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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

I hate to agree with you but...

Wait, no, I don't hate to agree with you. You're absolutely right. "Died from too much hard coding"? Yeah right.

Coding is hard intellectual work. And, as you point out, if you're not happy with the trade-offs at work, you can always start your own business. It's really an awesome situation to be in, compared to what we could have been doing a hundred years ago.

Everything's amazing but nobody's happy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

PS: I doubt the coding is what killed "John".

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I have a friend, he writes software for NASA spacecraft. His job is not inherently physically demanding, but many of those who know him worry that he will "code himself to death" eventually. When crunch time comes, he buries himself in his work. Doesn't sleep, forgets to eat, etc., for weeks on end. He's ended up in the hospital multiple times. So, that's what I think of when I read the story of "John".

This has nothing to do with "not [being] happy with the tradeoffs". These guys are perfectly happy acting like this; being the hero. But it's absolutely not something I'm going to encourage my friend to do to himself.

Isn't this caused by his personality and drive and not the fact that he writes software for a big, "important" name? If he wasn't writing software, it seems like he would probably sell, paint, drive (or any other "career") himself to death, right? I wouldn't encourage it either, but it's probably just who he is.

It seems like these type of careers just draw that type of driven person. This is just a guess, as I draw from my personal experience.

Sure, but what I think the article is trying to say is that programming is one of these careers that encourages people to spend _way_ too much time doing it, to the detriment of the rest of their lives; and, furthermore, that we do ourselves and our colleagues no favor by engaging in hero worship towards the most egregious examples of this.

Simply because we can't change other professions, doesn't mean we can't improve our own. And just because there are some obsessive individuals who "work themselves to death" doesn't mean the rest of us need to try to match them (or encourage them).

And in fact, the fact that you can spend as much time as you like programming, without really needing a break due to any physical stresses inherent in the work, allows these people to abuse themselves both harder and longer than they could in any other field.

I used to be able to do that when I was young, it was great. Now, it is much harder to block everything else out, I would be so much more productive if I could do that.

Of course, you need a break every now and again, and not eating/exercising is going to catch up with you, but I am guessing this guy is quite young.

He's in his thirties. But I don't think "productivity" to the point of putting yourself in the hospital is good for you at any age.

If he writes software for manned spacecraft I think that would be terribly stressful: knowing that lives depend on whether or not there are any bugs in your code... I think if I wrote software like that I would be very likely to obsess over it.

And please nobody suggest TDD. TDD has its place but it's not a holy grail and it only tests the tests you think to write. Even if your code coverage is 100% you have certainly not tested every possible input and path if the software is at all complex.

Any busdriver or airliner pilot is responsible for more people on a daily basis.

Good point. They aren't responsible for billions of dollars going poof, though (especially the bus driver).

A lot of people put the value of a life at around the expected work society gets from it - and then try to argue that that's not what they really think, obviously, because doing so would be immoral.

A single A380 (ok, that's a big one, but why not) is worth about $300 million. Not quite billions, but it's still more dough than most if not all of us will see in a lifetime.

Other problem is though, A380's cost a lot but probably get built at a decent rate. If someone had say caused a software bug in say new horizons, that could mean no pluto mission for a decade if not longer. So no loss of life but certainly a big loss.

You do know that Engineers and Software Developers help build buses and airplanes too, right? Those guys are responsible for every single flight on that aircraft. Not only for all the people that fly on them, but also the airline investment.

If you think software developers (or bus drivers, or airline pilots) can get paranoid, you should see what happens before test flights on airplanes.

As far as I know he's only been involved with unmanned projects.

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