Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

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>>> For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait.

Total BS. Top-to-bottom offensive, elitist junk masquerading as logic. Written by someone who has never spent an afternoon with a farmer, with a cop, with a fisherman, a professional musician, a pilot or any manner of soldier. Some professions dictate one's entire life. Software engineer is not one of them.

You can be a software engineer 9 to 5 and be something else on weekends. Ask a farmer what they do on weekends. 99 time out of 100 it will be something on a farm. Ask a pilot and they will ask which hotel they are staying in and when thier next flight is schedualed. Ask a soldier and the will ask whether they are on recall. Some professions have days off, others do not. Those are the ones that define a person's life and personality.

> elitist junk masquerading as logic

Lol. "Déformation professionnelle" is an elitist junk these days. It's a defect, and I would gladly get rid my brain of all this programming bullshit if my life didn't depend on it and I wouldn't hear from every fucking corner how:

1) During 2010-2015 Indians/Eastern Europeans/Outsource agencies are going to replace me

2) During 2015-2022 Bootcampers/kids working for a bowl of rice/laid off journalists are going to replace me

3) 2024+ AI is going put me on the street

You seriously think living in a perpetual fear and constant arms race with Leetcode/System Design/other devs/AI is elitist? Fuck off.

How did you get any of that from the comment above? I thought the elitism they were referring to is the the assumption that other jobs don't also have equally deep impacts on a person's identity and way of being.

The part about existing outside of work - that's just reality though. A lot of coders are just doing it to support their families, and a lot of them aren't doing a side hustle or side projects when they're off the 9-5. That stuff gets normalized and glamorized in the highly-compensated-engineering-for-cool-tech-company scene, but there really are working coders who don't do any of that and get by fine all the same. They just tend to live in uncool cities and work in uncool industries.

Then quit doing it. I am legally not allowed to quit my job. I do not have that priviledge. If i dont go to work they will send police to make me. To say that software development is somehow special, more impactful on one's life and personality, than that is indeed very elitist.

I don't think you will get much sympathy by dismissing the anxiety of others, I doubt your job give you special neural receptors that make the cortisol hit different.

I'm still unsure why programming jobs haven't mostly been outsourced to India. Sure the contractors suck but people at IBM, India tend to write decent code for IBM, US.

>but people at IBM, India tend to write decent code for IBM, US.

If you've ever used IBM software, you'd know this is nowhere near reality.

It's because the people at IBM, India get paid multiple times what the contractors get paid. IBM, India, thus hires much better programmers than contractors. This sort of outsourcing isn't nearly as cheap - maybe half the income of a programmer in the US.

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