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Programming is a Terrible Job

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Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#11

Post by al2o3cr »

TL;DR for the article: "OMG, work is BOOOOORING!"

See also: the disillusioned former law student who went in to change the world but ended up pushing paper, the disillusioned architect went in to design monuments but ended up designing Wal-Marts, the disillusioned English major who went in dreaming of the Great American Novel but ended up spell-checking ad copy.

There is a difference, though: if "wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks" really pisses you off, you can FUCKING CHANGE THAT. Not every discipline has quite that level of flexibility.

BTW, GTFO off my lawn.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#12

Post by joebo »

It's not too different than other hobby turn professionals. Like to work on cars? You may want to become a mechanic. Replacing brakes for the hundredth time is not nearly as interesting or challenging as the first time. On the upside, you get to be around the environment you love and occasionally there may be some new problems to solve. As with any profession, there is always an opportunity to learn and improve even on something that is considered routine. For a mechanic, maybe do it faster or with different tools.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#13

Post by kalleboo »

> Sometimes I also think if it would be different if I was born several decades earlier

Or you'd be complaining about writing yet another missile ballistics program, or converting another basic mathematical or statistical algorithm into MUMPS.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#14

Post by twic »

garethadams wrote: post #7

Solving problems is interesting. Repetition is terrible. As programmers many of the things we build are to automate processing that other people would find repetitive and make errors doing. As a result, our work becomes repetitive and we make errors doing it. As some level we've succeeded – we've added a layer of abstraction and made a lot of people's lives easier – but we've also moved our expectations ahead of us a…

I suspect that even back then, there was a lot of tedious grunt work. My dad did some sort of academic goofing about in the late 70s, early 80s. Should be pure and focused, right? Well, at one point, they got a new hard disk for the minicomputer, and he had to write a driver for it. There is always absurd shit you have to do before you get to the good bit.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#17

Post by camus »

auggierose wrote: post #2

It is terrible because we let "the real world" dictate how we develop our software. That is a mistake. What we can create is basically only bound by our imagination and the ability to articulate this imagination in a precise and consistent form. Eventually "the real world" will have to bend to that.

Or , you can be usefull to the real world and actually solve its problems. Some actually love that, you know and some even like boring predictable stuffs...

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#18

Post by hds »

My (unsolicited) advice would be, go and find one of those jobs that you idealise from a few decades ago. They still exist, just where they always were, in academia. Of course, it's not all playing, but if you want your job to revolve around programming things that nobody has programmed before, that's the place to be.

Have a look at getting into a PhD programme in Computer Science, Computational Engineering or something even more abstract like Computation Number Theory.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#19

Post by darklajid »

xinn wrote: post #3

I felt the same way. I quit. I'm still unemployed. I will admit the job I had wasn't nearly as dreary, but I was still plagued by the fact that what I was doing was utterly pointless and had zero value. In retrospect, I wish I had just grown the fuck up and accepted the simple fact that the chances of any person on this earth making his or her life meaningful outside of his or her own family are astronomically slim.…

Thank you.

I think about quitting every single day, but this fear lets me grind through the day. Being unemployed is just no option if you're not alone/have family.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#20

Post by realrocker »

That's not the question I asked myself. Born in a society with limited career options, it was, Would I rather do boring shit I hate? or Would I do boring shit I love and can closely relate to. The answer was obvious to me. It was either that or a Government job with lot's of job security and dangers of certain intellectual death by corruption and general numbness. It was always a choice between lesser of two evils.
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