Programming is Not Terrible

Just a slight suggestion that doesn't actually have to do with the article itself: Make your links stick out more. Maybe I just have bad eyes but I really can't tell if a word is a link until I hover over it.

I have a hypothesis. Is it possible that the people who talk with wide-eyed wonder about programming after doing it for ten years and the passion that they have for writing software haven't come to appreciate the banality of almost every problem that they're going to be asked to solve in the software space? If you find putting together CRUD apps and laying out contact forms challenging and engaging after ten years, you may lack the mental capacity to really appreciate and understand why programming is terrible.

The reason open source software exists is because programming is terrible - if programming were the digital orgasm that these people pretend it is, people wouldn't have been bitching for years about how bad the open source ORM they're using is - they would have rewritten it already, twice.

Programming is a menial mental task for anyone with the capacity to properly abstract their real world problem into a solution that a computer can understand, with a few bits of crunchy debugging on top, that has no reward on its own.

We program, not because it is fun, challenging, or fulfilling, but because it is morphologically necessary for our continued existence as solution creators and problem solvers.

90% of the time spent programming is a slog. All of the enjoyment comes from the 10% of time spent solving cool problems, but more and more as open source technology gets better, sturdier, and more engrained into IT, the 10% problems are being solved before ldconfig is done doing its thing, and so you're left with 95% slog or 98% slog.

Are there domains where programming is still hard? Most definitely, but for most programmers programming is no longer drole.

Excellent. This is what I wish I could have said in response to that other article, but couldn't find the words for.

This post is exactly right -- and I've seen a few newly-hired programmers in their first job out of college who had a very difficult time adjusting to the "real world", where programming isn't about fun and games and self-fulfillment any more, it's about creating real-world value.

There's nothing unique to programming in this -- journalists discover they can't write about whatever they want, scientists have to follow the funding, etc.

However, I do wonder if programmers, on average, might have particularly inflated expectations of what their jobs will be like? Just like the original blog post expressed. And what makes this so?

Huh. I understood the article he's referring to as something more along the lines of "don't make «programming» your job, make it your tool". Similarly, not becoming a "software engineer" means not becoming a merely guy with a hammer, but a guy with and idea and a hammer. That idea I liked pretty much, actually.

Dude, when most programmers hit 25 they have already learned dozens of frameworks, know how to build compilers, machine learning, etc. The problem is after a certain age, all the cool/novel stuff no longer is, and it becomes boring as hell and your back to building CRUD Apps and your still got most of your career ahead of you.