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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

#131

Post by nebula8804 »

Keyframe wrote: post #109
amelius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't we send the AI to meetings instead?

Maybe we can have AI talk to AI and we're behind the scenes. AIs give us summary as talks happen and ask us which direction we want it to go. Kind of like we use lawyers - they talk to other lawyers.

I think there are probably 100 startups that have already spun up this very second to tackle this use case and will subsequently go bankrupt once Microsoft adds this feature to Teams.

At least we have the memories we made along the way.

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

#132

Post by holoduke »

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…

95% of the programmers do not know hackernews. They finished their degree in Java and thats what they do their entire career. Noway they can rebuild an entire facebook. Not everyone is an all stack hacker developer, infra structure specialist like many folks here

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

#134

Post by justincredible »

semitones wrote: post #82
bjackman wrote: post #47

IMO it massively depends on what you're working on. I work on some codebases that are primarily about moving data around in Go. There are patterns to follow, there are no tricky algorithms, concurrency is largely solved, etc. All the challenge is about the broader engineering task of developing requirements, communicating, managing risks of deployment, stuff like that. Then, I work on kernel code where it takes me mo…

It might be the case that, the "hotter" the code paths that you're writing are (the more they get executed), the more difficult it is to write that code, where as for "colder" paths (of which there are so many more), the code isn't as difficult but there is a lot more overhead of managing complexity, business priorities, process, communication, etc. Linux kernel code is probably some of the hottest code on the planet…

[dead]

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

Frummy wrote: post #111

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.

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by Nzen »

regus wrote: post #116
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…

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!

TPS stands for Test Procedure Specification [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPS_report

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

#138

Post by SillyUsername »

ravenstine wrote: post #59
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 developer…

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

No assumptions, it's because my team are asked regularly by the 20+ year experienced developers to fix their problems so much so that it causes problems for my sprints, mostly because it's unplanned work.

> And how much does it actually matter?

Because other people have to carry their work instead of doing their own work.

> Programmers today are expected to adapt way more frequently every passing year.

This is how it's always been, but it doesn't take much effort to learn the Java syntax invented in the last 10 years, or a new Java API that looks useful. Keeping up to date in your own field, programmer or not, is just good practice.

It shouldn't be necessary to point out use of a broken/deprecated Date API, or annotations that have been in Spring for 15 years that does the same job as roll your own bodge a dev cobbled together, without tests, over an entire sprint (to get to PR late for a deadline) and now has hacks across a code base everyone has to work with.

> The idea of software was to make our lives better, not for our lives to make the code better.

I agree, but some of us chose to wrestle with the devil so users don't :)

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

#139

Post by chmod600 »

nebula8804 wrote: post #129
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…

>Every programmer can create the system from scratch Are you sure about that? Can one coder recreate Facebook's(for example) complete architecture from scratch? Unless I misunderstood you, I'd imagine there is just too much domain specific knowledge in all the components to do so even in a single lifetime. >The most incredible work happens in the first 3 months by a lone developer green-fielding with no boundaries. T…

I think the point was that code is not inherently limited in the same way as other kinds of engineering.

If you tell someone to engineer you the arm for positioning a desk lamp, they aren't going to give you the hydraulic arm for a 12-ton backhoe without anyone noticing. There are physical and cost constraints that will prevent that from happening pretty quickly.

In software, there are no comparable constraints. A few MiB of software contains extraordinary amounts of complexity but could easily fly under the radar and ship, and then become a maintenance nightmare.

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

#140

Post by zackmorris »

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…

Same here, 30+ years experience, programming's always been easy for me.

The hard part is suspending disbelief to ignore how bad nearly everything has gotten. Every language, every framework, every operating system, every hardware platform, every paradigm like the web/mobile/AI is so riddled with obvious mistakes and missed opportunities that it takes nearly everything I have each morning to start working. I've reached the point where I know what the mistakes will be before I even see the tool, and then experiencing them over and over and over again is like a never-ending slap in the face. I'm basically crippled now with unending anxiety and loneliness from living in a world where nobody can see how hard I work, and I have no way to explain to them how all of my work is due to this unnecessary friction that apparently only I can see. And that I even know how to fix the issues, but having to work steals all of my time, so there will never come a day when I'm free of obligation long enough to ever demonstrate what's possible.

The real kicker is that after going through several healing and growth processes, I know that I have it in me to step into this other life where things work and I'm productive. But that's the fallacy. The actual truth is that the horrors I perceive are in the world now. Wealth inequality has passed a point of no return. Along with environmental collapse, the rise of authoritarianism, the worship of ignorance, the lack of empathy, the painful sense of unfairness that so many feel so profoundly that causes them to lash out and perpetuate the injustices that they've suffered onto the world rather than work together collectively to solve them.

The only thing that can save us now is help from above that isn't coming. Billionaires could pay their taxes. People could love their neighbors instead of buying guns. We could all stop feeding the financial institutions that have captured every government. Instead, we're sold this bill of goods that our salvation is in our rugged individualism. So we spin and stew and contemplate the worst while the rich and powerful divide us so they can laugh all the way to the bank. I just have this sense that the only salvation is to get out of tech entirely and I dunno, move to the woods or an island somewhere and live the gratifying life that's been denied to us. Correction - that we have denied ourselves for reasons we don't even understand.

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