Programming is a Terrible Job
pastebin.com
pastebin.com
What this really sounds like, and the message gets muted by the complaints, is that the author wants you to find a part of software that interests you and follow that path. I agree 100%. Some people love front-end Javascript websites and all that entails. I find it painful. I still do it when called for but my true love is in low level protocols, embedded programming, hardware, and anything else that let's me get to the "bare metal". It too can be mundane and painful, but I find joy digging through RFCs and implementing them, pushing and popping from the stack, handling memory, and a bunch of other stuff that others might find completely boring.
So I do agree - it can be boring and you should always be looking for something you truly like doing. There is so much in this industry, the world is wide open to you.
the best part for me is, the more i learn the better it gets. And the longer i do it, the bigger the variety of solutions and ways to get things done.
Sure, will get stuck on a crappy project from time to time, which could last for 1-12 months, and it may not be a blast, but i know it's temporary, and the more senior i get, the more say i have in making it suck less.
It took me many years to learn this, but you don't always have to do what you're told (if you know you can do it better). If you're being pressed to get something done, you'll be inclined to cut corners and hack it. But in the end you can just do it the right way, and tell your boss afterwards. The trick is to do it in the same time it would take to hack it. If it means working nights and weekends? so be it.. in the end, it's your name and showing such ownership will eventually give you a bigger voice, and people around will know who produces quality stuff. And if you're working for someone that will not be happy about you doing it the right way just because they told you otherwise, you don't want to work for them in the first place.
KILL ME
After 3+ years of dealing with banker types when I first started (1991ish), I wanted to leap off the building and land on their fancy cars. :)
Without a doubt, the tightest fisted, greediest and most short sighted people I've ever dealt with. Save 15 minutes here and waste months in the future when you've forgotten how this hack works. Get it out now.
Then I had a few dream jobs. It seems to go in cycles. Get used to it or change professions.
will probably have a 2-3 month break to hack on some project and return to contracting afterwards, hopefully somewhere more interesting.
In the United States probably. The author doesn't sound too old, and says that he/she got access to the internet much later. Which means the author is probably from the Middle east or China or South Asia. The work culture there is not as open as in the west. Daily job means monotonous routine work. What excited him about the prime numbers problem was the novel aspect of it, and the fact that he was in control. Later, in his/her day job, that was no longer the case -- someone else was making the decisions. Until these nuances trickle into daily jobs, most people will sooner than later burnout.
Get yourself some good skills and apply to jobs you really think you want instead of whatever the local industry has to offer.
When people ask what I do I always tell them how fortunate I am to have stumbled into something that I love doing, can make good money, and am okay at doing it.
But: I f'ing love my job as a programmer. There is nothing in this world that I'd rather do. There's nothing that constantly fills me with as much joy as programming does. I admit that I might be a bit lucky here, having founded the company I'm working for; that allows me to pick my battles and find a good balance between stuff that's pure joy and stuff that's just a job.
I do however look out for everybody here who likes solving the interesting problems as much as I do - we try to keep the interesting problems evenly distributed between us.
The thing is: Many of the crappy tasks can still be made interesting: Form a challenge. Fix something related that has been bugging you constantly. Try to implement the crappy feature without performance regressions. Try to implement it in the cleanest way possible. Try to make your future self proud.
If it goes beyond changing the working in an email for the 100st time, I'm sure there is something in there that can make your task bearable or even enjoyable. At least it is for me.
True being a boss is not all roses but your problems shift to a higher order, such as how can I build something customers would love... Versus how can I fix this trivial bug because my boss told me to?
If I can help it at all, I will not be the person responsible for somebody to write the rant that OP has posted.
Of course, it's not all sunshine and puppies--there's grunt work that just has to get done, and everyone takes their share.
Crappy employers of programmers just want to exploit employees, just like crappy employers of other kinds of workers.
If I can deliver something, even if not the most interesting or elegant, that gives the sales/marketing people giant, shit-eating grins, well, kudos to me. Usually, that means I'll be given time to go back and make enhancements, add functionality, or placed at the top of the list for the next cool project.
Don't get me wrong, I push for doing things the right way whenever I can, but acting like you can have it all with no compromises seems silly.
Lucky you, I have been there too. But at my current position, trying to use more modern technologies (Angular.js for example instead of a 15-year old stack without clean separation between front-and backend) to be more efficient is met with stares.
And I venture to say this happens very often in a lot of shops. At least outside of California.
Then I go home and write pure OO coffescript/C#. The company is great, but we have very different views on how software should be desigened.
Sure, we're in businesses (well, most of us), and there's little room for gilding the lilly or perfectionists who can't deliver.
That said, I've always found that elegant code is easier to maintain, thus reducing technical debt. If your employer doesn't want to reduce technical debt, you're either working for a start-up that's in a mad rush to 1.0, or you're working for someone who doesn't understand or care about the interest you pay on technical debt, and it may be time to move on.
I've approached problems with goals like trying to do everything in a declarative functional style, and not passing nulls to avoid having to check for null. It's worked great, until we hand the code off to somebody else, with a new requirement, and that person breaks all the rules not because it's a particularly hard problem to solve, but just because they don't care.
It's an issue I'm currently working through right now, and I'm not sure if it's something to write a style guide/manifesto for, or if there's a better way to enforce it, or if it's just not a battle I should be fighting when dealing with an outside vendor.
I think the author is delusional if he thinks any programming anywhere doesn't have large swaths of time that are a bit mind numbing. And my experience has been the programmers who think themselves 'above that' are the ones that provide the least value.
Our job is not to program, our job is to create value. You should be getting your jollies off of making cool shit happen, solving real problems, not necessarily that you just invented some sophisticated new algorithm.
I spent three years rebuilding video games I grew up on a really limited cell phone platform, it was a blast from a technical point of view. I've spent the last three years building fairly rote software that is used in developing countries, it is satisfying more because of the end result that software will hopefully have.
Go get a job someplace where you care about the end result of your work, or go work someplace where your technical side is challenged, but programming is not terrible, your attitude is.
I can't pay my bills with enjoyable.
> I don't think I ever caught myself writing code for my employer and thinking "hey, I really enjoy this"
-----
> Our job is not to program, our job is to create value.
It's supposed to be the job of every worker out there. Even janitors (believe me, clean toilets are quite valuable). Or maybe you think our job is to think about what creates value, then do it (or have it done)? That part is not programming, it's business analysis. The OP was a junior programmer, and as such likely had no say on BA. Heck, in general, junior programmers don't even get to chose their programming language, nor their build system, nor the high-level architecture of the programs they write. Genuinely thinking of creating value? That's a pretty good way to get fired. Just do what you're told, and watch (edit: and learn from) the consequences as they unfold.
-----
> You should be getting your jollies off of making cool shit happen, solving real problems, not necessarily that you just invented some sophisticated new algorithm.
True. However, the OP said:
> Imagine coming to work to spend hours googling, wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks and battling Javscript and CSS.
This is not making cool shit happens. It's loosing untold amount of time battling accidental difficulties. Solving "real problems" is precisely what the OP would have liked to do:
> There were a lot of really hard problems that programmers had to solve that didn't exactly involve javascript hacks to make internet explorer users happy
Working around a problem (such as IE6) that could in principle have been avoided in the first place, is not the same as solving real problems. Computers were supposed to augment the damn human intellect, and now they're mainly used to extract money from other people. This emphasises the short term and zero-sum aspects of our economy, both of which are poor at advancing humanity forward.
Sure! Can you provide for my family while I do?
Once you have kids, you can't as easily say, "well, we'll just sleep in the car for a year", or "I'll just stay at work ten hours a day and take advantage of their free meals" (or something). For most parents, our risk-taking preferences change dramatically once we have something to lose, and the pressure from our spouses makes it a little bit harder to take on risks of catastrophic failure.
My advice to anyone who doesn't like their job: please don't come to work in a shitty mood all the time, bitch and moan, and spread your poison around. You don't have to love your job, but quit making excuses and being lazy and go get yourself one you will love.
Finding a job I love would require me to change my career and–in the best case–would most certainly offer a starting salary that's far less than I need, given my current financial responsibilities (e.g., my family and $130K in private student loan debt).
Furthermore, I would most likely have to earn another Bachelor's degree.
See where this is going...?
Also, how can I fulfill my financial obligations with an entry-level job in Archaeology?
Poor guy. I write stuff I enjoy for my employer all the time.
Writing code that gets used by others no matter how cumbersome makes me feel like I've won the lottery.
Why do football players, musicians and movie actors get payed 1000x as much as the software engineers who made the technology to make possible their success? TV, Internet, radio, now all HD quality. So that some people can enjoy their work and earn millions while we who invent and produce the infrastructure should suck it up and call it work?
Does our society really encourage people to do stuff they dont really want to do, stuff they dont find enjoyable?
Just my twist on this.
Do you think their jobs are cake walks? You think football players really enjoy the training, really enjoy destroying their bodies on a weekly basis? You think musicians haven't toiled for years and years making no money at all before reaching the level where they can make a living?
Even if you believe that they enjoy every minute of it, you are pointing at an extreme minority. Software engineers are in the top 5 best paid jobs and frankly, our jobs are ridiculously easy and enjoyable.
I always say Tom Cruise, Christian Bale, etc. (pick any major actor) would have been successful in their life no matter what since they have the incredible drive and discipline to achieve their goals.
I also get just a bit frustrated when we boil everything down to "software/tech runs the world" so we should be glorified in some way. Well, sewage systems also run the world. I certainly don't recall or care who built that.
It reminds me of a quote from Muhammad Ali:
“I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion'.”
Now I'm not going to say that every athlete or musician is like that, which is part of the point; reality generally defies generalizations, but I will say that discounting the work professional athletes put in is a bit narrow minded, regardless of any perceived pay-hardwork or pay-joy ratio.
And the gorilla is never tired.
Alternatively if you compare all aspiring athletes, musicians, and actors to all programmers, you may find that programming does pretty well.
The closest you can find in the programming world is probably John Carmack, who found a way to earn a large sum of money based directly on his programming talent.
They endure that life because they know the door that opens to the field where they can do what they want is only reachable through this muddy road.
I program both for work and for fun, and I can understand that. (I also act, only occasionally, and yeah, regular programming job is a lot more stable and low-risk, so it's understandable that the upside is a lot lower.)
Athletes' bodies are taxed to the maxed. Most of the above are in the public light 24/7, they might feel unsafe and have to hire bodyguards. That's not something everyone is going to enjoy. These people work hard, sometimes long hours. They are on the road, sometimes away from their families for long periods of time. This might be an exciting life at first, but wears you down after a few years.
Your average working musician has a "day job" playing for weddings, churches, and corporate events anyway. Not the life of luxury you seem to imagine. They are spending their off time marketing, networking, and planning their next event.
Most actors don't "make it big" and spend most of their time auditioning for roles, networking, and spending time looking for more work. I know a actor. She actually quit and got a "day job" because of the unstable nature of the work. If you get a role, you're still working under a deadline, and you're still working under the authority of someone else. I've heard in an interview somewhere that TV actors can work up to 12 hours a day.
After all, while preparing for the Australian Open Serena Williams said "I don't love tennis today, but ... I've actually never liked sports."
What about the people who support the infrastructure that make your job possible? The people who get paid less than you. The people (probably immigrants) who work in farms and factories and slaughterhouses to bring you food? The cooks and servers in the restaurant. The workers in China who build your computer/computer parts.
Why does this "every single second" strawman keep cropping up? The complaint was not that every single second of programming isn't glorious, it is that every single second is shit. The idea is not "other jobs are perfect because they are fun all the time", it is "other jobs are better because they aren't 100% pure shit all the time". If you don't agree that programming is 100% pure shit all the time, then argue against that. But don't stoop to lame strawman arguments.
Personally, I don't find single second of my job to be shit. I really enjoy my job for the most part. There is some time spend on mind numbing tasks, but I tend to take those in stride. I wouldn't want to do anything else really. There's pros and cons to every occupation.
They don’t. The notion that they do is laughable.
Let’s look at baseball. Baseball players are known for having huge multi-million dollar contracts, right? But that’s only major league players. The vast majority of professional baseball players play in the minor leagues, where they earn just a few thousand dollars a month (and they don’t get paid in the offseason). And that’s not all; minor leaguers are still really really good at baseball. They’re all easily in the top 2-3% of baseball players. There are simply no jobs for the other 97%.
The average minor league baseball player making $15k a year playing baseball is a vastly better at playing baseball than the typical senior developer making $120k a year at $BIGCORP is at programming.
As for the couple hundred guys making multiple millions a year who you hear about all the time? Well, there’s even more engineers who have struck it rich with a startup, and no baseball player will ever come close to Zuckerberg-level wealth.
You are comparing employees to a CEO and business owner (which doesn't have anything to do with technology, other than for the initial lines of code). Of course he has more wealth.
This bears repeating. Rare is the job that allows the job-holder to write code for the sake of writing code. Most of us have to build software that adds value to some other business process.
That takes a lot of thought and research, a little bit of code, and a lot of testing, documentation, and maintenance.
If we're lucky, we get to pass off what we consider the most mundane of those tasks to other employees. BUT! If we're good, we can (and do) perform all of those tasks when needed.
Just as rare is the job that allows the job-holder to clean up toilets for the sake of cleaning up toilets. Janitors clean toilets for a reason: allowing people to poo in a clean, healthy environment, therefore diminishing their stress and health problems, therefore making them more productive at whatever they do, which means more money for their company. On the other hand, getting paid for cleaning toilets up without reflecting on those good consequences is quite common.
Programming is the same. Many, possibly most programmers, are paid to implement specifications handed out from above, few questions asked. They are definitely not paid to think about the actual business value of the solutions they are told to implement. The bigger the company, the more junior the programmer, the truer this is.
The nice thing about computer science is you can make a decent living out of your hobby. The not so nice thing - you have to do what people pay you to do, whether they are customers are bosses. It's still a much better living than a poetry expert makes.
When the realization set in I got angry. First at the job then at myself. I held it tight knowing someone was to blame. Anger lead to depression which sparked more anger. But depression won, and eventually lead to a calm realization that programming wasn't the magical world I wanted it to be. So it became just a job.
I never wanted it to be just a job. I work with people who don't know a bit from a byte. They could care less what I code as long as it works. For a long time I believed them. I just made it work. Recently I've started to believe again.
I've started to believe in the magic again. I'm learning that within the boundaries of my job I can create little realms of beauty. No one cares how I code so I can code to my own enjoyment. I've stopped caring what other people thought. And I've stopped looking to the job and outside world to give me enjoyment and I've started looking inside myself. To find the joy in my own actions, in the moment.
I would say that if you work on a very large scale system with an explicit way of how things are done and there is extreme rigidity in doing anything differently than the job gets tedious quite fast.
I would venture to say that most developers do not fall into this category and have more autonomy (even if that is just building a CRUD web app). Most code isn't peer reviewed and the emphasis is on getting results. Within those boundaries one can do so much to keep things interesting.
I also find it interesting that as developers we sometimes feel frustrated that the end users don't understand or care about the complexity of the implementation and how much may have gone to just that single push of the button on the screen.
How much do you care about the complexity of your car, or the countless bridges that one may drive through? I can sense the complexity behind it but at the end of the day, I enjoy that is come down to turning on the ignition.
Every profession has these issues. Ask the newly grad civil engineer who's tasked to work on a bridge. What do you think they get to do? They get handed the mother of all books on how a bridge is built and everything important that needs to be considered. Their job becomes one of plug and play as there is only so many ways one can build a safe bridge. I had one of my professors relate this story and he couldn't handle it. He went on to graduate school and become an engineering professor.
For better or worse, we get some say on how that bridge gets built, as long as it stays and functions as a bridge by the end of it.
I find a lot of developers just give up, shifting responsibility from internally to external factors. It's hard to see someone just going through the motions, not evening really trying because the job has become "boring". It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the company starts to recognize this and eventually puts someone more inclined in the same position.
The bonus, for me, is that occasionally there will be a colleague who gets it, someone who doesn't get that glazed look on his or her face as my words pass in one ear and out the other, and who can become a true partner in the quest to maintain, improve, and extend the software's capabilities. When you find someone like that, it makes the effort seem worth it.
I've done the same with the Account Executives where I work. Some get it more than others, but most only get it part of the time. Still it's better than nothing.
It's not just a job for you; you never wanted it to be just a job.
It looks like you have found the cathedral in your job.
If you know a trick for maintaining a sense of satori in such conditions, you would oblige me enormously by describing it.
I don't think I'm that great of a programmer. I'm self taught and I have a lot of insecurities about my abilities. Even though I get paid to program. Even though I pickup new languages, on my own, and write working software with them.
So when I write code I write it as simple and direct as possible. I stay away from clever and I stay away from cute or smart. Because I know that the idiot that will be maintaining the code and need to understand that code will be me.
I think having hobby projects can help provide a nice balance between doing whatever the hell you want and doing what is needed right now. It also gives you the opportunity to learn new things which you can maybe apply later to your actual job. As long as I have my favorite forever project, I won't be bored.
But programming many jobs seem like the types of thing you can do even without the job.
I don't work for "a company". I work for one of several companies, depending on the week/month, and sometimes two or more at the same time.
Personally I prefer shorter contracts, but I have constant offers of longer contracts, so I could go that route if I wanted. But I also want time to work on my own projects.
Though, in the abstract, sure, it's not always possible. This is advice along the lines of "Be Really Awesome and Have an Excellent Business Network." Not everyone can really follow it.
But there are a LOT of freelance jobs floating around right now, so it's a good time to give it a try if you can.
What I loved: you get to work on pure software. None of the BS with internal company politics, requirements gathering, user analysis etc. You are focused on a specific set of tasks. You are paid much more than as a perm (but not for vacation, sick days etc)
The last part is important to me at this moment in time. It effectively meant I could work for 6-7 months and make as much money as a perm salary. (This is a short term view to take though). This difference should cover down time, when you are looking for new contracts or you just want to take a little time off to upskill. Depending on the availability of jobs, you can be very selective on the contracts you choose. I've known people leave within a few weeks and move onto something else since it was "not as advertised". Because you shift job fairly frequently (3-6 months usually) you get to meet a lot of different people, learn different techniques and different skills.
The bad part: No vacation pay, no sick pay, you work a day you get paid for a day. You are usually hired for a particular skill, so there is no training. If you don't like a job, there's no point in complaining since they will hire someone else - in a decent company, they will try to accommodate your growth, longer term at least. You can be let go on a very short notice and there is no job security (obviously). It can also make it tougher to get loans and mortgages since the criteria is much stricter.
It's not for everyone, and depends very much on what you do, but I have plenty of friends who freelance and would not go back to permanent positions.
BUT: Speaking only of programming, which is what I choose to do, that extra work can be extremely fulfilling. No, you can't just be working on what you want all the time, but honestly most projects that are driven entirely by people's spare time end up incomplete. The list of exceptions is long, but the list of projects that are incomplete, in features or documentation or in handling of corner cases, is far, far longer.
I love open source, but there are some domains that all the open source options suck. I think a big part of that is the amount of real, un-fun work required to really finish a project. And yet, when creating a project for a job, you (sometimes, at least) need to really finish it: Add the features your users need, handle those corner cases, write up that documentation.
And having really completed a project and seeing the feedback from hundreds of users that find it to be awesome? THAT is amazingly fulfilling. Even if it's not fun every step of the way.
I assume journalism can have similar benefits, but I can't speak to that.
True, and most of them also pay a lot less.
Part of OP's problem is that he, like me, started with programming as a hobby and still wishes it was.
Note that in hobby programming there are still boring parts to push through. Additionally I still have to do sys admin work so I have a server for my website. And other such things. But as a hobby I can choose to pause it whenever I want. I can stop and go read a book instead. I can switch to another project just to keep working on something fresh then switch back when I have the energy to push through the boring part.
Also, real work often has policies, paper work (digital version of it), politics, and all kinds of other stuff that gets in the way of just writing code and making nice software.
See also: the disillusioned former law student who went in to change the world but ended up pushing paper, the disillusioned architect went in to design monuments but ended up designing Wal-Marts, the disillusioned English major who went in dreaming of the Great American Novel but ended up spell-checking ad copy.
There is a difference, though: if "wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks" really pisses you off, you can FUCKING CHANGE THAT. Not every discipline has quite that level of flexibility.
BTW, GTFO off my lawn.
What's painful, it's not doing something repeatitive. It's being presured to repeat it, without being let automatizing it, which is what we should do as programmers.
She did the wrong thing and asked her boss. "Not enough time, there's more urgent things to do."
She then lost an hour per week, contributing to the general sense of urgency that she lived under. Of course, this wasn't the only such script she thought about by far.
-----
My advice: if you can shoulder the risk, automate it before your boss tells you not to.
I think programmers should be paid to not only do the crappy grunt-work, but also for automating it away, even though there will sometimes be cases where it turned out not to be worth it. To me, the automating is part of the job.
And sure, I remember when I used to think I could rewrite entire applications in a few hours the "right way", but that was pure inexperience on my part. For a junior dev, they might want to run it by someone more experienced, but otherwise, these kind of tangents can turn out to be some of the most valuable time spent on a project.
I agree, except no one should ever have to work on their own time. Personally, I think she should have written the script on company time.
So don't present your results to the boss until all the work's done. It takes as long as it takes.
I will admit the job I had wasn't nearly as dreary, but I was still plagued by the fact that what I was doing was utterly pointless and had zero value.
In retrospect, I wish I had just grown the fuck up and accepted the simple fact that the chances of any person on this earth making his or her life meaningful outside of his or her own family are astronomically slim. The machine we contribute to is one that takes in money, spits out more money, and creates very little value in the process.
And honestly, does any of this sound unique to programming? Do you think carpenters are all happy just making what people will buy from them? Do you think musicians all just want to make music people will buy? Mathematicians of old just being glad they could reliably hit ships with a cannon? Electricians constantly just plugging in similar wirings into similarly bad houses? ...
An anecdote to highlight your point.
I'm a web developer, but I've built furniture four our new house last year. It was fun, I've learned some new things and, most importantly, it's still there once the electricity goes out. It provides, in my opinion, a lot more value than nth iteration of some corporate website re-design. I thought in a parallel universe I could become a carpenter and live a great life. Then I've imagined the parallel universe in which a frustrated carpenter dealing daily with stupid client demands, building the same table over and over again, physically tired and risking dismemberment on a daily basis, comes home. He wants to make him a website to reach to more clients, so he picks up HTML and CSS and Wordpress, builds it and it's fun, it works, you can interact with this creation from anywhere in the world! He goes to sleep thinking "I should've become a programmer instead...".
So, I guess we all need to develop a 'family-centered' philosophy or life more than a 'work-centered'. I find this rather compelling, albeit difficult to tackle (because it is likely you spend more 'conscious' time at job than with your family).
So, as you say, it is a problem of a fine-tuning of one's own values.
Not that I am suggesting 'crap jobs' are good for anyone. But that one has to value 'family success' much more than 'job success'.
I think about quitting every single day, but this fear lets me grind through the day. Being unemployed is just no option if you're not alone/have family.
It's not that I do a job in a field that I hate. I have a crappy job in a field that I love. I'm convinced I could resign much more easily if it were the former case..
As programmers many of the things we build are to automate processing that other people would find repetitive and make errors doing. As a result, our work becomes repetitive and we make errors doing it. As some level we've succeeded – we've added a layer of abstraction and made a lot of people's lives easier – but we've also moved our expectations ahead of us and now we're playing catch up.
The author says
> Sometimes I also think if it would be different if I was born several decades earlier
but I don't think it would. The problems would have been more fundamental and the solutions would be more "pure" computer science, but I imagine you'd still have the same level of tedium with regards to debugging and loose user requirements.
Most "programming" is just "digital plumbing". No matter how flashy or utilitarian the taps or basin are, underneath the job is pretty much always the same - you hook up hot water to one tap, cold water to the other, and the sink drain to the drainpipe. You can do a great job or a shoddy job - so long as nothing leaks _too_ much, it doesn't make any difference to most people.
Almost all of the programming jobs in the world are like that - call it CRUD or MVC or Mobile Apps or Web Apps or websites or SaaS, or PaaS - you're mostly gonna spend your life hooking some user interface up to some data store doing some sort of filtering or data transformation in between - and hopefully having some real-world side effects that generate value for someone, be that entertainment, education, ecommerce, improving the efficiency of some previously manual or tedious process, or often - just releasing a new version of the same old thing because marketing decided it's time for a version number change and a few "new feature" checkboxes for their competitor comparison. Most "day to day programers" _don't_ get to write new 3D renderers or physics engine for exciting games or write the next great crypto system or solve hard computer science problems or software to control new spacecraft or fighter jets - or whatever "interesting programming problem" you can name. But if you're lucky, you might get to solve real world problems your business/clients/customers have – by hooking some fancy new off-the-shelf taps up to some standard boring old digital plumbing in fairly standard ways – occasionally you might even get some new-to-you plumbing job, perhaps plumbing in an espresso machine or a fridge-with-ice-cube-maker-in-the-door, and that'll be fun - the first time. Maybe even the second and third time - then it'll be "just another standard plumbing job", with a different fridge or coffee maker.
I saw a presentation a week or so back, that seems to me a lot like the article-writers original "I'll write some code to find Mersenne Primes!" - it was a bunch of local guys presenting (at DorkBot here in Sydney) about the new ASIC USB BitCoin miners they were building - you _can_ find and attempt to solve interesting computer science / math problems, but there's _vanishingly_ few people who'll employ you to do it.
How? Mostly (not entirely) by working for a defense contractor. Everyone seems to knock corporate jobs, but I swear to you I've done so much cool stuff because it is only companies that size that can bid on and win this interesting work. Plus, I went to university (another false meme around here - college is just a piece of paper), where I learned the chemistry, physics, electrical engineering, and math to do all this stuff.
There is plenty of pain in big government type projects, but there is pain in every thing important. Do you want to wrestle with undocumented CSS behavior, or wrestle with how to program this robot, or how to reduce defect rates in your machine in the factory, or how to make this plane fly. Sentence structure doesn't make it clear, but I consider only the first boring, and the rest extremely interesting.
There are a lot of those kinds of jobs. You may not live in SF anymore, and end up at an airbase in Iowa, or in Albuquerque, or Huntsville. OTOH, your pay will be absolutely amazing compared to local property prices, and you can raise a family, go on great vacations, and not worry about living in the crazy bubble we are in right now.
I know it won't appeal to everyone, but I swear to you there are tons of extremely interesting, challenging jobs out there that aren't start ups, and aren't corporate internal reporting apps (TPS reports). You will need to be far more than a Ruby on Rails developer, CSS+HTML5 jockey, or what have you.
edit: all of the above is written by a US citizen. I don't know what opportunities are like in other countries, and don't mean to imply that any of the above applies to anyone but a US citizen. I don't know.
Some job profiles include programming GPUs, device drivers for a new device, writing kernel code for the processor, firmware for other chips on a motherboard.
There are also math intensive jobs such as 3d spatial programming for manufacturing simulation and nanoscale image processing for finding defects in wafers.
Compiler and language enthusiasts often enjoy working in the forefront. When Intel plans to come out with a new instruction set, it uses its own engineers to write an optimized compiler (better than gcc) for those instructions.
Same goes for Java in Oracle.
like, if the path from an app to a webservice were like plumbing, i'd lay the pipes, data would move, and that would be it, on the the next job with the same pipes and tools i used for this one. but actually, as the project matures, i hope to have made several nice little json-schema-sized pipe connectors that i and others can freely reuse.
my ideas for improving the ui development process are not quite as mature as this is the first system i've worked on with much emphasis on ui design, but there are already a few interesting corners to look into.
and i'd really like to hear from anyone else with ideas as to how to allow people who don't know as much about programming integrate their human interface ideas with the machine interface underneath. i guess that's what this google web designer thing is all about, though.
DRY.
Solve the problem of repetition.
My advice would be - become a solver of other people's problems who happens to know how to develop software.
This may sound like a futile exercise in semantics, but believe me, this subtle little shift in thinking has made all the difference...
In order to escape OP's "boring as shit" programming life and have a ball turning nothing into something, one has to change their perspective: It's not about the code, or the elegance, or us, or what we become; it's about solving our customers' problems. That's it.
It doesn't matter if the solution requires the most elegant algorithm ever conceived or smacking someone on the side of the head; solving the problem is where the rush comes from. The elegant and cool code is the byproduct.
Once OP understands this, he'll be too busy building and solving to rant.
edw is right - avoid that "Software Engineer" label. It's a pipe dream of broken promises
When the customer perceives that the programmer's goals are aligned with his goals, he will be much more inclined to send that programmer work.
In contrast, the programmer who sees the customer as an ignorant philistine who "doesn't appreciate good design" or "doesn't understand what he needs" will drive customers away.
Landing pages and NoSQL backends are not deductively better or worse: at best they are statistically or inductively so. Typically, however, choice is simply intuitive.
Making good intuitive choices is the essence of design and the way to develop good design intuition is not to sit down and bash on one's first solution until it plausibly works. Education should attempt to teach students that falling in love with one's first idea is a tarpit.
Teach students the practice of coming up with three independent design schemes and developing each to the point that the merits and flaws of its underlying design concept is evident. Maybe one is worth developing.
Throwing away months of output is not wasted effort - just as lines of code are no more a relevant measure of productivity than pencil lines on a blueprint. Artists have stacks of sketches and studies, architects stacks of abandoned schemes.
Most ideas are not worth loving, let alone executing and most solutions cannot be demonstrated correct via mathematical logic. The education of programmers should align with this reality.
I'm optimistic because functional programming is already seen as an often viable alternative to bashing on an array - garbage collection is a useful abstraction outside the computer too.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad situation - hell, the bulk of my work is prototyping, and I throw away probably 90% of it. I just don't think this is unique to design, and I think that software engineering differs in that you usually need to proceed farther to see the flaws in your design. Science is a more apt metaphor - the scientists I know easily throw away 99% of their lifetime output, because the point of science is to prove yourself wrong as quickly as possible.
"Internet was a luxury in our struggling country"
I can only imagine that doing outsourced/offshored work brings with it an extra level of dehumanized drudgery.
I am a software engineer who typically works with small teams and/or small businesses. While the code-writing itself can be mindless CRUD work, and is almost never interesting on a theoretical level, solving actual problems for my users makes it worthwhile to a large extent. I am solving real problems for people trying to get through their days -- people I get to work with face-to-face. That's rewarding.
If you're doing mindless CRUD work for somebody five thousand miles and several levels of management away, though, that kind of rewarding feeling must rarely be possible. I don't know if I could do it.
1. You get to create things
2. You make things that are useful to other people
3. It is fascinating to see the program you wrote execute as intended
4. There is always more to learn – you are never done
5. Short distance between idea and running program
6. Code is very expressive
There are also lots of jobs to chose from, and they pay relatively well, so if you don't like where you are: switch. There is no reason to stay in a boring job when there are many interesting ones to switch to. More on why programming is great: "Why I Love Coding" http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/
Make it a hobby. The stuff you care about at least. Apply things you discover there in your professional life and you'll stand-out and be noticed.
Most programmers don't love the job. They don't go home and think about how something can be made more efficient or scale better or fit into smaller spaces. Hell, most don't know the meaning of time and space and why those things matter. Those who do (so much so that they make a hobby out of it) are the kinds of people you want working for/with you.
Hang in there. It's not all bad.
11 Years ago I starting in the video games industry, as a graphics-programmer. This meant I lived and breathed graphics-related topics. After about 6 years I could no longer take the tedium. I moved away from graphics into more general programming (in the same company) and found the variation really helped me get through the day. I've now left the games industry and couldn't be happier.
My suggestion is that if you are unhappy in your current programming role, learn some new stuff in your spare time and apply for a new job. At the end of the day, we do stuff that only a small % of the population can do. It's a skill that people are willing to pay you for, and you don't have to go down mines or anything :)
I program Android at home and decide when I want to do the boring parts. Sometimes I make it fun by finding some way I can script or generate the boring, repetitive parts of programing games or layouts. Heck, sometimes I just grind at it with a 6 pack and a good playlist. But at work there's often weeks at a time where I'm forced to do the crap work that no one ever really dreamed of. It needs to get done, it has strict deadlines and I'm not allowed to drink. But it pays me well and its part of the stepping stones to getting to the fun parts.
After spending the amount of time I have on HN I must admit that I am blessed with the position I'm in so I can't complain fully about it but its not fair to say that programming is a job to avoid simply because you're tasked with the crap every so often. For one, you need to earn your stripes to be put in that position where your responsibility and accountability are high enough to get the critical components. The guy right out of school onto the job dreams big but its no different from any trade or job in the world: new guy gets the grunt work. Perhaps its because I spend more time talking with fellow geeks or perhaps we do have a small superiority complex but no one should be fresh into a career thinking they'll be the one doing all the magnificent things you see on the web crafted by experts and superstars of their field. Heck I went through that faze too and I'm still very young but its much easier to see once you interact with the next shipment of grads: I don't hand off the critical work because I don't know they're good for it yet.
Right now, I write fault-tolerant, distributed systems in Go for a living. I really enjoy it. But a decade ago, my first programming jobs were building websites in ASP (pre-.NET), PHP, and ColdFusion for a little over minimum wage. There are truly very few software tasks worse than writing ColdFusion.
I now count myself as proficient in a number of languages and I've done all kinds of different things over the course of my career. My latest side project is learning game development. Maybe my next job will be doing that?
If you don't like what you do, make the choice to do something else, then take the steps to make that goal a reality. You never know where you'll end up, unless you lack the energy or courage to try.
My story is very similar: teenager obsessed with programming, working with paltry early-days computers (Sinclair ZX-80, Apple II, TRS-80, etc.), writing Mersenne-prime & other such fascinating-but-obscure programs, got a $4/hr job writing dBASE II programs for an apple farm, way advanced in college, 20+ year career as a software engineer.
I don't think I ever caught myself writing code for my employer and thinking "hey, I really enjoy this".
Speak for yourself. I wrote lots of code for my employers thinking "hey, I really enjoy this". I love my job. Oh sure sometimes the situation gets hard/grinding/depressing, but that's what ANY job will do. On the whole I REALLY ENJOY PROGRAMMING AS A CAREER.
It has nothing to do with boring/exciting, that depends on the project/company/coworker.
So if one limits oneself to just what the customer wants boss what the boss demands - programming is terrible, but programming unlike most other jobs allows one to follow one's own heart with costs tending to zero.
This is why I started working for myself. There are some things I have to do that I don't enjoy, but for the most part I do get to pick and choose how I spend my time.
Have a look at getting into a PhD programme in Computer Science, Computational Engineering or something even more abstract like Computation Number Theory.
I really enjoy making games and simulations, but I have trouble picturing myself working in the industry, as I really want to work on technology that solves problems. And if I were to "specialize" as a game programmer, I would probably be a generalist in that subfield.
One area that I find extremely interesting is the realm of real-time, embedded software. My dream job would be at Tesla Motors, writing software for autonomous cars. Unfortunately, it's not as easy to get experience with embedded systems as it is to get game programming or web development experience. And, for the same reason, it's not as easy (or cheap) to amass a portfolio of, erm... UAVs, robots, elevators -- what have you.
I also enjoy making web applications, doing system administration, and everything in between. And I can't deny that I've had my "start x website in dorm room like Zuck and be rich" entrepreneurial fantasies.
Does anyone have advice or words of wisdom? If I had to choose one area to specialize in, it would be embedded software, but I feel like I could get a ton of great experience as a game programmer on my own, for free, while getting a cursory glimpse at embedded systems would require more than just time as an investment.
How might I pursue a career in embedded software? I think the real-time nature of game programming would be a nice complement to real-time embedded software development. Should I pursue both?
Sorry about the essay, but this dilemma has been bugging me incessantly lately.
You should contact some of the research professors at your institution and see what's going on at the school in those fields. Look up the robotics/AI professor and go knock on his door. Ask him what he's working on and if he needs any undergrad programming help. Usually these professors will be glad to take on a student to a team if there's room at all.
Of course you'll likely need some decent to good C/C++ skills, and arm/x64/x86 Assembly may help too.
What makes you think those you can't be those specialist you mentioned? All those roles are still very high in demand, and if you really find generic software engineering lowering your IQ, nothing is stopping you to do those things in your own time. Remember Linux?
Even in mainstream game development, people tackle complex algorithmic problems everyday. From game graphics to enemy AI, there are countless "hard problems" to solve.
My point is, just because your boss wants you to churn out generic CRUD apps everyday, doesn't mean you have to limit yourself to that. Just by spending half an hour everyday on something you really loves can make a difference.
I don't have to imagine it. Happens every fucking day.
I think programming is easier for those who learned it at non-IT work: they don't have passion for theoretical, ideal things, and every chore solved is a holiday. I did like this. I had no time to argue about semantics/approaches/OOP, just to resolve problems with very limited time. Then I went to professional IT companies, and except for money and some smart guys around, the work isn't inspiring.
If you're going to dedicate your life to programming, you have to love code: syntax, text editing, refactoring, commenting, testing, debugging, tuning. All of that low-level stuff. The problem-solving and learning-new-technology fun parts are just the icing on the cake.
I think the fact that we've all grown used to pretty UI and are design/experience conscious means there are more developers spending their energy in prettying up stuff, making it mobile friendly, etc. which not everyone enjoys - though looking at it after its done might still give some satisfaction.
On the other hand, I still enjoy writing scripts to help me with tasks, figuring out a nice algorithm to solve a problem, etc.
If you have a 60-40 mix of stuff you don't enjoy and stuff you enjoy, I think that is OK. If that 60 grows to 70/80, makes it really tough to stay motivated.
> It is now time to conclude this long-winded rant.
> I would like to end with a piece of advice for those who
> are thinking of becoming a software engineer. My advice
> would be - do not become a "software engineer". I know
> there is a lot of demand right now, but 1) the demand
> won't last forever; 2) most of the "software engineer"
> jobs are boring as shit.
Or pick a general boring thing and automate it away. Thats also hard.
Or perhaps enable non-programmers to write programs for their own problem domain without having to learn much (if any) programming, so you don't have to do the "boring shit". Hows that for a challenge? :)
Sometimes political or budgetary constraints can prevent projects like these from finding legs, but good points.
Growing up, I often worked summer jobs that were either construction or factory work, right beside men in their 30s and 40s. Some days the weather was over 100 and we were expected to work in it for 9 or more hours. Some days we were doing something near a chicken plant where I had to put up with an unbearable odor the entire day. Often times, our only available toilet was of the portable kind. I've been a ditch digger. I've been up on a metal roof in that 100+ degree weather. I've spent 8 hours consecutively (with the exception of lunch) doing the exact same thing every 30 seconds.
Programming isn't so bad, by comparison.
Name three that your boss will allow you to work on.
> there are all sorts of exciting projects to get involved with
Name three that your boss will allow you to work on.
> If you think its all just JS hacks you're doing it wrong.
Or maybe that's his boss doing it wrong: like, "This form is ugly on our HR people's computer. Please fix it by next week." Of course, the stuff is badly written, badly documented, and have to work with 5 different browsers, including IE6. The fastest way to please your boss is the JS hack. The fastest way to displease your boss is to suggest that, maybe, IE6 is a teeny bit outdated.
Your boss may not let you work on it but there's no reason to not work on it outside the job for 5-10 hours a week, just for kicks. Those kicks might be enough to keep the day job more bearable.
If at the end of the day, putting in 5-10 hours a week extra out of your own time for it is considered too much, then accept that you also see your work as just a job.
When a job sucks, the solution hardly lies in what you do in your spare time. First, I would try to improve the job, or enjoy it, or quit it, or annihilate it (we're programmers, annihilating jobs is what we do). And if all that fails or otherwise isn't worth my efforts, then I will give up and learn to love my spare time.
When someone is complaining their job sucks, my first reflex isn't to tell them to man up, cheer up, or give up. It's not helping. instead, I ask myself what could be done about it.
If you find your interests lead away from your job, then that is a path to skilling up for a more appropriate job.
If you think it sucks you have to work so long and hard to find and/or get those interesting jobs it does .
But it's because other people are willing to do this and will get the interesting jobs leaving the boring ones to those that don't.
For a web front end task job that doesn't have JQuery 5-10 hours in it could save so many hours at work after introduction you may look like a hero and win you more paid at work research time.
Prove you are worth research time to your employer.
Of course, this assumes that it actually is your boss who's wrong, and you're not just ignorant of the market realities that your business operates in. If you want to avoid that JS hack and drop support for IE6, you better have numbers that show that it's a negligible part of your revenues. And if you do have those numbers, it will be much easier to convince your boss.
(True story: I was working on Google's visual redesign of 2010. As a team, we all estimated that supporting IE6 would double the development cost and add a minimum of 3 months to the schedule. We took this info - along with numbers for IE6 market share - to our managers, who took this to their managers, until it reached the executive level. The verdict: we didn't have to support IE6. This was the first version of Google Search that dropped support for it - Docs had dropped support a couple months earlier - and started the tidal wave of sites not supporting IE6.)
I don't know who wrote the linked article. But I do know that the above text was the wikipedia page for Ariel T. Glenn before it was deleted. She currently works for the Wikimedia Foundation.
After all, motivation is something that you build, not something you have passed-on by DNA.
Instead of spending 99% of your time bullet-proofing your software for idiot users who can't use a computer, write software as a tool to automate your own job.
Not all programming is writing web apps or gluing together frameworks. Some developers work on lower-level software, which involves writing more code from scratch and doing more algorithmic thinking. It depends a lot on the job. There are very few problems in the code I work on that can be solved using Google or StackOverflow.
I think a lot of people can relate to this. I've often wished I could have finished college right before the .com boom, because it would have been so obvious to me that the internet was going to be big. Or would it have been? Hindsight is 20/20. If you had been born decades earlier you likely wouldn't even be into programming.
I can distinctly recall seeing Mosaic for the first time in 1993 when a fellow undergrad showed me his home page. My thoughts were essentially, "that's really stupid: it's just a bunch of boring information about you". Email and usenet seemed (to me) far more interesting and important.
Complicating this plan, though, is the fact that I put more emphasis on family than on work satisfaction. If I have to put up with a boring job but get to live in a nice house in a nice community and spend time with family, that might be worth it. I'm just not totally satisfied that it is yet. But I can't go risk everything in a San Fransisco start-up attempt.
If you don't like what you are working on, isn't it naive to assume that the entire field is like what you are doing?
Get some passion. If you show up to work, close tickets, do enough to get by, then not think about programming until the next morning when you show up to work you are not going to learn, you are not going to level up, and you are not going to impress anyone. Maybe you can gladhand your way into management, but you won't be any good at it and you've risen to the level of your own incompetence. I can't imagine that is very pleasant either.
Meanwhile people all over the place are working on hard problems of their own choosing and love every minute of it. I think they earned that. They earned it by taking the risk of success or failure on themselves, or by working hard and learning and working hard and learning until they had the freedom to choose what they would work on, because the decision makers trusted them to deliver if it was possible to deliver.
You can't shit shovel your way out of being a shit shoveler.
Software plays such a critical role in today's society that I almost (almost) think computer scientists and software developers need to be licensed like civil engineers, which would then create some standards. Of course there are a lot of reason why this would be a bad idea, but bottom line issue is the lack of consistency between schools.
The thing he doesn't consider is people like me, so let me flesh out that penultimate paragraph:
"If you like to build products that help solve problems in the real world, become a full stack web developer. If you like the delight that comes from encountering a user experience that has considered corner and edge cases and approached them in a unique or profound way, learn how to do the hacky shit that seems super boring or mundane to other people."
Programming is only terrible if you work on something you don't care about. I'm assuming that's his real point but it gets hung up on the day-to-day frustrations of web development in particular. It's pretty clear to me that web dev isn't his favorite coding discipline, but just because it's not his cup o tea doesn't mean others don't enjoy the shit out of it. I don't get how people can love being QA engineers but far be it for me to say its terrible.
If you're building your own web app, you decide if, and when, to support IE. If it's bringing in $10k/month and you can double that, it's worth the hours of unpleasantness to get the additional money. If it's something you're doing for fun that isn't going to make money, you don't do the IE hacks. But there's no point in doing someone else's IE support, unless you can get a promotion or a bonus out of it.
The problem is that while he sucks at politics (that's why he's doing someone else's shit work) he doesn't know he sucks-- the first of four stages, unknowing incompetence-- so he thinks that the industry is just chock-full of shit work, because that's all he's able to get (and he hasn't figured out that you don't really "get assigned" the best work; you just do it). He needs to learn how to fight for himself; that's his real problem. Otherwise, he'll end up pulling a Walter White over-correction when it's decades too late.
We don't all like the same things or find the same things interesting or dull. Some of us like the variety, just working on whatever a day throws up, tinkering with whatever to solves a problem a person or an organisation might have and make things a little bit better. Code which is never going to amaze or astound anyone, code that may have been written under horribly compromised circumstances, can still make a big difference to people, and for some people that in itself is satisfying.
Programming is many things, at one end an end in itself at the other a tool for doing stuff. Programmers find different elements of what programming can be interesting and / or fulfilling.
Yes, there are a whole bunch of programming jobs which are wiring up CRUD apps, or writing jobs to parse data. They're not satisfying for some people but that makes them a bad match for those people, it doesn't make programming terrible.
That's definitely not a software engineer routine. Engineers craft/architect solutions instead of "wiring shit together". Of course, being able to re-use existing stuff is part of the job but if your job is wiring things together, specially if you do not know how those things work, you're not a software engineer.
That said, there are different software engineering gigs with different level of difficulties and solving different kind of problems. I like the advice of specializing, getting into more computer science, but that's still software engineering.
Don't get fooled just because the market is full of shitty web development gigs, that's a small portion of "software engineering".
Now I'm transitioning into the business world, and finance. I absolutely love trading stocks, and the thrill that comes with it (especially when you're on the winning end of a trade), but of course there's plenty of downsides too (reports, spreadsheets).
And of course, I write code for fun and to automate certain tasks, but even that can be tedious.
There really is no perfect job, but there are good ones. I think it's more important to maintain work-life balance than to be overly concerned about how much fun your job is...
If I have to write a TPS report generator, I will try to make it the most concise, reusable, tested and well documented TPS report generator that the world has ever seen.
I don't think that means much of anything, and I don't identify with the rest of the post, but I find it interesting that someone from another time and place has a nearly identical programming origin story.
programming is a toolset, its in the eye of the programmer where the passion for creativity, design and ultimately product lies. programming when combined with architectural skill creates the beautiful products we call iphones, devices, web stuff...
if someone is stuck thinking programming is just a tool they will naturally see it as boring or mundane. If someone takes that tool and changes the world with it, then Im sure they will not see it as such.
Or you'd be complaining about writing yet another missile ballistics program, or converting another basic mathematical or statistical algorithm into MUMPS.
There is always grunt work, but instead of "battling" javascript and CSS you could use the opportunity to learn more about browsers, interface design, etc. Channel the frustration into building new, better frameworks, or helping improve the existing ones. There are plenty of opportunities to exercise your CS education in fast-growing or large-scale businesses. And for all I know, solving problems in the kernel or coding OpenGL could be even worse.
For me, solving problems in the kernel is immensely more interesting and rewarding than fixing the n-plus-oneth CSS aligning bug. It also comes with the added advantage of using real development tools instead of nuts and bolts that barely help you.
On tooling, take a look at current webkit/FF/Opera inspectors, TraceGL, TernJS, the upcoming IE11 developer tools and TypeScript. You'll be surprised.
Or, as jwz has done, open a bar and sell beer instead.
Even as a hobby, I've always preferred writing a script that parses badly broken websites and sends commands over SSH to an ncurses program that does something fun and useful, than calculating some number that has been known since the 30s.
Brokenness is fun, a challenge. It's straightforward CRUD that I dread.
Check out section 7.6 of Phil Greenspun's SITE CONTROLLER thesis http://philip.greenspun.com/research/tr1408/complete.pdf . It seems there has long been plenty of undesirable programming work (anyone for in-house COBOL?) but a BS in CS may have been a more reliable route to interesting work before the PC software industry.
I've been working all day from a bar in downtown Austin, TX. My CEO is a developer and is very understanding. Deadlines have to be met, but how or when you work is at your discretion.
I previously worked in a very harsh environment with a hostile CEO, and I can understand that it can be oppressive. However, I think that the status quo is changing.
/2c
I think that almost any particular sort of work can be either wonderful or terrible depending on a lot of other factors:
- autonomy
- relationship with coworkers/management/clients
- work/life balance (cliche, but there's really something there)
- possibilities for learning new things in the course of the work, etc.
Cooking professionally can be ugly, filthy, horrible hard work. There's the television version of the rich and famous cook and the reality of the actual work being really hard. And, yes, you have to do a lot of stuff you don't really enjoy doing. And, yes, it isn't all creative and wonderful.
Why am I making an analogy to cooking? Because over the last few years I've ended-up doing a lot of cooking for my family. I've studied some and really enjoy the creative process. However, I've also found myself completely and utterly fed-up with it at times. I used to be the designated cook when we went camping. The last time we went camping I drove out as far as necessary to go get take-out.
So,yes, programming, depending on the choices you make, can be like sausage making.
If you are the creative type you need to make an effort to find the right job for you or start your own business. Still, as someone else pointed out, you are going to have to stomach the idea that you are still going to have to do things that you will not enjoy. This is true of any job.
I always told my employees that I'd never ask them to do anything I was not willing to do myself (or hadn't done before myself). Examples of that were things like washing the pile of filthy coffee mugs in the kitchen area ('cause it seems that adults are pretty bad about cleaning after themselves sometimes) or getting in our Haas CNC machine to clean it. The point wasn't that I expected them to actively do these things but to realize that all of us ought to understand that there are things you don't enjoy doing that simply need to be done.
As a programmer you need to seek out work that really turns you on. How do you know? Because you can't stop thinking about it and you can't stop working on it. You want to talk about it all the time and you want to learn how to do it better. In other words, you are passionate about it.
In general terms there's a lot of mobility in the CS world. You need to take advantage of this and actively hunt for work that is really engages you while fully understanding that utopia does not exist.
Yes, all jobs have some boring bits, but if it's always boring then you should change!
There are really enjoyable programming jobs out there. It depends on:
- the tech-culture and environment at your work - your manager(s) and colleagues (kind of related to the previous point) - your problem space
Identify why your current work sucks and then either move or change it!
Programming is one of the only engineering fields that has a quick feedback loop between Hypothesis -> Results. And I love that! Also the open ended difficulty bar inspires constant accomplishment. I love it by every character typed! I have to stop myself cause I have some coding to do ;^p
Just take a step back and ask, "what is the company I work for trying to do?" And if you don't like it, or don't think it's cool enough, move along. Again, it's all your choice.
In most cases though programming is a means to and end. In that case you've got to not only enjoy programming - but also believe in that end. When you do you'll happily wade through all kinds of language, system, and framework quirks and frustrations to get to that end.
Get yourself some new development work, and try to pick the hardest challenges and that'll often be enough to stimulate you.
With a little not realising if you actually take your hobbies seriously they too will have drudgery in them at times. Not dreaming about but actually finding Mersenne primes is a world of hell.
If you find yourself in those kinds of jobs: move on. There's plenty of interesting projects and companies out there that will allow you to apply yourself. Keep looking.
this is one of my greatest fears. at the same time, it seems inconceivable - i can't picture it.
could programming really go the way of being a lawyer?
how would that happen - less demand for software, or an oversupply of software engineers?
If you've never really enjoyed your job I can't fathom how it's taken you so long to realise this isn't for you.
What must be noted is that there are other jobs that pay just as well, and do not entail as much complexity and pain.
Just ask all the hustlers who make us build their pyramids.
sigh
I cringe whenever I hear this in any context. If you find yourself feeling this way, you should strive to do the things the next generation will feel this way about.
The world doesn't owe anyone satisfaction. It's up to the individual to find what makes them happy. Maybe some jobs aren't all that satisfying, in that case at least you now know this and can do something about it. Want to be a NASA computer scientist? Guess what, you can!
Lamenting about the 'golden days' of software where it was all tucked away in labs is short sighted. There are SO many more opportunities to do SO many more exciting things. Software is in its infancy, the real world changing tools are still to be discovered. Apply yourself.
I recommend software engineering to any of my friends who I think would find it as fascinating and enjoyable as I have.
No one who can say this about themself is in a position to be making any absolute statements about anything.
How does a programmer NOT wake up every morning with a head full of inspired, flaming joy at the thought of what we do for a living? I've been at this for 5 years now (putting me in the same generation as OP, and the other blogger I came across) and I'm still ragingly in love with this craft. And I (_just_, you might say) write web apps. Yes, there are tedious days (we are, as many have stated WORKING, after all). And yes, sometimes the nature of constantly shifting specs leads us into some ugly code - but that's the nature of writing and designing to meet the needs of customers; sometimes customers really just NEED something that isn't very pretty.
But the root of what we do is this: we conjure ideas from memory and imagination, commit them into words and incantations in the terminal, and send out our instructions to be carried out by the machine. Making our will manifest through a medium that is almost completely malleable to our intentions. If there's another trade out there that's more nakedly similar to "wizard" I'd love to hear about it. What we do is barely-adulterated magic. And there is so much room for improvisation, art, and beauty in the crafting of our instructions, that even a simple CRUD interface can become a work of glory.
I freely admit that, in my enthusiasm, I'm sounding a bit deranged. And I'm painting this in a bit more glowing light than most day-to-day coding deserves. But it pains me to see a programmer with such a negative outlook on programming. And when that view gets touted as a warning against being a coder, I feel those of us who really and truly enjoy our trade need to be standing up and making the counter-argument - with all the ardor and enthusiasm it deserves.
Addendum: and OK, so the OP may not be making the claim that "programming" itself isn't what's bad, it's the JOB that's bad. It's writing the code that our clients need, day-in, day-out, that's bad. My counter-claim to that: writing bad code is a choice. You can look at every problem that comes to you as "just more toilet cleaning", or you can look for the aspects of the problem that separate it from all the code you've written before, and start writing the correct, clean, elegant response to it. And if you're solving the same problem a second time, well it ought to be that much easier than before, right? If you solved the problem PROPERLY the first time, there should be very little work in solving it a SECOND time. So now you find yourself getting paid to do less work, while - hopefully - leaving yourself room to more fully commoditize whatever process you've found yourself on, making it easier to KEEP getting paid while doing less and less work each time. With your remaining time, you solve OTHER problems, and continue filling the pipeline with magic and money.
Seeing the job as tedious and boring starts as a choice you make yourself. Getting back the magic you felt in your youth is just a matter of remembering it; and choosing to see it in the next project that hits your inbox.
I'm much newer to this (one year and still studying) but I really hope I can feel this way for the rest of my life.
In a world being eaten by software, in a world where information is on its way to becoming the most atomic unit of value, it's hard to imagine a more profound and useful skill.
That said, I don't think he has to stay stuck in this mentality. And, there are many benefits to being "just a software engineer". Much of it depends on your attitude towards life and what you're expecting and/or hoping to get out of it.
First, it's important to recognize that as we get older, we'll eventually have to confront the fact that not all of our dreams and ambitions will come true. If you look at the number of thought leaders in the industry in ratio to the total number of programmers, very few make it to the top 1%. I don't think it's a zero-sum thing, it's more that at a certain point, people give up and decide to do something else. OP may be one of those people who decides that because reality didn't match his expectations, he's just going to give up. On the other hand, he could decide to push himself and his understanding of what it means to program to a new level. And then he might see new opportunities in his current job that he hadn't noticed before. I know that this can sound hopelessly fanciful and idealistic, but it really is true and quite possible; I speak from my own experience here.
Second, one of the most awesome things about programming - regardless of the type you're doing - is that it helps improve your mind. Since I've been in the tech industry, I've found that my thinking tends to be cleaner, more rigorous, and more realistic (though not always, of course). I have an easier time understanding difficult topics than I used to and I also find the process of learning easier than in the past. For that reason alone programming is a worthwhile pursuit. Who doesn't like their mind to work better?
Finally, OP has some growing to do and should try to realize that his current predicament has much to do with his attitude and little to do with his actual job. As other posters have noted, this problem exists in every creative industry. You were excited about the pure fun of it when you were younger, and now you feel mugged by reality as it were. Part of this could relate to our model of education which sometimes makes it seem as if academia is much preferable to actual private industry work. Like they said in Ghostbusters - "they expect results in the private sector!"
My advice to OP would be to try and balance his current work responsibilities with something fun outside of work, something that gets his juices flowing. Learning to bring a sense of play into your really helps, otherwise yes...the sense of drudgery can kill you. So the trick is to learn to stay positive. Sounds like a tall order but it's definitely doable.
Not for me.
Mine is a Wonderful Life.
My main issue is a manager or a boss that can't manage a project properly and it crashes and burns (and I just have to watch and smile) or I am forced to work weekends or extra hours because of it.
This has happened at nearly every development job I have ever had. So, I started my own company and now work for myself.
No wonder we have so many product managers, project managers, UX designers, UI designers, other forms of designers, but very few developers.
No wonder people rather be PMs of different sorts.
Your job is what you make of it. Bring some awesome music, change your desktop background, install a new theme, read some shit during lunch. It's what you make of it, and you're in a better position than a lot of the people out there!
As for your job being what you make it, I totally agree. There are lots of ways I have made my work life better recently even when I hate my job (for example I got a keurig) and until you do everything you can in that aspect you can't be sure you won't be happy. When you do all of these and THEN still aren't happy, find a new job.
To make any job "fun", I always have IRC and messages going so I can talk to people a lot of the time. Keeps the day exciting.
In a lot of software shops, you are not allowed to chat, use IM or even bring headphones (like here)
My experience and I would venture to say most of the comments are based on people working in North America (or a similar place).
I would say that likely you work for a company that is either based in India or another similar country. I can definitely see how they would treat software developers like a sweat shop.
And its tough as "change your job" doesn't readily apply.
I don't dispute what you are saying but that seems to much for a software company to be doing in North America.
Actually Germany and the company has its strongest workforce in the US.
1. Programming punishes you brutally if you do it wrong. Bugs occur for what seems like no reason, problems are unsolveable, and the job becomes an unrelenting, unrewarding slog. (Conversely, it's a hell of a lot of fun if you're doing it right.)
2. Some companies and teams are managed by idiots who will force you to do things wrong. If you're 22, you'll probably end up working for at least one or two before you're 40. Leave them, because...
3. Until you get used to doing things right, and learn how to things properly, and get the credibility that comes with actually being good at this job-- and that takes a while-- nothing will make sense and your career will be for shit.
When you're bad at your job (and everyone is, when starting out) or when things are bad, it's not obvious. Nothing is ostensibly bad, so much as incoherent. You get trapped in a flood of grunt work that seems beyond automation because either (a) you're not skilled enough, yet, to do it; or (b) you're not in an environment of excellence that encourages automation. When things seem unpleasantly stochastic, get out and move to a more coherent place.
The issue with OP is that he hasn't figured out that solving the right problems is far more important than solving the highest percentage of what's put in front of you. IE hacks? If it's your web app, or if you're strongly investigated in the success of the thing, make a cost-benefit analysis and decide whether to do the IE hacks; at least if you end up doing them, you're doing them for you. If it's someone else's ambition and you know that doing good work won't be paid in kind, just do well enough on the grunt work to avoid political adversity. Then pack away as much time as you can to learn the skills you'll need, and make the contacts you'll want, for the next act.
Rule One, which should never be broken: if it's bad for your career, don't work on it. I'm not saying never work on unpleasant stuff. Sometimes, the unpleasant work is important. If you ever want to be a founder, you have to get used to doing annoying or unpleasant work when there's no one else to do it. However, if the work actually hurts your career-- and there is plenty of work like that out there-- then it's virtually never worth doing.
In the short-term, if your boss considers it important, it is (by definition) good for your career. However, if you're getting tossed the IE support while the interesting work gets passed on to favorites or hogged, then it's time to (a) just get up and do more interesting stuff-- it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission-- or (b) find another team or company. So long as people like OP don't realize that they need to take self-executive responsibility for their own careers, they'll be doing the shit work no one else wants to do.
Programming gets a lot better as you (a) get better at it, (b) gain credibility, and (c) learn the warning signs that surround bad jobs and failing teams. There are a lot of people who get to work on better stuff than someone else's IE support. It takes a while to get there, and it's done one day at a time, but unless you're untalented, steady progress will lead that way. Even if you don't care to play politics actively, you have to learn the warning signs. That takes years. Until you develop those skills, everything seems nonsensical and wrong, though; and the industry seems uniformly terrible. It's not. It's mostly terrible; the good news is that it's mostly terrible because of the MBA-style, anti-intellectual management that used to be common everywhere, and that's slowly going extinct-- because what it produces is of too low quality for it to survive.