"I'm convinced that a large % of programmers don't like computers" | Hacker News Reader

"I'm convinced that a large % of programmers don't like computers"

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It is rare to be able to find a career that satisfies more than one or two quadrants of "Ikigai"

(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai)

That is:

• what you can be paid for

• what you are good at

• what the world needs

• what you love

I don't fault people at all for only indexing on a job they're good at, and which pays, until we can figure out this whole post-capitalistic mortal coil thing.

There ARE many fortunate people for whom programming fulfills all 4, but they don't seem to last long before the profession crushes the love of it out of them. :)

That said, True Sickos who love this shit, hit me up, we need to stick together.

How to hit you up?

”Do not worry about your problems with Mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater.” Albert Einstein

At a certain point you know enough about how the sausage is made that the youthful illusion of love is impossible.

Every machine is reasoning given form. The spatula encodes understanding that the pancake needs a flat supportive surface to help it flip without breaking. Computers happen to be general purpose solutions to arbitrary problems. It’s fine to love the solution To a problem and not the embodiment of the solution.

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes," Edsger Dijkstra

I always liked that quote because telescopes can introduce artifacts, so astronomers absolutely have to know them in a foundational way, just as the artist needs to know the brush and the canvas.

I don't care for computers and I hate all programming languages but I love computer science.

Wasn't that by Abelson/Sussman in SICP lectures, instead of Dijkstra? Or did Abelson/Sussman say that because Dijkstra said it, quoting Dijkstra?

It was famously Dijkstra, so they were almost certainly quoting him. He was responsible for a lot of great aphorisms; I think he was as quotable as he was irascible.

I would agree here. I've been working on computers since I was 13 and started coding when I was 15. Many of the old coworkers I had treated it like a job. They just wanted to get it done and go home.

It was very rare to find someone genuinely interested in it.

I know what you mean.

I always figured if you were genuinely interested in what the electronics is capable of more so than what it is already doing, you were more likely to come up with things that electronics has never done before.

Otherwise not so much.

I'm fortunate enough to have been in the field from way back when people only ever did it because they were genuinely and obsessively into it. The only people who were doing it for the money were the ones making office software.

Things are radically and tragically different now.

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