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'Coding Is Not Fun, It's Technically and Ethically Complex' (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: For starters, the profile of a programmer's mind is pretty uncommon. As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks. Manic attention to detail is a must; slovenliness is verboten. Coding isn't the only job that demands intense focus. But you'd never hear someone say that brain surgery is "fun," or that structural engineering is "easy." When it comes to programming, why do policymakers and technologists pretend otherwise? For one, it helps lure people to the field at a time when software (in the words of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen) is "eating the world" -- and so, by expanding the labor pool, keeps industry ticking over and wages under control. Another reason is that the very word "coding" sounds routine and repetitive, as though there's some sort of key that developers apply by rote to crack any given problem. It doesn't help that Hollywood has cast the "coder" as a socially challenged, type-first-think-later hacker, inevitably white and male, with the power to thwart the Nazis or penetrate the CIA. Insisting on the glamor and fun of coding is the wrong way to acquaint kids with computer science. It insults their intelligence and plants the pernicious notion in their heads that you don't need discipline in order to progress. As anyone with even minimal exposure to making software knows, behind a minute of typing lies an hour of study. It's better to admit that coding is complicated, technically and ethically. Computers, at the moment, can only execute orders, to varying degrees of sophistication. So it's up to the developer to be clear: the machine does what you say, not what you mean. More and more "decisions" are being entrusted to software, including life-or-death ones: think self-driving cars; think semi-autonomous weapons; think Facebook and Google making inferences about your marital, psychological, or physical status, before selling it to the highest bidder. Yet it's rarely in the interests of companies and governments to encourage us to probe what's going on beneath these processes.
"It's Technically and Ethically Complex"
You could say the same about living.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If you don't think programming is fun, then you're really missing out. The reason so many people work on open source code for free is exactly because it is fun, and we can see that the quality of code from people doing things for fun can be quite high.
If programming isn't fun for you, then something's wrong. Maybe you have a manager who completely stifles you, or maybe you only glue together libraries other people wrote. I can see how that wouldn't be much fun. Or maybe you have a manager who writes code, gives it to you, and says, "here, debug this." That would be hell. Either way, if your job is programming change stuff around until you can really see what is so much fun about it, otherwise you're in for a miserable career.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Its complex. And its fun. Part of the reason its fun is that it is complex- if it was easy there'd be no challenge to it. If you don't find the challenge fun, you're in the wrong profession and will be happier elsewhere.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks. Manic attention to detail is a must; slovenliness is verboten.
Attention to detail? Slovenliness? These people must not have looked at much corporate code, there's a world of kludges out there.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Not all of us writing code to throw the switch of a railroad track with an unstoppable locomotive barrelling down towards a group of three deaf people who could not hear it coming, while there is an invalid in a wheelchair on the side track who could not get out even if he could hear it coming. Most of our coding examples are considerably less ethically complicated.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I Had to say it, it just seemed required.
From my perspective, Programming is fun. Programming is like painting, with words and symbols, but when the canvas is completed, you have a moving piece of art capable of doing tasks.
The part that the article is missing, is that "Working" is not fun. Take a child to the beach, and what will they likely do for fun? Dig holes and make sand-castles. Even many adults will enjoy doing this right along with them. Now, fast forward to when they are adults - do they enjoy digging ditches for a living? No, they don't. Once you add the stigma of a job to the activity is when you pull the fun out of it.
Programming for it's own sake is fun. Having to answer for what the program does to your boss is not.
Articles like these are just hipsters trying to avoid getting jobs and writing inane stuff for these sites. We used to call them bloggers.
The “learn to code for fun and profit” narrative is designed to support the claim that all the people who are losing good jobs to automation and offshore mania only need to take a short course in programming to be making the big bucks. The truth that not everyone is suited to be a programmer, and that the “big bucks” programming jobs are becoming as endangered by offshoring as factory jobs, kills that narrative and forces those who are supposed to be running this country to come up with real solutions to the very real employment problems of large numbers of people in the Rust Belt, Coal Belt, You Name It Belt. Those solution are difficult to find, and cost money to implement, which means no tax cuts for the one percenters. Can’t have that, so everyone must become a programmer because that’s the job of the future. Rinse and repeat.
Programming is fun. If it isn't fun to you, then you won't be successful as a programmer, and you will be as unhappy in your job as the average worker.
The comparison to a neurosurgeon is hyperbole, but I would compare it more to a novelist. Writing a novel is hard, so hard that people who don't enjoy it don't do it; yet the only evident work in a novel is simply typing.
The main difference between coders and novelists is that shitty coders can still make bank. Because of that, people who hate coding and people who are terrible at it (a venn diagram of almost entirely overlapping circles) sometimes stick with it.
Noveling and Coding have one other awful terrible truth in common: Everybody thinks they can do it.