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My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

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Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#261

Post by Chris2048 »

kdamken wrote: post #181
Chris2048 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a 30yo dev, I started getting pains in my wrist, and numbness on one side of my hands (the pinky and finger-next-to-it). I switched to a ball-mouse at work, and no longer get this. I believe the large amount of time using a mouse had compressed and damaged my nerves somehow. I'd recommend the switch for anyone spending hours with a mouse.

Just for your info - that numbeness is your ulnar nerve flaring up. There are three main nerves in your arms, the radial, median and ulnar. If you start having those issues again, there may be an issue in your ulnar tunnel, aka where your funny bone is in your elbow. Typically, if the issue is worse when your arm is bent, you know it's that. Just wanted to save you some trouble googling things if it happens to comes…

I used to get the same thing playing ultimate (frisbee).

when I caught the disk, the edge would snam into my wrist. I hear volleyball players get the same thing. I made a wrist-protector from tap and bandages. Eventually though, the numbness still came, maybe even worse due to the false protection from the protector (like how boxing gloves actually harm boxers more in the long run by allowing fights to go on longer).

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#262

Post by frenchy »

hawleyal wrote: post #210
wtbob wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JavaScript is actually an incredibly flexible and effective language. == vs === No integers. Assignment is declaration. Prototypes. Curly brackets & semicolons. Semicolon insertion. It may be flexible (in the sense that an Alfa Romeo driven into a telephone pole at 120 mph is flexible), but it sure as heck ain't effective. JavaScript is the great shame of the computing industry: that it exists, and that it is used,…

Such hate. By far not as bad as you portray. Have you attempted the 8th level of hell that is PHP?

Back in the day when I was just learning to program, I wrote a BBcode library in JavaScript. Not knowing any better, I made very liberal use of globals throughout my code.

I later went to go port my code to PHP 4 (that was current at the time). To my surprise I was getting all these errors about how crappy of a programmer I was (both from globals and from misspellings and related problems).

I'm honestly not sure how people hate PHP so hard and yet don't mind JavaScript.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#263

Post by _gi12 »

okyup wrote: post #140

I agree that programming is a dead end job. It's popular and relatively easy. It doesn't require any special skills. Anyone with an average IQ can learn it. There's low cost and barrier of entry to getting started. It's fun and addicting when you're a kid. Then you get trapped and it becomes monotonous. There's only so good you can get at programming. Beyond that, most of your time is spent on debugging trivial issue…

You've described exactly how I feel. I've only be at this game for 4 years and I'm already looking for a way out. Programming is fun in the way that doing drugs is fun; it's addicting and provides a quick high, but at the cost of staring into a computer screen for weeks on end with little to no interaction with other people aside from meetings (which only exist so that your superiors can tell you which widget to crank out next).

I consider myself to be very introverted yet programming is still too extreme on the asocial end. A career in programming will gradually cause your social skills to atrophy. It's pretty obvious that if you spend 40+ hours a week talking to a computer that eventually you'll start to feel and act more robotic than your peers who regularly interact with real people in the real world.

Working as a programmer doesn't provide real human experiences. Everything that you do and learn as a programmer is extremely abstract (and usually convoluted). You won't have interesting stories and wise aphorisms to share your children and grandchildren, because everything you did was inside a virtual world.

Everything you build as a developer is extremely temporary. You will work extremely hard to build something over a period of months or even years, only for that software to be immediately discarded when the business pivots and decides to pursue a totally different path. If you work for a startup, you're hard work will be absolutely worthless if the business goes belly up. If you decide to contribute to open source software and build the next generation of frameworks, tools, and languages, prepare for that to work to go out of fashion within just a couple years. A construction worker can go back to a building he built 50 years ago and it will still be standing. A doctor or lawyer with 20+ years experience will be well respected, but as a developer your experience will be disregarded unless you're an expert in whatever framework/language is the flavor of the month.

Programming pays well and is a cushy office job. It doesn't provide much else.

EDIT: I fully expect people to reply with the usual "well that's just your opinion, man!". Yes. I know. This is a personal rant and not a master's thesis. If you love this career more power to you. I'm just sharing my opinion because I know other developers feel like I do, and feel trapped in a well paying but otherwise unfulfilling career.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#264

Post by cableshaft »

xiphias wrote: post #81
pjmlp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one retires, there are lots of more interesting things to do with your life than spending the remaining days of your life in front of a computer screen.

Like what? The more I know about things outside programming, the more I see how interesting it is and how much boring, repeating stuff you have to go through to have fun in other parts of life.

Designing board games. But the pay is nowhere near as good as programming.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#265

Post by [deleted] »

okyup wrote: post #140

I agree that programming is a dead end job. It's popular and relatively easy. It doesn't require any special skills. Anyone with an average IQ can learn it. There's low cost and barrier of entry to getting started. It's fun and addicting when you're a kid. Then you get trapped and it becomes monotonous. There's only so good you can get at programming. Beyond that, most of your time is spent on debugging trivial issue…

[deleted]

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#266

Post by Chris2048 »

dcw303 wrote: post #166
Chris2048 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a 30yo dev, I started getting pains in my wrist, and numbness on one side of my hands (the pinky and finger-next-to-it). I switched to a ball-mouse at work, and no longer get this. I believe the large amount of time using a mouse had compressed and damaged my nerves somehow. I'd recommend the switch for anyone spending hours with a mouse.

Do you mind me asking, at what times did you feel the pain? I've been having something similar but always during the night, so I had not made an association with RSI.

Usually after using the mouse or my hands for a couple of hours or so while. If it started happening, anything that compressed my wrist (or something) could begin to set it off.

Do you have anything on or around you arms when you sleep (or lie on them?).

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#267

Post by feiss »

VLM wrote: post #217
tomp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10X the assets => retire 10 times sooner => program when you're retired => no missing out

My dad never really retired, but lets just say he got extremely picky about the contracts he picked up and the people he would work with. Being able to do what you want, rather than what you need to do to survive, is pretty nice.

Kudos to your dad. That's what I try to do, but my skills to say no are not very polished yet..

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#268

Post by wcummings »

okyup wrote: post #140

I agree that programming is a dead end job. It's popular and relatively easy. It doesn't require any special skills. Anyone with an average IQ can learn it. There's low cost and barrier of entry to getting started. It's fun and addicting when you're a kid. Then you get trapped and it becomes monotonous. There's only so good you can get at programming. Beyond that, most of your time is spent on debugging trivial issue…

>You will be worthless if Western civilization ever fails and drops out of the Technological Age.

Who cares?

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#269

Post by ryandrake »

cableshaft wrote: post #215
Zelmor wrote: post #24

He would have been unhappy with the other choice as well, because then it is the programming side he would be missing out on. I would advise everyone to read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536 You chose one option out of many, and the others may no longer be a possibility. However, the writer's unhappiness does not spawn from his inability to be successful at what he does,…

I was a programmer, and then spent a year and a half as a games producer, and could have kept going down that path, but decided to go back in programming. Half the time I spent as a producer I was worried about the fact that I wasn't doing any programming, and my skills were atrophying. Production had some real perks in comparison, being able to meet a lot of people I admired, going on business trips, etc, but I got…

Unfortunately, in the vast majority of places, you can't have both. You're either making the decisions about content or you're implementing other people's decisions. In my experience, very few companies have engineering roles where you get to say, "This is best for the product" AND go off and implement it.

Re: My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

#270

Post by antoniuschan99 »

forgottenacc56 wrote: post #56
rajeemcariazo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

could you elaborate more about using node and npm

I used to hate npm with the burning heat of a thousand supernovas. I think maybe they changed the way it works because now it tends to work instead of assaulting you viciously with a massive cascade of dependency errors every time you try to install a package. Until recently it was quite the absolute worst experience of software ever for me and I used DOS and Windows 1.0. Every time I realized I had to use npm I woul…

Were the issues way back in 2012/2013?
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