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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

#61

Post by cortesoft »

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.

I believe I can solve any programming problem, but I can't solve all of them... there aren't enough hours in the day

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

#62

Post by hyggetrold »

Reading the comments here, I am having a total Slashdot throwback moment. Did anybody actually read TFA?

Most of the replies I am seeing here seem to have treated the article's title as a writing prompt.

Read the whole article friends - it's got a nice amount of nuance and the author unpacks what they mean by "difficult" very well.

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

#63

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

Hum... When the computer we command run into that kind of problem, it's almost universally better to fix incompatibilities post-fact with an exceptional process than it's to avoid creating them.

But somehow, people are never allowed to do that.

But rest assured that if you need a heavy process just to coordinate a handful of developers, you have a bad architecture. Even if you do pessimistic preemptive coordination.

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

#66

Post by dionidium »

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…

This is why I don't worry too much about AI. It can write the code better and faster than I do? Wow, you just freed up 5% of my day.

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

#67

Post by hasty_pudding »

ravenstine wrote: post #49
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…

Yup. As a senior programmer who's been a professional for 10+ years and has been programming on and off since roughly 10 years old, I have found that the more time I spend in my field, the harder my work becomes in a way that is disproportionate to my experience. It's not the programming itself that has become more difficult, but all the process, tooling, and lack of organizational self-correction that makes aspects…

This is my experience too.

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

#68

Post by darepublic »

On the topic of good code, yes it should be understandable to the reader. I used to think about good code in terms of various principles and maxims, but with more experience I feel like the story of requirements is overlooked. When requirements were static from the beginning and easy to understand for all parties you can get good code. It kind of exists in a bubble of stability. And when you reach for it again the stableness is unchanged so you just forget about it and it becomes part of the background noise. Much of the time the tech debt and weirdness of codebases I encountered in the wild is a reflection of an untold story of how requirements changed and miscommunication between the parties involved

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

#69

Post by MichaelZuo »

pjmorris wrote: post #56
throwitaway222 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Yes, pair programming is fine, but even just two folks working on something literally too complex to individually grasp necessitates committee work, paperwork, and all the rest.

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

#70

Post by zoomablemind »

Generally, I think of programming as about managing complexity. Simplifying and ranging the tangled objectives, tying loose ends and integrating with even more complex systems.

So, naturally, as one progresses in the field, the level of complexity often increases with experience. Sure, some tasks become easier, but those are getting assigned to 'juniors' or just are no longer interesting...

Here it is, more experience, yet still uphill with complexity. It does get tiring at some point.

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