[alisonatwork]

This implies that all people who don't enjoy coding are also not very good at it, which doesn't match my experience.

There is a significant cohort of professional coders who enjoy the comfortable lifestyle who write very bad code. In fact, I'd venture to say there are far more of those than people who don't much enjoy the work but still do it well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic.

[fpgamlirfanboy]

> well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic.

It's amazing how many people in tech can't imagine that the same people that can grind med school or IB or big4 accounting or white-shoe law somehow can't grind the same way in tech. Newsflash: the majority of people in FAANG are grinders not "passion coders".

Personally I hate this job but I'm very good at it and it was either law school with my 98% LSAT or tech. I picked tech because reading and writing briefs all day seemed somehow worse.

[sublinear]

It's easy to assume you're great especially working under "passion coders" who keep stuff afloat.

Who else would go to bat? Everyone can immediately tell who the grinders are, but you have to hire sometimes anyway.

[fpgamlirfanboy]

> It's easy to assume you're great especially working under "passion coders" who keep stuff afloat.

i work on compilers+hardware so that's the backdrop here.

here's a real hypothetical for you (ie it happened but i'm not going to use specifics): our internal proprietary compiler is spitting out incorrect atomics instructions that deadlock our internal proprietary multi-core DNN accelerator. this incorrect code is downstream of a big, lucrative, customer's (you know which one) LLM model.

now the question: is it the "passion coder" that will solve this or the grinder?

[CapmCrackaWaka]

I didn’t mean to imply that, my entire post should be caveated with “on average”. There are certainly good programmers out there who don’t really enjoy it.

[raxxorraxor]

I enjoy programming and write bad code constantly. Sometimes it is decent, but I am rarely completely happy with the result.

Also in day-to-day work you don't really research the best solution for non-critical systems and instead implement the first solution that comes to mind. It will mostly never be touched once it is in production.

Over time seeing systems you implemented working is the largest reward for me. You have forgotten how they work anyway, so bad code is less of an issue then. And if you do look it up again, you might be angry about your stupid past self. Meh, at least it means you know better now.