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twowatches

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Mate, don't point it out! Just enjoy how nice it is being able to be a "professional" without having to be a professional and regulated all the time. Imagine in ten years if they brought in a bunch of tests you had to do to get a programmers license - I'd honestly probably just change career, and in the end we'd just end up with a further shortage of programmers.

I use basically nothing of what I learned at uni to do my job. Everyone knows that the best devs usually didn't have any formal education. It's all based on merit - let's just keep it that way as it seems to work fine.

As a counter example - I'm currently living in Germany and I need a guy to fix up the walls of my house. Problem is it's impossible to find anyone to do it because there's not enough qualified craftsmen in the country. Everything is so tightly regulated that nothing gets done anymore, so instead there's a move towards folk trying to do it for themselves and buying materials from non-regulated big American-style hardware stores. Wouldn't life be better if we all had a broader skill set and were able to hack things together ourselves in an unofficial capacity like programmers do?

This describes me to a certain degree, and it's perfectly doable. I'm sure a lot of people do this, and I think a lot of the "find something you love" kind of posts are idealistic and unrealistic. I used to love software when I was younger and it was fresh and I still thought I might be a genius who could do something amazing, but then I went it to the real world and discovered that I was fairly average in what I did and, much importantly, anything you do for 40 hours a week becomes boring and a drag. That's why I keep my real interests and hobbies to my spare time where they're limited in time so they can't get boring. But at the same time this means I will never get that good at anything.

There are a small percentage of folk who are really good at programming and are at the bleeding edge making really cool stuff but for the vast majority it's just brick laying for a wage, which I think is fine but programming is exhausting so it's hard to find comfort and not burn out. I manage by having found cool guys to work with so it's a good laugh. I do wonder what I'll do when I finally just don't have the mental resilience to write code anymore and have to find another job.