The Developer's Dystopian Future

I don't know your wealth situation but one positive thing about our profession is that it provides us with the finances to travel and continue experiencing the things during your semester abroad. In my 20's, looking around, it was difficult finding people who had the vacation and money to travel abroad.

If you can make sure you realize that this is your job and take time to take advantage of your situation I feel it can justify the sadness you experience from our profession.

Same thing bro with musicians, "Amateurs are gear-heads, pro's worry about techniques, and masters tries to listen to the sound"; traders/gamblers, "Amateurs focus on their winning, pro's worry about preserving their capital and masters worry about executing their performance where losing and winning money is only a side effect," and ad infinitum.

I'm going to try to provide an alternative perspective, one which is more optimistic. This is love letter to programming, written in my late 30s.

I've been programming since my parents brought home an Apple II. Even though I sometimes get burnt out for a couple of months, sooner or later I find myself hacking some fun little program together, and I'm obsessed once again.

When I work for somebody full-time, I search out jobs that throw lots of random, interesting problems my way. When I consult, I like medium-sized projects that teach me something new.

In the late 90s, I hacked on Lisp and Dylan compilers. In 2001, I had strong opinions on how generators should work. In 2007, I spent time fooling around with probability monads. Right now, I'm delivering production code in Ember.js, and on the bleeding edge, I'm spending some personal time messing around with Rust.

I want my code to be simple, beautiful, expressive, correct and fast. Every few years, somebody invents a library (or sometimes a language!) that allows me inch a little closer to that goal. I suppose that if I ever felt my tools and my code were truly good enough, I might get frustrated with the rate of change. But if anything, I'm impatient. Our tools could be better. When will I get to play with the good stuff?

Of course, I do get tired of some things. If I never again see another huge Rails 2.3 app with undeclared dependencies on 30 dodgy abandoned gems, I'll be a happy programmer. And I wish that the various JavaScript frameworks would finally settle down enough that I don't have to budget one month per year just to keep production apps up to date. But then again, I didn't much like that sort of foolishness when I was younger, either.

My only real problem is that the day is short, I do have outside interests, and there are so many cool programs left to write.

It is the loss of the sense of wonder. The trick is that computers today are really really really fast versions of computers from 60 years ago. Fundamentally the same box, just faster and with more memory and disk space.

That isn't entirely true of course, there are special function architectures like GPUs which have a specialness all their own, but it is true for most people.

But the thing that drives people in the beginning, is the sense of wonder. Same thing with relationships, when they are new, everything about them is new and exciting, and then they aren't that much new any more and you don't get any relationship augmentation from the newness. So once you've discovered computers, and made them do your bidding, that is all new and all exciting and the feedback loop is strong. But once you have done all of the 'usual' things once, and due to work obligations are doing them again, but in a slightly different way, you aren't getting the adrenalin rush from the newness. Computer games, same thing, movie franchises, same thing. So what to do.

Well when the rush of newness runs out, you have three choices; pick a new field, pick a different area in the field, or take it to the next level. New field or different area choices give you a new thing to be excited about, taking it to the next level requires that you challenge yourself.

Taking an example from the article, "... I don’t feel like I really grok the module system. I definitely don’t understand the class system. What the hell is a generator and how does it work the way it does? I am so lost."

Decide to take your understanding of Python to the next level, and by that seek out the more advanced texts, read them, read the source code, build Python from scratch, add some change to the module system, analyze the impacts, look at how classes work in Python and compare them to classes in C++, Scala, Java, and Go. If you can get over that hump then you can get engaged in learning things at a deeper level. I really didn't understand Python modules at all well at Google until I took apart the SWIG system to write some C code that was accessible by Python. Port it to a different architecture, benchmark it, change it and benchmark the changes. That is what I mean by "going deep." You will find after a while that there is a lot of similarity at that next level too.

Another skill people don't work on until later than they should, reading code. Read a bunch of code, figure out how it works, prove your understanding by changing it.

All of these things are the programmatic equivalent of strength training at a professional level. If you can't get any satisfaction from this though, option 1 (try something new) will give you more satisfaction long term.

With regards to your last point: it's also up to job seekers and employees to signal to organizations that they need to take professional development seriously. You have to fight the pressure to over-specialize and demand opportunities to learn new tools and techniques. There's a basic conflict of interest here between employer and employee: the employer wants a highly specialized cog they can replace when their needs change. The employee wants to develop a speciality, but also build a general base of skills and dabble in new technologies so he can stay employable for years down the road. Employees need to fight for their interest in this regard, and employers need to have the foresight to realize that the most talented people who have the most options will not take a job at a place that stifles their professional development.