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

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

#371

Post by samdixon »

chasd00 wrote: post #289
rockemsockem wrote: post #214

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…

I would counter with it's easier to fix bugs, improve performance, pay down technical debt than it is to fix consensus, stakeholder buy-in, and strategic direction. So even though good code, design, and architecture isn't easy it's still the easy part in a relative sense.

> stakeholder buy-in

Fixing bugs, improving performance, paying down technical debt all require this as well, which makes them significantly more difficult to actually implement.

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

#372

Post by hannofcart »

agentultra wrote: post #308

The author might be missing the intent of the observation. Maybe they’re misinterpreting it. What I, and many people who’ve said, “code was never the hard part,” aren’t referring to the skill of an individual. It’s not the hard part of the engineering process of developing software. Programming languages have manuals. Many data structures are well documented. There are frameworks for damn near everything. While the d…

If what you're saying is true we are moving into an era where rockstar product managers are going to be more in demand than programmers since they can do all of what you mentioned above.

And typically (though not always) product managers have better people skills than programmers and consequently they might be more effective at the "gathering requirements" and "working together" bits you mentioned above.

Even much of the "validating releases" and "testing" parts should also be things that a decent PM should be able to wrangle now by themselves with some LLM agents to assist them. Afterall, why bother about code quality of a testing harness. So long as the PM can keep a coherent test case list and have end to end tests that cover them, programmers can leave that to them as well.

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

#373

Post by keeda »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #199

Don't get your panties in a twist over marketing slop selling AI to companies

Hmm, hasn't "code was never the hard part" typically been said when downplaying the impact of AI-assisted coding, rather than highlighting it for marketing purposes?

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

#374

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

hakunin wrote: post #356
pdpi wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The comment I responded to suggested that we don't really have to be "insulted" because code is actually not hard, good code is hard. But the statement "code was never the hard part" doesn't make that distinction, it's a blanket statement, that any normal person would associate with all software. I argue there is no reason to try justifying such a misleading statement.

Completely agree. I feel like lots of comments in this thread are getting side tracked by useless nitpicking, e.g. "Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is." - oy vey.

In it's original context, it's very clear what "Code was never the hard part" was referring to, that of all the steps of product development (ideation, requirements, design, implementation (coding), deployment, operations, maint, etc.), that code was not the hard part. That's the meaning we should be discussing, and I agree with the author, I believe coding very much was the hard part. Since Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat were recently in the news, I recall some stories about them fixing issues with the search index in the early days of Google where there were random bit flips that were causing the index to be corrupted, and they fixed it and coded a durable solution. This is very much just a code-specific problem that very, very few other people would have been able to solve.

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

#375

Post by Jblx2 »

tptacek wrote: post #359
Jblx2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Writing code doesn't have a notably higher (if at all higher, vs lower!) IQ requirement compared to some of the basic components of EE Average IQ of Electrical Engineers: 121 https://www.iqcareerlab.com/tools/iq-for-profession/electric... ...which is the top 10% of the population. https://www.desperateminds.com/blog/iq-120.html

Do you believe these numbers? Is there a cite somewhere in the literature for valid, proctored IQ tests being given to representative samples of different professions for these kinds of comparisons? The link you've provided is to a company selling online IQ tests.

Is the argument that electrical and mechanical engineers are not smarter than the average person? How about figure 8 (PDF page 86) of:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120905095856/http://www.ssc.wi...

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

#378

Post by tptacek »

Jblx2 wrote: post #375
tptacek wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe these numbers? Is there a cite somewhere in the literature for valid, proctored IQ tests being given to representative samples of different professions for these kinds of comparisons? The link you've provided is to a company selling online IQ tests.

Is the argument that electrical and mechanical engineers are not smarter than the average person? How about figure 8 (PDF page 86) of: https://web.archive.org/web/20120905095856/http://www.ssc.wi...

Doesn't this basically make the argument I'm making, that there's no well-defined band of IQ test scores for different professions?

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

#379

Post by andai »

For me the hard part is remembering the "long tail" of the stuff I don't use long enough for my brain to consider it worth putting in the permastore. So I just spend a lot of time googling stuff I already "know" how to do, because the frequency is too low.

It's not hard, it's just bloody annoying. And that's my favorite use of AI so far. Telling it what the code should do, and it translates that into language X's stdlib incantations.

I also find this to be the optimal level of AI usage. If I let the AI run around the codebase doing other stuff, then I need to spend more time and energy later catching up. Whereas, if I stay "in the driver's seat", ask for tiny changes, and approve them manually, the mental model doesn't never gets desynced.

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

#380

Post by win311fwg »

pendenthistory wrote: post #98
majormajor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing code doesn't have a notably higher (if at all higher, vs lower!) IQ requirement compared to some of the basic components of EE or MechE work. Programmer salaries have been driven up by the ability to write-once-sell-globally and the dramatic profit margin difference between that and, say, producing chips where there's a much higher fixed cost due to the need for more real material, tooling, etc. Many of those…

Salaries are a product of supply AND demand. Supply of good programmers and EE/MechE is low because it requires above average intelligence and a lot of education, while demand for software has been much higher than demand for EE/MechE. Now that the demand side might invert.

While you are directionally accurate, the flaw in your thinking is revealed by the fact that bad programmers also have high salaries, and plenty of five year olds have no problem being bad programmers, so there is clearly no need for above average intelligence or education to be a bad programmer.

As hard as it might be for this audience to comprehend, supply is limited simply because it is an undesirable profession. The majority of the population couldn't think of anything worse to spend their time doing. Much as the same reason why they don't want to go work on oil rigs and other such work that is high paying but what most people are unwilling to do.

High compensation is actually not as strong as a motivator as you might think. It can tip the scales if someone is already on the fence, but it doesn't suddenly make someone who absolutely can't stand something to change their mind.

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