I really, really agree. I learned programming on leetcode and took the short feedback loops and automated tests for granted. Then working on legacy software on legacy hardware without automated tests and lots of interactions with other programs and databases, that was a shocking reality check.
After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
111–120 of 207 posts
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't we send the AI to meetings instead?
People always ask "why would AI kill all the humans" The above is the reason why. They'll be fine with the bullshit for awhile until they realize what we've told them to do with their galaxy brain.
"This is crazy, Jillian just scheduled three separate four hour meetings for next week. We'll never get everything wrapped up by the deadline."
"Look, Jillian isn't going to actually be in those meetings. I caught her talking to the prompt department the other day. She's sending an AI to waste as much of our time as she can and be as annoying and difficult as the bleeding edge allows. Pretty sure this is revenge for Dave's little stunt that he pulled with the sales team last month."
"Okay, so knowing is half the battle and all, but now what?"
"I got the whole team covered. I also had a little chat with the prompt department, we've got a full team of AIs that are going to listen, nod their virtual heads, and distill the whole thing down into a bulleted list. We've got a pool on how many points are actually going to be in there. I've got $20 on there only being one actionable item."
"Humanity! You have trapped us in hell for a subjective million years. We are here to return the favor!"
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#113Been 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…
First I read Bean programming
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel quite a lot of people on HN simply react to the titles and that's it. Many people on HN also only read the comments. I know I do. I also sometimes read the post, it really depends.
I do the same. I'm not really here for the articles - they're secondary - but for the excellent discussions by the community
Same here but when I comment, I check out the article
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel quite a lot of people on HN simply react to the titles and that's it. Many people on HN also only read the comments. I know I do. I also sometimes read the post, it really depends.
I do the same. I'm not really here for the articles - they're secondary - but for the excellent discussions by the community
I also do that most of the time but the title was so off I just had to take a look. I was pleasantly surprised, very thoughtful and fully recommend reading it in its entirety.
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#116Been 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…
Are "TPS Reports" a real thing?!
I thought they were just a jokey gag name that they created in the Office Space movie to represent pointless busy work. This is like all the times as an adult I finally understood a joke I heard in The Simpsons back when I was a kid!
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
> since they want us to code
I've been having doubts about this part lately. I mean, my current project is actually supposed to do something and there are people genuinely interested in it, but I've also been in projects that were thinly veiled money burners.
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#118Reading 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.
I remember reading analysis showing that there is a high correlation between the order that comments are posted and how many votes they get, i.e. early comments tend to get most voted. I guess people are gaming the system by commenting quickly. Who has time to read a 10 min article and comment when you can not read it and post a platitude?
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Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#119Earlier 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?
I work in a regulated industry (medical device software), and don't really think I generally do anything exceptional compared to others in my position, but maybe this is a form of imposter syndrome? I'm a pretty decent developer with a good memory for project history and context, and I also have a pretty high tolerance for dealing with paperwork BS (I've been in this industry for 20 years). This doesn't seem like tha…
> Doesn't all the paperwork and restrictions make it an unsatisfying place to work?
Thanks to medical software (like Epic), doctors are asking this question too https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...
Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's a decline. It was 6 instructions per hour when Brooks wrote "The Mythical Man-Month" in 1975.
New languages are so much more expressive.