Be nice to programmers

Is it really that different in other professions? Does the doctor always bring good news? Are all of the teacher's students bright chaps? Does the firefighter save each and every life? The lawyer win every case? The financial advisor always make a plus? Are a real estate agents' clients always happy with their sales price? Sure, there are lots of professions where there are rarely any negatives, say, a taxi driver, but is that a rewarding job?

I think this is really about your mindset. I often feel like a sculptor... I start off with something that doesn't look at all like the final product I have in mind, and over time I approximate the final result closer and closer. Error messages or not, to me that's just feedback, just like the sculptors' fingers find roughly hewn spots on the surface. Is the sculptor supposed to get mad at a little rough spot on his sculpture? Of course not, he just chips it away.

The one suggestion I have for programmers who are offended by error messages is to give TDD a try. With TDD, the test failures you get are to be expected: after all, you specifically engineered them to fail in the first place. So you don't have to feel bad about those, and you can revel in the positive feedback you get from a passing test. And if a test fails unexpectedly you can be happy that your safety net has actually done its job! I'm not being facetious: if you see error messages as negative feedback (again, I don't, but maybe you do) then TDD might just give you the positive feedback you've been craving.

Impatient clients with overblown expectations notwithstanding, but you get to pick those :-)

The key for me was to document the things that I hated about the job, and avoid them at all costs, but to acknowledge that criticism is something that feeds back into an application improvement process. ie. Don't take it as personal that someone is criticising you/your work. Find methods of improving the communication channel so that you don't spend days/weeks coding only to find "that's not what I wanted! that sucks!"

I'm fortunate to have an ex hacker/programmer as my manager who knows/understands/addresses my needs very well in my current role.

At some point I stopped chasing the higher paycheck, because I recognised that with a higher paycheck comes higher expectations, demands, hardships. Look at it from the employer's perspective - "We could hire 2 graduates at your cost, at that rate we expect you to not make mistakes, and to get twice the amount of work done."

A friend earns almost twice as much as me, with similar years of experience, but he is expected to miss lunch, stay back until midnight, answer calls to China/India on a friday night. No please/thankyou/you're doing a great job. Just "do it".

Keep searching until you find the right role.

I think part of the zen of programming is understanding that problems exist, and if you are given the proper tools you can solve pretty much all of them. I can solve any general problem that comes my way, the only times I stumble is when I get caught up in my company's complex business logic that must be implemented. This is a minor issue, and really has more to do with my lack of experience than my skill at programming. So don't let bugs get you down, just put one letter in front of the other and keep on trying.