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Programming is a Terrible Job

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Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#271

Post by collyw »

aryastark wrote: post #235
randomdata wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good point. When you look at the top richest people of the world, some of them are (were) programmers. None of them are sports or movie stars.

eh, I don't think that's the same. Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, they weren't top 1% programmers. They are simply people who knew programming (to some degree) and got rich from their business ideas. Whereas the athletes, like Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, are incredibly talented. The closest you can find in the programming world is probably John Carmack, who found a way to earn a large sum of money based directly on his p…

Zuckerburg got lucky as well. I has signed up to a few similar apps before facebook, but the timing was right to get a critical mass.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#274

Post by haihaibye »

avenger123 wrote: post #86
loup-vaillant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are an incredible amount of hard problems and interesting challenges in frontend web dev. Name three that your boss will allow you to work on. > there are all sorts of exciting projects to get involved with Name three that your boss will allow you to work on. > If you think its all just JS hacks you're doing it wrong. Or maybe that's his boss doing it wrong: like, "This form is ugly on our HR people's compute…

I think that's giving too much power to your job. Your boss may not let you work on it but there's no reason to not work on it outside the job for 5-10 hours a week, just for kicks. Those kicks might be enough to keep the day job more bearable. If at the end of the day, putting in 5-10 hours a week extra out of your own time for it is considered too much, then accept that you also see your work as just a job.

Learning a useful tool at home related to work pays off.

For a web front end task job that doesn't have JQuery 5-10 hours in it could save so many hours at work after introduction you may look like a hero and win you more paid at work research time.

Prove you are worth research time to your employer.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#275

Post by haihaibye »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #132
avenger123 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's giving too much power to your job. Your boss may not let you work on it but there's no reason to not work on it outside the job for 5-10 hours a week, just for kicks. Those kicks might be enough to keep the day job more bearable. If at the end of the day, putting in 5-10 hours a week extra out of your own time for it is considered too much, then accept that you also see your work as just a job.

The OP himself reckons the hobby is fine. It's the job that sucks. Sure, you can take some quality programming time outside your job, and the OP does exactly that , but your day job is still taking a huge chunk off your life. When a job sucks, the solution hardly lies in what you do in your spare time. First, I would try to improve the job, or enjoy it, or quit it, or annihilate it (we're programmers, annihilating jo…

Work normal hours for your job then anything extra pushing your skills in areas you find interesting. This can be on tangentially related work tasks or research or skills.

If you find your interests lead away from your job, then that is a path to skilling up for a more appropriate job.

If you think it sucks you have to work so long and hard to find and/or get those interesting jobs it does .

But it's because other people are willing to do this and will get the interesting jobs leaving the boring ones to those that don't.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#276

Post by auvrw »

bigiain wrote: post #41
garethadams wrote: post #7

Solving problems is interesting. Repetition is terrible. As programmers many of the things we build are to automate processing that other people would find repetitive and make errors doing. As a result, our work becomes repetitive and we make errors doing it. As some level we've succeeded – we've added a layer of abstraction and made a lot of people's lives easier – but we've also moved our expectations ahead of us a…

"Solving problems is interesting. Repetition is terrible." Most "programming" is just "digital plumbing". No matter how flashy or utilitarian the taps or basin are, underneath the job is pretty much always the same - you hook up hot water to one tap, cold water to the other, and the sink drain to the drainpipe. You can do a great job or a shoddy job - so long as nothing leaks _too_ much, it doesn't make any differenc…

so i understand where the plumbing analogy is coming from, but, as with most analogies, it's not a perfect parallel. moreover, as someone who's currently spending a lot of time wiring up ui elements to data stores and data stores to other data stores, i find the comparison a little hurtful.

like, if the path from an app to a webservice were like plumbing, i'd lay the pipes, data would move, and that would be it, on the the next job with the same pipes and tools i used for this one. but actually, as the project matures, i hope to have made several nice little json-schema-sized pipe connectors that i and others can freely reuse.

my ideas for improving the ui development process are not quite as mature as this is the first system i've worked on with much emphasis on ui design, but there are already a few interesting corners to look into.

and i'd really like to hear from anyone else with ideas as to how to allow people who don't know as much about programming integrate their human interface ideas with the machine interface underneath. i guess that's what this google web designer thing is all about, though.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#277

Post by Supermighty »

aaronem wrote: post #222
Supermighty wrote: post #84

I've felt this way before. Dejected that the my new job wasn't an exciting candy land of save-the-day hacks and movie montage of elegant code spanning the screen. My expectations were too high. I thought we would always do the right thing to kick out software all grown up ready to take on the world. When the realization set in I got angry. First at the job then at myself. I held it tight knowing someone was to blame.…

I don't want to burst your bubble, but there are bosses out there who a) will read and criticize your diffs and commit comments, and b) will not be anywhere near as capable as you. These circumstances combine to produce a situation where it is entirely possible to be "too clever", which elicits a polite chewing-out and an assignment to go back and replace elegant code with code that any idiot can maintain. If you kno…

(I'm replying late to this so you may never read it.)

I don't think I'm that great of a programmer. I'm self taught and I have a lot of insecurities about my abilities. Even though I get paid to program. Even though I pickup new languages, on my own, and write working software with them.

So when I write code I write it as simple and direct as possible. I stay away from clever and I stay away from cute or smart. Because I know that the idiot that will be maintaining the code and need to understand that code will be me.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#278

Post by stephencanon »

Tsagadai wrote: post #261
jafaku wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for the couple hundred guys making multiple millions a year who you hear about all the time? Well, there’s even more engineers who have struck it rich with a startup, and no baseball player will ever come close to Zuckerberg-level wealth. You are comparing employees to a CEO and business owner (which doesn't have anything to do with technology, other than for the initial lines of code). Of course he has more wea…

So there are billionaire baseball coaches?

In fairness, there are billionaire team owners, but they didn’t become billionaires by founding baseball teams.

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#279

Post by gohrt »

BuckRogers wrote: post #149
aestra wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Who is to say every single professional athlete and musician and actor enjoys every single second of their career? Athletes' bodies are taxed to the maxed. Most of the above are in the public light 24/7, they might feel unsafe and have to hire bodyguards. That's not something everyone is going to enjoy. These people work hard, sometimes long hours. They are on the road, sometimes away from their families for lon…

So basically the takeaway from all of this is that instead of walking on the backs of the downtrodden, all those immigrants, infrastructure people, poultry producers and programmers should be paid a hell of a lot larger portion of the profits.

Are you really lumping bottom 5-10% wage earners with the top 5-10% of wage earners in a nation, and calling them both downtrodden?

Re: Programming is a Terrible Job

#280

Post by paulsizemore »

aaronem wrote: post #222
Supermighty wrote: post #84

I've felt this way before. Dejected that the my new job wasn't an exciting candy land of save-the-day hacks and movie montage of elegant code spanning the screen. My expectations were too high. I thought we would always do the right thing to kick out software all grown up ready to take on the world. When the realization set in I got angry. First at the job then at myself. I held it tight knowing someone was to blame.…

I don't want to burst your bubble, but there are bosses out there who a) will read and criticize your diffs and commit comments, and b) will not be anywhere near as capable as you. These circumstances combine to produce a situation where it is entirely possible to be "too clever", which elicits a polite chewing-out and an assignment to go back and replace elegant code with code that any idiot can maintain. If you kno…

I've been able to build trust with stakeholders, and that lets me be 'too clever.' The problem is when they lose that trust, because of a situation they are going through. Being clever is a risk in many situations.
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