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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

The same is true for most fields of academia, the arts, or professional sports.

In fields where people are doing things primarily for love, they are willing to accept comparatively low salaries, crowded labor markets, and poor conditions to get a chance to do what they love for a living.

Source: am physicist.

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"Get a job doing something you love and you'll never work a day in your life."

If I had a dollar for every time I heard something along those lines while in schlol, I really wouldn't have to work a day in my life.

Advice like that is repeated ad nauseam in acadamia and I loathe it. Schools (at least in the US) do a terrible job at setting realistic expectations for labor markets. Worse, I think they are guilty of misleading students' perceptions of the market in fear of them otherwise dropping out.

When it comes to overcrowded labor markets, I put most of the blame on academia.

You're taking that quote way to literally. It means if you do something you like, it won't feel like work.

It has nothing to do with job security.

That's the "status economy" for ya.

You're either fighting to get it or fighting to hold on to it.

has more to do with scarcity of talent and demand rather than "things people love to do." Coding pays well because it is important and few people are smart enough to do it well. Service sectors jobs are not fun and pay poorly and there are a ton of job seekers relative to demand due ot low cognitive barriers to entry. Most job that would be considered "fun" either have low demand and or low cognitive barriers to entry.

I'd say physics is a lot harder to do than your average SV developer's job. Even more so playing sports at a level that brings in real money.

What is "physics" as a job? The problem with physics is that there are few applied physics jobs compared to CS and applied CS (software developer) jobs. Similar things can be said about CS, there aren't very many CS jobs and I'd say it's comparable in difficulty to physics.

> The problem with physics is that there are few applied physics jobs compared to CS and applied CS (software developer) jobs.

Isn't every engineering job essentially applied physics?

that is why there are two variables: difficulty and demand. There is more demand for coding than physics work.

Except coding jobs that are heavily sought after also pay a lot less than those that aren't, and often have worse conditions. See for example, game development. It can be as tough as working as a software engineer at say, Google, but pays significantly less because of how many people want to get involved in the industry.

That's exactly what op's saying.

The idea that few people are smart enough to code well is probably the great myth of our field. When people say that, no doubt they're thinking of Febrice Ballard (and, human nature being what it is, assigning themselves to that same category). Spend some serious time as a consultant working with software developers in reality. Most of the day-to-day work of most software development shops is straightforward, trainable, and less complicated than a lot of other white collar jobs.

Every competent woodworker does stuff that is at least as intellectually challenging as routine software development. But you don't see a lot of people saying "few are smart enough to cut mortises and tenons".

I would pay good money to watch someone who considers themselves in the group of "the few smart enough to code" try to trim a room with crown molding.

I think if they were taught (i.e., if they looked it up on youtube), they'd be pretty good.

I remember about 20 years ago being just fascinated by the folks hired by my dad who came to do construction at our house, the key thing I learned watching them was that you needed the right tool for the job at hand (and you don't even have to own a lot of it -- you can rent from Home depot a lot of the big tools).

Insofar as smart coders are good engineers who know what tools to use and follow directions, they'd be pretty good at it. I do most of my car work in my garage myself, and I'm planning to build a room in my basement next year myself. Not only is it not that hard, it's actually extremely fulfilling and fun to do it yourself.

As a beginning amateur woodworker with an extensive Youtube education, but now being overseen directly by an actual professional woodworker, and without intending any snark or malice, let me just respond to that: "hahahahahahahahaha".

Watch someone hand-cut a dovetail (heck, watch 10 different people hand-cut them), then get a chisel and a coping saw and a marking gauge and try it yourself. It is not easy, even if you (as I did, to little effect) condense all the video tutorials you watch and the chapter in the Tage Fried book into written step-by-step plans.

You can absolutely do it! I'll eventually be able to do it semi-competently, I think. But I doubt you'll get there without learning to respect the challenge at least as much as you respect the work that went into getting you to a comparable level of coding aptitude.

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