Whatever happened to programming? (Old post - has anything changed?)

http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/whatever-happened-to-programming

by ColinWright • 15 years ago

34 17 15 years ago

reprog.wordpress.com

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

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

The follow-up article at http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/whatever-happened-to-... addresses this comment, essentially saying "my job doesn't suck, but what about everyone else?"

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

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?

Produce• 15 years ago

What path worked for you?

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

Working for small companies. They tend to invent new things, instead of trying to leverage existing off-the-shelf products into synergy, and other market-speak that just means they put libraries together and call it a product.

There's plenty of untapped stuff out there, and some fields are so crazy about business logic that there's no way to re-use anyone else's, so you have to write it yourself.

I also develop random things that suit my fancy in my free time.

I have yet to feel like I was just putting Lego blocks together.

zwieback• 15 years ago

I work for the "man" and lucked out in the sense that there are still pockets of new product development where you get to do some interesting coding that has nothing to do with plugging libraries together. And I get to buy a $10K scope if I need it - happy camper!

But even without funds or a cushy R&D job, I would go farther and say that this is the best time ever for the type of coding the author suggests is more stimulating: for next to nothing I can buy a fairly powerful microcontroller for robotics or whatever, for less than your monthly smartphone bill you can buy an embedded Linux system and do some really heavy lifting.

jdost• 15 years ago

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.

arcdrag• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

thomaslangston• 15 years ago

We can still play Minecraft.

carsongross• 15 years ago

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.

JackQuack• 15 years ago

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.

owenmarshall• 15 years ago

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.

hsmyers• 15 years ago

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 :)

gromgull• 15 years ago

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.

sequence7• 15 years ago

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.

Whatever happened to programming? (Old post - has anything changed?)

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