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Comment by anon1253 | Hacker News Reader

Okay, I’m going to be a little bit far out there. A lot of this seems to be grounded in the negative. “How to deal with x” how to “do y when z has failed”. Some of it technical and some of it interpersonal. Why have we created this sphere around programming? What makes /this/ profession so different from any other? And my believe is: nothing. It’s not hard. It’s not better. It won’t “eat the world”. Heck it probably didn’t make that much of a difference in the grand scheme. It’s just sitting on your ass and either do as you’re told or come up with something better, like 90% of all work. Software is just like any other job, and chances are it is completely stupid like most other desk jobs out there. And if not, the same general skills apply. Stop feeling like it is difficult or even special.

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Eh. Most major centers of power have large computing resources changing how they do things. Wal-Mart, for instance, as a basically non-tech company, leveraged computers for stocking and supply chains and became a culture-chaging retail giant. Computers have made their way into cars, and even toasters. We have high frequency trading (done by computers) majorly affecting markets. I could probably go on like this for a while. Eating the world, check.

As for not hard--I don't know. We have an unusually high paying career, which companies do not do out of the generosity of their hearts. They have a limited supply of people that can do it. Quite a few people show no aptitude at all. At the high end, it merges into pure computer science, with an essentially unlimited amount to know. So, you can draw badly, or become a professional artist. Certainly, a person can program badly, but I don't think you can call it "not hard" any more than you can call anything else "not hard".

I wouldn't, and don't, romanticize it. It often just sucks. And programmers can often come with pointless, inflated egos from some view that they do something special, and I would like to see a check on that and those pointless egos deflated. But "not eating the world" and "not hard" don't really check out, from my perspective.

Most professions have already changed the world. Air conditioning for example dramacily changed how and where people work and play. Plumbing has dramatically reduced the spread of disease. The older professions are so integral to society it’s hard to thing of a world before agriculture or fishing.

Give it 200 years and programming will probably be thought of as accounting. Well paid and nessisarily, but hardly revolutionary.

PS: Salaries have generally stagnated over the last 10 years suggesting supply and demand are well matched. Their is a lot of stratification, but most programmers make well under six figures.

Programming is more a meta-profession, it tries to automate and eliminate the boring or repetitive part of all professions.

I don't think we can ever standardize programming any more than we can standardize humanity's collective goals and ambitions.

High level languages standardized assembly. Tools have increased the amount of knowledge you need to function as a programmer, but they also provide standard solutions to real problems. It’s not like CSS is nessisary for building a website, but it really does both help and replace a lot of custom code.

Plumbers still need to get things to work in your house, but tools and techniques have largely removed guesswork. The end point will be different than accounting, but I feel the trend is clear with knowledge replacing the need for extreme generic problem solving skills.

‘Design Patterns’ are of real though limited value, that’s a meta example of exactly what I am talking about.

Salaries have been stagnating because companies refuse to raise the salaries, along with ever increasing inflation. Your 100k job was worth less than a dollar back in 1980, due to inflation.

Programmers should be making closer to 200-300k per year; but then everyone else would be making 30 or 40 dollars an hour minimum wage.

Supply and demand aren’t well matched, considering the job posting out there. But there’s a lot going on influencing all of this

I wouldn’t call Wal-Mart a “center of power”. They’re essentially a market player, and are powerless in the face of market forces. CIA, Kremlin, or even Wall Street (with their ability to extract wealth out of society via laws paid for in bribes) are centers of power, in the way that they really get to impose their will on others.

No other profession has quite the same capacity to transform itself.

Like blacksmiths, programmers are capable of building tools that not only change the way they work but enable new kinds of work to be done, often by making previously onerous tasks trivial, and giving the individual a much large potential impact.

Unlike blacksmiths, programmers can share their inventions with the entire industry in the blink of an eye. So the rate at which the programmer's toolchain can change is indeed special.

Sure, it can also be glorified plumbing at times, but I think we think programming is special because it is.(Not that that will continue to be the case forever.)

You should watch Primitive Technology on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA

Speed of change is also behind the neverending stream of fad and fatigue. A little.

If programming was like blacksmithing there would be a lot of self-built kind-of-working-but-not-really-finished-yet hammer factories, and an inexplicable upsurge in lame horses.

At some level of abstraction all jobs can be made to look similar. It's just not particularly useful to abstract to that degree.

I think if you look in the communities formed by any groups of people sharing professions, you'll find a similar magnification of the importance and uniqueness of that profession: humans generally have a tendency to find the stuff they spend the most time around more significant, and often forget that the significance-difference is in perception only.

That said, because of software's generality (in terms of the number of domains it's applicable to), it is relatively unique.

I'd say it's at least on par with accounting and finance which are pretty ubiquitous in our society.

Programming is generally considered more challenging than most professions, and it has a transformative potential that must other fields don't. It's okay to recognize that, whilst also not having an over-inflated view of yourself or elitist stance.

We're also entering a new era of the difference between cutting-edge or transformative engineers, and (the still respectable, but more normal) standard dev.

I do some pretty basic science based engineering. It's not special, it just helps some business people in my firm. But the deepmind guys are special, and there really isn't anything like it right now in other fields. The potential seems unbounded right now, that's really exciting!

>>Programming is generally considered more challenging than most professions, and it has a transformative potential that must other fields don't.

Or, most other fields have already transformed the world. Programming is in the process of transforming the world. So it looks to us as if it is unique.

Software is roughly the way we take ideas that cannot be made in a physical form and put them out there in the world. The idea that 'software' will some day stop transforming the world is just as weird to me as saying physical matter will some day stop transforming the world.

That said, most of us have pretty plain jobs. And most of what we write isn't that impressive. But still, just like you can invent a completely new gadget (that is likely useless), you will always be able to invent a completely new piece of software (that is likely useless).

Speaking as a non-programmer, I find computer programming one of the most difficult things I have ever done. In a sense it's a lot like writing. Sure, everybody can write, but few people can write well. Writing a short computer program is easy, but writing a complex program, in a way that it both works and you (and others) understand it, it's the hardest thing.

Programming, in the broadest sense of the word, is hard. Even for the most intelligent people. You don't have to look much around you for crap every day it-solutions, security breaches, million dollar rocket exploding into another planet or medical radiation-equipment killing people instead of curing them.

Programming is special because of the outsized speculation still occurring and the willingness for tech firms to ignore regulations and morality to defeat entrenched players. The amount of money this approach can capture is staggering.

Programmers, even those of us working outside of the valley, therefore demand high wages - ultimately because of amoral unicorns and deceptive business practices. The demand outstrips supply, making programmers in other roles overvalued as well. This leads to a sense of entitlement, and a perception among programmers that we are somehow superior by virtue of our chosen career and the skills that accompany it.

This in turn leads to outsized egos, unreasonable tolerance of bad behavior, and toxic culture.

I am sorry I cannot accept this cynical position

"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more"

-- Alan Perlis

What "we"? This was written in 2002 (16 years ago), as it says in the title. I think your outrage is excessive.

> What makes /this/ profession so different from any other?

No credentials. All it takes to be a programmer is appeasing somebody in a 30-60min interview. What other white collar career can you say that about? It takes more to be a truck driver.

Sales. Marketing. Entrepreneur (impressing VCs). CEO, in many cases (though you have to impress a handful of people, not just one).

That's with barely any thought - I expect there are more.

Magic does not change the world? I find that difficult to understand. Using obscure incantations to affect the physical world is pretty much mind-blowing, as far as I'm concerned.

As some one with a lot of development experience - I don't see any problems with the authors comments.

It never occurred to me that someone might disagree with that. Obviously sw development is not harder, more complicated or more important than any other trait.

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