Ask HN: How long have you been programming and what have you realized? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How long have you been programming and what have you realized?

4 pointssujayk_339 comments

Did you have any realization in the time you have been programming?

I'm just starting my journey in programming and want to build something valuable in the future.

Feel free to share any of your thoughts:)

Almost 45 years. Started as a kid in the 1970s with an Apple 2 and some sort of timesharing system (MUSIC/SP?). Regret not getting a degree (it seemed like a step backward at the time). I moved from systems programming to “web” programming which sort of became systems programming once we moved beyond simple CGIs.

I don't particularly enjoy it any more, too much gatekeeping. Oh? You don't know the specialized name from 1997 for a common pattern that has been around since the 1960s? You must not really know how to “program”. I find we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. We have multi gigahertz systems that barely seem better than the megahertz systems a generation ago.

60 years this month. Started on a Standard Elektric Lorenz ER-56. 3,000 words of memory each holding 7 decimal digits. Programming was in machine language - we didn't even have an assembler. That made hair grow in your chest (female programmers being an unfathomable concept)

about 45 years

1.) Everything old is new again ... eventually

2.) Every 10 years someone predicts some new gizmo will 'replace programmers'

3.) Tech has ups and downs just like any industry ... and every time it's bounced back 'up' its been with more demand and higher salaries

edit:formatting

Hoping for 3rd point to activate soon!

23 years (god I'm getting old)

It all ends up bad. Just make it good enough to move on. Come back and throw it out and redo it later. Or, more frequently, never come back because good enough was good enough.

38 years. Programming is fun but if you can't solve it without a computer you're only going to make it worse by using a computer.

LOL... "Anyone can make a mistake, but to really screw stuff up requires a computer" :-)

Maybe 15 years. I've realized that I should have learned other professional skills, and that there's a tremendous amount of personal investment I should have avoided having in professional projects. As a professional programmer, there was what I thought was important based on what seemed to be best practices, and there was what was actually important, which was probably getting something visibly completed regardless of quality as fast as possible, and improving if there was any extra time.

Importance and value are determined by who's paying you, not what you'd like to imagine is important in some hypothetical world, and getting paid is the most important thing outside of side projects.

I also wish I'd have realized earlier that at least in western culture, people rarely say what they mean and it's absolutely crucial you learn to read the room. The word "ostensibly" is quite useful. If you're working on anything but open source or a side project, your goal as a contributor is to infer what the goals actually are of the people who have the power to fire you, even if they state the goal of the project is "to make the best x" or "make the world better". If you spend time making something accessible, but it doesn't ship on time and nobody asked for it to be accessible, you've fucked up and nobody will thank you. If your company says they care about your well-being, and you take an in-opportune mental health day, you'll realize pretty quickly what your manager actually cares about, and it's probably not you.

Other than that, programming is awesome and powerful and mentally stimulating and potentially profitable, and it's pretty cool to get into, so welcome to the fray.

I started in ROM BASIC at 9 years old. Had my first philosophical epiphany that a string is a null terminated character array at 11 (and what's a null anyway?) I was inching into the six figures in my early 20s, and was running a multinational technology team soon after that.

I actually started professionally in sys admin and production engineering, with websites on the side. Now I snootily say I'm a back end business applications developer (though we're all mostly full stack web these days.)

I've cashed out (modest) stock options, quit jobs to travel the world for a year here and there, burned out, re-acclimated, and now work 100% freelance for years (remote only for ten years before COVID was the office killer.)

I can see from other comments that a lot of burnout kills the joy of technology. While I can't say I haven't "been there", you can find a ways to work through it.

It's actually disappointing how the state of the art continually devolves. At your peak your cognitive problem solving will conjure magnificent abstractions which the world will be unworthy of.

LLM assist is a fine example of reverse evolution. Coding is more like being a short order chef than a gorme cook.

A mind adept in problem solving, truly understanding technology, and income fluidity are still nice, yet turning something intimate into your grind is ... well ... prostitution.

Keep your cash locked up and don't live like a middle American consumer, and when the time comes you'll have "screw you" money you can go off and do your own thing with.

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