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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

I have the feeling that code is becoming less and less important. In my day to day job as a SWE, coding is the easy part. There are tons of other things to do besides coding, service maintenance, discussing priorities and trade-off, helping users, fixing perf issues, code review, oncalls, tweaking configurations, understanding poorly-documented API and other systems.

Maybe I'm getting old, but it seems there are more and more things to know. Sometimes it's overwhelming and the constant context switching is killing me.

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This is your experience showing; when you start out, the programming language and coding is everything, favorite activity, and you consider it the most important thing.

But over the years, as you get more experience and responsibilities, learn more tools and languages, you realize it's only one aspect of software development.

The overwhelming and context switching is a Problem in our industry I think, and it's perpetuated by concepts like devops and full-stack developers. Sure, some parts of your responsibilities only take up a percentage of time, and it's not worth hiring someone full-time for. But trying to make everyone know everything within a team is wasteful and putting a lot of pressure on them. It's pushing people to become jack of all trades, master of none.

Same here. First few years of being a SWE I had all the romantic notions of working late in some dimly lit office with a packed war room of developers, slamming Red Bulls at 3am while you're all trying to figure out some bizarre bug that keeps crashing your web app. I had a lot of those late night sessions and major releases that you go home at 6am and are expected to be back in the office by lunch.

Lately, its the same thing for me. Very little coding and actually building stuff. Its mentoring, meetings, fixing broken API endpoints or bug fixes that have lingered through multiple releases and keep getting shelved. I'm not sure if I've just lost my passion for coding, but it doesn't feel like I do much coding any more at all.

A master painter can paint anything. Deciding what to paint is where they find the challenge and the fun.

First you focus on technique. Then you focus on the what.

And sometimes you’re no master painter and don’t want to be one, you instead focus on the what and figure out the how by trying things out. You eventually learn tehnique along the way…

Code is just as important as ever, but a two star general doesn’t carry a rifle either.

This is an underrated analogy. I'm stealing this.

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