot of the stuff does take deep thinking, trial and error, multiple failures, and many hours of work... it is just that the concentration and focus to do that hard work comes easy to me. I don't have to force myself to focus on the hard thinking, it just comes naturally... I would have to work to STOP myself from thinking through the problem, even if it takes hours or days.
On the other hand, it takes all my willpower and mental control I have to finish filling out that OKR or the weekly status report or whatever.
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#33Speaking as someone with 10+ years experience with C# and TypeScript, coding is in general pretty easy.
What’s hard is managing complexity and dealing other people on large projects.
This really isn’t surprising when you think about it by comparing writing of code to writing of spoken languages. Just because you’re excellent at grammar and spelling, allowing you to write great emails and possibly even essays, does not mean you have the expertise to write a good, cohesive, long novel.
Similarly, making a short video by yourself or with a few friends is achievable for most. But making a full length feature film requiring the collaboration of 100s or 1000s of individuals while keeping to budget is no trivial task.
Really valuable programmers understand that the actual coding is only a small part of being able to deliver a large successful project, where the real hard part is preventing the complexity of a code base from overwhelming your team while effectively communicating with others to ensure you build the correct thing which works cohesively.
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#34Disagree. Programming now for 30 years and it's a breeze to pick up new frameworks and ideas.
I do see a lot of struggling developers who are only in it for the paycheck, who learnt their Java only skills 20 years ago who wonder why it doesn't get any easier...
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#35Yes, 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…
How do you realize that one is building the wrong thing?
Not OP, but asking yourself who would use what you are building, and then checking whether they will use what you build is a good start. Of course, the "checking" part is hard, even with a lot of methodology.
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#36Been 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…
Most of those processes, tps reports, jira and other annoyances is because in a programming environment you literally have too many cooks in the kitchen. Every programmer can create the system from scratch, so to prevent them from doing so, we have to make it super annoying. Basically it's a people problem.
The most incredible work happens in the first 3 months by a lone developer green-fielding with no boundaries. The only way for that codebase to move forward after getting a second/third/fourth person is to increase process, introduce pain and bloodshed.
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#37Speaking as someone with 10+ years experience with C# and TypeScript, coding is in general pretty easy. What’s hard is managing complexity and dealing other people on large projects. This really isn’t surprising when you think about it by comparing writing of code to writing of spoken languages. Just because you’re excellent at grammar and spelling, allowing you to write great emails and possibly even essays, does no…
Agreed. I've said forever that I spend one month a year coding, and 11 months debugging, testing, documenting, negotiating, packaging, releasing, supporting.
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#38Speaking as someone with 10+ years experience with C# and TypeScript, coding is in general pretty easy. What’s hard is managing complexity and dealing other people on large projects. This really isn’t surprising when you think about it by comparing writing of code to writing of spoken languages. Just because you’re excellent at grammar and spelling, allowing you to write great emails and possibly even essays, does no…
Agreed. I've said forever that I spend one month a year coding, and 11 months debugging, testing, documenting, negotiating, packaging, releasing, supporting.
There's been academic studies on this. The average hourly productivity as measured in lines of code for professional developers is very low. Along to order of 1 to 2 lines of code per hour. This is because of all the other communication and synchronization that you mentioned that needs to happen.
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#39Merely responding to the headline, but I've always held that if I reach the point I am no longer learning/challenged (here, maybe that means literally everything is easy), then it's time to consider moving on to something else.
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#40Been 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?
Judging by my SO's experience as a corporate drone others get the same type of bs, but without the pay.
She works really hard in comparison to me and half of that work is wrestling with the ever changing processes (or actually Standard Operating Procedures), that never cover all the edge cases.