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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.
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?
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
If you don't think programming is fun, then you're really ---
--- not a programmer?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I also call bullshit. Coding is fun. Product management, dev ops, and putting out fires and meeting customer needs is a lot less fun. But this unfunness can also be present even in small open source projects. All it takes is tons of users writing in wanting feature changes or experiencing/reporting bugs (or asking if you could please re-write the project in Rust), and you'll start feeling just like any fledgling startup. So I revise my statement -- coding is fun when done for oneself as a creative and intellectual exercise. Share that code, however, and you will be on a pathway to unfunness, but on the other hand people will reward you for that unfunness, so it's really a matter of balancing the rewards with the inherent unfunness of the activity.
Surgery is fun. Cutting is FUN!!! .Its keeping the patient alive, making sure that sterile environments are maintained, making sure the nurses dont leave instruments inside the patient and closing up which is unfun.
In order to reduce the cost of medical care in the US we need to attract more kids to surgery.
I propose holding an hour of Surgery event in every elementary school where you do surgery on a frog and prescribe laxatives to guinea pigs.
Also 7 days surgery bootcamps where anyone without any science background is taught to operate on dogs.
Also automation. Robots do surgery much better than humans
Alas none of this is going to happen as the American Medical Association has basically bought both parties. Wish the ACM was as good as the AMA at protecting the privileges of programmers
**Life is too short to be serious**