The Programmer Identity Crisis

The honest answer that applies to almost everyone here is that as a kid, they liked playing computer games and heard that the job pays well.

It's interesting, because to become a plumber, you pretty much need a plumber parent or a friend to get you interested in the trade show you the ropes. Meanwhile, software engineering is closer to the universal childhood dream of "I want to become an astronaut" or "I want to be a pop star", except more attainable. It's very commoditized by now, so if you're looking for that old-school hacker ethos, you're gonna be disappointed.

Careful with the “doesn’t add value” talk. If you follow it far enough to its logical end, you get to “Existence doesn’t add value”

Full disclosure: I am old.

When I started programming for Corporate™ back 1995, it was a wildly different career than what it has become. Say what you want about the lunatics running the asylum, but we liked it that way. Engineering knew their audience, knew the tech stack, knew what was going on in "the industry", ultimately called the shots.

Your code was your private sandbox. Want to rewrite it every other release? Go for it. Like to put your curly braces on a new line? Like TABs (good for you)? Go for it. It's your code, you own it. (You break it, you fix it.)

No unit tests (we called that parameter checking). No code reviews (well, nothing formal — often, time was spent in co-workers offices talking over approaches, white-boarding API… Often if a bug was discovered or known, you just fixed it. There may have been a formal process beginning, but to the lunatics, that was optional.

You can imagine how management felt — having to essentially just trust the devs to deliver.

In the end management won, of course.

When I am asked if I am sorry that I left Apple, I have to tell people, no. I miss working at Apple in the 90's, but that Apple was never coming back. And I hate to say it, but I suspect the industry itself will never return to those "cowboy coding" days. It was fun while it lasted.

Ignoring LLMs for a second, some code I write is done in sort of full-craft full-diligence mode, where I am only committing something where I am very proud of it's structure and of every line of code. I know it inside and out, I have reasons for every decision, major or minor, and I don't know of any ways to make it better. Not only is the code excellent, I've also produced a person (me) who is an expert in that code.

Most code is not like that. Most code I want to get something done, and so I achieve something quite a bit below that bar. But some things I get to write in that way, and it is very rewarding to do so. It's my favorite code to write by a mile.

Back to LLMs - I find it is both easier than ever and harder than ever to write code in that mode. Easier than ever because, if I can actually get and stay in that mode psychologically, I can get the result I want faster, and the bar is higher. Even though I am able to write MUCH better code than an LLM is, I can write even better code with LLM assistance.

But it is harder than ever to get into that mode and stay in that mode. It is so easy to just skim LLM-generated code, and it looks good and it works. But it's bad code, maybe just a little bit at first, but it gets worse and worse the more you let through. Heck, sometimes it just starts out as not-excellent code, but every time you accept it without enough diligence the next output is worse. And by the time you notice it's often too late, you've slopped yourself, while also failing to produce an expert in the code that's been written.

Why would someone who likes solving problems choose a very lucrative career path solving problems… hmmm

You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that doesn’t pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software.

I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion.