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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

#431

Post by yieldcrv »

> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?

Programmers are the only[1] hired professionals that can compete directly or go off the market entirely in their own venture with either:

A) nearly zero overhead costs

B) can afford the overhead costs

The compensation is to discourage programmers from doing so, make life comfortable enough for them to not want to bother with getting around IP assignments

The major market of California barring and invalidating non compete clauses in case law, and strengthened by the legislature, also codifies this premium

Make the software alchemist’s lives comfortable

[1] feel free to find counterpoints, and what is their compensation like?

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

#432

Post by agumonkey »

prinny_ wrote: 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…

Yes, it reeks of people who spend a lot of time following naming scheme convention and copy pasting a lot of shallow things.

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

#434

Post by mawadev »

noman-land wrote: post #382
mawadev wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are putting a lot of words and judgements into the authors mouth. Why exactly is it acceptable to not just do your role and expect the underlying requirements to be correct and measurable, especially when there are separate roles whose sole purpose is to do exactly that?

Because being a code monkey is getting devalued like crazy every hour that agentic coding improves in ability. If all you do is take well specified requirements and turn them into a piece of code you are going to lose your livelihood unless you can learn to do more than that or you're at the very top end of people who do that.

Getting the requirements did not work properly before, what makes you believe it is going to happen now?

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

#435

Post by tsoukase »

nunez wrote: post #409
pdpi wrote: 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.

English is a hard language to learn, especially as an adult. So many weird rules that everyone takes for granted.

Every language has it's specific difficulties as foreign, the French pronunciation, the Spanish speed, the Chinese ... well leave it. The English has the "easiest difficulty" among all: phrasal verbs, which are of moderate importance and can mostly be avoided.

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

#437

Post by Aeolun »

rockemsockem wrote: post #214
prinny_ wrote: 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…

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…

> a sufficiently complex consumer or enterprise app winds up having big performance problems if people don't know what they're doing

Yes, and absolutely nobody will care if it does the thing it was meant to do. Performance is near always an afterthought because there is no single team that gets judged on performance.

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

#438

Post by tomveber »

blub wrote: post #426
buran77 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but many details Which part of my list was just "a detail" to be dealt with at some point in the lifecycle (but only if you're not too busy shipping features) for you? You're laying bricks before knowing if the wall's supposed to be concrete. > Code is a form of low-level design and is where the rubber hits the road. Sure but in keeping with your analogy tires are fungible across most cars and it takes minutes to c…

No part of your list was just a detail, but all parts of the list consist of essential properties and details. As I said, many of those details will fall into place when one starts implementing the core architecture. It also matters a lot what scale one is operating at. Bigger scale will require more effort up front, PoCs, several big iterations, etc. To give a smaller scale example, I defined a general simple protoc…

[flagged]

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

#439

Post by thereforegrin »

bramadityaw wrote: post #411
zero_shift wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what you mean by enterprise project? If you just mean a large company, I would say they do exist - though it may take some looking for them. You can find them in companies that have to deal with "real" things (hardware, factories, production lines), or where there is an interest in taking advantage of emerging technology (advertising, e-commerce) I would call my current project relatively systems-level too…

> ...it's better to be a goat than a cow. That's the first time I've heard that idiom. What does it mean?

I don't know it either, but I read it as: - 'goat' referring to both the 'greatest of all time' as in specialized and at the same time to it being a not-so-common animal, - while 'cow' is simply just a common animal, so in this context it represents a plain worker.

I'm not aware of any 'cow' acronym, that would directly relate to work/proficiency as the 'goat' does but it would further enhance the meaning behind the quoted phrase.

In fact it's exactly what is missing, for the phrase to be instantly understandable by making it symmetric in both direct and acronymic reading.

So is there a 'cow' acronym, that is an antonym to 'goat'? I'm not aware of one.

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

#440

Post by brabel »

didgetmaster wrote: post #401
prinny_ wrote: 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…

Writing some code that actually works for the problem at hand, can be fairly easy. Writing code that does this while being clean and efficient is a lot harder. How many slow, buggy programs have been written because the assigned programmer did not yet have the expertise needed to do it right?

> How many slow, buggy programs have been written because the assigned programmer did not yet have the expertise needed to do it right?

Basically, all of it. By the time a programmer has enough experience to design and implement software properly they are “promoted” to some paper pushing management position.

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