Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfc | Hacker News Reader

Am I really the only person that was a little troubled by the stated assumption that programming is generally more difficult?

View on HN

You think project management is generally more difficult than programming?

You must not be a programmer. :)

I think "difficult" is a tough term to pin down. I was troubled by the fact that the assumption was made as if it was a scientific fact; especially since making the assumption clearly eliminates a valid answer to the question.

Maybe I just took too many logical reasoning / philosophy classes in college...

Meta-discussion remark: whenever I point a flaw in an argument I try to add a disclaimer stating that I'm not necessarily taking the opposite side. This seems to cool down the discussion a bit, especially if the argument in question is in line with the HN (hive-)mindset.

Edit: This was meant as a response to your comment about being downvoted, sorry.

It's more difficult to do well. Easier to get started, but harder to master. At least to my brain.

Having been both a programmer and a project manager, there are difficulties to both jobs, but frankly, the difficulties of project management are harder to see.

Programmers have the difficulty of the unforgiving reality of having to make things _work_ - pass tests, compile, perform. This makes their job challenging, but it also makes it rewarding in that you know when you've gotten it right, when that piece of work is done.

Project managers have a task much more like herding cats: a poorly (or non) defined problem, moving goalposts, and a lot of "least worst compromise" kind of decisions. They have to deliver business results while keeping engineers and execs happy, in many cases with much of the responsibility for a projects success and little of the authority (i.e. they can't hire or fire engineers because the engineers don't actually report to them.)

I'm not saying one is actually harder than the other - that's very situation-specific. Just that the "difficult" parts of the project manager's job are less obvious to a programmer. (And, I'd note, often the _exact_ types of discomfort that most programmers would love to avoid dealing with themselves.)

(A good project manager is a shit umbrella, a bad one is a shit funnel. If you're in a shitstorm, learn to love your umbrellas.)

The difficult parts of programming are fun. The difficult parts of project management are hell.

You are not completely alone in this. And there's also the statement right alongside that equates the difficulty level with working late.

One problem is that the term "programmer" covers such a wide range, from "code monkey" through "business analyst who codes." The range of productivity in code monkeys varies greatly, but they are still essentially fungible. When you start adding analysis and problem solving skills value goes up and fungibility goes down. In organizations that have formalized the separation of coding from analysis and problem solving, the coding roles will (and should) pay less. I think that's a bad decision, but it's certainly common enough.

The truth is a lot of programming is just gluing existing systems together or coding routine CRUD apps. Ironically, those jobs seem to be relatively highly paid.

I think many people who could do these jobs very well would rather be doing something else. Therefore supply is low and demand is high.

Sometimes the down voting here is rather perplexing. The post starts out by denying a rational explanation for the cause of salary differences without any justification.

How is noting a flaw in the argument/question-setup worthy of downvoting?

That bothered me too. It seems inconsistent to say that "programming is generally more difficult", but "good people skills" are relatively scarce compared to programming skills.

I think that much of the problem is that the role of project manager and low-level manager are drastically different at different companies. At many companies these roles are nearly useless; they are filled with people who attend meetings and parrot things said by the people under them to the people above them and little else. There are of course companies where this is not the case, but I am not sure that they are terribly common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com