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"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

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Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#71

Post by pjmlp »

12ahg11 wrote: post #31
pjmlp wrote: post #19

Nope, only those without a degree that cannot do anything else, e.g. the bricklayers on a building. Real engineering has always been about talking with the multiple parties, organising architecture meetings, taking down requirements, if no infra team available setup the whole CI/CD pipeline, and so on. Programming could be done in whatever language, or low code/no code tool, solved the business problem. Now what will…

Oh really? I thought the language needed to be ALGOL on a Burroughs B6700!

If it solves the business case. A proper engineer would actually recognise that should be NEWP in 2026.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#72

Post by prinny_ »

I believe there are some programming jobs in which the code is absolutely the easier part. Not all of us work in signal processing, integrated systems or have to push upstream to Linux kernel because the company we work for really needs a memory allocation optimization for its data centers.

Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incredibly difficult and frustrating problem to solve. Especially if you need to also oversee the execution of the strategy. So not only you have to predict what they want or know the domain deeply enough to understand what they say they want is not what they really want, you also have to come up with a plan for executing your solution in a corporate environment.

There is a reason that books like "the staff engineer's path" cover topics such as local maximums, communication, establishing support for executing a plan or creating alignment on big efforts. In large corporate environments with multiple international customers, code is most of the time not the hardest problem.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#73

Post by varjag »

mrkeen wrote: post #13

The answer to all these "if coding is easy" questions is that coding isn't programming (to put it in Lamport's terms). Encoding your ideas into a programming language is easy. Understanding that your ideas are bad is hard. You have clients with multiple devices connecting to your backend simultaneously, while you mediate their interactions with your partner systems. Their versions might not be up to date. It's a dist…

Nope, coding was still the hard bit. Every failing programmer would jump into architects or prod management but not the opposite way.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#74

Post by pdhborges »

woodruffw wrote: post #51
hakunin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with those customers. That's like saying "building a car is not hard, building a real car that you can use and that passes regulation is". IOW, writing code is hard in every reasonable context.

How many programmers operate under that kind of regulatory and operational constraint regime? I think most don’t. (In interesting ways this is programming’s greatest boon and curse: if we treated it more like building bridges or cars, the world would be a very different place.)

Touch billing, touch medical data, be at a B2B company that needs to catch all the ISOs to have a chance to land bigger contracts. I don't think it's uncommon.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#75

Post by skydhash »

mrkeen wrote: post #13

The answer to all these "if coding is easy" questions is that coding isn't programming (to put it in Lamport's terms). Encoding your ideas into a programming language is easy. Understanding that your ideas are bad is hard. You have clients with multiple devices connecting to your backend simultaneously, while you mediate their interactions with your partner systems. Their versions might not be up to date. It's a dist…

Those computing ideas (like distributed systems, concurrency and task scheduling) can even be found in even a single program/system. They are often entangled with even broader concepts, like visual layouts, security (authentication, authorization), communication and encryption, control systems, signal processing,… And those are often accidental complexity.

The essential complexity can be easily resolved by talking to domain experts. You will get a nice requirements document afterwards. That’s when the engineering and management concerns appear.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#76

Post by realusername »

photios wrote: post #53
hakunin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with those customers. That's like saying "building a car is not hard, building a real car that you can use and that passes regulation is". IOW, writing code is hard in every reasonable context.

> Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Now add the time dimension - keeping code correct as the business and the people in it change. That's how I explain to people that LLMs will not replace us developers.

Maintenance over time is 90% of the work anyways, you don't start a project from scratch every day

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#77

Post by bdangubic »

bob1029 wrote: post #9

> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)? Because programmers have generally been forced to wear additional, invisible hats that are essential to making the code happen in the first place. Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with t…

After 30+ years in the industry the absolute best programmers I know never spoke to any customers, like ever. so bullshit comment all around. I’ve been coding for 30+, have obscene salary and do not wear any “additional hats” or talk to any “customers.”

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#78

Post by raggi »

One of the strongest teams I worked with, working on an extremely large and ambitious project used to answer a lot of product/executive type questions regarding missing areas that we knew how to author and could safely assume general design consensus “it’s just typing”.

It was a very useful contraction in the right senior circles where there was a pretty good understanding of the meaning and decently reliable assumed consensus.

I eventually stoped using the phrase because it had started leaking deeper into the team and the impact on earlier career or less confident programmers was often no longer positive, it could be misinterpreted in lots of different ways but the most harmful was when it would further decimate confidence and discourage requests for help when something wasn’t obvious to the ultimate author.

As with almost every attempt to generalize in software engineering the repetition or extrapolation beyond the context in which it was intended can have negative side effects, it doesn’t matter if it’s a simple notion like “dry”, or a comment like “code was never the hard part”. None of these phrases survive context loss and still retain efficacy at general receivers.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#79

Post by pjmlp »

relaxing wrote: post #49
bob1029 wrote: post #9

> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)? Because programmers have generally been forced to wear additional, invisible hats that are essential to making the code happen in the first place. Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with t…

> The gigantic salaries paid to the most prolific employees is not due to their ability to write code. It is due to their ability to interrogate the shit out of the customer until they finally reveal the true requirements. That doesn’t describe any devs I know, especially not in the old days. Interrogating customers and bringing back requirements was the job of management (who got big salaries, too.)

Not in agency or consulting jobs.

Re: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

#80

Post by throwawayffffas »

Coding while definitely not easy, it was never the hard part.

The hard part has always been how to solve x problem. Coding is the last piece of that part, which while not easy is not the hardest.

The art of computer programming books are not about coding they are about computer science, i.e. figuring out how to compute solutions to problems.

Figuring out what to build is definitely not the hard part though.

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