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Comment by agscala | Hacker News Reader

I agree, and also I'd like to add something. While it's not really an attractive job to many people, it's also relatively difficult for most people. Farming is different in that it's easy for anyone to do (it's just manual labor). Realistically, you can't expect a large portion of the population to be capable of programming.

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> Farming is different in that it's easy for anyone to do (it's just manual labor).

I have a small grain farm and also develop software professionally. I find software development is the easier of the two, personally.

Problems in software all go back to the rules of computational theory. It's not exactly easy, but the space is fairly limited and can be understood with some effort.

Problems in farming are all over the map. Sometimes you have to engineer a new piece of equipment to get you out of a jam, other times you're dealing with biology, medicine, mechanical work, sales, you name it, you probably have to deal with it. And you need a solution now. By tomorrow, your profits for the year will be gone.

I grew up on a citrus farm in Florida, I was the first generation to leave the far after NAFTA due to the fact that we could no longer compete as a family farm. While Farming has a lot of variables that cannot be controlled and is grueling work, I did not find it to be any more mentally difficult than development. There is a lot of science in farming for sure, but one thing about farming that is very different than software development is that only one person needs to do the thinking and can then delegate to less inclined individuals. The structure of the workforce is different in that a single thinker can do the processing for a group, in software there is no such luxury, if I do all the thinking for another developer then I might as well take the 10 minutes to write it down and save the salary of the other developer. That's the big difference, roles can be delegated in some professions, in others they just cant. To some extent they can be in software, you can have a test developer, and a build manager but for the most part each one is working out specific, unique problems in their domain.

> but one thing about farming that is very different than software development is that only one person needs to do the thinking and can then delegate to less inclined individuals

True, although, technically speaking, that work still exists. The programmer just delegates it to the computer instead of having people do it. There is no reason why you couldn't have an assembly line of humans hand-compiling your programs, if you really wanted to. Once you give them the basic rules, they can set forth and complete any task that you ask of them. It is just repetition at that point.

Farming is quickly going in the same direction. The delegatable jobs are, more and more, being done by machines.

> Realistically, you can't expect a large portion of the population to be capable of programming.

Then you look at the code of the people who are attracted to coding, and 'capable' of it and pale in fear of how bad the code is (even if it works).

Exactly. I think that metalsmithing in the past would be a better analog for programming today. It is difficult, takes years of apprenticeship to do well, but it still provides a valuable service (horseshoes among many other things).

Not everybody back then were smiths though, just like not everyone today will be programmers. Programming definitely has a great impact on society (like smithing did), but if you consider the incredibly important impact that farmers have, they hardly even compare.

Farming "Just manual labor"?

Common, have you ever tried to plant something?

THAT is difficult!

Any profession could become a mass profession.

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