The 8 hour work day was quite a victory but since it happened long ago i would really like to see how health and productivity in each occupation declines over time and by task. I expect not just the obvious jobs to have quite absurd numbers and vary a lot from person to person. One might imagine a gradually increasing hourly rate, a decreasing one or a combination of the two. Writing code i could probably do 2x an hour per day. Much respect for those who can do full days. If we imagine there to be roughly 500 defined occupations it seems quite doable to measure how "easy" coding really is.
“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
221–230 of 590 posts
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#222I believe there are some programming jobs in which the code is absolutely the easier part. Not all of us work in signal processing, integrated systems or have to push upstream to Linux kernel because the company we work for really needs a memory allocation optimization for its data centers. Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incred…
IDK, a sufficiently complex consumer or enterprise app winds up having big performance problems if people don't know what they're doing w.r.t. the code they write and how they connect systems together with that code. Those performance problems start out not mattering much, first it impacts one seldom-used part of the site, then another, but that chips away at users and can eventually tank the product. That doesn't ev…
Yup. And performance problems don't just bleed the user base, they also slow down development and testing internally, both directly and by nudging developers away from attempting some tests or use cases in the first place.
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's questionable though how much the programmer is operating under it. The programmer's work may need to comply, but there are a bunch of things that can reduce how much the programmer themself deals with it. There are the executives, the lawyers, the product managers, sometimes the designers, who to varying degrees determine this before they land in the requirements the programmer sees. But there are also the libra…
Even if you get a crispy set of requirements from all parties you are still responsible for implementing all of then while making sense of the existing system (and from my experience significant issues arise at this stage when the full extent of requirement implications ia better understood). On top of that you might also be responsible for operating the thing, participate in compliance doc writing and do ongoing mai…
Yes, these things reduce (not necessarily how to zero) how much compliance the programmer is doing. They aren't figuring out how to get a car legally on the road, they're still figuring out how to get a car to do car things. The compliance questions the engineer sees are largely engineering questions. Sometimes hard engineering questions.
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
The infra org has to also understand their internal customer!
And that should be the engineers' job instead of outsourcing it to PMs who do not even use any of the infra services -- I'm not insulting the PMs, of course, but to state a fact. Infra is used to serve the internal engineering teams, and the PMs don't code, so they don't have a need to use the infra.
But do the infra team engineers use the infra they're building?
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#225The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is clear many aspects of work and life will be transformed—including programming.
I'm still not seeing it.
I'm seeing a lot of loud people, a lot of LOC produced, and a lot of people angrily pointing to their sideprojects... but no massive impact outside our bubble. Remember it's 2026, we are 5 years into this hype, the models are better than ever, and all the software we used around us is basically in the state it would have been in had we projected 2021 tech 5 years into the future ("in 2026, there will be... another backend JS runtime!")
I'm afraid all the personal anecdotes of technologists have not translated to real world results... other than negative ones like GitHub now having 0 9s of reliability.
Of course I suppose I'm "coping", as if I wouldn't be over the moon if AI had made me 10x productive... but maybe, just maybe, a lot of people really like talking to chatbots?
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#226Everybody saying "coding was never the hard part" is really telling on themselves. Coding was never "hard" because most organizations were absolutely unwilling to take on any technical work that was hard. That tells us about business strategy and culture rather than anything about the fundamentals of programming or technical work. The real conclusion is that programming is such a high-leverage activity that even tech…
It's not really telling on oneself. Like you said, the easy stuff (e.g. basic business process automation i.e. constructing simple database queries) happens to be economically high ROI right now. Something like 3d graphics or signal processing or whatever are comparatively niche and less likely to pay as well. Most jobs that people will actually pay for are actually pretty mindless. Even for the more "advanced" jobs, it's likely the domain knowledge and not the programming per se that's difficult.
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#227The "code was never the hard part" is a narrative pushed strongly by designers, MBA guys and product managers. Even before AI, they've always treated programmers like low-lives, someone beneath them and completely replaceable like commodity. Ironically, of this entire group, it isn't programmers that are being replaced left and right. Whole product teams, designers are being replaced. Good coders are still in demand - because, someone has to fix the vibe coded mess. In design, there is no reference for good and bad. You either like a design or not. In code, something either works or not. That's why it's always hard to replace a programmer as opposed to a designer.
Has Claude code et al replaced programmers? Not really. And it will be a long time before it can - because someone needs to still instruct the direction of the code, the base architecture to build upon and that comes with real human experience.
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#228Tech is not the issue, people are
"If figuring out what to build is the hard part, why do so many product managers seem clueless" - because people
"LLMs may be good at coding" - they are not;
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting take. Can you link us to your (correct, maybe even formally correct) AI-generated software? Given how general this post is, I assume you wouldn't mind if I extend this to, Idk, aviation or spaceflight, so mind linking to any GH repos you have where you've written code to work in environments like that? I ask because all you said was "making software" and didn't say what kind of "software" we're talking ab…
Since you apparently work on this kind of software, here's a challenge for you: take the last several bugs that were reported and paste them into Fable, pointing it at your code. How long does it take? Does it find the issue? In more or less time than the engineers took? Ask it to review your code for design and cohesiveness issues. How does it do?
Fun example I've had (some weeks ago), Agent completely dismissed the lack of strong consistency in our db system, this tiny bug would have caused a massive problem in the future.
A bug that is not immediately obvious, no syntax error, logic is sound, works as expected on local and QA envs. But let it run in prod for 2 months and you have a massive problem.
I'm not dismissing LLM's here btw, just pointing out that there is probably a lot of things that go into the category "you don't know what you don't know". These kinds of issues may or may not be a problem depending on the business you are in.
Most of the time the latest models perform better than I expect.
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Writing code is not hard. Writing code has a minimum IQ requirement; a significant fraction of the population will essentially never be able to code by themselves. That labor supply limitation is what's kept programmer salaries relatively high.
I've watched dozens of people try to learn to code and fail, some definitely not for a lack of trying. Of those that did learn, only a fraction had the IQ or passion to be genuinely good at it. The difficulty of it has absolutely been a bottleneck to the supply of good devs, keeping salaries high.
We've also seen decades of effort, much of it successful, aimed at making it easier. Programming used to be harder. (Difficulty alone doesn't account for high salaries.) If it was never "the hard part", what motivation for all that effort? Books, pedagogy, tooling, languages, even the notion of publishing a library is an attempt to make coding a related task easier for others. There's been comparatively less effort in making "the other parts" easier. Though certainly things like software development methodologies count.