[pc86]

100% - my friends who have only ever written code think it's a "hard" job in the objective sense. That among all possible jobs, it is on the difficult side of the spectrum.

I've been an EMT, a line cook, a dishwasher, a waiter, sold insurance, and worked on political campaigns. The easiest of all those is 10x harder than the hardest day of writing code.

It's frustrating at times, sure. There's office politics, sure. We probably have to deal with a disproportionate percentage of weaponized autism, sure.

But it is a cushy job and the "money per unit of effort" metric is off the charts compared to basically every other job I can think of, and definitely every other job I've ever had.

[Izkata]

I don't have much experience in jobs like those, but a family member who jumped between whole different professions for years does. He always got bored of them because, at least according to him, all of them had one failing: you learn everything you need in a couple of months or so, then it's pretty much just getting better at doing those things repeatedly.

Eventually he tried out programming and found there's no real end to the amount of things to learn. It was the only job he found that he wouldn't get bored on. He only eventually left because of bad bosses.

I think that might be the factor that makes it hard vs easy compared to others - that for a lot of people, continual learning (which they thought they'd left behind when they finished school) is why it might be harder than the other jobs ones you listed. Though I know I'd find those ones harder for other different reasons.

[bigstrat2003]

Yeah, I definitely agree with you. Any time you see someone saying how hard it is to write code as a job, you can tell they've never had a "real" job. I grew up working on a farm every day - I would take programming every day of the week. Even on the days when I'm frustrated or dealing with difficult people, it's better than hard physical labor which wears down your body, is fairly gross (lots of poop!), and doesn't even pay 1/2 of what programming does.