[lrdswrk00]

I worked in a restaurant through high school and have been coding professionally for 20 years.

After a certain point, programming becomes less hard. It becomes a set of very familiar syntax snippets to copy/paste around.

Rushing around a kitchen in the heat, and often toxic, juvenile environment all week never changes… versus programming in your house?

Give me a break. You’re not coming close to putting the same real pressure on your body.

[bluGill]

There are different hards. I've worked construction: you come home at night tired, but your brain is awake and ready to think (which is why so many veg on the couch - it keeps the brain busy and body resting). In software the hard jobs leave your brain tired, but your body is ready to go - this is a hard place to be in as your brain can't figure out how to get the needed exercise your body wants.

Programming can be copy/paste, but the hard days when you have to figure out how to eliminate some mutex across some threads so the whole performs without a race condition - that will always be hard.

[FredPret]

It took you…

- 20 years of work

- x years of study

- being born with the right nature/nurture mix for computer work

…to get to this point. That’s a very significant initial hump in difficulty that restaurant work doesn’t have.

[lrdswrk00]

I did both for multiple years. I know which one feels like work.

Go work 20 years of Friday and Saturday nights in a popular restaurant. Does not have to be the same one, as the expectation is the same.

The level of effort I need to put into coding dropped off exponentially.

As one ages the level of effort out into restaurant work goes up.

Let’s rely on science and not bias. Programming is still not sweatshop work on the regular. I work 4 solid hours a day.

[FredPret]

I know, I’ve done both too.

Why isn’t there a flood of ex-restaurant workers becoming software engineers? Because getting over that hump is really hard, statistically speaking.

[pessimizer]

You're equivocating on the meaning of the word "difficulty." It's impossibly difficult for anybody but me to be exactly me, but that doesn't mean it's hard work for me to be me.

I've worked in a factory as a machine operator, and in a company as a programmer, and they're not comparable in either difficulty or compensation.

[bigbob2]

They never said it took 20 years for programming to become less hard

[tester756]

yet compare entry level for programming and waiter job

people with engineering degree struggle to find job as SE.

let alone that you need to put hundreds/thousands of hours into it in your free time

and then still learn a lot as dev in order to move up

i'm not saying that it makes SE harder, just different.

[forz877]

Anyone can work in a kitchen. It's physically demanding, but the tasks are not that hard and easily picked up without any real education. Sorry that's just the truth. And why we don't have as many programmers as service workers.