Programming is a Terrible Job

Oof, this guys has it bad.

The thing he doesn't consider is people like me, so let me flesh out that penultimate paragraph:

"If you like to build products that help solve problems in the real world, become a full stack web developer. If you like the delight that comes from encountering a user experience that has considered corner and edge cases and approached them in a unique or profound way, learn how to do the hacky shit that seems super boring or mundane to other people."

Programming is only terrible if you work on something you don't care about. I'm assuming that's his real point but it gets hung up on the day-to-day frustrations of web development in particular. It's pretty clear to me that web dev isn't his favorite coding discipline, but just because it's not his cup o tea doesn't mean others don't enjoy the shit out of it. I don't get how people can love being QA engineers but far be it for me to say its terrible.

That might be true - but she should do it only to prove that those kind of investments are worth it, and to gain trust from her boss/team.

I think programmers should be paid to not only do the crappy grunt-work, but also for automating it away, even though there will sometimes be cases where it turned out not to be worth it. To me, the automating is part of the job.

And sure, I remember when I used to think I could rewrite entire applications in a few hours the "right way", but that was pure inexperience on my part. For a junior dev, they might want to run it by someone more experienced, but otherwise, these kind of tangents can turn out to be some of the most valuable time spent on a project.

Those jobs suck bad for him.

We don't all like the same things or find the same things interesting or dull. Some of us like the variety, just working on whatever a day throws up, tinkering with whatever to solves a problem a person or an organisation might have and make things a little bit better. Code which is never going to amaze or astound anyone, code that may have been written under horribly compromised circumstances, can still make a big difference to people, and for some people that in itself is satisfying.

Programming is many things, at one end an end in itself at the other a tool for doing stuff. Programmers find different elements of what programming can be interesting and / or fulfilling.

Yes, there are a whole bunch of programming jobs which are wiring up CRUD apps, or writing jobs to parse data. They're not satisfying for some people but that makes them a bad match for those people, it doesn't make programming terrible.

  "Internet was a luxury in our struggling country"

Based on this, though nothing can be assumed, I can't help but wonder if the author was doing outsourced/offshored development work for another country?

I can only imagine that doing outsourced/offshored work brings with it an extra level of dehumanized drudgery.

I am a software engineer who typically works with small teams and/or small businesses. While the code-writing itself can be mindless CRUD work, and is almost never interesting on a theoretical level, solving actual problems for my users makes it worthwhile to a large extent. I am solving real problems for people trying to get through their days -- people I get to work with face-to-face. That's rewarding.

If you're doing mindless CRUD work for somebody five thousand miles and several levels of management away, though, that kind of rewarding feeling must rarely be possible. I don't know if I could do it.

protip: every job is like this. I went into journalism because i LOVED reading and writing. Making it a career sapped the fun out of it. Now i'm coding professionally. It's much more fun than the pressures of journalism, but I do find myself sometimes thinking "this was more fun when I did it just for the heck of it"