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“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

blog.senko.net

341–350 of 586 posts

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#341
No, it means you’re more than just syntax.

And that if you make a bot that produces syntax you haven’t produced a programmer.

Some workers are more 1:1 with syntax, like a developer from a gig platform or overseas contractor, the deliverable being code files.

But the staff software engineer deliverable should be software, novel outputs, a face in meetings, someone to blame if it all goes wrong, a member to fill out the ranks, a person to get coffee with and talk about adjacent things that open new doors, in a sales capacity it might mean travel and interpersonal stuff like drinks and talks to convince people to integrate, it’s thoughtful often emotional back-and-forth from frustrated contributors on GitHub that lead to changes and innovations, and other things of value that language models can never do.

I would say further that even if you model emotional intelligence, or the whole world even, unless AI has a face I can punch if it crosses some line and it knows it has a face, what its own face is and why that matters to itself, it will always fall short in terms of empathy. Our sense of empathy and emotion originated in the wilds among fear and terror and the thrill of catching and eating food, discovering others, and understanding the consequences of everything before me in this moment.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#343
post #72

I 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…

About halfway through my career, I spent about 10 years working in the enterprise SaaS/PaaS space. 6 as a developer, ~4 as a product manager. Both sides of that coin are difficult. Trying to create a product strategy that meets the needs of hundreds of large companies is a special kind of hell. And on the dev side, even "simple" things are not simple when they have to be implemented at scale, software updates cannot break existing customer code/configurations, and customers must have a hundreds knobs and dials and scripted escape hatches to implement their own business logic.

Even when code was not the hardest problem, it was still a hard problem.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#344
post #26

LLMs are the invention of the loom. Code is being industrialized. Yes, there always will be artisanal weavers and a smaller number of them get paid a lot more money to do this by people who can afford it. Everyone else either started operating a loom or did something else. Automated looms are now making mass amounts of textiles but the artisans are no longer doing the physical act of weaving. The artisans come up wit…

Easy on the cocaine. There are no credible AI code bases on GitHub.

> There are no credible AI code bases on GitHub.

heh that's quite a statement. How would you even know and what does "credible" mean?

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#345
I like heuristics, but find broad statements are usually a bad idea in IT/Software. Developers in particular are very quick to find holes in logic.

When I think of code, I like to compare it to old complex physical machines. Think automaton. If you zoom in enough, what you see is indeed somewhat simple. But zoom out and the answer changes.

Then there is maintenance, manufacturing, tooling, etc.

I suspect that as humans living in a physical world, we understand intuitively the vast knowledge and skills required to design and build different kinds of machines. Software tends to hide inside boxes that look similar, but are infinitely variable.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#346
post #205
post #72

I 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…

I've been programming for 30 years and "Code was never the hard part" does not offend me. It's something i've been saying for a long time. You can teach anyone the mechanics of coding well in like 6 months. Programming is the hard part! I want to make this distinction because to me programming is about solving problems and coding is a way to express the solution. Designing algorithms, architectures, etc can be done w…

I like Dave Farley's classification of Coders, Developers and Software Engineers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcjBfSiyI0k

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#347
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You've really seen a web software product die because of performance issues?

Web software I don't know but there are many "modern software" that were meant to replace COBOL code running on AS400 that ended up never making it to production because they were running so badly and projects ended up being money pits.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#349
post #9

> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)? Because programmers have generally been forced to wear additional, invisible hats that are essential to making the code happen in the first place. Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with t…

"wear additional, invisible hats " No ... those are not invisible hats ... those are the real hats . Software is 'Knowledge Distillation' the code is the hieroglyphic artifacts. Engineers Engineer, Scribes Scribe. Just so happens developers do their own scribing.

[dead]

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#350
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking/writing English is easy. Writing literature at the level of Shakespeare is hard. Writing educational content that makes hard concepts accessible like Grant Sanderson is hard. Likewise, coding is easy. It's just writing, and any child can learn it. Coding is not programming, and the hard part of the job lives in that distinction.

Why does it have to be Shakespeare? There are millions of good writers that got there by working hard. Seems pointless to go into either extreme, when just being good at anything is generally hard.

It doesn't have to be Shakespeare, but hopefully everybody agrees that writing at Shakespeare's level is indeed hard. I agree that writing good (but not great) or even just ok literature is still hard, but that invites a bunch of no-true-scotsman arguments that I just can't be bothered dealing with (like "writing Fifty Shades of Grey isn't actually hard" or something similar).
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