> Being a software engineer is tough.
No, it isn't. Software engineering is one of the easiest careers. We are so coddled that we think what is described in this post is tough, that alone is evidence of how not tough our career is.
No, it isn't. Software engineering is one of the easiest careers. We are so coddled that we think what is described in this post is tough, that alone is evidence of how not tough our career is.
I’ve had a wildly successful career in tech where I’ve gotten to do, what to me are crazy impressive things (I don’t want to brag about here but you may have benefited from some of it, certainly all of you have done more impressive things than me, and thank you for that) and I don’t regret it a day, but as someone that’s worked in those " normal jobs", other than factory work I found the jobs themselves WILDLY more satisfying than anything I’m doing today.
Tech work did used to be a lot better and I still love learning new things but if I could make a few hundred grand a year and never do another OKR and garden I would take that so quickly you can’t even imagine (actually I’d take it for a 100 grand year).
Now I’m old and I have people that depend on me, so I do the OKR shuffle and play all the politics, and even lead on new tech that I think is being misapplied in the org but hell if I can get anyone to believe me and just use SQLite. But if I was single and had no kids, I’d gladly give up the 6 figure lifestyle to get my hands in the dirt again or even get through a hard rush in the kitchen with the team, there was so much more worthwhile about the jobs I had before, it was just the benefits sucked and couldn’t support a family in the USA without a lot of luck and sacrifice.
I think maybe it is possible that most of you that think these other jobs are so hard just didn’t come from a family where they were normal, but for me they were, and I don’t see anything wrong with them other than the pay and the benefits. They’re honest work.
That said I’d be ok if technology companies just let us do our jobs without all the bizarre AMA, self help talk and bizarre behavior from management.
The thing is, it's a job that needs creativity, spontaneous decision making as well as personal responsibility for those decisions. It's a real easy job if you don't need to take this responsibility (e.g. those who come after me when I am long gone have to deal with the consequences). It becomes a hard job the instant that you have some passion or ethical concerns that drive you to create software that holds up to your own high standards and requirements.
I think that's what makes it so hard for many. We are incredibly passionate (why would we be on this forum in our free time otherwise) but we constantly have to betray our own principles to make it work or stay employed.
This is the hardest lesson to learn for a lot of software engineers. By nature, computers are unforgiving, so a lot(most?) of us are wired to do things 'right'. The apparent fundamental incompatibility of that mindset with modern corporate environments is a pretty painful lesson to learn.
This is not to say that any one of the approaches is the one true approach. To a company software is a means to its ultimate goal of more profits.
To an engineer though it's often both, a means of livelihood and a source of joy. Reconciling the second with the first is easy in theory and hard in practice.
I loved it and got hired internally the second try. If I tell you we were called 'flight dispatch officers' you might be able to figure out which airline that was.
In about 12 years the airlines headquarter and ops center moved to the Midwest so I opted to stay in NY and go to school for retraining. I choose WAN admin because there were no coding schools. Here I got my A+, MCSE, MCSD,CCNA,CCNP,CCIE. But in the meantime I got heavily involved in scripting and coding. So my first job was perl, PHP and SQL developer and I've been doing it for quite some time now. I must say this is the most liberal and appreciative career I've seen. As long as your work is done, you can be anywhere. Besides the great salaries, benefits, (,ok no travel) these jobs are fun. Good choice.
Just wanted to say that's impressive.
I do get pleasure when building software, but like many others I also dream about starting a farm to diversify my income and get some physical work regularly.
I worked on a farm and I find this romanticising outright ridiculous because I don't think a lot of you understand just how hard is it to actually make a living from the land.
That said the farm I worked I knew the farmer and his dad pretty well and I worked there year round for a couple of years with breaks in the summer. Harvest time was insane and not all the years were good, but the family were comfortable and most of the time the workload was reasonable. It maybe different now but I lived in farm states then and I personally knew several well to do farmers that were living very well with more assets than I currently have. So I’m not sure I’m fully on board with your view of farming. It depends a lot on time and place I’m sure though, I’ll fully admit that I’m no expert.
Financially it is great, no doubt about that. Take away the money and it’s a terrible job - despite loving programming, design, and engineering. And I mean, I love design, programming, ambiguity, and the constant learning required.
My largest source of sanity in this career is to spend extra time at work doing the things that I love in my position. Ironically, I get high performance ratings because of this - but have to fight to spend my time on it.
Modern tech companies and culture suck, even the best ones that I praise. I can’t even blame anyone at this point because it is hard and I have not started a company that tries to be better. I'm not even sure I would do better, to be honest.
Re “source of sanity” I’ve caught myself doing the same with extra work, but sometimes it backfires when the little fun tool you wrote solves the purpose so well that it becomes the company standard and then the politics comes in, I don’t mean the “oh we need this feature super badly that breaks a bunch of other things can you do it for us” that’s just having a successful project. I mean when it starts figuring into political finger pointing and you’re forced to be involved in it all since you are the creator of a tool tangentially involved in some inter office politics. I’ve not figured out how to avoid that yet.
Unfortunately that has also pushed lots of good engineers to either disengage or work extra hard to push things through despite organizational problems (I seem to alternate between both but I feel too responsible to really disengage).
Often I wonder why can’t it be easier?
Why do you have to fight if it's extra time? And couldn't you avoid the fighting by just doing it on regular time?
As someone who only delivered newspapers and worked in a video store as a kid, before landing my first developer job, I’ve always had this impression.
And I could never convince myself to go work on a farm, or in a nursery, or at a gas station, because working on my computer, often from home, always paid better.
I feel like most computer problems are made up, and so many real-world problems draw in your emotions and senses.
It’s funny, I feel the same but come to the opposite conclusion. I don’t want to look back on my life thinking that I spent all my time chasing fake problems. The calculus is different for everyone though.
If I understand you correctly, it is an argument to not pursue software development?
I agree, I am mostly in it for the money and my own curiosity.
And I do see that it sometimes solves real problems, like removing landmines. But it's rare.
Neo-liberal capitalist economies are full of fake problems.
Take flash trading for example. I know why it exists, and I know why it works. I don't fault people for getting involved in it, because they (and we) exist in the system we have.
Yet, think of all the money that has gotten both pumped into that industry and the industry has made in profits, and all for...being able to algorithmically trade penny differences in value at a profit due to volume.
Is that a problem that is worth solving? Well, in our current economic system, it is, but should it be?
I don't know whats better per se (I'm not arguing for communism or some other clearly failed economic political system) but I sure feel like I can identify problems that could quite easily fall into the made up category.
I’m not sure it’s worth the required effort input at a system level vs other places the effort could be applied, but there is at least some abstract benefit to it, I think.
Now before you get out your tiny violin, I'm not saying other people don't have it worse, or that anyone should direct their sympathy towards us at all. I guess it feels more like a golden handcuffs situation.
There's a lot of stuff in the industry to suck any joy out of writing software
Still, for me, at some level always enjoy the act of building something that needs to function in the demanding environment of the digital world (especially, high-volume applications). Yeah, it requires you to use your experience and training to solve difficult problems and produce a real result. For me at least, this typically enough to keep me going:)
I think you just described most people who aren't SE's. The only difference is that they can't land better paying jobs.
I think people often put the goalposts further away than they truly are by comparing numbers cross-currency directly like this or just round numbers in general.
I do recall a software manager (OK apples to oranges) grumbling about 10 years ago about him exceeding that level, and having to play games to avoid being bit by the tax impact which cuts in between £100k and £125k.
That said, I do know engineers who indicate they earn in excess of £100k, and they're not lead nor founder level - just experienced in the appropriate area.
Are you sure?
Compare working in big law to big tech, and it will be plain as day. And I am not even getting into the baseline requirements to get there (undergrad from a good school with great GPA, LSAT, a top law school that is gonna cost you a pretty penny, hustling for internships, BAR, etc.), which SWE as a career has pretty much none of. The overall work-life balance difference alone is crazy.
Not everyone works in big tech. A lot of devs worldwide work in mom and pop shops, legacy businesses, or various consultancy/body shops. Big-tech workers are the exception, not the rule, except maybe for the US workers.
Nope, so called 'dark matter' developers are the majority in the US too. HN is such a small sliver of the developer community, those who work for big tech even more so
Is it the case outside of the US? Genuine question, because I am not super familiar with close reality dev jobs outside of the US. But from what I saw, it didn’t strike me as an obvious thing that they get ground to the bone or have high barriers to entry (as opposed to other highly-paid white collar jobs).
no high barrier to entry whether you're worked to the bone or not depends on the place
but yeah, in general devs have nothing to complain about.
This has been my observation, software developer pays about the same as a plumber or electrician in places like England, outside of select industries like high finance in London etc
I respectfully disagree. I think there's alot of room for improvement in our industry, even in regards to pay we could do better. Think of the value delivered per engineer vs what they're paid, the ratio is typically very high, meaning engineers are paid a fraction of what value they provide.
Interesting sidenote, given you mentioned plumbers: being a plumber in the US has higher barriers to entry than being a dev (gotta have your apprenticeship program completed under a licensed master plumber and pass the journeyman plumber exam). On the flip side, they get paid pretty decently well.
But most jobs are tough - in some way.
Software Engineering is one of the most information-volatile industries in history that I can think of.
You have to aggressively keep pace with potentially, and I’m guessing here, the fastest shifting industry in history in terms of practices and knowledge and improvements.
Not only that, it is constant failure and obstacles - bugs, frameworks, features, platforms, what have you - and constant layers of abstraction. A lot of the time you cannot visualise any outputs.
Software Engineering is a highly skilled industry, and probably the most competitive industry in the world, with a very high rate of uncertainty and layoffs and change. We are working with some of the most complex systems created by man in history.
I don’t think you can make a broad generalisation that we are coddled lol. Software Engineers in the USA in certain population centres earn a large salary, sure, but look overseas and comparatively that is not the case.
Seriously, by what metric is Software Engineering one of the easiest careers? I’d like to hear your viewpoint because I think it’s so off-base that I must be missing something.
It has its definite perks like work from home.
But Software is up there as one of the toughest knowledge-worker industries there is.
There are much tougher careers like anything Electrical Engineering, but by no yardstick is Software easy
It may be fair to say that it wants to work its way towards that as the industry matures, but that hasn't been the case. People have been able to make insane amounts of money in software. You cannot make money in a competitive industry.
This doesn't necessarily correlate to skill at writing software, but I've also encountered a higher ratio of poor performers from this growing demographic, as well. The end result is that the median skill level seems to go down over time.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and seems like it should be expected as the pool of people working in software development grows.
But as time goes on, there are definitely more and more people who are trying (and succeeding!) at doing it.
One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner. They probably had more intense study and testing in 3 months than most people do in a 4 year undergraduate program, SWE included.
-Those tests are no joke, but saying they are more intense than a 4 year CS degree is ridiculous. Also the major airlines you can compare to FAANG, and many people study for 6+ months to pass those interviews - Airlines are union jobs. If you get them you aren't getting fired unless you try to do something really stupid. - There isn't any wondering if you are doing a good job or not , and you don't take any work home. - Regulations change or you can switch planes, but the career is leaps and bounds more static then SWE.
Net net is that they are very different jobs. SWE is a great gig overall but I take issues with people saying how much harder or easier it is than other jobs. "It depends" is the answer.
That is a completely different kind of thing than the kind of thinking that we do in programming. One isn't better or easier than the other, just different.
An airline pilot is "grey collar".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-collar
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/01/gray-colla...
It breaks the original metaphor, and nobody knows it or the confusing borders of the definition - bad for communicating.
Most people seem prideful to self-identify into blue-collar or white-collar.
What's the meaning of the obviously next step pink-collar or black-collar?
Yah. Profusion of terminology is confusing.
There are many blue collar jobs that require a lot of education and the consequences of errors is loss of life.
I would have been incredibly rude to tell them "No, your job isn't _really_ white collar, and you haven't changed your social standing as much as you thought."
On the contrary you can absolutely be a white collar worker with low social standing in the US. It's not hard, I'd even argue most white collar workers fit that description. Think of a customer support representative working in a call center for wages. Their job is definitely white collar but it does not pay well and is the type of job you typically associate with someone struggling financially. Not someone of high "social standing".
In the US blue collar/white collar does not directly correlate to low/high social status. While it is probably true that white collar work is correlated with higher wages or salaries, it's the money that drives social status, not the color of your collar.
A friend of mine is a construction foreman. He lives in a mansion in a suburb of a suburb, is a member of a highly regarded country club and makes more money than me. He’s blue collar.
Being proud of that is like being proud of a six figure salary in California.
Out of 10 people off the top of my head, most of them have been laid off in the past 5 years. For the ones that found new jobs (that I know) they are not satisfied with their pay.
I've talked my pay vs theirs and am shocked. Almost a decade worth of experience, making what I was making 4 years into engineering, in non management positions, and worse job security.
I could be mixing up programmer vs SWE. I just call them techies.
Seems shocking that a SV swe would make what a mech eng makes after 4 years.
Industries with difficult certifications tend to protect those when awarded. It’s a grind to get in but then the employment is easy and lucrative.
This is the promise of a career as a pilot or doctor. (Inb4 doctors do hard things)
In contrast, industries that are lucrative but have a low barrier to entry (sales, real estate, etc) tend to have direct performance competition.
In software by the time you finish your 3 months course the tech is considered obsolete.
Not just Frontend. Backend can change on a dime.
Elastic/MySQL/CockroachDB is using different license that's incompatible to AWS. We have to switch our stack!
Kafka is out. It's all about Iggy! What do you mean it's different language? Learn it!
Things can be hard in different ways. After coding for whole week doing garden work can almost come as a relief.
This is a meme that’s just not true. Nobody outside of the most junior applicant or most transient contractor is paid for the skills they learned this year.
The most important skills last forever. Getting a good CS or EE degree is still the best way to get started.
That's a made up fantasy. They wouldn't get hired at all in real life. Ask me how I know. Where I live recruiters only check that your recent experience and stack match the ones on the job, otherwise your resume goes in the bin.
Like Ygg2 said below, employers don't want generalists with generic CS knowledge, they want people they can immediately slot in and start crushing Jira tickets.
That's not true. Like I said, this is more of a problem if you are trying to break in.
> people they can immediately slot in and start crushing Jira tickets.
This is representative of the only the most precarious software contracts.
> They wouldn't get hired at all in real life.
I have hiring capability and I would hire them.
The poster said their skills would be out of date. I think you're confusing a sales problem for a skill problem.
It's the case wherever I applied, which makes it true for me.
>This is representative of the only the most precarious software contracts.
Same argument as above.
>I have hiring capability and I would hire them.
Where are you located? Do you hire fully remote?
I think this may be the real problem you are facing.
Ten years isn't enough time to standardize something and make it a job requirement.
I still write a lot of Python and shell. I still use Linux, mostly systemd. (I did have to use initscripts early on and do not miss them at all. systemd's way easier.) The entire networking stack has changed only minimally, with only early versions of SSL/TLS becoming obsolete. All the software I use to do my job is the same (A terminal, Vim, Firefox, GNU coreutils, and a smattering of other tools). I still use the same cloud services and databases. The skills I learned in school are equally as useful today as they were then, especially math and CS theory.
The only major shift during my career has been migrating from Linux VMs to containers on clusters (first on Mesos, then Kubernetes). Having administered both at scale, Kubernetes is a lot easier.
All of those listed things have changed. Python went from 2 to 3, number of shells has multiplied like rabbits. Linux changed in leaps and bounds. It got async, BPF, different tech stacks, and window environments.
> Do you want the list of things that haven't changed since I started programming as a kid?
Sure basic principles have remained the same, but huge chunks of ecosystem have been transformed. Perhaps we are looking at it from different perspectives.
It's kinda like ecosystems. Amazon tropical rainforest looks the same now as it did 1000 years ago from birds eye view. But on the ground entire species came and went, and the species living there changed dramatically, in quality and quantity.
My issue is, employers don't want general knowledge, they want an easily slottable asset. You need to know their tech stack. Even if it changes. Hence why LLMs are so in demand.
The number of shells that are relevant to any workplace I have worked in have been two, possibly three if you're working somewhere heavily Apple-based. All three of these shells are POSIX-compatible. Other shells exist, but are entirely optional and rarely used (I say this as someone using one of those other shells).
Linux has changed more, and is probably the biggest source of change in the list that the previous poster described, but as they point out, most of these changes make managing Linux systems simpler, and shouldn't really cause significant problems.
I think you're strongly exaggerating the scale of changes here.
> My issue is, employers don't want general knowledge, they want an easily slottable asset. You need to know their tech stack. Even if it changes. Hence why LLMs are so in demand.
I'm a frontend developer. Every job I've had, I was not familiar with the specific framework they were using when I went in for that job. In every case, that's not been a problem at all, because I've been able to clearly demonstrate that I understand the foundation of frontend development, which is far more important than the precise technologies used in the company's framework of choice. My experiences in general are the complete opposite of what you describe here: every single employer that I've worked for has wanted primarily deeper general knowledge rather than specific knowledge of their specific stack.
Maybe this is a market thing — maybe things really are that different here in Europe — but your descriptions do not ring true at all for me.
Are people really using Iggy/hyping it already? TIL it's now an Apache project[0], that's awesome, it looks impressive!
Sure, most reasonable people are definitely not ripping out Kafka for Iggy yet, but I'm certainly happy to hear it getting more usage/at least being considered.
30 minute walk before work, gym after work, outdoor/physical hobbies, intentional healthy eating, etc...
These, to me, aren't difficult and end up providing a net benefit on your life far outweighing the effort required to implement them.
Anyhow, unlike my non-programmer friends, I can never leave my work - whenever I'm walking my dog, working out, cooking dinner, or taking a shower - I still keep thinking about the things I need to solve, the failing tests, the PR comments, my open-source projects, etc.
Yes, I still love my job and wouldn't trade it for anything else. Sure, I'm very happy that I don't have to leave the house at 2AM to risk my life, but still, it isn't really one of "the easiest careers" - I am easily disposable, I don't ever receive a pension, whenever I need to find another gig - I have to go through seven circles of hell, and it never is the same hell to go through, I have too many bosses, I constantly have to keep learning new skills, routinely prove my worth, and defend my opinions, because even after twenty years of building expertise in various areas, in our field of work, one can never confidently call themselves an expert.
I've been battling RSI and stuff for the past two years and am starting to make progress although it's required me to get both of my wrists fixed and potentially both of my elbows in the future.
It's easy to just say "Oh, do this workout" but it can be very difficult to do that if you either lack the time or have other health issues that prevent you from doing them.
For me, I have rods in my legs and fused ankles so even though I try to hit the treadmill regularly, doing so means I wind up in a lot of pain.
None of this has got in the way of my passion for building software, although for me there is a distinction between what I do (or want to do) in my own time vs. what I have to do for work.
It's a good day when I can really apply myself to a problem at work.
It's less great when for whatever reason, I'm prevented from being able to do a good job.
And the sad thing is that often, you're not prevented from doing a good job because of any technical or time constraint, it's usually all political.
That's the thing that sucks most :)
But younger kids seem oblivious to what kind of damage this line of work does to your body, and it's pretty much unavoidable. They'd be "Ah, so what that I've been typing for fourteen hours straight? My knees are fine; I can just walk it off...". Yeah, well, try figuring out your Python dependency conflicts or broken GitHub Actions, or focus on some concurrency bug when your sciatic nerve is pinching or your neck hurts like you received a bullet straight under your shoulder blade.
I'll see how they sing their "the easiest job ever" song when they get to experience chronic pain and become nearly incapable of sitting in front of the screen, not even for forty minutes, let alone hours.
This isn't an axiomatic quality of software engineering though. For every developer with your level of dedication (obsession? anxiety?), how many developers log off at 5 and compartmentalize their work away from their personal life?
That being said, your other paragraphs are pretty agreeable to me.
Programming is an act of creation. Any creative worker - artists, sculptors, novelists, potters will agree, you cannot timebox your creation - it creeps back into your life even when you're away from your studio, from your desk.
I have worked in several different countries. With diverse teams of programmers of different levels of expertise. Different stacks, various types of industries. Most programmers are creators. Those who log off at 5, don't think about it and keep it separate from their lives are "office workers" at best - maybe not even programmers, I'm not sure what to call them. I met that kind of people only twice (with some stretching, maybe three times) during my work life. Both of them ended up switching to different roles later. So, yes, to a certain degree it is perhaps "an axiomatic quality" after all.
The human body is designed for movement, and sedentary behavior disrupts metabolic processes, affects posture, and almost unavoidably results in weakened muscles and bones.
Staring at screens for extended periods leads to digital eye strain - dryness, irritation, blurred vision, headaches. Prolonged screen time can also disrupt sleep patterns which affects melatonin production. Additionally, it too, contributes to poor posture and musculoskeletal issues, particularly in the neck and shoulders.
Typing for long hours leads to repetitive strain injuries - carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, and muscle fatigue in the hands, wrists, and arms.
If you think you can undo decades of harm to your body by occasional exercise, well, I have bad news for you. If you think you can just hop around like a butterfly when you need to do something like setting up a Kafka cluster from scratch, which requires you to have a combination of technical skills and extended periods of sedentary work, screen time, and typing - something that can't be done "very quickly and only once," you're thinking of some other profession, not this. Extend that to five days a week, for many years - that's what's required - you'll find yourself primarily sitting, staring at the screen, and typing during most of your waking hours. This is a typical facet of a programmer's life.
Software development career WILL harm your body, and there are only limited things you can do about it, and only to the effect of mitigation - there's no magical cure, remedy, or escape.
I have first hand story where my colegue had a cow-worker like this and wanted to get rid of him.. Took whole year to do so, but NO.. he wasnt fired.. he was promoted!!! But my colegue said: At least, we get rid of him :)
Experience in our field is a double-edged sword - at times it can feel like a burden that pushes intuition away from the objectives. After all - we're all junior SEs - whenever we need to start a new project - we have to learn or at least refresh our knowledge. Just because a kid fresh from college doesn't know how to use Makefiles, can't write C without memory leaks, or hasn't used Vim keybindings and panics when seeing Emacs, doesn't mean they lack programming talent.
Industry shifted into weird direction here.. Youngsters are pet while old engineers that had knowledge and experience where squeezed more and more... It really makes you demotivated..
I never had to work free overtime as a postal clerk until 1AM because of a production bug in deployment
I never had to figure out how to fix a fry machine on-the-spot at McDonald's because the person who normally fixes it is on vacation in the mountains
I also never had to learn brand new ways of driving cars every few months as a valet driver.
Maybe your software engineering job is easy but, this is the most stressful job I've had. And i'm not your average HN'er that's only ever known being a code slinger
Thats what oncall is, every job ive seen makes you do it
That said, I also see very few jobs that involve on-call. Maybe that's because companies know they have to pay extra for it and therefore don't hand it out willy-nilly, but typically there'll be an ops team who do have on-call, and whose job is to triage and fix anything they can, otherwise just minimise the damage, and then maybe the most business-relevant couple of teams will also have an on-call rotation in case the problem can't be solved by ops alone.
Personally, I've never had on-call.
I see from your bio that you are based in a country with much better worker rights than the US.
I've worked construction when I was younger and wouldn't want to be still doing it at my age, it was physically harder but I wouldn't say it was tough work and at the end of the day I'd leave and not think about it again until I showed up the next day.
Have you ever heard of a modern software engineer who landed in jail because their error was part of an incident thst costed others their lives? Typically software errors are shrugged away as if they are extreme wheather events thst nobody can change.
Creating usable elegant, efficient, reliable, testable and maintainable software isn't trivial, but it is doable and the consequences to not getting it 100% right are usually comparably mild.
If I fuck up a part of code I usually produce a crash, patch it and I am good to go, if I select the wrong cables and put them into a building, I either cause a fire or I have to tear the whole building open to replace them, and let's not talk about civil engineering..
I remember sitting in a class of 30 people where people had over 30 different solutions to a complex load calculation of the kind that could kill people if it was realized.
Especially love the classic “Well, that’s not normal, only what I am familiar with is normal, because everybody thinks like me”-flavored responses. Obviously it’s not normal to work overtime or crunch because I’ve never done it. (Just ignore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games) and go back to shittalking SWE.)
Viewer: “Streaming is so easy, you’re basically not even working, streamers are so privileged.”
Streamer: “Can you act?”
Viewer: “No, but what -“
Streamer: “Ok so you can’t act. Have you ever tried acting out a play, but it’s 6 hours long and also hundreds of people get to shout obscenities at you, and also you’re sometimes obligated to respond to their disturbing comments completely ad-lib without breaking character, and also you have to be juggling at the same time?”
Viewer: “… well I still think <INSERT JOB> is harder”
It doesn’t take a genius to realize there a different dimensions of difficulty and yet somehow many people can’t
A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits, implicitly or explicitly depending on the problem a person it's currently working on, it takes an incredible amount of effort to relax your mind at the end of the day.
I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it, and by the end of the project I was so exhausted that I had to take a whole week to cool down my brain and relax my body.
It took me a whole month to fully recover!
I have worked as a construction worker with my father and I know how to grow my own fruits and veggies; I know the struggles with those things...but trust me, you cannot compare the two by any means!
Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!
At least, that's my case.
Don't say that to a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, or fast food employee.
> Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!
Going home at the end of the day and not having to think about work is sure great, except that fast food employee is probably doing their second job. As for that farmer, in one respect or other they're almost certainly operating their own business. Not managing. Operating. They're going to have trouble setting aside the stress of the job at night as well. Construction workers, well, they will be all over the map. Some will be like farmers, operating their own business. Some may be doing heavy or dangerous labor. Day to day, their job may rank as tiring. Over extended periods, they are expending their body. Short of switching to a trade, their career is on a clock. Truck drivers have their own issues to deal with. Again, a lot of them are operating their own business (even when the work arrangements make it feel like they're employed by someone else). If they're working within an urban area, they're typically driving in less than ideal circumstances for hours on end and dealing with a system that tries to make the system's problems the trucker's problems. Some long-haul drivers may earn a decent paycheck, at the cost of being on the road for days on end and being pushed outside of the safety envelope.
So yeah, everyone has something to complain about. But if you want those people to think that SWE's are arrogant jerks, then just go on saying how much worse your job is than yours.
Although, I agree, there is a lot of blue-collar work that is tough, especially on the body - have done a few weeks of construction work myself, it can destroy your body quickly if you don't learn how to pace yourself and use your body correctly (it's not something I personally would ever want to do long term). But there is also a ton of cushy blue-collar work that are easy - my roommate works at an Amazon warehouse, and she says that her role is mindless work that anyone can do sorting items in boxes.
Yeah, I am probably somewhat biased, but saying that the average fast-food employee's job is more difficult that an average SWE's job (with its deadlines, stress and politics, not to mention all the years of studying), that seems like a stretch. I'm all for the blue-collar worker, but let's be reasonable. Yeah, at least from what I've seen, often, it's not their jobs that are tough, it's the circumstances of their life (many of course are low paying, which makes everything difficult) and lack of advantages they had growing up...
... although, I do admit there are a lot of devs that once they get over the learning curve just coast at their jobs, learning little that is new and working on the same system year after years. Hmm, interesting...
I'm not going to pretend that software development is devoid of stress. That said, virtually every job has stress, deadlines, politics, and other such nonsense.
Yeah, at least to me in this thread, seems like we were referring to jobs themselves, not their overall lives.
But, I do agree, if we look at their lives overall compared to white collar, it seems like it can be just as stressful, especially because of the lack advantages growing up (growing up in a stable financial household, education, resources...).
Its so weird that development that pays well over $200K uses about 5% of the brainpower I used for college, when I got paid about $9 an hour to clean plates for 40 hours a week.
But, agree, many tech jobs require you to initially mount a difficult learning curve, then coast, doing the same thing over and over (although, for better and for worse, this was rarely what my jobs in tech were like. Was always jumping around having to learn new things).
That’s not normal or typical.
Unfortunately when you evaluate a project, initially everything looks and feel just right, that you wouldn't have any problem delivering the end result as soon as possible.
But..! We know how customers ask for small "favors" of "tiny" changes that won't affect the whole project, or so they think(!), which eventually end up delaying the whole development as they become painful hurdles, only to find yourself struggling to deliver the project so you can get paid in time.
Those who know this nightmare, know!
But if it paid well enough and had better job security, I’d much rather be building houses all day.
I worked in retail for a while and made it to supervisor. It was much easier than being a software engineer, the pay was just crappy.
Software engineering is definitely up there in terms of mentally demanding jobs, it just pays well.
And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying.
May I add that Agile (which appears to be the currently prevalent work methodology in SE) takes away much of the gratification of software engineering?
They are all easy and hard in their own dimensions.
Software engineering can bring immense joy, but it is often a hard job to do. While it may not be physically demanding like some trades, it is often intellectually demanding and stressful, especially with tight deadlines and evolving technologies.
You know that intellectual tasks, such as those found in software engineering, can require significant mental effort and may burn more calories than some physical jobs due to constant cognitive engagement and stress?
Even children could make it to the top of the world in this activity of intense sitting.
Clearly, being a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee is easier for them, and software engineering is harder, otherwise they would have switched to the easier and better paying job.
They can't do my job.
I won't do theirs.
Just because the stress is mental and not physical, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Ever heard of burnout?
Yes, it is. Tough is relative.
There is no "we" to be coddled, only your flawed perception of a difficult-to-grasp, heterogeneous whole.
There is no "we" to form a single impression of what is described in the post.
Rhetoric isn't evidence.
A doctor can’t give you aspirin without 2+ layers of administration to do the medical coding. I can only guess what bullshit liability insurance and licensure entails.
Knowledge work is usually paid because it isn’t trivial.
True that the other jobs are usually treated very poorly, though.
Yes it is. I can name a number of careers that are easier. Start with accounting or tax prep or mechanic or welder or barber or nail salon anything, on and on. Ridiculous.