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How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

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Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#41

Post by burntoutfire »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #32
mns06 wrote: post #13

It's an interesting question: which are the lines of code most frequently executed in the world today?

My wild ass guess would be one of: a) some high frequency trading algo, b) ray tracing/collision detection in popular game engines, c) the inner loop of google's spider, d) something common to mobile devices (maybe something in wifi or cell service?), or (most likely) e) the bitcoin hash algo. It makes for an interesting "how many manholes in Manhattan" interview question, and how you could possibly quantify your gue…

I'd add TCP stack in Linux (kernel). Should be hammered constantly on servers of the world and also gets lots of usage on smartphones and IoT stuff.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#42

Post by chubot »

brmgb wrote: post #34

While I somewhat admire the author feelings, as a direct answer to the chosen title, I have to say I don't share them at all. I view programming with a mix of indifference and boredom and the sad few years I had to do it as a job are easily the less fulfilling of my life. If I had to sum up my feelings regarding programming, I would say it is: - a lot of uninteresting busy work; - intellectually mostly unchallenging.…

I felt that way after a few years of programming. I was bad at debugging and several other things that would have made my life a lot easier. After a decade of programming, I got better at it, and started to like it more (even doing it in my spare time)

People like things they are good at. To be provocative: if you only did it for a few years, you probably weren't that good at it. The same can be said for math, playing guitar, etc.

Guitar is a good example. Anyone who has been playing for a year or 3 probably knows the drudgery of practicing some chords that don't sound like what's on the record, hurting your fingers, etc. When you get good at it, the drudgery goes away and you're left with fun.

And that's not to say "good" is a fixed target... The interesting thing is that once you get to a certain point, you can see the infinite world that you haven't explored yet.

If you like math then there is a ton of stuff in programming that's mathematical, but you can't get a job in those areas until you've mastered the basics.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#44

Post by infogulch »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #18
superbcarrot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots Out of all the problems with programming as a job, this is around the bottom of my list.

I'm working on an app that calls other internal services inside our company, one of them is a call to update an account balance. We were running into this issue where we were getting a 504 Gateway Timeout on the update balance call so I eventually found the Slack room for that team and asked about it. They ignored me for a couple weeks, but I kept asking and eventually someone answered and said yeah you'll get the 50…

I can guarantee you that 5 other teams rely on that specific behavior and don't have the will/independence ("budget") to implement that change if the api was fixed. Not only that, but if they did make that change, their manager would instantly have a handful of directors down their throat demanding an explanation why they just added work to their teams that are busy with Feature Work (TM).

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#46

Post by psyc »

As an indie game programmer, I cast magic spells and speak living worlds into existence. Pretty romantic.

As a paid software developer taking tasks and bugs off backlogs, justifying everything I do, no autonomy, forbidden to refactor, documenting everything, filling out dumb little forms in Jira that literally nobody ever sees again, attending meetings, making my boss look good, spinning myself in performance reviews, blah, blah, no I can’t say any of that is particularly poetic.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#49

Post by xwdv »

einpoklum wrote: post #26
xwdv wrote: post #3

How? Writing resource hogging code all day to figure out how to best display obtrusive advertisements is a good start.

If you're doing that, then quit. It's not worth it and you'll regret having done this. You'll find another job. Hell, you'll find another job as a programmer. Don't do this to yourself, nor to us.

Nah, the pay is good and worth it IMO. I see it similar to being a roughneck on an oil rig or even a coal miner. I make no illusions or romanticize the nature of my work.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#50

Post by yesenadam »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #6

I dont really understand the point of this article. Literally any system can be made romantic for the sheer fact that everything has spent hundreds of man-hours building up to it. The cheapest possible ballpoint pen is made up of years of research into the plastics, the machinery required to create bearings with the tolerances necessary, the exact chemical makeup of the ink etc etc. It just seems to be a waste of bra…

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is."
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