Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because our dad was paid for every hour of work he put in. He invested his time by the hour and his risk was minimal. For a startup coder he or she is investing by the month or year, and to walk away from that with not much to show for it can be awful. These coders arent paid extra for all nighters, they aren't compensated for losing relationships, they aren't covered when they burnout, all for a realistically very s…
I already mentioned in one of the threads below. Our work as software professionals today is more dependent on productivity not intelligence. We are quickly assimilating in to normal crowd. We may even be judged by the same metrics they are.
We are all writing software to solve business problems. We are not writing software for Software innovation.
Unless you are doing something special. Most software today is written in IDE's. You don't have to remember syntax at all these days. The IDE will do it for you. It knows what libraries you want, it knows how many exceptions your code can run into. It knows how to compile, build and package your code. I can give you your code coverage. It can even do documentation for you. There is hardly anything IDE's can't do these days.
All you need is a little semantic awareness. And there are solutions to nearly every problem you are likely to run into a software shop. There are libraries, API's and frameworks that have understood and defined your problems as a generic case and solved them. There are forums to help you out on edge cases.
All you do these days is know a solution to a generic pattern of problems. You fundamentally pull out those logical solutions from your brain and parameterize them for the solution need at hand. And remaining is simply IDE play.
Very little or really a non quantifiable of highly intellectual work is happening in business based software shops today. Google, Facebook are exceptions, not the normal.
And this isn't surprising. We need armies of programmers to do all the bulk of the business job out there. If you are still thinking that as a software guy you are going to work with math theorems, then you have got it wrong.
Given all these, my success depends on only two things. How much aware of the reusable solutions. How quickly and how many problems can I solve using them. Which is productivity.
This is drag and drop programming demystified.