171–180 of 207 posts
If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. On top of that there are all of the other professional skills you need to develop to be a really effective software engineer: communication, writing, planning, navigating organizations, figuring out the best thing to build and how to effectively make the case for it. The thing I like most about this career is the amount of depth it has - th…
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.
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?
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.
Take taxis for example. There were pretty restrictive laws about taxi operation. Limits to the number or taxis that could operate in a certain area, licensing issues for taxis.
Now suppose you just say, "We'll ignore those laws. We'll get rich".
That's not a programming exercise or an unsolved problem in software development. It's just fucking amazing.
I write code. I'm good at it. But I would never in my life have come up with something like that, got it approved, and then gone through with it.
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Because you might have architects specifying exactly what needs to be programmed, so the software development part is mostly done.
The idea that you can dream up architectures but not implement them and expect anything worthwhile to come out reeks of inexperience.
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maybe I'm just super smart but I don't have that difficulty and I've been doing this for 25+ years now. At some point in your career the challenge has to stop being about the mechanical aspect of programming and become about larger, more holistic, concerns.
You're defining programming down to "the part of programming which beginners have trouble with, that eventually gets easy", and using this to make some tautological point which didn't need to be made. What's the point of that?
> programming is the act of writing code, it should absolutely get easy.
If you can't come at me with an acceptance of what I mean when I say programming then go away, your dishonesty is not my problem.
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.
Off topic. I didn't know what TFA was so I googled. It didn't help (a cursory search). So I asked chatgpt, that helped. The Full Article. I, of course, knew what you meant.
If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. On top of that there are all of the other professional skills you need to develop to be a really effective software engineer: communication, writing, planning, navigating organizations, figuring out the best thing to build and how to effectively make the case for it. The thing I like most about this career is the amount of depth it has - th…
> If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. I mean, that's kind of tautologically true, but doesn't really say anything? You're not obliged to seek out challenges, and may not even benefit for it if you just chase them randomly. You can just get good at something that consistently needs doing, then make that your job, and let it become easy. (And then you can look for challenges el…
It makes sense if you're more interested in engineering than money. Stop challenging yourself and you stop growing.
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Yeah, I mean software development. I don't find the semantic distinction between that and programming particularly interesting myself - why write code if you're not doing that do develop software?
Because you might have architects specifying exactly what needs to be programmed, so the software development part is mostly done.
They also tell me, “this is the payload your API needs to accept,” and ignore the fact they half of what they are sending has never and will never be used by anything. It’s just needless complexity I add to get them to stop having meetings about it.
Are architects supposed to actually give me something I can work with and make my life easier? I’ve never experienced this, but I work in a very dysfunctional organization.
I expect there are many careers that are similar. In some ways, your experience doesn't matter. A civil engineer with 40 years of experience building houses, malls, or parking garages is still a rookie if they're building their first bridge, right? Many concepts still apply, maybe even most, but it's still going to be new and difficult. I have over 30 years experience as a software developer but I wouldn't want to pr…
> I wouldn't want to program for medical equipment After having done that for close to 20 years, I'm sure you'd be fine. You might not want to do it, but you most likely have the appropriate skillset.
When I started out I was in a command center for stuff that was pretty mission critical. It became pretty normal. I once walked down the hall and overheard someone say they had to log into production yesterday and they were terrified, as they hadn’t done it in years. Meanwhile, I hardly thought twice about it, as I was dealing with production systems all day every day… logging into hundreds of systems some days. I wasn’t careless, but also wasn’t terrified.
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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.
Jerry Weinberg wasn't writing about pair programming. He was writing about group work and where the problems lie in the interactions.