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

121–130 of 317 posts

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#121

Post by whynotminot »

jimbokun wrote: post #109
whynotminot wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We all owe every part of everything to those who’ve come before us. That goes without saying, really.

> 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.

Brother don’t patronize me. I’m a senior engineer I’m not yeeting vibe code I don’t understand into prod.

I also understand the possibility of all of this potentially devaluing my labor or even wholesale taking my job.

What would you like me to do about that? Is me refusing to use the tools going to change that possibility?

Have yet to hear what else we should be doing about this. The hackernews answer appears to be some combination of petulance + burying head in the sand.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#122

Post by toast0 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #45

Full disclosure: I am old. When I started programming for Corporate™ back 1995, it was a wildly different career than what it has become. Say what you want about the lunatics running the asylum, but we liked it that way. Engineering knew their audience, knew the tech stack, knew what was going on in "the industry", ultimately called the shots. Your code was your private sandbox. Want to rewrite it every other release…

> And I hate to say it, but I suspect the industry itself will never return to those "cowboy coding" days. It was fun while it lasted.

I don't think the industry will return to it, but I suspect there will be isolated environments for cowboys. When I was at WhatsApp (2011-2019), we were pretty far on the cowboy side of the spectrum... although I suspect it's different now.

IMHO, what's appropriate depends on how expensive errors are to detect before production, and how expensive errors are when detected after production. I lean into reducing the cost to fix errors rather than trying to detect errors earlier. OTOH, I do try not to make embarrassing errors, so I try to test for things that are reasonable to test for.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#123

Post by akra »

dennisy wrote: post #50

I absolutely loved this piece. I also agree with comments on this thread stating that problem solving should be the focus and not the code. However my view is that our ability to solve problems which require a specific type of deep thought will diminish over time as we allow for AI to do more of this type of thinking. Purely asking for a feature is not “problem solving”.

I think you can enjoy both aspects - both the problem solving and the craft. There will be people who agree that of course from a rational perspective solving the problem is what matters, but for them personally the "fun" is gone. Generally people that identify themselves as "programmers" as the article does would be the people who enjoy problem solving/tinkering/building.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#124

Post by antonymoose »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #45

Full disclosure: I am old. When I started programming for Corporate™ back 1995, it was a wildly different career than what it has become. Say what you want about the lunatics running the asylum, but we liked it that way. Engineering knew their audience, knew the tech stack, knew what was going on in "the industry", ultimately called the shots. Your code was your private sandbox. Want to rewrite it every other release…

Back when I started in the late 2000s you had much clearer lines around your career path and speciality.

There was a difference between a sysadmin and a programmer. Now, I’m expected to be my own sysadmin-ops guy while also delivering features. While I worked on my systems chops for fun on the side, I purposely avoided it on the work side, I don’t usually enjoy how bad vendor documentation, training, etc. can be in the real world of Corporate America.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#125

Post by aleph_minus_one »

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…

> 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 pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion.

I would claim that I love coding quite a lot. The problem is rather that my bosses and colleagues don't care about what I love about it. It is rather appreciated if you implement tasks fast with shitty code instead of considering the fact that tasks are easy to implement and the code is really fast as a strong evidence that the abstractions were well-chosen.

Thus, I believe that people who just do it for the money have it easier in the "programming industry" than programmers who really love programming, and are thus a big annoyance to managers.

I thus really wonder myself why companies tell all the time about "love for programming" instead of "love for paying the bills" and "love for implementing tasks fast with shitty code", which would give them people who are a much better culture fit for their real organizational processes.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#126

Post by jimbokun »

whynotminot wrote: post #121
jimbokun wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We all owe every part of everything to those who’ve come before us. That goes without saying, really. > 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. Brother don’t patronize me. I’m a senior engineer I’m not yeeting vibe code I don’t understand into prod. I also understand the pos…

It’s simpler than that.

It’s more of a funeral, collective expression of grievance of a great, painful loss. An obituary for a glorious, short time in history where it was possible to combine a specific kind of intelligence, creativity, discipline, passion and values and be well compensated for it. A time when the ability to solve problems and solve them well had value. Not just being better at taking credit than other people.

It was wonderful.

I know you don’t care. So just go to some other forum where you don’t have to endure the whining of us who have lost something that was important to us.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#127

Post by interroboink »

cardanome wrote: post #76
thorn wrote: post #39

Thank you, author. This essay made my day. It resonates with my thinking of last months. I tried to use AI at work, but most of times I regrettably scratched whatever it did and did stuff on my own. So many points I agree with. Delegating thinking to AI is the worst thing I can do to my career. AI at best is mediocre text generator. So funny to read how people attack author using non-related to the essay’s message cr…

The worst thing for me is that I am actually good at LLM-based coding My coworkers that are in love with this new world are producing complete AI slop and still take ages to complete tasks. Meanwhile I can finally play my strength as I actually know software architecture, can ask the LLM to consider important corner case and so on. Plus, I am naturally good at context management. Being neurodivergent has given me dec…

It seems to me that someone like you, seen from the outside (e.g. from a code-reviewing colleague), simply appears to be getting more productive, with no drop in quality. Maybe some stylistic shifts.

I don't think anyone is complaining about that too much. I wonder how many people there are like you, where we don't get much data. If people don't complain about it, we generally don't hear about it, because they're just quietly moving on with their work.

Not to be confused with the AI hypesters who are loudly touting the benefits with dubious claims, of course (:

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#128

Post by keeda »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #103
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.

You can spend as much time as you want on "configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments" and otherwise honing your craft, the business machine will still look at you as cogs.

May seem depressing, but the bright side is that you as an individual are then free to find joy in your work wherever you can find it... whether its in delivering high-quality code, or just collecting a paycheck.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#129

Post by inglor_cz »

bdangubic wrote: post #118
inglor_cz wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agree, I am 51 and all of this resonates true with me except… > That is NOT the same sort of talent. My fingers are clumsy; my mind is not. if handyman work was paying $600/hr your fingers would un-clums themselves reaaaaaaly fast :)

> if handyman work was paying $600/hr your fingers would un-clums themselves reaaaaaaly fast

I don't believe that. When it comes to motoric skills, including dancing etc., I am probably in the lowest quintile of the population.

Of course, I could become somewhat better by spending crazy amounts of time on training, but I would still be non-competitive even in comparison with an average person.

OTOH I am pretty good at writing prose/commentary, even though it is not a particulary lucrative activity, to the degree of being a fairly known author in Czechia. My tenth book is just out.

Talents are weird and seem to have mind of their own. I never planned to become an author, but something inside just wanted out. My first book was published just a few days shy of my 40th birthday, so not a "youthful experiment" by any means.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#130

Post by jimbokun »

bdangubic wrote: post #114
jimbokun wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

State of the industry both short and medium term is that you want to be the one doing replacing vs being the one being replaced. Not great but this is where we are at. If you are say SRE there are myriad of companies working hard to eliminate SREs but they need experts to set shit up so that SREs are not needed. Same thing will cascade to other Tech work, some faster than others. Career-wise I think it is wise now to…

Yes we are rapidly moving towards a time where bullshitting will be more valued than deep understanding and problem solving. Both LLMs and the broader culture are pushing in that direction.
Post reply on HN