
Whatever happened to programming? (Old post - has anything changed?) - ColinWright
http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/whatever-happened-to-programming
======
owenmarshall
IMO, this article is much ado about nothing. There are _plenty_ of companies
that offer programmers interesting challenges. I dare say that most of us
posting here work in such a company, or have before.

For those programmers who are supposedly stuck in a hellish 9-5 mix of
Javadocs and enterprise-grade XML and ETL and SOAP, consider, for a moment:

1\. Are they really "stuck"? The market for programmers is _massive_ ; why
should anyone be stuck in a job that they hate?

Of course there may be risks -- big enterprises have steady pay, benefits, and
much more certainty than the startup, but if you pick those advantages over
taking a risk... well, you can't exactly claim to be stuck, now can you? :)

2\. Are those jobs really "hellish"? Personally, I'd dislike them. But an
unhappy programmer is an unproductive programmer, and companies can't survive
being staffed by unproductive programmers. Is it that hard to believe that
programmers exist that _enjoy_ just chaining technologies together?

In the end, there are far too many options out there for this "woe is our
industry" type of post to really mean anything. But I'd propose, as a simple
solution for people who hate their day jobs: go home and do something you find
interesting. Maybe you can build a company around it. Maybe it gets you
noticed by a cool company. But at least you're having fun.

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jdost
Well the complaint is somewhat moot. The programming he is discussing is
professional, where it is results and business driven. If every time a company
wanted to develop a product that uses a database, MVC framework, web server,
etc, the programmers had to write some of those components from scratch, it
would be a nightmare. It would take much longer than necessary and probably be
riddled with security holes. This is not a sound practice for business.

If people are looking for the creativity in developing some of these things,
they can do it in their free time. That is the beauty of programming, all you
need to do it is a computer, keyboard, and monitor. There is nothing stopping
someone from going home and writing a database over a weekend.

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arcdrag
Whatever happened to home construction? In the old days I chopped down my own
trees to form into straight boards for the frame, dig up my own rock to make a
foundation, mine my own iron to be formed into nails, etc... Now I just buy
all the pieces I need from the hardware store and piece them together to build
a house.

~~~
tintin
Funny comment :)

But serious: there is nobody stopping you from cutting down a tree to build a
house. I think this also applies to programming. At home I am putting hours in
programing my own stuff, stuff that is done before and available in libraries.
I want to re-invent the wheel just to know how it is done.

At work it's all about cost. You don't have time to re-invent the wheel.

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carsongross
Nobody owes you an interesting job. If you want one, it is your responsibility
to find it.

Warning: this may involve tradeoffs like hard work, failure, uncertainty and
penury.

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wccrawford
I keep hearing this argument, and I always feel sorry for these people. I see
all this new stuff being developed, some of it by me, and I think, "Man, why
can't they just go do that?"

It's almost like they're broken. They've decided they need to work for the
man, and that they can't do exciting things on their own time. They can see
the path they want to take, yet they keep walking the same path they hate.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
The follow-up article at [http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/whatever-
happened-to-...](http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/whatever-happened-to-
programming-redux-it-may-not-be-as-bad-as-all-that/) addresses this comment,
essentially saying " _my_ job doesn't suck, but what about everyone else?"

~~~
wccrawford
So he writes an article that makes it sound like he has this problem, but he's
really just holding a pity-party for other people that he's imagining, and
-I'm- the one that gets modded down?

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ColinWright
This was posted 500 (or more) days ago, and the discussion there is
interesting. This is a genuine question as to whether people think the
situation is better, worse, or nothing to worry about - everything's fine?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1165623>

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hsmyers
I love it when a post on HN shows up a day after a mid-morning brunch based
rant about the subject at hand. It was my observation during the discussion
that if you take away all of the shiny toys that attend what passes for web
development these days, your average programmer would be left pretty much high
and dry and unable to continue at that point. Having vented at that point I
backed down and admitted that this was a VERY old argument that always takes
place as things change. Further that I really couldn't see any good reason why
things should be done the hard way. I even used to make jokes in my code where
main or the equivalent had a single function called 'just-do-it'. The fact
that I started out with IBM 360 BAL is totally irrelevant to today's
programmer and should be. I do worry about cases of 'what happens when': even
the best calculator is worthless if you don't know how to lay out the problem.
But that is a a minor problem/objection. I also find it interesting that my
'antique' knowledge has provided employment for precisely those situations he
mentions in the article: I can easily 'glue' together the output from one
black box to another. No one needs to worry about the boxes in question; which
is good since often they are inherited and are either a mystery or are quite
fragile or both. My code in the middle is typically quite short and very
easily modified to meet changing needs as necessary. So as much as I might
rant and rail about 'In my day', I'm actually better off today than I was
then. I also note that much of the toys I mock are in fact written by
programmers with the same bent as I have---much rather write a utility than an
application :)

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sequence7
When I used to play with code I could build anything I wanted and it was fun.
Now I have a job I have to build what the people who pay me need or want,
fortunately that can be fun too but often it isn't. That's why I call it work,
not play. I enjoy the satisfaction of making stuff happen via code and I don't
care whether I wrote the clever bit or not I care about whether my client is
happy.

If all you want to do is be a creative then that's easy, accept that you can
make anything you want but no-one will necessarily pay you for it. I think at
that point you're an artist and you get all the benefits and drawbacks that
the title entails. The main benefit being total freedom and the main drawback
being probable poverty.

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JackQuack
I think it's relative. If you're like me, and you grew up glueing libraries
together, then that is fun. It's relative. Sure, I know how to write assembly
and C, but I don't want to.

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gromgull
it's only about a year and a bit old - things don't change that quickly. Come
back and ask again in 2020 - with some luck, auto-completion in eclipse will
have reached some semi-strong AI point that can glue libraries together for
you.

