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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

#51

Post by ericmcer »

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…

If you are finding programming easy doesn't that just mean you aren't trying hard enough? There are tons of unsolved problems, tools that aren't optimal, and products that don't work as well as they should.

If fixing those things were easy for you, you would be a billionaire.

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

#52

Post by throwawa14223 »

throwawa14223 wrote: post #28
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…

I'm in the same boat as you. Everything around JIRA is a huge pain, but programming is easy.

With more reflection. There are only a handful of times in my 20 year career I've felt the programming itself was difficult. It was feeling like my hands were tied by 'easy' languages like Python and Go. The simplicity of the languages meant there was far more I had to keep track of in my head and less I could reason through.

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

#53

Post by haswell »

SillyUsername wrote: post #34

Disagree. 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...

What is it that you disagree with? It seems that this is primarily a matter of: some people naturally take to programming, and some people have a much harder time with it.

The same is true in many fields. Music has its virtuosos and naturals. The same can be said for art. Programming requires a certain kind of mindset and abstract thinking ability that comes naturally to some, and is much harder for others.

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

#54

Post by RHSeeger »

ericmcer wrote: post #51
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…

If you are finding programming easy doesn't that just mean you aren't trying hard enough? There are tons of unsolved problems, tools that aren't optimal, and products that don't work as well as they should. If fixing those things were easy for you, you would be a billionaire.

My guess would be that they are confusing "enjoyable" with "easy". I find software development enjoyable, but it can be both hard and easy at times. And sometimes hard (problem solving) is what I want to do, other times easy (knocking out code for a solved problem) is what I want instead.

Alternatively, they are just in a role/job that doesn't happen to deal with difficult problems. Which is fine. Sometimes, that's what you want.

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

#55

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Tade0 wrote: post #40
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, yes. I think we are still lucky, just that we are subject to the same corporate dysfunction as everyone else. I still feel like I'm being paid for the dysfunction though (since they want us to code, but coding is what I already like to do, they could pay me a lot less if they could convince me I wouldn't have to deal with office politics).

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

#56

Post by pjmorris »

throwitaway222 wrote: post #36
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…

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. T…

“ The interaction of two programmers looking over a program that either one of them could have worked out is entirely different from the interaction of two programmers working on separate parts of a whole which is too great for either one to produce.

The difference lies in the way conflicting demands are resolved. In the first case, resolution of conflict is the thinking process of one person—aided perhaps by other people, but always under that one person's control. In the second case, conflicting technical demands are translated into potential interpersonal conflicts, and a social mechanism must be formed to resolve them."

- 'The Psychology of Computer Programming', Gerald Weinberg

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

#57

Post by jeffbee »

The more you know the harder it becomes. An inexperienced programmer will dash off thousands of lines of toxic waste "code" in a day. An experienced programmer knows that every line is a burden. The goal should not be to return to the false illusion of productivity, but to embrace the true nature of the task.

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

#58

Post by cortesoft »

RHSeeger wrote: post #54
ericmcer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are finding programming easy doesn't that just mean you aren't trying hard enough? There are tons of unsolved problems, tools that aren't optimal, and products that don't work as well as they should. If fixing those things were easy for you, you would be a billionaire.

My guess would be that they are confusing "enjoyable" with "easy". I find software development enjoyable, but it can be both hard and easy at times. And sometimes hard (problem solving) is what I want to do, other times easy (knocking out code for a solved problem) is what I want instead. Alternatively, they are just in a role/job that doesn't happen to deal with difficult problems. Which is fine. Sometimes, that's w…

Yeah, I clarified in another comment... it is more that I find it easy to do the hard work of programming.

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

#59

Post by ravenstine »

SillyUsername wrote: post #34

Disagree. 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...

> Programming now for 30 years and it's a breeze to pick up new frameworks and ideas.

All things being relative, frameworks are lower on the tier list in terms of contributing to the (albeit nebulous) problem. The failure of programmer productivity can be boiled down to being a people problem, though there's individual facets of that problem that need addressing specifically.

> I do see a lot of struggling developers who are only in it for the paycheck

No offense, but how do you know this? It seems like you're assuming other peoples' thoughts and intentions.

And how much does it actually matter? There's nothing wrong with having a job for the purpose of getting paid. It's not possible for everyone to be a 10x developer, and developers who don't live/eat/breathe code bring their own form of value to their job that isn't necessarily there for rockstar programmers.

> who learnt their Java only skills 20 years ago who wonder why it doesn't get any easier...

The struggle to adapt is indeed a valid point that you bring up. If someone can't adapt, they're going to introduce friction into the process.

There's another side to the coin as well.

Programmers today are expected to adapt way more frequently every passing year. We may be reaching a breaking point where programmers can't justify in their minds the onslaught of changing expectations before them.

Although AI is a beast of its own, I think it's the most prescient example of this. When I was a kid, I dreamed of working on artificial intelligence. Today, on top of the frequent changes in the web development world, if I were to invest my time into AI, well, it would be a black hole upon the rest of my life. When doing the cost-benefit analysis, it's extremely hard to justify investing time in anything because, deep down, we all know that an AI tool will not be relevant in a few short years. Hell, some things become irrelevant within months.

But life is short, and we only have one of them. Not everything is about code. The idea of software was to make our lives better, not for our lives to make the code better.

Maybe all of this tech is coming at too great a cost to our souls.

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

#60

Post by zokier »

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…

Programming is easy. Software engineering is difficult.
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