Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Programmer Identity Crisis

hojberg.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 317 posts

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#101

Post by mncharity »

RamtinJ95 wrote: post #28

I think "Identity Crisis" is a bit over dramatic, but I for the most part agree with the sentiment. I have written something in the same vane, but still different enough that I would love to comment it but its just way more efficient to point to my post. I hope that is OK: https://handmadeoasis.com/ai-and-software-engineering-the-co...

I liked your emphasis on individual diversity, and an attendant need to explore, select, adapt, and integrate tooling. With associated self-awareness. Pushing that further, your "categories" seem more like exemplars/prototypes/archetypes/user-stories, helpful discussion points in a high-dimensional space of blended blobs. And as you illustrate, it branches not just on the individual, but also on what they are up to. And not just on work vs hobby, but on context and task.

It'd be neat to have a big user story catalog/map, which tracks what various services are able to help with.

I was a kid in NE43 instead of TFA's Building 26 across the street - with Lisp Machines and 1980s MIT AI's "Programmer's Apprentice" dreams. I years ago gave up on ever having a "this... doesn't suck" dev env, on being able to "dance code". We've had such a badly crippling research and industrial policy, and profession... "not in my lifetime" I thought. Knock on wood, I'm so happy for this chance at being wrong. And also, for "let's just imagine for a moment, ignoring the utterly absurd resources it would take to create, science education content that wasn't a wretched disaster... what might that look like?" - here too it's LLMs, or no chance at all.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#103

Post by wolvesechoes »

greymalik wrote: post #27

> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding. To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself. > careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

> but it doesn’t add value

Sad to see people reduce themselves willingly to cogs inside business machine.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#104

Post by NewsaHackO »

pmg101 wrote: post #93
NewsaHackO wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The point of being a chef is the food, not the knives They will never be able to undestand this, unfortunately

But what if the New Way to prepare food was to put a box into a microwave , wait 60 seconds, then hand it to the customer? Sure the customer still gets fed but it's a far inferior product... And is that chef really cheffing?

This is a strawman. The point is that the original poster was going on about knives, forgetting that the final product is the actual thing that matters, not whatever tool is used to create it. In your example, if the food is inferior, then the food is inferior.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#105

Post by inglor_cz »

whynotminot wrote: post #49
bcrosby95 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of most jobs in the world is to "solve problems". So why did you pick software over those?

Why would someone who likes solving problems choose a very lucrative career path solving problems… hmmm You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that doesn’t pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software. I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to…

At 47, I am an older guy already. But in my generation, people who went on to be programmers usually started tinkering with code at ~ 11 y.o. (back then on ZX Spectrum and similar cheap beasts available in freshly post-Communist Europe) out of interest and passion, not because of "I want to build a lucrative career".

(Given how massively widespread piracy was back then, programming looked rather like a good way to do hard work for free.)

Money matters, but coders who were drawn into the field purely by money and are personally detached from the substance of the job is an unknown species for me.

"You can also solve problems as a local handyman"

That is NOT the same sort of talent. My fingers are clumsy; my mind is not.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#106

Post by mupuff1234 »

codyb wrote: post #75
greymalik wrote: post #27

> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding. To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself. > careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

Configuring editors, dot files, and dev environments consistently adds value by giving you familiarity with your working environment, honing your skills with your tools, and creating a more productive space tailored to your needs. Who else becomes the go to person for modifying build scripts? The amount of people I know who have no idea how to work with Git after decades in the field using it is pretty amazing. It's…

Have you considered that the problem is with Git and not the users?

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#107

Post by senordevnyc »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #90
senordevnyc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the point of being a chef is the food, not the knives. If there's a better way to prepare food than a knife, but you refuse to change, are you really a chef? Or are you a chef knife enthusiast?

A closer analogy would be a chef who chooses to have a robot cut his tomatoes. If the robot did it perfect every time I'm sure he would use the robot. If the robot mushed the tomatoes some of the time, would he spend time carefully inspecting the tomatoes? or would he just cut them himself?

Even if the robot did it perfectly, you'd still have posts like these lamenting the loss of the craft of cutting tomatoes. And they're not wrong!

I guess I don't understand posts like this IF you think you can do it better without LLMs. I mean, if using AI makes you miserable because you love the craft of programming, AND you think using AI is a net loss, then just...don't use it?

But I think the problem here that all these posts are speaking to is that it's really hard to compete without using AI. And I sympathize, genuinely. But also...are we knife enthusiasts or chefs?

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#108

Post by senordevnyc »

pmg101 wrote: post #93
NewsaHackO wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The point of being a chef is the food, not the knives They will never be able to undestand this, unfortunately

But what if the New Way to prepare food was to put a box into a microwave , wait 60 seconds, then hand it to the customer? Sure the customer still gets fed but it's a far inferior product... And is that chef really cheffing?

If that's your analogy, then shouldn't you be able to dominate the market by not using AI?

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#109

Post by jimbokun »

whynotminot wrote: post #49
bcrosby95 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of most jobs in the world is to "solve problems". So why did you pick software over those?

Why would someone who likes solving problems choose a very lucrative career path solving problems… hmmm You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that doesn’t pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software. I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to…

You owe your cushy job and big paycheck entirely to those tech-fetishists that came before you.

Secondly, you are very blind if you don’t see that the AI making your job “easier” is close to replacing you entirely, if you don’t also have a deep understanding of the code produced. What’s to stop the Project Manager from vibe coding you out of the loop entirely?

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#110

Post by jimbokun »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #81
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're grossly underestimating the number of people here who fell into software development because it's one of the best outlets for "the knack" in existence. Sure, this site is split between the "tech-bro entrepreneur"-types and developers, and there are plenty of developers who got into this for the cash, but in my experience about a quarter of developers (so maybe 10-15% of users on this site) got into thi…

I got stupidly lucky that one of my hobbies as an avid indoorsman was not only valued by the private sector but also happened to pay well. This career was literally the only thing that saved me from a life of poverty.

Yep, and the younger people like us growing up now are just fucked.
Post reply on HN