The programming talent myth

WRT mythology, one important takeaway about the "1.5 million programmer job shortage" is the management declaring the shortage isn't looking for programmers, or white male programmers, or "rockstar ninja real programmers" but ivy league grads willing to sit thru 8 hour logic puzzle and coding interviews about linear algebra to work for $7.25/hr for minimum 80 hours per week in an open office packed in like sardines while people "work" by playing foozball for 60 hours per week next to you in one of the most expensive cities in the world for next to no stock options in a field rife with ageism where their career will be shorter than a typical NFL quarterback. But other than that, no problemo.

In reality there's no shortage, and isn't going to be one, outside a couple industries in NYC and SV.

While there's clearly some skill that matters, there's a difference between someone that's going slow and being thoughtful (arguably too thoughtful in many cases, myself included especially here) and being just plain slow.

My idea of a slow and not particularly thoughtful programmers are the ones that really do look like someone's programming in slow motion - as well as everything else (this is something beyond the professional work I've seen). They're slow to ssh to a remote server, they're still typing in passwords again and again every day, they're slow to type out even a simple git commit message, they're slow to write out an e-mail that has very low interesting content in it. In their off-time, they're going fishing, maybe playing board games, or just constantly trying to relax and avoid thinking about anything at all because they seem to instinctively avoid anything that would be serious or present any sort of stress. To me, they're the complete opposite of the "type A" personality that's always trying to stay occupied and hyperactive. I have no problem with this life approach on a personal level, but it's a liability in a business setting wherever you are in the world and whatever industry you're in because there is just no urgency to anything and the person is pretty much incapable of handling modern professional life perhaps in general.

I've been at this twenty years, and I have no doubt that most people can learn to do it, and some people are just radically better at it. I'm not sure why those should be either mutually exclusive or controversial points of view. Where the passion part comes in is that most people, the vast majority I would think, just don't want to do this for a living and never will.

We're a little like medical doctors in that respect. A lot of people would like to have an MD's paycheck but very few would actually enjoy doing what an MD does for a living. Another analogy, and one of my favorites, is to watchmaking. Watchmakers take great pride in the incredibly close work they do, and again while it may be work many could learn to do, it is work that few would want to do. I think this is very true of programming. Most people find it horribly tedious and boring, and don't see the creative aspects of it at all.

The last thing I'd note is that the focused act of programming is becoming a smaller and smaller part of the gig. To be a full-stack developer these days requires so much more than the ability to create a working program. The big picture is very big, it takes many years to get a really sound grasp of it, and you have to be motivated in the first place. Passion, again.

"In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong."

http://mindsetonline.com/whatisit/about/

Your argument falls apart completely when you take the long term lifecycle of the code into account. Which is exactly why we keep having these discussions.

And by the time we pay the price everybody cares. Of course, by then it's way too late to start caring about such esoteric programmer obsessions as elegant, simple, clean, and most of all: open to change.

Yes, all people ask is code that is good enough to do whatever it's supposed to do. They just have no fucking clue of what it is that the code is supposed to be able to do besides satisfying their short term needs.