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Programming is a Terrible Job

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Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#71

Post by rapind »

antocv wrote: post #55
nicpottier wrote: post #32

There's a reason it is called work and not play. If work was always enjoyable, then they wouldn't need to pay you to do it. I think the author is delusional if he thinks any programming anywhere doesn't have large swaths of time that are a bit mind numbing. And my experience has been the programmers who think themselves 'above that' are the ones that provide the least value. Our job is not to program, our job is to c…

> If work was always enjoyable, then they wouldn't need to pay you to do it. Why do football players, musicians and movie actors get payed 1000x as much as the software engineers who made the technology to make possible their success? TV, Internet, radio, now all HD quality. So that some people can enjoy their work and earn millions while we who invent and produce the infrastructure should suck it up and call it work…

Apples and oranges. Only the top 1% of athletes, musicians, actors make a living off it. Compare them to the top 1% of programmers.

Alternatively if you compare all aspiring athletes, musicians, and actors to all programmers, you may find that programming does pretty well.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#72

Post by loup-vaillant »

Wintamute wrote: post #36

There are an incredible amount of hard problems and interesting challenges in frontend web dev. The field is changing at a fantastic pace, and there are all sorts of exciting projects to get involved with. Its wide open. If you think its all just JS hacks you're doing it wrong.

> There are an incredible amount of hard problems and interesting challenges in frontend web dev.

Name three that your boss will allow you to work on.

> there are all sorts of exciting projects to get involved with

Name three that your boss will allow you to work on.

> If you think its all just JS hacks you're doing it wrong.

Or maybe that's his boss doing it wrong: like, "This form is ugly on our HR people's computer. Please fix it by next week." Of course, the stuff is badly written, badly documented, and have to work with 5 different browsers, including IE6. The fastest way to please your boss is the JS hack. The fastest way to displease your boss is to suggest that, maybe, IE6 is a teeny bit outdated.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#73

Post by AlisdairSH »

iSnow wrote: post #63
pilif wrote: post #47

Of course the day job isn't always fun. That's why it's a job and that's what we get paid for. But: I f'ing love my job as a programmer. There is nothing in this world that I'd rather do. There's nothing that constantly fills me with as much joy as programming does. I admit that I might be a bit lucky here, having founded the company I'm working for; that allows me to pick my battles and find a good balance between s…

I think, as a founder you are missing the point that 99 out of 100 times you are told - explicitly or by work schedule "do not do it in an interesting, performant or elegant way, just get it working somehow and move on"

Isn't that a challenge in and of itself? The majority of us are solving business problems, not technological ones.

If I can deliver something, even if not the most interesting or elegant, that gives the sales/marketing people giant, shit-eating grins, well, kudos to me. Usually, that means I'll be given time to go back and make enhancements, add functionality, or placed at the top of the list for the next cool project.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#74

Post by ricardobeat »

weland wrote: post #42
ricardobeat wrote: post #39

That's a very pessimistic view of software development. The thrilling part of the work is building things and seeing people use them. That's what it's all about. There is always grunt work, but instead of "battling" javascript and CSS you could use the opportunity to learn more about browsers, interface design, etc. Channel the frustration into building new, better frameworks, or helping improve the existing ones. Th…

> And for all I know, solving problems in the kernel or coding OpenGL could be even worse. For me, solving problems in the kernel is immensely more interesting and rewarding than fixing the n-plus-oneth CSS aligning bug. It also comes with the added advantage of using real development tools instead of nuts and bolts that barely help you.

Apples to oranges. My point is, writing OpenGL code or fixing driver compatibility issues can be just as boring. CSS is not exactly programming anyway.

On tooling, take a look at current webkit/FF/Opera inspectors, TraceGL, TernJS, the upcoming IE11 developer tools and TypeScript. You'll be surprised.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#75

Post by xerophtye »

BillyMaize wrote: post #52
rfnslyr wrote: post #46

It's an absolute luxury to be able to get paid exorbitant amounts and not having to break a sweat. Oh wow I had to parse CSV files for four hours, poor me. What if you had to break your back on a farm 10 hours a day with the constant uncertainty of whether you'll make a dime or survive until next year? Your job is what you make of it. Bring some awesome music, change your desktop background, install a new theme, read…

I really hate the attitude in the first few sentences. The "your life is better than others so be grateful" idea never really applies, its like saying "your neighbor gets beaten three times a day, so don't complain when you only get beat once!". Just because someone else's life is worse than yours doesn't mean your own is so great. Also, the person breaking their back on a farm might be doing that because they made c…

Actually, look at it from the farm boy's POV. "That guy sits in an air conditioned office all day creating some really cool stuff and he COMPLAINS?!?!" Kinda like the same feeling if you run into some rich brat complaining that he only has 5 yatchs and 2 mansions, etc. I mean i am up for the notion of always striving for improvement in your life, but why the ingratitude? Be grateful AND strive for better. You can still earn another million bucks WITHOUT complaining that you only have one million right now.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#76

Post by brudgers »

One of the author's frustrations, seeing months of work abandoned - is the byproduct of training programmers as scientists and engineers rather than designers...or rather it is the byproduct of a pedagogy which attempts to extend mathematical logic and proofs to messy social problems.

Landing pages and NoSQL backends are not deductively better or worse: at best they are statistically or inductively so. Typically, however, choice is simply intuitive.

Making good intuitive choices is the essence of design and the way to develop good design intuition is not to sit down and bash on one's first solution until it plausibly works. Education should attempt to teach students that falling in love with one's first idea is a tarpit.

Teach students the practice of coming up with three independent design schemes and developing each to the point that the merits and flaws of its underlying design concept is evident. Maybe one is worth developing.

Throwing away months of output is not wasted effort - just as lines of code are no more a relevant measure of productivity than pencil lines on a blueprint. Artists have stacks of sketches and studies, architects stacks of abandoned schemes.

Most ideas are not worth loving, let alone executing and most solutions cannot be demonstrated correct via mathematical logic. The education of programmers should align with this reality.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#77

Post by loup-vaillant »

AlisdairSH wrote: post #69
nicpottier wrote: post #32

There's a reason it is called work and not play. If work was always enjoyable, then they wouldn't need to pay you to do it. I think the author is delusional if he thinks any programming anywhere doesn't have large swaths of time that are a bit mind numbing. And my experience has been the programmers who think themselves 'above that' are the ones that provide the least value. Our job is not to program, our job is to c…

"Our job is not to program, our job is to create value." This bears repeating. Rare is the job that allows the job-holder to write code for the sake of writing code. Most of us have to build software that adds value to some other business process. That takes a lot of thought and research, a little bit of code, and a lot of testing, documentation, and maintenance. If we're lucky, we get to pass off what we consider th…

> Rare is the job that allows the job-holder to write code for the sake of writing code.

Just as rare is the job that allows the job-holder to clean up toilets for the sake of cleaning up toilets. Janitors clean toilets for a reason: allowing people to poo in a clean, healthy environment, therefore diminishing their stress and health problems, therefore making them more productive at whatever they do, which means more money for their company. On the other hand, getting paid for cleaning toilets up without reflecting on those good consequences is quite common.

Programming is the same. Many, possibly most programmers, are paid to implement specifications handed out from above, few questions asked. They are definitely not paid to think about the actual business value of the solutions they are told to implement. The bigger the company, the more junior the programmer, the truer this is.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#78

Post by smoyer »

pilif wrote: post #47

Of course the day job isn't always fun. That's why it's a job and that's what we get paid for. But: I f'ing love my job as a programmer. There is nothing in this world that I'd rather do. There's nothing that constantly fills me with as much joy as programming does. I admit that I might be a bit lucky here, having founded the company I'm working for; that allows me to pick my battles and find a good balance between s…

I agree whole-heartedly ... There are very few days when I dread what I have to work on, and you can always find something to improve.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#79

Post by lgieron »

seivan wrote: post #23

We're a broken tribe. Why build something yourself, when you can have a code monkey do it. I do feel like a code monkey. No wonder we have so many product managers, project managers, UX designers, UI designers, other forms of designers, but very few developers. No wonder people rather be PMs of different sorts.

I've been a PM, and also worked with software on a more abstract level (enterprise architecture). Came back to coding, and am happy with it. I much prefer poorly documented franeworks and half-baked tools to the day-to-day nonsense of politics that is inherent to working in higher-level role in any bigger organisation.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#80

Post by loup-vaillant »

informatimago wrote: post #37
bromagosa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the number of people that are pissed off about webdev and still don't success at changing it, and by the amount of "Oh Brand New Automagic Solution for Everything (TM)" coming up every month and still failing at fixing the mess that webdev is... I'd say it's not so easy to "fucking change that".

I don't know if it's easy or hard. I'd bet it's rather on the easy side. What I know is that it's not with having dealines to produce the next product that anybody will have the time to take some step back and come with a better (more automatic) way of doing things. What's painful, it's not doing something repeatitive. It's being presured to repeat it, without being let automatizing it, which is what we should do as…

I had a colleague once that wanted to invest 4-8 hours writing a script that would save her about 1 hour each time it is run. The script was expected to be ran about once a week.

She did the wrong thing and asked her boss. "Not enough time, there's more urgent things to do."

She then lost an hour per week, contributing to the general sense of urgency that she lived under. Of course, this wasn't the only such script she thought about by far.

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My advice: if you can shoulder the risk, automate it before your boss tells you not to.

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