They lied to you. Building software is hard
blog.nordcraft.com
They lied to you. Building software is hard
1–10 of 119 posts
Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard
#2"If you are looking for that one trick that lets you get ahead and jumpstart your career, my advice to you is: Don’t choose the path of least resistance. When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance. The same is true for learning any new skill. It is when you struggle with a specific problem or concept that you tend to remember."
Pretty nice description.
Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard
#3We have hard evidence of it becoming easier every damn day. AI is taking these jobs. The models aren't perfect, but the speed tradeoff is so massive that you really can't say it's "hard" to build anything anymore. Nobody is lying.
Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard
#4We have hard evidence of it becoming easier every damn day. AI is taking these jobs. The models aren't perfect, but the speed tradeoff is so massive that you really can't say it's "hard" to build anything anymore. Nobody is lying.
What is the hard evidence?
Edit: What I mean by this is there may be some circumstantial evidence (less hiring for juniors, more AI companies getting VC funding). We currently have no _hard_ evidence that programming has had a substantial speed increase/deskilling from LLMs yet. Any actual __science__ on this has yet to show this. But please, if you have _hard_ evidence on this topic I would love to see it.
Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard
#5"If you are looking for that one trick that lets you get ahead and jumpstart your career, my advice to you is: Don’t choose the path of least resistance. When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance. The same is true for learning any new skill. It is when you struggle with a specific problem or concept that you tend to remember." Pretty nice description.
As with anything, there's also too much of a good thing though.
In my own career I switched role to get more time on a area where I felt I needed more growth an practice. Turns out I never got really very good at it, and basically was just in a role I wasn't great at for 6 years. It was miserable. My lesson is "if you know you are bad at something, don't make it load-bearer in your life or career".
Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard
#6We have hard evidence of it becoming easier every damn day. AI is taking these jobs. The models aren't perfect, but the speed tradeoff is so massive that you really can't say it's "hard" to build anything anymore. Nobody is lying.
What is the hard evidence? Edit: What I mean by this is there may be some circumstantial evidence (less hiring for juniors, more AI companies getting VC funding). We currently have no _hard_ evidence that programming has had a substantial speed increase/deskilling from LLMs yet. Any actual __science__ on this has yet to show this. But please, if you have _hard_ evidence on this topic I would love to see it.
Closest I guess is hiring of juniors is down, but it's possibly just due to a post COVID pullback being credited to AI.
I definitely think a lot of junior tasks are being replaced with AI, and companies are deciding it's not worth filling junior roles at least temporarily as a result.
Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard
#7"If you are looking for that one trick that lets you get ahead and jumpstart your career, my advice to you is: Don’t choose the path of least resistance. When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance. The same is true for learning any new skill. It is when you struggle with a specific problem or concept that you tend to remember." Pretty nice description.
As with anything, there's also too much of a good thing though. In my own career I switched role to get more time on a area where I felt I needed more growth an practice. Turns out I never got really very good at it, and basically was just in a role I wasn't great at for 6 years. It was miserable. My lesson is "if you know you are bad at something, don't make it load-bearer in your life or career".
There's a reason that one of the big corporate skills books is Strength Finder - because fundamentally playing to your weaknesses isn't a good play, its that you need to consistently challenge yourself to keep building whatever muscle you choose to do. You don't want to build strength by lifting 10,000 pounds all at once, but by increasing your load every day.
In most professions barely anyone is doing the continual education or paying attention to the "scene" for that profession, if you do that alone you're probably already in the top 10%.
Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard
#8One more thing…
The newbie prototype was never all that hard. You could, in my day, have a lot of fun that first week with dreamweaver, Visual Basic, or cargo cutting HTML.
There’s nothing wrong with this.
But to get much further than that ceiling you probably needed to crack a book.
Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard
#9Building software is actually so easy that my 8 year old niece can do it. Shipping software is what's hard.
Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
As with anything, there's also too much of a good thing though. In my own career I switched role to get more time on a area where I felt I needed more growth an practice. Turns out I never got really very good at it, and basically was just in a role I wasn't great at for 6 years. It was miserable. My lesson is "if you know you are bad at something, don't make it load-bearer in your life or career".
There's a reason that one of the big corporate skills books is Strength Finder - because fundamentally playing to your weaknesses isn't a good play, its that you need to consistently challenge yourself to keep building whatever muscle you choose to do. You don't want to build strength by lifting 10,000 pounds all at once, but by increasing your load every day. In most professions barely anyone is doing the continual…
"A Specialist knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
A Generalist knows less and less about more and more until he knows absolutely nothing about everything"
Getting paid well doing something you actually enjoy doing is key =3
https://stevelegler.com/2019/02/16/ikigai-a-four-circle-mode...