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Comment by icase | Hacker News Reader

writing code is the actual fun part of the job though.

it’s a shame we automated that instead of the boring system design shit.

I disagree. Shipping has always been the fun part for me. I have been a DEEP engineer, and I love figuring out creative and deep optimizations, but writing them was never fun, designing them was. Writing the code has always been the least enjoyable part for me.

This is the conflict we've entered. There is a good portion of the engineering population that considers coding fun.

The other side considers shipping as a feature.

I can both sympathize and empathize with this conflict.

I love coding, or rather I love what coding allows me to do which is build and ship. That’s not be saying we abdicate any responsibility and yolo all our code but coding was _always_ a means to an end.

See also debates between high/low level languages.

You might as well say “real men/women only write Asm”.

All those things (coding / distributing / design / whatever) WAS fan to you / us. It was. "The thrill is gone ..."

>writing code is the actual fun part of the job though.

You mean typing the actual code into the editor is the fun part for you? For me, the fun part has always been "cause computer to do novel things", and actually typing/compiling/debugging the code is just a speed bump on the way to something fun.

It's like doing a jigsaw puzzle. The fun part is the doing. I don't really care what the final picture is, and once it's assembled the fun is over.

That's an interesting choice of analogy because I despise doing jigsaw puzzles. I don't see where the entertainment is supposed to be.

i mean solving a problem with code that came from my own brain.

the act of typing is trivial and second nature, like breathing. but going e2e from brain to keyboard to editor to working product..that’s the thrill. and it’s dead.

To me the system design shit is fun as well, different strokes for different folks!

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