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Programming is a Terrible Job

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Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#261

Post by Tsagadai »

jafaku wrote: post #198
stephencanon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? They don’t. The notion that they do is laughable. Let’s look at baseball. Baseball players are known for having huge multi-million dollar contracts, right? But that’s only major league players. The vast majority of professional baseball players play in the min…

> As for the couple hundred guys making multiple millions a year who you hear about all the time? Well, there’s even more engineers who have struck it rich with a startup, and no baseball player will ever come close to Zuckerberg-level wealth. You are comparing employees to a CEO and business owner (which doesn't have anything to do with technology, other than for the initial lines of code). Of course he has more wea…

So there are billionaire baseball coaches?

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#262

Post by michaelrkn »

joshlegs wrote: post #129
10098 wrote: post #126

Honestly, I can understand OP's frustration. I would be lying if I said I didn't think similar thoughts. But the truth is, you don't get do to what you want unless you're running your on company. Even if you are running your own company, you have to make sure you're doing the right thing in order to not go bankrupt. I think having hobby projects can help provide a nice balance between doing whatever the hell you want…

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"

Protip to employers: Make your jobs interesting and fun, and you'll find that your employees are way more productive than you ever thought they could be.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#263

Post by wat29 »

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…

+1. And the flip side is true to: companies that find a way for their employees to create value while enjoying their jobs are able to hire great employees and produce excellent work.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#264

Post by NTDF9 »

RogerL wrote: post #186
bigiain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Solving problems is interesting. Repetition is terrible." Most "programming" is just "digital plumbing". No matter how flashy or utilitarian the taps or basin are, underneath the job is pretty much always the same - you hook up hot water to one tap, cold water to the other, and the sink drain to the drainpipe. You can do a great job or a shoddy job - so long as nothing leaks _too_ much, it doesn't make any differenc…

I don't exactly know the truth of your statements above, but I've spent my life doing all of that cool stuff. I've written code for flight computers, done machine vision for factory inspection, supported cancer research by doing stats and data analytics, written 3D viewers/playback for aircraft black boxes, worked on robots and UAV for several years, and now I'm doing some computer vision + AI work that I can't make…

To add to Roger's answer, I can assure you that software engineers in semiconductor companies are having a ball as well. The work often involves understanding computer architecture, registers, memory and IO. Everything cool (read: advanced OS concepts) that you learn in college is getting implemented there.

Some job profiles include programming GPUs, device drivers for a new device, writing kernel code for the processor, firmware for other chips on a motherboard.

There are also math intensive jobs such as 3d spatial programming for manufacturing simulation and nanoscale image processing for finding defects in wafers.

Compiler and language enthusiasts often enjoy working in the forefront. When Intel plans to come out with a new instruction set, it uses its own engineers to write an optimized compiler (better than gcc) for those instructions.

Same goes for Java in Oracle.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#265

Post by progn »

greenyoda wrote: post #250

"Imagine coming to work to spend hours googling, wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks and battling Javscript and CSS." Not all programming is writing web apps or gluing together frameworks. Some developers work on lower-level software, which involves writing more code from scratch and doing more algorithmic thinking. It depends a lot on the job. There are very few problems in the…

See, that's what I love about this profession: it's never boring. If something _is_ boring, then almost by definition, it can be automated. The automation itself is usually interesting, and once you've automated your boring task, you can go on to do other interesting things.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#266

Post by exit »

> 1) the demand won't last forever;

this is one of my greatest fears. at the same time, it seems inconceivable - i can't picture it.

could programming really go the way of being a lawyer?

how would that happen - less demand for software, or an oversupply of software engineers?

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#267

Post by collyw »

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"

my (less experienced) team leader is always going for the "just get it working solution". I often fight back to take the time to produce something more elegant, knowing that in two months time, my solution will not need fixing a second time.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#268

Post by collyw »

resu_nimda wrote: post #199
jasonlotito wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been told that. I've been told to get something done. How I achieve that has never been an issue. Interesting, performant, or elegant does not mean it has to be slow. That's part of the challenge. Meeting the demands of the business while meeting the demands of a professional.

In my experience, virtually every coding task takes longer to do "the best way" than the quickest or easiest way. Many times it takes much longer. Either you are a savant-like exception to this rule, or your velocity is (significantly) lower than it could be. Don't get me wrong, I push for doing things the right way whenever I can, but acting like you can have it all with no compromises seems silly.

Depend on whether you are looking at the immediate time scale, (when "the best way" takes longer), or over the longer term, where it is often a lot better to sped the time up front, and have a good solution, rather than a quick hack.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#269

Post by p3drosola »

> I don't think I ever caught myself writing code for my employer and thinking "hey, I really enjoy this"

If you've never really enjoyed your job I can't fathom how it's taken you so long to realise this isn't for you.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#270

Post by fredsanford »

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #257
SonicSoul wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years here, and loving it too! the best part for me is, the more i learn the better it gets. And the longer i do it, the bigger the variety of solutions and ways to get things done. Sure, will get stuck on a crappy project from time to time, which could last for 1-12 months, and it may not be a blast, but i know it's temporary, and the more senior i get, the more say i have in making it suck less. It took me many…

7 years. KILL ME

Oh how I can feel this.

After 3+ years of dealing with banker types when I first started (1991ish), I wanted to leap off the building and land on their fancy cars. :)

Without a doubt, the tightest fisted, greediest and most short sighted people I've ever dealt with. Save 15 minutes here and waste months in the future when you've forgotten how this hack works. Get it out now.

Then I had a few dream jobs. It seems to go in cycles. Get used to it or change professions.

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