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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
The number one problem is that programming involves typing on a keyboard. And so, to politicians and all the other clueless, computer-illiterate masses, programming is nothing more than a simple, routine function that can be handled by any low-level clerk or secretary.
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
So, I read the article and the point completely eludes me. There is no news here. There are no facts. It reads like it is trying to be a think-piece, but contains no actual information. Even a think piece, with a primary purpose of expressing an opinion, needs to have some sort of basis in facts or information.
This "article" reads more like the introduction to a manifest, or some sort of random pontification.
Don't get me wrong, it is sure to prompt a robust discussion here on /., but the piece itself is not really that exciting.
That said, my perspective is that programming (analysis, coding, testing, etc.) is enjoyable, possibly even "fun," for the simple reason that I enjoy solving complex problems. When I was younger I spent lots of time playing videogames. As I got older and more experienced as a software engineer I began to realize that playing video games (good ones) and developing software are actually the same activity. Except that the former rarely results in a lasting benefit, while the latter is easier to get paid to do.
So, to me, it is the functional equivalent of getting paid to play videogames all day. I can count on one hand the number of days I have not looked forward to going to work in the last few years. So, yes it is complex and has an ethical dimension, but is also lots of fun.
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.
Well, I'll give you mosquito, because I'm not aware of any other way to say that in English, but if you start saying "c'est la vie" or "que sera sera" or "je ne sais quoi", I'm going to start answering you in French, because you're either switching languages or acting like a pretentious try-hard.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I'm having fun. Should I not be? Dang.
I"m still trying to wrap my head around the tern "ethically" and coding/programming in the same sentence...?!?!
I mean you code for 1 or 2 reasons:
1. Interest/Fun
2. You get paid for it.
WTF does "ethically" come into play here?
Geez, I see more and more people try to interject morals or ethics into things that have never had that connotation before. I see people equate paying taxes to morality....really?
And now, you have supreme ethical decisions to make before writing a piece of code? Seriously? How does this apply.
I mean, most things in your life, your fun, how you act, making a living, etc...do not warrant great time and deep thinking devoted to the morality of it, your ethics behind the decisions, and how it affect mankind....it is simply LIFE.
It's been done before for ages, and it didn't need to be analyzed....just do it for goodness sakes....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Never let the facts get in the way of a good SJW rant. They're still pushing that women make $.70 for every dollar a man makes and that engineering in general is full of bro's with nothing better to do than make women feel uncomfortable. The notion of fake news didn't arise in a vacuum. While Trump may have popularized the phrase "fake news" people have long since noticed that half truths and opinions are presented as "news" far more than actual, unbiased, both sides of the story facts.
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.
I was answering under the assumption of legal activity, not things that are codified as criminal by law.
That would just be part of the job working at Google or FB.
Gathering data is not inherently a bad thing as you seem to allude.
What is done with it, is another thing, but that's a human/business decision....not "coding ethics".
For the people that code, it is just a job, the decisions on what the company does which possibly could have ethical or moral connotations, is already done at management levels, not at a coding level.
Hell, in cases, the coder may not even know what the whole program does, they only code parts of it per specs given to them, maybe only a module, so they don't even know what the whole program does....no ethics or morals there.
But I posit...coding itself has not ethics or morality....decision making at management level on what a company does may have those type questions...but a person decides if they want to work for a company or not...that's not ethics or morals at the level of coding, but on the level of what type employment you seek or hold.
Personally, if it ain't illegal, and they pay me enough, I"m good to go with just about anything.
But, hey, whatever floats your boat.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The days when tech was dominated by people who wanted to be there are long gone.
Which is unfortunate. Those people make things bad for the rest of us. If they figured out how to enjoy it, things would be better.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I no longer code for a living, haven't done that for a very long time. But I write code just about every day. Now my tasks are to analyze large data sets and to help formulate policy decisions and improve businesses processes.
A lot of my colleagues do this work without coding. They do all sorts of insane and stupid shit with Excel and Access, and spend a lot of time doing tedious shit by hand. I spend a lot of time automating that shit, in the hopes that the next time I have to do it, it's close enough that I save myself a boatload of time. Sometimes works out, sometimes doesn't.
But that's fun for me. Data handling is awesome, and I love coding to pull in shitty data, massage it, and output nice clean data sets. I love writing code to do rough analysis on those data sets to see if there might be some really important information in there.
I've got the luxury of doing essentially personal coding for a living. That's amazing. Very glad to no longer have to code with others. Sometimes that's fun, but a lot of time it turns into a real grind.
As for ethically complex, the decisions that come out of my analyses do indeed impact human beings, in a number of different ways and settings. However, I'm much happier trusting clear, well-commented code for that than a bunch of Excel macros, linked sheets, and pivot tables. I shudder to think what's buried in my co-workers' analyses.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Mod parent +1 informative / insightful.
I've been programming since the early 80's and this is **exactly** what programming is: You are solving a puzzle.
A programmer is no different from a mathematician, scientist, engineer, musician, etc. The mathematician is fascinated about patterns, operations, and the relationship between the two. The Scientist takes delight in learning how the physical universe works. The engineer enjoys building things from the microscopic to the macroscopic. The musician expresses their emotions in a music form ands takes delight that their fans find their creatively resonating with them.
The fact that you can make money at it is just a bonus.
* Some puzzles are hard real-time likes banking software.
* Some puzzles are soft real-time (like game development).
* Some are pseudo real-time (like OS development)
* Some are offline, like "Machine Learning".
At the end day though it is about software solving a problem. If you don't find solving puzzles fun, then find another job. Because doing it for the money will show in your work.
If programming is not fun then you're are doing it wrong -- of the corporate monoculture has sucked the soul out of it. In either case, change jobs, or change careers.
Life is too short to spend the majority of time doing something you hate.