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Ask Slashdot: What Are the Hardest Things Programmers Have To Do?
itwbennett writes "Software development isn't a cakewalk of a job, but to hear programmers tell it (or at least those willing to grouse about their jobs on Quora and Ubuntu Forums), what makes programming hard has little to do with writing code. In fact, if the list compiled by ITworld's Phil Johnson has it right, the single hardest thing developers do is name things. Are you a software developer? What's the hardest part of your job?"
I actually agree with that list.
The head and tail of the list
9. Designing a solution
1. Naming things
are pretty much two sides of the same coin.
If you have a design, you will know what call things.
If you have names for everything, you will be able to build a design from there.
And these *are* the hardest things on the list.
By far the hardest part of my job as a professional software developer is estimating how long a feature will take to develop.
Estimates, and filling out my time sheet. The stuff I do doesn't fit into neat little categories that the PMs want (unless they're really vague).
Easy: The hardest thing a programmer has to do is explain why what they're doing isn't a simple matter of programming.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Apparently where I work, it's documentation. It's so hard, we don't have any.
I build something exactly from their specifications.
Someone wants something changed, I change it.
Someone else wants something changed, I change that.
Another person wants it back the way it started.
The users are NEVER happy. It's maddening.
Their laundry
Trying to comprehend other peoples code is, without a doubt, the hardest thing for me. Naming? That would have never occurred to me as a 'problem.' If you can't come up with a proper name fairly easily maybe you didn't really know where you were going.
Deal with clueless management.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
A distant second to development time estimation is when I'm working for a place that requires class and or worse, pseudo code level design. I would almost always rather do a functional spec or similar higher level design then just start cranking out code, making changes as needed.
I name all of my classes and variables "George." Problem solved.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
i mine as well tell them that I raise unicorns.
That was hard. I loved that dog.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
Deal with people....
It's the clueless marketing and product spec types who don't have a clue how computers work, don't have even the most superficial knowledge of how the current systems work, can't decipher what customers say they want, and write product specs which are so devoid of reality as to soak up more time straightening out than everything else combined.
Infuriate left and right
I get more requests than I can physically accomplish. Usually requests come from higher ups or people that really need something to make their jobs easier. I'd like to help everyone, but keeping up is impossible.
There are only two hard problems in Software Development. Naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.
The hardest thing i do on a daily basis is testing my code properly so that it won't break any of the 100 or so applications that it interacts with, any of which may also have change and impacted how they interact with my application.
And their ever changing specifications, indecisiveness, lack of comprehension of the time it takes to implement, then re-implement something, and their general reluctance to pay once it's done.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
Here's a spec that is incomplete and will keep changing over the life of the project. Tell me how long this will take and remember that your preformance will be measured against how well you meet your estimates.
What is the hardest thing "coders" have to do? Based on the evidence that I have seen, over more than 20 years?
Comment their code
Either that, or produce relevant, well-defined logging.
The other hard things they have to do are usually related to have a project to complex or ill-defined for producing a clear outcome. This is usually not the coder's doing, but a downstream problem derived from insufficient architecture role/guidance and probably a weak project management function.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The most annoying and maddening thing I've ever had to do was follow a changing spec list from a manager who thought it was some iterative process, instead of giving me an actual complete task description to work on.
Even though it was his nickel, it sucked the enjoyment out of that job.
to /. about inane flash-based articles when I should be working.
The hardest thing for me is that there are so many different environments and the code needs to work in all of them. There's integrated dev, qa, staging, end-to-end testing and production and each of them are subtly different. When deploying code, the logistics around how to get it to the right place at the right time in a working state can be really hard. A simple Google search for branching strategies will show that there's numerous ideas on the best way to shepherd a team through the code freeze, regression, deploy and MR phases.
Things get even more complex in an elastic environment where you have to autoscale. A simple call to a database can then require service discovery, master election and a whole host of other technologies/techniques that adapt to the fluid conditions of an elastic environment.
So from a code perspective, you always have to built abstract interfaces to non-specific infrastructure. A simple file loading turns into loading a URI that loads via the proper strategy (file://, s3:// or even something custom that reads from a db). A caching layer may be distributed in production and a simple in-memory hash in development, so that has to be abstracted too. Making sure your db queries are performant can also be difficult when your local database is nowhere near the scale that exists in production.
We've had some limited success using vagrant/chef for development environments to make them more similar to the downstream environments (i.e. developers actually run multiple VMs with individual functions as we have in our prod environment), but there's a limit to how much you can run on an individual machine.
Naming is the easy...just get a thesaurus and understand that it's important. Though it does remind me of one of my favorite quotes about software development (credit to whoever said it originally...I'm too lazy to look it up):
Half of programming is naming; half is figuring out responsibility boundaries; and half is rewriting because you named your god-object wrong
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
I agree with the list, generally-speaking.
I would expand on the designing things point: it's not just matching requirements with implementation, but also designing something which will still work 10 years and 20+ design and technology iterations from now. It's designing something to anticipate future changes, and code in flexibility where appropriate. It's making something which doesn't just perform the function, but doesn't have subtle flaws which will cause very hard to diagnose issues down the road. It's building code which will still be maintainable, even after various future iterations. The ability to design code properly is what differentiates between a "normal" developer, and and extraordinary one.
IMHO, anyway.
They promise things that can't be accomplished. Ugh.
I'm still trying to find a way to use the GPU for computations without having to jump through crazy hoops to do it. Also, multithreading in general is often a PITA to get right...
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I often find myself in conflict:
Short, easy to type, but possibly ambiguous names
-or-
Clear detailed names in 26+ characters
The choice depends on the audience I believe will be reading, and if I am having a good/bad day
Preventing a steady rain of feature requests that vastly exceed the development capacity. Often these features will take longer in programming time than the time they will save.
Another hard one is to use an older programming technology when you have been using a far newer one for some time.
Most of the other issues don't bother me if the project is really cool. Plus with my productivity ramped up management tends to stay out my way. OTH, with boring project, everything on the list is 10x more painful. Unfortunately, for the typical programmer, their entire life is spent working on the former.
Coders have probably spent far more time helping wars, real and simulated, than solving them.
Testing is often the hardest part of writing any feature or fix because often times it takes a relatively long time to set up an environment and a test scenario. It's also particularly difficult to narrow down a problem to its source when integrating with software for which no source code is available and support is sketchy. I've seen problems in Microsoft and SAP software that take a long time to work out and sometimes leave me SOL.
The hardest part is when the person asking you to implement something new doesn't think through the implications of what they're asking for. Sure it looks great on powerpoint for one specific use case, but rarely are all of the relevant factors are taken into account.
Math? Math is fun. Naming things? Very entertaining. Designing a complicated algorithm? It's what I live for.
Had you asked me twenty years ago what was the hardest thing about programming, I'd say, interfacing with non-technical management, for a variety of reasons.
As me today, and I'd say offshore infrastructure admin. Doing my job is fun. Somehow convincing someone else with few communication skills and little training to do their job so I can do mine, that's probably the hardest part today.
Not the answer you may be looking for, but the difficulty of the problem at hand is generally under your control. A balky environment managed by an undertrained call center is not. That's where the real pain originates.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Nothing is harder.
Nothing pains me more than seeing bad programmers make up fake problems they then "solve" with unnecessary complexity, no thought into the pattern applied (if applied at all) and using the loudness of numbers to silence a good idea.
Communicate effectively with less intelligent people
That's one of them. The other is getting everyone to agree on what to do and how to do it.
Nowhere on the list did I see cache invalidation. What gives?
I guess it's the third item on the list at work, only the other way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The hardest thing, consistently over the years, is to bridge the gap between the ideal and the practical. We've all faced problems that could be so easily solved if we could just rearchitect the code or omit a few requirements. Situations that would be so simple if only they were so simple. Crafting a beautiful algorithm and then being told that you have to add an exception here, or a special case there. I generally prefer driver-level programming because it tends to involve the lowest number of hacks and special cases(if you're laughing at this, you're probably a firmware guy that hasn't written an application or middleware in a while).
Working on a commercial product that has limited logging ability and trying to reproduce and diagnose errors in the field is pretty high up on my list of hard things to do. Unfortunately it is nearly all I do nowadays.
Working on unglamorous code or writing documentation is hard, but mainly because it's hard to stay focused.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
This was eloquently described by Phil Karlton, and extended by Martin Fowler:
There are only 2 hard things in computer science: Cache invalidation, the naming of things, and off-by-one errors.
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html
Getting up in the morning.
Find a mate and procreate
Hardest: understanding the actual requirements, fairly often the first part of that is distinguishing clients' (management, other departments, customers, whatever) proposed resolutions to situations they as a rule neglect to describe from the actual situations and the resulting problems that need solving.
Next hardest: naming is the easily-describable part of it, a prerequisite but not the purpose. What it boils down to is making it worthwhile to read the code, to follow the "if you can't teach it, you don't understand it" rule and not waste people's time.
After that, the stuff you can learn by ordinary study.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
What Are the Hardest Things Programmers Have To Do?
Dealing with incompetent project managers.
Yet Another Web Site
Getting the proper requirements from people.
1. Enumeration.
......
Wait. Strike that. Make it:
0. Enumeration.
Have gnu, will travel.
Please a Marketing department.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
Even worse is the expectation that the firmware can magically tweaked to make a poor design suddenly work as intended.
And not waste time on Slashdot all day.
The technical stuff is all doable. Politics, management, etc. -- those are hard. Best part of the job is getting that stuff out of the way and designing/coding.
I would rather write documentation all day long than write tests. Developing a good test suite is hard. (Putting together a crappy set of tests is easy, but of no value). As much as I hate developing a test suite, though, I love having it when it's time to make a release.
The hardest part of being a Software Engineer is making management understand how valuable you are and making them assign to you interesting work.
Because debugging did not even make the list, I must assume that the author is only an armchair programmer, or only writes toy programs. And why is "choosing names" rated harder than "designing"? This opinion could only come from someone who is often required to choose names, but never to design.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From my experience, the hardest thing for a programmer that because code may look weird or ugly is NOT a reason by itself to change it. The only reason to change it is if it is buggy, or does not meet the current requirements.
But some programmers just can't help themselves, dig in with both hands rip the guts out end up breaking everything because they have failed to understand why it was written in that weird ugly way. On the other hands I'm glad they are programmers and not surgeons:)
For me, I think the hardest part is often "figuring out what to build in the first place". Sometimes that starts from a product idea. Sometimes it starts from an imperfect requirements document. (I have never seen a perfect requirements document.) Going from that to "what do I build?" is the hardest part.
If you are the sort of programmer who works on big projects and is handed a clear and unambiguous spec... then sorry, I have absolutely no idea what your hardest problem might be.
I think i speak for many, the hardest thing about my job is the expectation that i will work late or overtime without extra pay or work over family holidays such as christmas and the like.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Dealing with established cultures working with outdated technologies and trying to drive change.
I suppose its better if 100,000 people from each side ran at other with swords until one side is dead?
Could someone copy/paste the list from that site? I don't feel up to solving exactly what combination of allowing Javascript to run from 15 different domains is required to get the slideshow to work...
The 10th hardest thing: Make their shitty javascript heavy site work.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
These things are not hard as in O(e^N) hard, and you won't learn about them in your CS class. But you have to deal with them every day in real world
Well, "not going to war" could be considered an excellent solution to conflict
So.. it has come to this
The hardest part is spending 6 to 8 weeks developing systems that someone decided were urgent and good to go, only to have them say "burn all the documentation we're redoing this from scratch".
When the issues were ones I pointed out were going to be there before this whole thing started.
After a while though, my Army days come back, and I remember nobody's shooting at me, so it's all good.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I agree that this used to be a big problem for me. Then I got a job outside of academia, and they made me learn to use an IDE (oh how I miss the days of doing everything in gedit and command-line gcc...), so now renaming a variable (and getting all its references) is a matter of one right-click. What this means is that if I can't figure out what to name something, I can just name it "blah," "stuff" or "temp" and then refactor when the inspiration strikes.
What is the hardest thing "coders" have to do? Based on the evidence that I have seen, over more than 20 years?
Comment their code
Either that, or produce relevant, well-defined logging.
The other hard things they have to do are usually related to have a project to complex or ill-defined for producing a clear outcome. This is usually not the coder's doing, but a downstream problem derived from insufficient architecture role/guidance and probably a weak project management function.
It's hard to develop a strategy when your boss comes running in screaming "The sky is falling" because your biggest competitor just released a new version that adds feature X and you are now tasked with implementing feature X into your product by tomorrow and it has to be on all the install media that has already shipped as well.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Having a conversation with a female is the most difficult thing your average programmer will ever have to do.
That's because you're doing it wrong. Didn't you get the memo?
... was the hardest thing for me today. Is there any reason that Ghostery finds 16 various advertising and tracking widgets to block that apparently are required for the page to load? Also, why would you put a list of 16 items in a slideshow? Just to buck up advertising revenue for multiple page views?
I'll just guess what's on the list, and say it's 80% right, but that the hardest thing altogether for me is getting decent requirements from end users. Right after that it's explaining why is not only not Agile, but often not helpful by itself.
Last, and this is an ever present distraction for me, is to explain to some folks the definition of "priority" and why the phrase becomes meaningless once you have two or more #1 priorities for an individual.
(Btw, I did find a 'deslider' site, for example, this article can be 'deslided' here: http://deslide.clusterfake.net/?o=html_table&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.itworld.com%2Fslideshow%2F124383%2Farg-9-hardest-things-programmers-have-do-378834 )
Hence this post.
And answer this silly questions! also understand the client needs and make them look like what he wants....
So click that link, and it wants me to sign in to view answers? With my Facebook account? Holy shit, Experts Exchange came back from the dead! (And if you happen to do it on mobile, they'll also nag you to install their app.)
It's like someone took Stack Overflow and decided to add 100% more crap.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I'm a developer and I would put this up as the hardest thing I have to do. Since I know the guts of why and how something works, I tend to have a really hard time writing particularly helpful User Manuals to other people. There is no group within us that spends time writing manuals (so I have to do my own) and it does require me throwing the manual at somebody somewhat unsuspecting and hoping it makes sense to them.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
The hardest thing programmers have to do is think like non-programmers. Or maybe even think like someone other than them.
None of these things are rocket science. Some of them are computer science, but that's kind of the point.
Programmers are typically forced to develop software to demanding schedules which leave no room for the things in the list. They CAN do those things, they are just never given the time to do them.
Yes, many programmers won't do them even if given the time, or will goof off if given the time until they have to write crap code to meet the deadline, but that's a different story. Or maybe not.
The hardest thing a programmer has to do is Think like someone else, Not goof off when you think you can get away with it, and to push back to have the time to do the things that are necessary to write AND MAINTAIN good code.
Of course, circumstances vary. The difference between a startup succeeding and failing may in fact require being first to market with crap code. But at some point, you have to pay back the technical debt you build up.
Ok, so lets add that to the list as well.
Oh, and making end users understand the impact of their crazy changes.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
So is "calculating how to increase the damage your weapons will cause so that when you bomb people trying to throw acid in the faces of little girls going to school or cutting off the noses of women who make complaints about rape, they will decide to stop fighting or die."
I suppose its better if 100,000 people from each side ran at other with swords until one side is dead?
“You mean, you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword and we'll try and kill each other like civilized people?”
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
That's the easy and fun part.
If you find that to be the hardest part, then what do you consider the fun part?
Compared to figuring out a design, everything else is tedious and boring. Things like debugging, documentation, and testing are hard because they are boring.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
What's more real: the Bitcoins that you mine or the unicorns that you claim to raise?
If programming is a piece of cake, you need to find something more challenging to program.
Bragging that your programming job is easy is like bragging that you aced remedial pre-algebra.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
^^ oops didnt mean to post as AC.
http://interserver.net/
People are the best part of my job...and the worst. Technical challenges can be a real PITA but they don't even come close to comparing to the difficulty of people challenges. And of those challenges, communicating clearly with people is perhaps the most difficult part of my job on a daily basis. (The second is dealing with "problem people", who have some kind of personality issue that makes them difficult to work with.)
How many times have you heard someone start a sentence with "I thought what you meant was..." or "I thought you knew..." or something similar. Or said the same yourself. Communication is hard, and if you think otherwise you probably don't realize how many assumptions are being made on both sides when you talk to people.
The other hardest thing is getting a story (requirement) to "done done". Writing unit tests and getting them to pass is easy. The hard part is making sure I update the design document, project wiki, and deployment doc; that I check the license agreement for the library/framework I just downloaded; that I don't have SQL injection problems; that I've added system tests; .... Of course having a checklist helps.
It all depends on the specific programmer. Some are good a design, some are good at coding, some are good at testing, some are good at debugging, and so on. Rarely is a single person good at everything. Everyone has they own unique strengths and weaknesses.
expects the Spanish inquisition
it makes me happy to see this:
words are our tools...well alpha/numberic symbols arranged in groups to form instructions for a machine to execute
typing a word is the same as 'naming' the thing you are creating when you type...ha! this certainly gets us into a Mobius Strip of language after awhile
as I've learned programming, I've found that 2nd Order Cybernetics concepts to be incredibly helpful
you start with the 'Social Construction of Reality' which has become a convention almost like the Big Bang more than a theory from any one scientist...it is broadly accepted across the Social Sciences
essentially, they idea is: humans communicate meaning and construct our individual brain's concept of the 'universe' based on language
to see what I mean, now dig in to some Cybernetics theory to see how theorists define 'cybernetics'...Norbert Weiner is my favorite
notice the parallels the author draws between controlled and autonomous systems in machines and in nature on the definitions table on page 1
I believe we can push computing languages further by applying these concepts to coding, precisely because they are founded upon and grounded in the truth that you hit upon when you say this:
if we *start* there and continue with a 'cybernetic' approach programming becomes more inviting to noobs, new languages are easier to learn for experience programmers, skills transfer across any system or domain in programming better, and coding starts to resemble network topology
I'm not doing the best job explaining things, cybernetics is a tough concept to just bat around in conversation...but if this interests you have a look at the paper I linked above...the first thing they do is discuss what cybernetics is and why it is useful
its kind of my mission to push computing towards a more cyberntic model and away from a Turing model
Thank you Dave Raggett
1) Naming things
2) Cache invalidation
3) off by one errors
Holy shit. This exactly.
I got here through a series of tubes
I simply don't use it unless absolutely necessary because some fool did in a linked runtime library library; but only then to identify it as foreign cruft.
Fuck Charles Simonyi. Anyone who does use it is a shit-for-brains M$ droid. And I ALWAYS use integer variables i,j,k,and l for loop counters in the traditional Fortran way.
Maybe that's where the notion of a true name comes from.
Whenever I find myself having trouble naming a class or a method/function, it's typically a sign that something in my understanding of the problem (or the framing of the solution) is wrong. And I need to revisit the thought process that took me there. Usually, once I do so, names fall in place without much friction.
Anyone who is a software developer should ALWAYS have admin privileges be an administrator on their desktop development machine and also on any server development machine.
I make this very clear to any prospective employer. If that criterion is not met I simply refuse to work there.
Sysadmins should be strictly shown their proper place below developers in the hierarchy of any shop.
To be fair, it usually comes as pressure from sales.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
I know I have long time between commits because I'm sure as hell not committing anything that doesn't even compile. Also, when I am in the middle of writing code for bullet point X and it is not done to the point that it will page fault with a null pointer exception (as an example), I'm not committing that either. I certainly don't look forward to the verbal shit storm that inevitably follows when I would commit such code and someone tries to actually use it. You get a commit when I have finished exactly one task.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
First off, let's define "hard". You could mean
a) absolutely hard: it takes lots of effort to make this work at all
b) hard to do well: it takes lots of effort to do this well even though I can do this somewhat acceptably with minimal effort
c) time consuming: this takes a lot of f-ing time, and it's unclear that the effort justifies the benefit
a) seems like the most appropriate definition, but judging by the list they seem to mean either b or c.
9. Designing a solution :
b. I can make you some working software based on your off-the-cuff requirements pretty easily. Anticipating what you really meant, what you will ask for next, and writing code that can be easily leveraged to do those things would be 'a'.
8. Writing tests
c. For small projects, automated testing way more time than it's worth. For large projects writing tests is the only way to make it work at all. Of course, all those medium sized projects and those projects that start small but may become large are a challenge. And weather or not the software lends itself and the programming team knows how to use a testing suites make a difference.
7. Writing documentation /ever/ reads documentation because we all learn the hard way that it's perpetually out of date. The UI and API /are/ the documentation. If, by "writing documentation" you mean "designing a good UI/API" that makes it obvious to the user what's going on, then this becomes 'a'.
c. No one
6. Implementing functionality you disagree with /., so I guess that's all of us.
WTF - If you're getting paid, do what you're told. If not, tell 'em to do it themselves. This is only "hard" in any sense if you're a pedantic a-hole. Oh, wait. This is
5. Working with someone else’s code
b - But if they instead had "writing code that isn't a PITA for others to work with", then it's an 'a'.
4. Dealing with other people
That's only because: http://www.dilbert.com/2013-10-10/
But I guess if we spent any time developing our social skills, we wouldn't have had time to learn how to program.
3. Estimating time to complete tasks
Okay, this one really is 'a'. On the other hand, you just shouldn't do this. Instead, you need to get good at getting customers/users on board with iterative development where they wait/pay a bit and get some incremental functionality as you work towards some end goal that neither of you can really predict up front.
2. Explaining what I do (or don’t do)
See #3.
1. Naming things
See #5. Naming things is easy. And my names make perfect sense to me.
Also, queue the penis jokes based on my use of the word "hard" in the subject.
The deadliest words ever spoken in IT: "All You Have To Do Is..."
It's compounded by the fact that they're not only spoken by clueless users and pointy-haired bosses, but by the software people themselves. Who should have learned better at some point.
One of the most perverse things I've discovered over the years is the parts of the project that incur the bulk of the time, pain, and suffering aren't the arcane complex gnarly things. They're almost always easier and less trouble than expected. But entire days can be lost on something as simple as a misplaced comma.
People.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this. I work on a project that's spread across eight countries. The lingua franca is English, which makes me one of the lucky ones as a native English speaker. As you might guess, it's a pretty big project, so things like push-button refactoring aren't any use when someone misspells a variable name, or inadvertently names something after a swear word or a racial slur. (Or, more to the point, did so in acquired code that's now 12 years old and really shouldn't be touched if it's been working fine, and there's no staff for cosmetic changes anyway.)
People have talked about commenting and documentation. It's that much worse when someone's writing in their third language, or they write in their native language and you hope you can translate it well enough to get what they're really trying to say.
And then you've got all the cultural issues surrounding hierarchy, face and the loss thereof, egos, power, seniority, communication formats, and all that.
I'd love to have the luxury of being the lone cowboy, even if the PHBs were constantly jerking me around about what I'm supposed to be doing.
Yet your logic does not work very wel and is therefore falsified. Find a new theorem. Politician.
nosig today
To be fair, it usually comes as pressure from sales.
Who don't understand the value of the software to a customer, and can only line up checkboxes next to price tags.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If I had to deal with fleshy bugs, I would think programming were especially hard too.
Also, missing from the list: managing multiple projects. The "one interruption costs 20 minutes" is BS. Brief interruptions have little effect. The problem is the weeks-long "interruption" to work on a temporary emergency priority, and then afterward going back to the first project having to rebuild all the mental structures in your mind. Compounding the problem is that during the mental rebuild process, interruptions do hamper it during that time. Interruptions are like wind. The stronger and more established the mental structures, the more resilient they are against the wind. Even though mental rebuilds are a fragile time, still the fragility is overestimated and so it becomes the fear of interruption (interruptions are more painful than destructive) that leads to procrastination and delay -- worse than the interruptions themselves.
And that's not getting into the multiple project issue of dealing with multiple bosses in a non-linear org chart. I suppose that might fall under the overly broad "4. Dealing with other people."
I've been a programmer/aka software engineer/aka web developer/aka IT Director for 39 years and the hardest thing that programmers have to deal with are changing expectations which manifest themselves in scope creep and scope creeps (i.e. users who don't really know what they want or need but they need it like yesterday). I think Agile techniques have helped to channel this quite a bit but that requires the right corporate culture to be successful. The truth is that computational tools are still "magic boxes" to users and it's a rare project manager/agile team that can bridge the gap between the effort required in implementation and the user's perception of what they really need.
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
Don't document what your code does, I can (usually) tell that from reading it. Document why it does what it does.
End of message.
It's hardly a myth to me as it has happened more than once.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Constantly educate them how much work something will be every time they request a new feature. Sometimes they are surprised at how easy things can be done and vice versa.
Explain that the software hasn't changed, so it's not likely to be a software problem.
No, writing a new device driver will not fix a broken input device sending thousands of spurious signals per second and no I will not write one 10 minutes before the device is due to be put on a van to be sent to the customer.
No, it's not "just typing." It has to be designed, implemented and tested. Just because it compiles I will not ship it to the customer.
Use Windows for real work. It's broken. Things that take minutes on a real OS take days or weeks on Windows, and 50% of that is getting fighting with license servers, virus checkers, broken user permissions and missing packages.
Using SAP for configuration control. It's broken by design. Why does it take weeks to do anything with SAP? Why does it go out to lunch for several minutes when you type a value in a box? Why does it randomly forget things you've entered? Why is the UI so crazy?
Fight with documentation in PowerPoint, Excel and Word formats. We have cross-platform tools and open documents for that sort of thing. Why should I have to go hunting on the Windows network for a file in a proprietary format to tell me what versions of things go into a package? Why isn't it in a plain text file in git or on a wiki?
No, I will not fix your broken Windows. Stop it. Buy a real computer and learn to use it.
No, it doesn't run on Windows. Life's too short.
Fight with libraries written in C++ and build scripts written in DOS batch files. Seriously, get with the 1990s.
Visual Basic, C# and .NET applications for configuring kit which can only be developed on WIndows and run under Windows. Oh, what do you mean that version of the development platform and evironment isn't supported any more? Do we have a license for it? Oh, it doesn't run? The environment, the platform or the app? Oh all of them? How much for a new license? Oh you can't get one any more? Right.
Stick Men
Hands down, the most difficult thing I've had to do is start a new job. New technologies, new software, new people, new environment, new policies, I'm two weeks into a new job and the anxiety is driving me bonkers. It's more stressful than the worst deadline crunch I've ever experienced... and here there is no deadline here!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Why sales for tech needs to be technical. Why sales for tech need to be subject matter expert for customer domain.
Why good technology experiences by customer organizations are rarer than princess farts.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
How is that related to commenting one's code?
Protip: It's not.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
The hardest thing is keeping myself from choking the living shit out of some corporate manager who desparately needs it due to changing the requirements every other day or so.
We were coding with Simulink (diagram based thing). When things get complex you take a group of blocks and group them into a subsystem so you get a hierarchy of block diagrams. Each subsystem displays a name under the box, and everyone tries to give each block a name. People choose names of varying quality, but we had one guy leave the default name on every block "subsystem". To avoid name collisions it adds a counter as a suffix. I expanded the tree-view on the left side of the screen once and was able to fill it top to bottom with "subsystem2" "subsystem3" nested 5 levels deep. There is no way to navigate the code except by looking at the diagrams, but those consist of basic blocks (mostly math operators) and bigger boxes named subsystem. Fortunately some of the signals are labeled.
And of course the guy quit right after delivering this piece of shit to production.
If you can't deal with a boss who comes in screaming, "The sky is falling," the fault lies entirely on you. First, this is part of the common lack of social skills and big picture prioritization that plagues most programmers. Handling the boss is something everyone has to do, and the rest of us that work hard, have to deal with a dumb scrap of a boss, and still get our work done competently are tired of hearing that whine. Second, if you can't manage your reactions to your boss to produce good work, you need to find an easier place to work.
Everybody has an occaisional entire day/week/month destroyed by the dumb whims of sales, the boss, or that one retarded customer. Guess what, their product still ships and works.
In my experience the most difficult thing to do is to deal with people that have no idea about programming. Many of these so called "business users" are constantly changing their minds. The functional design documents (the documents that describe what the business need is for the program you are being asked to write) are almost universally incomplete. As I read through them I am forced to go back for clarification. The missing details are often critical to the programming approach taken so they must be resolved, otherwise I will have to rewrite sections later on.
I used to think these business people were just stupid. Now I think they are just lazy. They don't do the necessary research and just kick the can down the road to the developer. Unfortunately, these people are often in charge so it becomes a fact of life.
Nobody has requirements. What they have is problems, and it's the engineers job to build something that solves those problems. They may be able to offer some requirements or offer an idea what they want it to look like. The only way they have complete knowledge of what they want is when they already have it - when it's complete. It drives me insane when people put together a development process that shows requirements being complete at the start, or they show the "V" model of development and forget that a big circular arrow goes in the middle showing iteration (this is never accounted for in the schedule because it can't be).
If you expect complete requirements you don't fully understand your job.
For me, the hardest thing has been making users actually like and enjoy using your code. There is a lot of psychological science that goes into a program's usability, and my computer science degree didn't touch that topic.
I love how you jumped to other roles to blame on programmers' failures.
Having held most roles in IT and operations, I think the hardest thing for programmers is relating to other human beings. They really suck at that.
I think you misconstrue my observations and my tentative conclusions.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
NO the hardest thing to do is watch non-techy business TWATS overrule you on naming things, misapply standards and turn a perfectly good piece of code into something you're ashamed to have your name attached to. But hey they own the business so it's their decision. What other fucking industry do we do this in? You don't let the patient decide which surgical cut or stitch to use in a heart operation. You don't let someone who wants to build a home decide actually you to tell an architect or builder "actually we didn't want that fucking foundation, let's just leave it out".
followed by documentation
one of the hardest things i do is sit in front of a computer most of the day.
would prefer to be more out and about
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Some hard things seem easy to outsiders, and some easy things seem hard. When reality doesn't match up to preconceived notions, then tensions can often build and trust ruined. Us geeks often are not well adapted to deal with the potential frictions caused by the interaction of people with technology.
For example, some add-on feature requests are quite easy to write mostly independently and just "tack on" to the existing code set. Other "add-ons" require changing fundamental architecture, making them time-consuming and risky. End users and managers don't know which is which, and so judge it based on superficial estimations.
Even many semi-tech-savvy managers don't realize that you may have designed it different from how they would do it such that a particular change is a royal PITA, but they think you are fibbing, and seemingly don't have the time to listen to a fuller explanation.
Table-ized A.I.
Commit != comment.
Common Sense (+1)
Not only do you have to understand the problem in hand, you have to understand how the prior programmer understood the problem.
Taking showers.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
All right, but apart from thinking like others, not goofing off, pushing back on the schedule, and paying the technical debt, what have the Romans ever done for us?
(Wait, what were we talking about again?)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"What are the hardest things programmers have to do?"
Find some scrap of motivation to will our insufficiently caffeinated carcases back into the code monkey meat grinder.
That and giving a damn about documenting a single arg function that's literally 10 lines long (binary). Soul sucking imbecilic totalitarianist managerial scum.
I take it all back; The hardest thing is not becoming a felon.
Yeah, well. I work on the sort of application that require lot of customisation on top of a core product. Our sales generally "wow" the client and get them to sign by showing the UI. One of the first client customisation though, is hooking to their system so that they don't have to use our UI.
In some cases, it is all about checkboxes. With large companies you sell your software to one strategic group but that's a totally separate operational group that get to use the software.
So sure those companies should go under for such inefficiencies, but apparently they post billion dollar profit every quarter and received government bailouts the one year they failed.
I know that not all programmers have to worry about that - some stop at some test environment and it is later client's problem to do actual implementation in final environment. But some programmers are working in companies where stuff is created and delivered for in-house needs - and what I have found the hardest in entire equation is to actually deliver the final result. Sometimes, there are so many dependencies, rules, noise introduced by other systems etc that it is really really hard to do the last step and to deliver the actual, tested solution to destination. Preparing the deployment scripts, overviewing that all db dumps were done at correct time in case rollback is needed, guiding hand of some poor chap from offshore location who sees your application first time in his life but has to do installation because you are not allowed to touch production machines - these things often take more effort and sweat than the coding.
That other people have shitty Bosses doesn't mean he can't complain about his you miserably twat.
But... the future refused to change.
1) Resist urge to kill coworkers
2) Wait for slow-ass software on slow-ass hardware connected by slow-ass networks to slow-ass databases
The most difficult thing *always* turns out to be programming to some API that the manufacturer says does X, but either really does Y, or simply crashes -- and then finding out that they're not going to fix it, except or unless in some later version of the OS, thereby doing all the current, stable customers out of whatever it was I was trying to accomplish. I mostly program for OSX these days, so my examples are all Apple-centric.
1) I was writing a POS application for a Chinese restaurant owned by friends. I had an old mini core 2 running 10.6.8 I wasn't using, and I wanted to make the app around this unit. So I spent a couple of days writing it, using UTF-8 for the Chinese parts, and everything was going swimmingly. I ordered some receipt printers (one for the counter, one for the kitchen to print orders, and one for the to-go/delivery table.) English? No problem. Everything worked. Put characters -- I mean actual Chinese -- in the file to be printed via CUPS, and the print process would crash. The problem? CPU-specific bug in a CUPS filter (Apple owns CUPS now.) They have no intention of fixing it in 10.6.8. They told me, "Upgrade the mini to Lion." So I ordered Lion on a stick and stuffed it in there, and the Lion installer informed me "CPU not supported. Core 2 duo or above required." So the fix is in, but I can't run the fix. So I ended up buying a new mini. Yeah, that "fixed" it. At a cost of $600. Thanks a whole f'ing lot, Apple.
2) Qt 4.x: Full of bugs. Fixes? Sure. In 5.x. But 5.x is full of new problems. I'll spare you the details, other than to point out that if they'd just bloody fix the stuff they claimed as working in the first place, rather than constantly surf forward and expect you to follow them, I'd a darn sight happier.
I feel that if the manufacturer says "here's an OS, and here are the features it offers you (API list, UI operations, etc.), then they are obligated (because I have invested time and/or money based on what they claimed) to make it happen. I accept that first out the door, there may be things that are not working right. What I don't accept as "ok" is this attitude that it's ok to leave it that way. You get a straight up bug report you can verify (print high UTF-8 characters crashes your printer filters) by Ada, you should fix the thing YESTERDAY. It's more important than your new OS, because it's about the reliability and honor and ethics of what you do. You don't fix it -- Apple -- and you go from respected vendor to the opposite (both lose respect and that much less likely to vend anything to me.)
Same thing goes for apps. You sell a paint program that is supposed to draw rects and circles, but won't draw circles, you bloody well need to FIX it so it DOES, and make sure that fix is available to every poor bastard who bought your paint program WITHOUT requiring them to change anything else.
It's NOT acceptable to say "You must upgrade to the next OS" or "That's fixed in the latest version, but that only runs on a 4 core CPU so you're screwed" When you say stuff like that, some people, somewhere, are getting red faced, ramping up blood pressure, and contemplating ways to deliver a clutch of rabid wolverines to your development team in a box marked "live strippers, schedule party immediately."
Related to that, I've learned to stay well clear of other people's frameworks and libraries. If I wrote it, I can almost certainly fix it. There's nothing more disheartening than writing in about a bug and hearing back that it's been upon some list, while your stuff remains broken, etc. Might as well have written it yourself anyway. Assuming you have time, of course.
Everybody's in such a damn rush to move forward, they're unwilling to see to it that current efforts are made to represent fine craftsmanship instead of a harried dash to ship at any cost in reliability and honor.
I've got a lot of older software because my reaction to "you gotta upgrade to get that fix" is "you're not getting more of my money until what you sold me in the first place works as you told me it would." I can't always stick to that rule, but I assure you, I try.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Or, as happens in the real world, they focus on training all of the new recruits your bombs motivated, so they can send 10X as many terrorists out to fight you.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In no particular order - dealing with management not interested in product quality - dealing with management who is biased towards their local site over product quality (Tel Aviv is full of ass-hats in this regard) - dealing with management that interprets "Agile" as being 30-45 minute "standups" every day that are nothing more than "I worked on Bug X today" rehashes. - dealing with management wherein the people hired by a particular manager are automatically given more credibility than people who are forcibly transferred in. Yes, I refer to AMD from direct experience.
score balancing in games can be hard to get right to make fair so people can just do the same move over and move to build score with small risk.
'nuff said
Deal with bullying managers that impose tight immovable deadlines in front of senior management, and then when I tell them to reset the client's expectation and blue sky renegotiate the entire contract with the client because the deadline is unachievable in front of senior management they get upset and then start bullying you and physically attacking you and I walked into a Police station and the Police officers refused to take my official report of a harassment incident. I wouldn't get any witnesses anyway because they were junior management and everyone's scared of their careers - they all have families to feed. That was in my old company, now in my new company my predecessor's predecessor had a breakdown and tried to commit suicide, but these get covered up by corporate management.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Either that, or produce relevant, well-defined logging.
You get much better at that if you develop complex multi-process server applications where there's no chance of attaching a debugger.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
(excuse funky format. Slashdot fnorks up my Android kbd) For me... #1 is accurate time estimates. I can usually guess the time to write the code. What I fail to take into account is time for emails, meetings, documentation and training. New rule is best estimate +40%. #2 work/life balance. Putting in more than the basic 40/wk for any company is stoopid. The company *does* care if i work myself to death on their behalf -- it saves them the effort of RIFfing me. #3 juggling, aka task switching. all the studies indicate this is a time sink for jobs requiring concentration. I'm poster child (ok, poster geez) for multitasking deficiency syndrome.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Is dealing with articles split up into 11 pages to try to sleaze more "pageviews" out of you. Presuming you bother to read them at all.
The hardest part of a programmers job is working with people that
1) don't understand programming
but
2) forces the programmers to work a certain way that doesn't fit the mindset or workflow of programmers and/or programming
with
1b) think they understand programming
as a worst case.
Or wasn't that was what meant?
1) Maintain consistency with your peers when writing the same software together.
2) Communicating with peers
3) Not making assumptions
4) Not telling me about ad-hoc design/schema changes
5) Estimates
6) Consistency in quality assurance procedures
However it appears that with oversight, training and having the work delegated into manageable quanta, all these problems go away. :)
A lot of it was caused by the heroic one programmer/one product/no design or requirements model.
Or "FAD": http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/FrontAhead-Design.aspx
If I had to choose one word as What's Hardest and Most Important?
"Consistency"
1. Figuring out the right problem to solve. Or the best problem (which problem will have the most impact when solved).
2. Explaining why something took longer than I expected it to.
3. Estimating the time to fix some random bug before I understand the bug.
4. Explaining why the work I've done over the past year is more important/difficult/better than the work done by a co-worker over the past year.
5. Balancing staying focused on task versus expanding the breadth of my knowledge about the system I'm working on (I naturally bias towards the former).
6. Understanding the forest when I spend all day looking at individual trees (related to 5).
7. Knowing when to ask a co-worker a question to get past an obstacle in five minutes versus spending an hour figuring it out on my own.
Most of the things the article describe sound like the easy parts.
Most of my challenges seem to revolve around communication.