Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

piglei.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 207 posts

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

#191

Post by ericyd »

mrozbarry wrote: post #100
ericyd wrote: post #86

> As "wordsmiths," programmers often neglect reading. However, reading is an essential part of quickly improving your programming skills. I'm always surprised to hear that most programmers dislike code reviews. I've found code reviews to be one of the most useful ways to learn new design patterns and language features. I personally believe that adopting a mindset of curiosity helps make code reviews enjoyable rather…

The biggest thing is people have bad experiences with reviewers, and people have a lot of insecurity when their work is scrutinized. The biggest issue with code reviews as a process is it's always positioned as being adversarial. Often, you set up a pull/merge request, and someone later does a review, but it's not personal, it's cold and blunt data. Even with a reviewer who has the best intentions, it's tough. Pair p…

I think you're right. I'm not sure why people attach so much ego to the experience though.

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

#192

Post by 3abiton »

MarkSweep wrote: post #141

A lot of these points are why I still enjoy programming as a hobby, but less so enjoy it as a profession. It is much easier to program something where you are the only customer. No project manager alternates between asking me increase and decrease the number of story points per task. No one comes with a last minute request to create a throw away demo for some executive who can only understand pointy-clicks things. Di…

What you describe as annoying about your experience sounds like a case of stakeholder management rather than frustration with programming. But I totally agree with you too.

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

#193

Post by breadchris »

I like the comparison to writing. In order to be a better writer, you must read works that are well written. The most common way that I read code are by traversing my source tree into the code I depend on (stdlib/third-party). When dependencies are compiled in some way, reading the code is not possible. It makes learning different code patterns impossible and causes a lot of "reinventing of the wheel"

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

#194

Post by fragmede »

icedchai wrote: post #190
nhatcher wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ChatGPT won’t say anything that could possibly be considered offensive, unfortunately.

which like, we're adults here. "fuck" is against the guard rails?

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

#196

Post by jspash »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #171
simonw wrote: post #4

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 walking ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges.

Yes, it's true of everything. But it doesn't really mean anything. Is walking easy? Then make a choice. Walk faster. Call it running. Make it harder. Walk up mountains. Walk backwards. Chew gum at the same time. There are always ways to improve.

Or you could choose to do nothing. Easy walking is great! Do it in a park and clear your mind. Use it for time to think over problems. Or just enjoy the ease of your new-found skill.

Lastly, it's good to acknowledge that not everyone can walk as easily as you or at all. Perhaps you can help them. Make of it what you will.

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

#197

Post by phendrenad2 »

Here's a little secret: everyone finds programming difficult. Sure, programming itself is easy. But in the real world you can't just program, you need to work as part of a team with people who have definitely, definitely, definitely never read (nor will ever read) Hacker News. Even if you beg them. Even if you pay them 200k/year. And they will write bad, undocumented code that you need to deal with, or worse, they're managers and will penalize you for trying to write good code the first time and promote those who write horrible code quickly (but need to fix it five times, finally getting it right after many months).

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

#198

Post by cagmz »

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…

Well said.

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

#199

Post by mettamage »

angarg12 wrote: post #84
hyggetrold wrote: post #62

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?

I don’t think that’s it. When I comment early, it is not to game the system. It’s to kick start a discussion around the title. Or I am intrigued about something by the title and then it’s fun to go on a bit of a tangent.

I also appreciate it that a submission with a small amount of upvotes has a discussion going.

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

#200

Post by landgenoot »

DotaFan wrote: post #16

Most challenging part for me is to read between the lines what the clients wants and to offer them appropriate solution. Refining the idea and finding appropriate solution. Creating it is the easier part.

This. Our job is not to write code, but to translate a fuzzy idea into an abstract model.

That's why I think we don't have to fear AI-models that much.

Post reply on HN