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After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

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Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#141

Post by MarkSweep »

A lot of these points are why I still enjoy programming as a hobby, but less so enjoy it as a profession. It is much easier to program something where you are the only customer. No project manager alternates between asking me increase and decrease the number of story points per task. No one comes with a last minute request to create a throw away demo for some executive who can only understand pointy-clicks things.

Directly addressing the title, one thing I still find difficult in programming is implementing an informal parser. Think calling read(2) and parsing an HTTP request. Making something work with partial reads and multiple buffers is tricky. I really should reach for a real parser sooner in these situations is the actual answer and stop trying to work at such a low level of abstraction.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#142

Post by kevmo314 »

arrowleaf wrote: post #77
cafebeen wrote: post #9

Greg Lemond wrote about fitness, "it never gets easier, you just get faster", which perhaps applies as well to programming.

I've always hated this saying, and I think the reason applies here too. If you take up running and it never gets easier, that means you're never managing your pace and you're always going full throttle. That's a straight shot towards injury if not chronic disability. Most aerobic benefits happen at zone 2, where your heart rate is just above 'easy effort'. When you start out, this might just be walking, so it makes s…

Lemond's statement is in reference to racing. The race isn't won in zone 2. Same with programming. Nothing wrong with a lot of zone 2 programming, in fact it's quite important to maintain balance like you describe, but the race isn't won with comfortable work.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#143

Post by nhatcher »

hyggetrold wrote: post #62

Reading the comments here, I am having a total Slashdot throwback moment. Did anybody actually read TFA? Most of the replies I am seeing here seem to have treated the article's title as a writing prompt. Read the whole article friends - it's got a nice amount of nuance and the author unpacks what they mean by "difficult" very well.

Off topic. I didn't know what TFA was so I googled. It didn't help (a cursory search). So I asked chatgpt, that helped. The Full Article.

I, of course, knew what you meant.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#144

Post by whatshisface »

kevmo314 wrote: post #142
arrowleaf wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always hated this saying, and I think the reason applies here too. If you take up running and it never gets easier, that means you're never managing your pace and you're always going full throttle. That's a straight shot towards injury if not chronic disability. Most aerobic benefits happen at zone 2, where your heart rate is just above 'easy effort'. When you start out, this might just be walking, so it makes s…

Lemond's statement is in reference to racing. The race isn't won in zone 2. Same with programming. Nothing wrong with a lot of zone 2 programming, in fact it's quite important to maintain balance like you describe, but the race isn't won with comfortable work.

"The race" is won by 1,000 people working together in a way that at any given moment no more than 490 are undoing the work of the others.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#145

Post by pjerem »

nhatcher wrote: post #143
hyggetrold wrote: post #62

Reading the comments here, I am having a total Slashdot throwback moment. Did anybody actually read TFA? Most of the replies I am seeing here seem to have treated the article's title as a writing prompt. Read the whole article friends - it's got a nice amount of nuance and the author unpacks what they mean by "difficult" very well.

Off topic. I didn't know what TFA was so I googled. It didn't help (a cursory search). So I asked chatgpt, that helped. The Full Article. I, of course, knew what you meant.

Oh, i was thinking about another f word.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#146

Post by lolc »

arrowleaf wrote: post #77
cafebeen wrote: post #9

Greg Lemond wrote about fitness, "it never gets easier, you just get faster", which perhaps applies as well to programming.

I've always hated this saying, and I think the reason applies here too. If you take up running and it never gets easier, that means you're never managing your pace and you're always going full throttle. That's a straight shot towards injury if not chronic disability. Most aerobic benefits happen at zone 2, where your heart rate is just above 'easy effort'. When you start out, this might just be walking, so it makes s…

The saying resonates with me. I have different problems programming now compared to when I started. But I still bang my head against a wall until it gives or I leave with bruises. I may not notice the little walls I step over now, and I learnt which walls to respect. The easy stuff I do on the side.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#147

Post by WalterBright »

mjevans wrote: post #128
WalterBright wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every programmer can create the system from scratch Every programmer believes he can create the system from scratch FTFY I'm one of the "every", too. If I knew how hard writing a C++ compiler from scratch would be, I'd have never tried it.

Which parts did you find blockingly complex, or was it more the interaction of so many language features? The operator overloading aspect of C++ , IMO, allows for obtusely opaque domain specific languages where the actions and side effects of an operation aren't immediately clear to someone getting to know a new codebase. It's almost as bad as the enterprisy nightmare of polymorphic objects and interfaces that can be…

I found C++ code to be simply difficult to read. When code "in the wild" didn't compile with my compiler, it would often take a long time to find the problem and understand what went wrong.

Probably the most time consuming and frustrating aspect was trying to be compatible with Microsoft's compiler. Much of the way it worked was quirky and ad-hoc, and took a lot of time to figure out.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#148

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #6
simonw wrote: post #4

If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. On top of that there are all of the other professional skills you need to develop to be a really effective software engineer: communication, writing, planning, navigating organizations, figuring out the best thing to build and how to effectively make the case for it. The thing I like most about this career is the amount of depth it has - th…

Sure. But getting ground down by dealing with people around you that generate the same problems over and over, can get tiring. I mean 2 basic areas: 1. Management turnover. New Managers, let's re-invent the wheel again. 2. New hires. Newer programmers that wont believe anything you say until they implement something incorrectly themselves. And you have to deal with fallout. 3. Should add 3rd -- New Framework/library/…

Most of this just goes under the heading of Office Life. It's not specific to programmers except for #3 and that's pretty much self-inflicted.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#149

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

slindsey wrote: post #5

I expect there are many careers that are similar. In some ways, your experience doesn't matter. A civil engineer with 40 years of experience building houses, malls, or parking garages is still a rookie if they're building their first bridge, right? Many concepts still apply, maybe even most, but it's still going to be new and difficult. I have over 30 years experience as a software developer but I wouldn't want to pr…

> I wouldn't want to program for medical equipment

After having done that for close to 20 years, I'm sure you'd be fine. You might not want to do it, but you most likely have the appropriate skillset.

Re: After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult

#150

Post by throwing_away »

ravenstine wrote: post #49
cortesoft wrote: post #17

Been programming over 30 years, since I was 8 years old and my dad’s coworker gave me his old BASIC programming books and I was hooked. I have always found programming easy, and still do. It is just fun, and I still love learning new languages and tools and paradigms. It is still my favorite hobby. However, WORK is hard. Dealing with office politics and changing priorities and bad leadership and meetings and TPS repo…

Yup. As a senior programmer who's been a professional for 10+ years and has been programming on and off since roughly 10 years old, I have found that the more time I spend in my field, the harder my work becomes in a way that is disproportionate to my experience. It's not the programming itself that has become more difficult, but all the process, tooling, and lack of organizational self-correction that makes aspects…

> Unlike the feeling of being a human robot, it's a feeling of the system attempting to slowly stretch my humanness to its limit.

Poetry.

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