| The grass was always greener in the past / Cualquier Tiempo pasado fue mejor. Pure creative programming work have always been a small subset of programming in general. Were COBOL programmers creative? Data Base programmers? IBM programmers? Those were the majority of software jobs in the past. I have been mostly a pure C,Verilog, VHDL, analog digital electronics -low level engineer for a long time before becoming entrepreneur and using much higher level languages in our company. Was it creative? A lot. I interacted with machines like robots that did things like moving 20 tons or lasers or robots or whatever. Was is painful, tedious and boring?. It was, also. You need to make it rain using active work of whatever is necessary for your job. The fact that something is not "sexy" is a great advantage for a job as it removes most of the competition. Being hard scares most people. The best advice I could give young people is to find hard problems and to find the techniques and tools that could make those problems easier. We use psychology and things like lisp as secret weapons. Thinking in the 35 people that created Facebook is extremely misleading, because fb got extremely lucky, and they were hundreds of thousand of programmers working in other companies. The monetary success of fb has a lot more to do with free money created by central banks than anything the founders created as their technology was easy to replicate but its financing was not. There are intense opportunities today like they were in the past. But they are hard, like it was hard in the past. |
Some of those jobs surely had creative aspects to them … far more creative than the recent YAWS (yet another website) using ASWF (another shiny web framework) with all the bells and whistles included.