[baq]

Being a parent is definitely harder that being a software engineer if you want to do a good job. Same for being a farmer. It isn't the default job anymore for a reason.

You could argue more women nowadays don't want to be mothers because it's hard. Especially if that's the second job and unpaid, actually you have to pay lots of money to be a successful mother. So yeah, it's exceptional... that anyone wants to have children at all! Though that's quickly changing, too.

[rndmize]

> Being a parent is definitely harder that being a software engineer if you want to do a good job. Same for being a farmer. It isn't the default job anymore for a reason.

There's a difference between hard = effort, and hard = difficulty. Most people struggle to understand software engineering concepts. If you do understand them, then the effort required to succeed at the job is less than parenting/farming/etc; but there's a reason software engineers are in the top 20% of the economic ladder and picking vegetables on a farm is on the bottom.

And at last check, subsistence farming was still the default job worldwide. Perhaps things have changed in the last decade or two, but I have my doubts.

(I'd also take issue on the idea of parenting being difficult, vs. good parenting, vs. newer cultural expectations on parents/education/helicoptering, vs. kids being free to roam etc etc., but that's a whole huge discussion on its own - and I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that raising kids is not harder on either axis than having a job, but doing both at once is very difficult and forces an economic choice many women are making in favor of money.)

[randomdata]

As both a farmer and a software engineer, farming is way harder – and I don't mean in terms of effort. To your economic point, farming pays better too.

Sure, neither is hard if you want to do it at subsistence level. Hell, I started programming at like 5 years old. Software development is the easiest endeavour a human can partake in – so easy, it is easily picked up by young children who can barely read. Anyone can build software.

But I think it is far to say that building robust, reliable, maintainable, performant, and scalable software that satisfies a market need is a different story. And same goes for farming. If you want to farm at a level beyond subsistence, that is when it becomes hard.